My Democratic colleagues have opposed President Donald Trump’s agenda at every turn, and that’s their right. But their decision to shut down the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) isn’t some harmless act of political gamesmanship; it’s incredibly dangerous.

In the one month since Democrats voted to deny funding to DHS, the United States has faced at least four apparent terrorist attacks.

On March 1, a gunman wearing a “Property of Allah” shirt killed three Americans and wounded 13 others outside Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden in Austin, Texas. On March 7, two men tossed explosives into a crowd of protesters near Gracie Mansion in New York City. The men told the New York Police Department that they had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. They had hoped to kill more people than the Boston bombers, but the courageous acts of NYPD officers on the scene foiled their attack.

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On March 12, a gunman — who had been released from prison after providing material support to ISIS — entered a classroom on the campus of Old Dominion University, shouted “Allahu Akbar,” and opened fire. He killed an ROTC instructor before brave students stopped him. That same day, a man in West Bloomfield, Michigan, injured one security guard when he rammed his vehicle into the Temple Israel synagogue while preschool was in session. According to the Israeli government, the suspect — who apparently shot himself amid a shootout with the Temple’s security — had a brother who was a member of the terrorist group Hezbollah.

These terrorists killed four Americans and injured dozens more. It makes me nauseous to imagine how many more could have died if not for the bravery of local law enforcement officers, the Temple’s armed security and Old Dominion’s ROTC students.

These attacks on American soil all occurred against the backdrop of President Trump’s decisive action in Iran. To be clear: President Trump had no choice but to strike Iran. He wasn’t trying to start a war; he is trying to end one. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who shared the same affinity for killing Americans as the terrorists who just struck within the United States — wanted to resume building nuclear weapons, and he would have been able to do that if we didn’t stop Iran’s missile and drone production soon.

I’m confident our airmen will annihilate Iran’s missile supply, but that won’t eliminate the threat to the American people. The Ayatollah may have used his last rotten breath to trigger sleeper cells within the United States. These lone-wolf terrorists may be plotting additional attacks here at home, and we have no clue how many terrorists may be living among us because President Biden left our border wide open for four years.

During that time, the Biden administration released at least 99 known individuals from the terrorist watchlist into the country — and those are just the suspects we know about. It will take an all-hands-on-deck effort to find and deport every terrorist lurking among the estimated millions of unvetted people that the Biden administration released into our country.

Yet DHS, which employs