A new polling shows that even in leftist California, the ideology that promotes allowing boys who say they are girls to compete on girls’ athletic teams is a losing cause.

“Most Californians support requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams matching the sex they were assigned at birth,” according to the polling.

“Solid majorities of adults (65%) and likely voters (64%) support requiring that transgender athletes compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with. An overwhelming majority of public school parents (71%) support such a requirement.”

That result is part of an assessment by Public Policy Institute of California.

According to a report from Fox News, “California Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted trans athletes competing in girls sports is ‘deeply unfair’ during an episode of his podcast last month but defended allowing it out of empathy for the transgender population.”

Officials in the state are trying to defy President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”

The California Interscholastic Federation confirmed it will follow “state law” letting boys in girls’ competitions if they say they are girls.

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has warned Newsom to comply, after his state claimed to be a “sanctuary” for transgender minors.

“Allowing participation in sex-separated activities based on ‘gender identity’ places schools at risk of Title IX violations and loss of federal funding. As Governor, you have a duty to inform California school districts of this risk,” McMahon has warned.

“As Secretary of Education, I am officially asking you to inform this Department whether you will remind schools in California to comply with federal law by protecting sex-separated spaces and activities. I am also officially asking you to publicly assure parents that California teachers will not facilitate the fantasy of ‘gender transitions’ for their children.”

Another result found that only 45% of respondents think the state’s K-12 system is “generally going in the right direction today,” and half of Californians say the system is in need of “major changes.”

“Forty-five percent of Californians think that the state’s K–12 public education system is headed in the right direction,” said Mark Baldassare, of PPIC. “Half of adults believe that major changes are needed in the state’s K–12 system and that the quality of education in the state’s K–12 public schools has gotten worse in the past few years.”

The new statewide survey also found, “Around half of adults (49%) and likely voters (52%) say that the quality of education in the state’s K–12 public schools has gotten worse over the past few years, while 41% of public school parents say this. Ten percent of adults, 9 percent of likely voters, and 18 percent of public school parents say public schools have improved in the past few years.”

Only half of adults and 51% of likely voters approve of the way Gov. Gavin Newsom, a far-left activist who has promoted illegal aliens and other radical agendas, has managed the public education system.

“Similar shares approve of how the California Legislature (48% adults, 48% likely voters) and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Thurmond (47% adults, 47% likely voters) are handling K–12 education. More than half of public school parents approve of the way Newsom (58%), the state legislature (56%), and Thurmond (59%) are handling K–12 education.”

It also revealed 71% of adults oppose President Donald Trump’s plan to end the U.S. Department of Education and turn its responsibilities mostly over to state and local officials.

“This includes strong majorities across regions (80% San Francisco Bay Area, 72% Los Angeles, 70% Orange/San Diego, 66% Central Valley, 66% Inland Empire). Partisans are sharply divided, with Democrats (91%) and independents (72%) far more likely than Republicans (31%) to oppose closing the department,” the survey said.

Parents also have significant concerns about enforcing the nation’s laws against illegal immigration at schools.

“Asked how concerned they are about the impact of increased federal immigration enforcement efforts on undocumented students in local public schools and their families, solid majorities of adults (66%), likely voters (64%), and public school parents (74%) are very or somewhat concerned,” the survey said.

The findings are based on responses from 1,591 California adult residents. The sampling error is ±3.1 percent at the 95 percent confidence level for the total unweighted sample and ±3.6 percent for the 1,094 likely voters.

A Democrat member of the Michigan House of Representatives admitted that she pulled a childish “prank” on one of her Republican colleagues after he took up two spaces in their designated parking lot.

Shortly after noon on Thursday, state Rep. Julie Brixie (D-Meridian Township) and a staffer walked into the area of the House parking garage where Rep. Matt Maddock (R-Milford) was parked. According to security footage sent to Blaze News, Brixie can be seen making several passes around Maddock’s vehicle with what Brixie later identified as Saran Wrap.

Not satisfied to wait until Maddock was done for the day to discover her little joke, Brixie then took to the state House floor and announced: “Colleagues, colleagues, can I have your attention? Colleagues, I just came in from the parking ramp, and there’s a black BMW with a license plate number, [redacted], your hood is open, your lights are on, and your engine is running. Thank you.”

Fauci received several six-figure deposits through 2023 totaling $1.15 million according to a 141-page financial disclosure obtained by Open The Books, a government watchdog group.

The documents do not describe the source of the deposits.

Fauci leveraged his celebrity status as the top trusted messenger on COVID-19 to pad his earnings in 2023, just as newly empowered Congressional investigators sharpened their focus on the ways Fauci betrayed the public’s trust at the pandemic’s height.

Fauci sold his memoir to a subsidiary of Penguin Random House for a reported $5 million in March 2023. That news coincided with a March 2023 congressional memo showing Fauci had privately “prompted” an influential paper dismissing the theory that COVID could have resulted from a lab accident. On July 1, 2023, Fauci began an appointment at Georgetown University as distinguished university professor in both the School of Medicine and School of Public Policy. Roughly two weeks later, two of the coauthors of that paper testified to Congress about the extent of their collaboration with Fauci.

The White House on Friday updated the official covid.gov page to highlight this paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” and Fauci’s behind-the-scenes role in downplaying the “lab leak theory.”

Fauci also accepted speaking gigs with several special interest groups in 2023. Some of these organizations and trade associations — including the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) — have policy agendas that intersect with the federal government’s COVID-19 response or the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the NIH division that Fauci led for nearly four decades.

Fauci’s esteem in the scientific community was lucrative in 2023, despite nagging questions from Congress about his endorsement of gain-of-function research like the coronavirus experiments funded by NIAID in Wuhan, China.

Fauci accepted medals with monetary prizes from the highest echelons of academia including Columbia University’s Calderone Prize, worth $50,000, and the National Academy of Medicine’s Lienhard Prize, worth $40,000.

Fauci’s final government salary totaled an unprecedented $480,654, the highest salary earned by any of the roughly 2.4 million employees who work for the federal government, including the president, according to Open The Books. Fauci continues to accept a six-figure pension.

Fauci’s net worth roughly doubled from $7.6 million the year prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2019 to $15 million in 2023. Fauci also received taxpayer-funded transportation and security detail via the U.S. Marshals Service as a private citizen in 2023.

“Dr. Fauci’s assets soared during the worst of the draconian Covid lockdowns while families and small businesses struggled through school closures and lost income. Now it’s clear the cash kept coming during his first year of ‘retirement,’” said Open The Books CEO John Hart. “He was rubbing elbows with groups like AHIP flanked by taxpayer-funded security — even as his wife remained the top bioethicist at NIH.”

Amid concerns Fauci misled Congress under oath about the research in Wuhan, former President Joe Biden granted Fauci a pardon on Jan. 20.

Fauci did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Delayed Retirement

Fauci announced in August 2022 that he would retire in December 2022. At the time, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer of Kentucky warned that “retirement can’t shield Dr. Fauci from congressional oversight.”

In November 2022, Congressional Republicans — who had been investigating connections between Fauci’s NIAID and the Wuhan Institute of Virology — won control of the House of Representatives and thus key committees.

Now, Open The Books has uncovered evidence through Fauci’s Application for Immediate Retirement that he delayed his retirement until Jan. 6, 2023 — three days after the new Congress started — but misinformed Congress about the change.

Fauci sent a request to NIH Acting Director Larry Tabak to delay his retirement in order to retain personal protection, emails suggest.

An email from Tabak to Fauci indicates a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Marshals Service was still tied up in the Office of General Counsel.

“OGC is working to clear the MOU from the USMS,” Tabak said in a Dec. 27, 2022, email to Fauci confirming his delayed retirement date.

In both a transcribed interview with congressional investigators in January 2024 and in public congressional testimony under oath in June 2024, Fauci described his retirement from federal service as having occurred in December 2022.

Bioethics?

Some of the growth in the Fauci household’s net worth stems from the taxpayer-funded salary of Dr. Christine Grady, a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, who earned $263,005 in 2024.

An NIH official told the DCNF earlier this month that although Grady had a good reputation within the bioethics discipline, she had a conflict of interest that posed ethical questions of its own.

“One of the problems when the coverup was going on of the Wuhan lab leak, that whole fiasco, was that they were not listening to anyone giving ethics advice,” the official said. “If they had had someone at the table with knowledge of this, they would have said: ‘Hey do you want to play it this way, or be more transparent?’ Someone could have raised the question.”

“That’s something Christine Grady could have, or should have, done,” the official continued. “She wasn’t able to do it because she was Fauci’s wife.”

“Maybe they had discussions in private about what was going on,” the official said. “She was placed in a conflicted role because of that.”

Grady was among the employees at the Department of Health and Human Services affected by the department-wide restructuring and reduction in force prompted by the Department of Government Efficiency earlier this month. Grady was reportedly given a choice between relocating away from the couple’s tony Beltway neighborhood to an Indian Health Service post or leaving HHS.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Barbara Jordan’s thunderous warning still echoes: immigration is a privilege we extend only when it strengthens—not undercuts—American workers, and “those who should not be here must be required to leave.” In this interview Elizabeth Farah teams with Jeremy Beck of NumbersUSA to hand you Jordan’s lost blueprint—slash the chain‑migration loopholes, end the visa lottery, mandate E‑Verify for every hire — then dares you to act. Washington buried Jordan’s plan the day she died; pick it up now, flood your representatives with it, and refuse to let another politician trade away your wages, your security, or America’s unity in the name of fake “compassion.”

WATCH:

Here are the links to watch the Elizabeth Farah Show interviews on other platforms:

Elizabeth Farah on X
WND on X
WND on Rumble
WND on YouTube
WND on Facebook

President Donald Trump has openly promoted his plan to fire thousands, even tens of thousands of federal workers to cut waste, fraud and corruption from the government.

He’s already accomplished a lot of that, shutting down some entire bureaucracies with plans for more.

But now he’s going full throttle, with an announcement that the administration it is moving ahead with a new rule, previously known as “Schedule F,” that will make it a lot easier to remove federal employees it believes “are undercutting President Trump’s agenda.”

BREAKING: The Trump Administration is revamping Schedule F to STRIP civil service protection from federal workers, making it easier to fire them. pic.twitter.com/JI8t2vf96m

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 18, 2025

SCOOP: The Trump administration today will announce that it is revamping “Schedule F” in a move that will make it easier to cut federal employees it thinks are undercutting Trump’s agenda, @axiosalex reports https://t.co/zUzDVmM5nD

— Axios (@axios) April 18, 2025

A report from Axios noted the plan apparently will limit “civil service protections” for about 50,000, or 2% of the federal work force.

The report explained, “The Office of Personnel Management’s new rule — dubbed ‘Schedule Policy/Career’ — will allow many career civil servants to be classified as ‘at will’ employees, making them easier to remove. Trump aides argue they need greater flexibility to fire civil servants who are underperforming, engaging in misconduct or undermining Trump’s policy plans.”

While many, many federal employees are supposedly performing “nonpartisan” jobs, many of those have, in fact, made their posts partisan by pursuing their own political agendas while being paid by taxpayers.

Those would be known these days as the “Deep State,” which in fact has weaponized large parts of the federal bureaucracy against Trump.

The report said it was toward the end of his first term that Trump, by executive order, established a Schedule F category, but Joe Biden immediately killed the plan.

The report noted a White House official confirmed that even unelected career bureaucrats need to be accountable for the agenda chosen by voters.

It was earlier this month that some agencies started picking which positions should fall under the new definition, the report said.

Leftists have claimed the cuts already being made by the Department of Government Efficiency are threatening operations of key programs such as Social Security, but Trump actually has ordered that program recipients be provided benefits as usual.

“Trump’s plans to implement the rule has drawn aggressive pushback from labor groups.,” the report said, citing the  American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who have sued to restore protections for their dues-paying members.

Many in America’s government, along with those in the highly profitable pharmaceutical industry, insisted at the time, and some even insist how, that COVID-19 was a natural variation of a bat virus that came out of a Wuhan, China, “wet market” and infected people.

Ultimately, millions of people around the world died and trillions of dollars were lost economically. Even now, the side effects of the often-injurious mRNA shots are harming people, with consequences such as heart failure.

The government at that time, as President Donald Trump’s first term was ending and Joe Biden was taking over White House operations, claimed that only the new shots could be used, that other medications like hydroxychloroquine, which was proven effective against COVID, should not be allowed.

One of the results was billions of dollars going to the makers of the new shots.

But now the White House has exploded the COVID myths pushed by officials and authorities with a new report.

It states bluntly that:

“The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature. Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events. Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research (gene altering and organism supercharging) at inadequate biosafety levels. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market. By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.”

Further, much of the so-called “science” that was used to justify the theory that it came from a wet market, rather than the much more likely leak from the Wuhan lab, came from a report, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a document the White House charges “was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the lab leak theory.”

It actually was “prompted” by Anthony Fauci, now retired from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The report confirms, “A lab-related incident involving gain-of-function research is the most likely the origin of COVID-19. Current government mechanisms for overseeing this dangerous gain-of-function research are incomplete, severely convoluted, and lack global applicability.”

Further pointing to the lab, the report said, “EcoHealth — under the leadership of Dr. Peter Daszak — used U.S. taxpayer dollars to facilitate dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. After the Select Subcommittee released evidence of EcoHealth violating the terms of its National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) commenced official debarment proceedings and suspended all funding to EcoHealth. New evidence also shows that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has opened an investigation into EcoHealth’s pandemic-era activities.”

It’s also because of failures by the National Institutes of Health, “NIH’s procedures for funding and overseeing potentially dangerous research are deficient, unreliable, and pose a serious threat to both public health and national security. Further, NIH fostered an environment that promoted evading federal record keeping laws…”

The information has taken years to surface because of multiple layers of “obstruction,” the report charges.

“The Biden Administration’s HHS engaged in a multi-year campaign of delay, confusion, and non-responsiveness in an attempt to obstruct the Select Subcommittee’s investigation and hide evidence that could incriminate or embarrass senior public health officials. It appears that HHS even intentionally under-resourced its component that responds to legislative oversight requests,” the White House page charges.

Also, “Daszak obstructed the Select Subcommittee’s investigation by providing publicly available information, instructing his staff to reduce the scope and pace of productions, and doctoring documents before releasing them to the public. Further, Dr. Daszak provided false statements to Congress.”

That agenda was aided by David Morens, a senior adviser to Fauci, who, the statement charges, “deliberately obstructed the Select Subcommittee’s investigation, likely lied to Congress on multiple occasions, unlawfully deleted federal COVID-19 records, and shared nonpublic information about NIH grant processes with EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak.”

The details provided by the White House were sourced from the “House Oversight Committee website, a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability in the U.S. House of Representatives.”

It continued with blame for others, including the World Health Organization, which is charged for its “abject failure” to respond, “because it caved to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and placed China’s political interests ahead of its international duties. Further, the WHO’s newest effort to solve the problems exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic — via a ‘Pandemic Treaty’ — may harm the United States.”

That infamous “social distancing” requirement to keep six feet apart? It “sort of just appeared,” according to Fauci’s closed-door testimony, and was based on no science all, but still was used to “shut down schools and small business across the country.”

Also, “There was no conclusive evidence that masks effectively protected Americans from COVID-19. Public health officials flipped-flopped on the efficacy of masks without providing Americans scientific data — causing a massive uptick in public distrust.”

And there were those lockdowns, which not only “forced millions of Americans to forgo crucial elements of a healthy and financially sound life,” but also “caused immeasurable harm to … the mental and physical health of Americans.”

Case in point was New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s orders that forced nursing homes to accept seniors who had tested positive for COVID-19, and who were put in populations where the virus could be spread.

That was, the report confirms, “medical malpractice.”

“Evidence shows that Mr. Cuomo and his administration worked to cover up the tragic aftermath of their policy decisions in an apparent effort to shield themselves from accountability.”

Oddly, Fauci, whose net worth grew by millions of dollars during the pandemic, was given a presidential pardon by Joe Biden before his term in the White House ended. It was “for any offenses” that he “may have committed” against the United States.

The O’Keefe Media Group released undercover video of Jonathan Ferrer, the HR Director for Summit Public Schools, a charter network operating in California and Washington, admitting to race-based hiring.

Ferrer admitted to violating Title VII, California FEHA (prohibits discrimination) and school policy.

“You get presented with, on equal merits, like a white person or a black person or whatever. Yeah, we’re going with the black person,” Ferrer told the undercover OMG reporter.

“Whenever there’s a qualified candidate and they happen to identify differently or present differently, we’re probably going with that person… That’s what DEI is all about,” Ferrer told the undercover journalist.

“We have one trans teacher in our district, and, so, I think it’s just culturally, we just naturally look for those folks,” he said.

When asked if Summit Public Schools would ever hire a Trump supporter, Ferrer said, “I don’t think we would hire them.”

“We do have DEI questions built into our selection process,” Ferrer said. “We have a rubric… if they say any of these things, this is not someone who’s answering the question the way we’re aligned to answer the question.”

WATCH:

EXCLUSIVE: Summit Public Schools HR Director Confesses to Violating Title VII, California FEHA, and School Policy: “We’re Going With the Black Person… NO MATTER WHAT” in Race-Based Hiring; Admits, “I Don’t Think We Would Hire MAGA People”

“Whenever there’s a qualified candidate… pic.twitter.com/ZIOCtpcgjQ

— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) April 17, 2025

“At Summit Public Schools, we’re committed to being an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to maintaining a team that is free from discriminatory conduct in accordance with all applicable state and federal laws. We expect each and every employee, including our Human Resources team, to uphold our commitment. Any allegations of discriminatory conduct or verified misconduct are taken seriously and addressed through established internal procedures,” Valeria Torres, Government Affairs Manager for Summit Public Schools said in a statement to OMG.

UPDATE: OMG has received a statement from Valeria Torres, Government Affairs Manager for Summit Public Schools, regarding Director of Human Resources Jonathan Ferrer’s comments:

“At Summit Public Schools, we’re committed to being an equal opportunity employer. We are committed… https://t.co/3s2ffZ7nEI pic.twitter.com/37rCNJrnTr

— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) April 17, 2025

This article originally appeared on The Gateway Pundit.com.

An instructor at Washington State University who was captured on security video beating up a student who was wearing a MAGA hat is learning the cost of his political violence: His job.

The professor, Patrick Mahoney, “has been fired from his post,” according to the Daily Mail.

EXCLUSIVE: Frontlines reporter @choeshow has obtained surveillance footage showing Washington State University (WSU) PhD student instructor Patrick Mahoney and WSU employee Gerald Hoff attacking engineering student Jay Sani.

Sani claims that Mahoney and Hoff assaulted him… pic.twitter.com/AhNae3FDMT

— FRONTLINES (@FrontlinesTPUSA) April 15, 2025

A Communist faculty member of Washington State University was arrested after allegedly assaulting a student for wearing a MAGA hat. In February, WSU junior Jay Sani was getting takeout in Pullman, Washington’s historic College Hill district when he was allegedly ambushed and… pic.twitter.com/xjfqvgUoPm

— Melissa Hallman (@dotconnectinga) April 15, 2025

The video showed Mahoney, “along with student Gerald Hoff ripped Jay Sani’s hat from him while outside of a bar near the Pullman campus on February 28.”

The video confirms Sani, who is Indian-American, was pushed to the ground by the two men and punched repeatedly. He was left with scrapes and bruises and reported the assault to police.

The university later confirmed that Mahoney was “relieved of all teaching responsibilities.”

“Washington State University is aware of an off-campus incident that occurred last February involving a WSU staff member and a graduate student. After an investigation conducted by the City of Pullman’s police department, and in accordance with WSU policies, the staff member’s employment has been terminated. The second individual involved was a graduate student serving as a teaching assistant. He was not a Washington State University professor. This person has been relieved of all teaching responsibilities.”

The report said the video first was obtained by Turning Point USA Frontlines reporter Jonathan Choe, and it confirmed policy bodycam footage confirmed the offenders “admitted to the assault.”

Mahoney, to police, tried to blame the victim.

The two attackers also have been arrested and charged with assault.

A Facebook post said, “A fight ensued which resulted in Jay Sani being thrown onto the concrete. This caused Jay Sani to bleed and suffer further injuries. One or more of them then proceeded to kick Jay Sani while he collapsed on the concrete.”

The reported noted that Mahoney “has been active in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, including advocating for the Pullman City Council to sign a Gaza ceasefire resolution.”

Though the COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread resistance to the Biden-era military’s vaccine mandate, COVID isn’t the only mandated shot being resisted by some service members for religious reasons.

Army Sergeant Dan McGriff (a pseudonym) spoke to WorldNetDaily on the condition of anonymity, anticipating reprisals. He emphasized that his views do not reflect those of the Department of Defense or the Department of the Army.

In the summer of 2021 during the thick of the pandemic, the non-commissioned officer “saw the writing on the wall,” suspecting a COVID-19 shot mandate was on the way for military service members. So, in August 2021, he was not surprised to see the rollout of former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s now-rescinded mandate.

After conferring with his wife, he made the decision to seek exemption, not only from the COVID-19 shot, but for all future vaccines as well.

“Some people were getting responses back within 30 to 90 days at most, but mine took about six months, going all the way up to the Army surgeon general to be denied or accepted,” McGriff told WND. “And in March 2022, I received my initial denial.”

While the decision could be appealed, the Army sergeant said there was no guidance available. “I sent my appeal within seven days, and from that moment on I was a ghost.” He explained that even though he had approved orders for a new duty station, he was not allowed to move because he was “unvaccinated.”

During this period, he was also barred from attending schools or trainings that could have advanced his career.

With a large family to care for, McGriff grew increasingly worried about his future, knowing he could be separated from military service for refusing the shot. In September 2021, his fears were compounded as his appeal was denied. Subsequently, he received a General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand, or GOMOR, a permanent stain on his record for so-called misconduct.

McGriff spent the next several months fighting for his career, to no avail. And on the brink of administrative separation near the end of 2022, he said the former Defense secretary suddenly rescinded the mandate on Jan. 10, 2023. “After turning in all but one uniform, my career was saved about 30 days prior to facing an administrative separation board,” he recalled.

Unfortunately, his fight against being compelled to receive vaccines was far from over. As he told WND, “When my religious accommodation (RA) appeal was denied [in September 2021], the Secretary of the Army emailed a memo stating that I was denied and I could not request a blanket RA for all vaccines and had to do them case by case, or individually, even though they all went against my religious beliefs.”

“With that, I exercised my rights to request not to take the flu shot” in October 2022, McGriff said. At a time when he was finally unflagged for separation, had the GOMAR removed from his permanent file, and was allowed to transfer to a new duty station, he said, “my previous duty station somehow lost my RA request for the flu vaccine.”

Then in December 2023, he added, “I submitted a new one.” Strangely, in January 2024, this new religious accommodation request had also been lost.

Today, Sgt. McGriff finds himself seeking a religious accommodation for the flu vaccine for a third time. There is an Army regulation in place stating he does not have to take the vaccine while waiting for approval. And though he considers it a blessing to have avoided the shot in recent years, he said, “there have been loose threats of denying leave requests for not having it.”

Are the circumstances surrounding his objection to the flu vaccine a coincidence, or have they been deliberate? Either way, he feels that “when it comes to Christians, our religious freedoms are being trampled on while wearing the uniform.”

In McGriff’s opinion, “All vaccines should be optional and not mandated.” However, as it stands today, if a service member is not up to date on immunizations, that service member is not considered deployable.

“Do our religious rights count for anything?” he asked WND.

Apart from his religious objection to vaccines, he also pointed out that “with mRNA vaccines being the future, things are going to get very scary very fast.” Afterall, mRNA COVID-19 shots have been widely associated with a well-documented risk of serious side effects, including but not limited to cardiac issues and cancer.

The fight rages on, over whether an illegal alien deported by the Trump administration to a prison in El Salvador can be extricated from that prison and returned to America.

El Salvador’s president says no.

Further, whether judges in America can force President Trump to go into a foreign nation, retrieve one of its citizens from behind jail bars, and bring him back to America in a scenario that likely would lead to further deportation orders.

Amid all of this, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, traveled to El Salvador and insisted to officials there he had to meet with the inmate, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, pressuring them over and over until they relented and set up a photo opportunity.

Now Trump is calling Van Hollen a “fool.”

The Washington Examiner said Trump’s comment on social media was, “Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone. GRANDSTANDER!!!”

President Trump, citing the catastrophic damages to America from Joe Biden’s years-long open borders scheme that allowed millions of illegal aliens, including known terrorists, to come into America, has made one of his term’s goals to crack down on that activity.

He’s literally closed off illegal aliens’ paths into the U.S., and also has been working to deport as many as can be identified and captured.

Democrats, smarting from landslide losses in the Electoral College and popular vote in last fall’s presidential election, have chosen to object to anything Trump does regarding national security.

As part of that they have taken up the cause of Garcia, who was eligible for deportation but apparently had a court order that he should not go to El Salvador.

I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return. pic.twitter.com/U9y2gZpxCb

— Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) April 18, 2025

HOLY SH*T El Salvador President Nayib Bukele is trolling Democrats so badly. I absolutely love it

Now it’s time to impeach Sen. Chris Van Hollen pic.twitter.com/iydbpxAfH3

— MAGA Voice (@MAGAVoice) April 18, 2025

Senator Chris Van Hollen met with a deported illegal alien MS-13 member instead of the family of his own constituent, Rachel Morin, who was slain by an illegal alien.

Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/KdRzm6VOa8

— JOSH DUNLAP (@JDunlap1974) April 18, 2025

Van Hollen said, “I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.”

The Department of Homeland Security targeted Abrego Garcia for deportation due to his alleged MS-13 ties. On Wednesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi released 13 pages of police and immigration records on Garcia dating back to 2019, revealing suspicions against him of human trafficking, gang activity and more.

A federal judge has claimed the Trump administration must “facilitate and effectuate” Garcia’s return to the United States by April 7, a claim that is on appeal.

Van Hollen had simply traveled to El Salvador and demanded access to Garcia, to which authorities there explained there was more to the process than that.

Eventually the meeting was staged, and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele mocked the senator.

“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!”

Bukele added, “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”

The backlash for Van Hollen advocacy for an illegal alien is expanding, too.

BREAKING: American Accountability Foundation has filed an ethics complaint against Sen. Chris Van Hollen for assisting a foreign terrorist organization with his trip to El Salvador.

In our letter to Leader Thune, we demand that he instruct the secretary of the Senate not… pic.twitter.com/VFzqhEAd3X

— American Accountability Foundation (@Theswampmonitor) April 18, 2025

The American Accountability Foundation said it had filed an ethics complaint against him “for assisting a foreign terrorist organization with his trip to El Salvador.”

“In our letter to Leader Thune, we demand that he instruct the secretary of the Senate not to foot the bill for Van Hollen’s trip and wants the Senate Ethics Committee to open an immediate investigation,” the organization said.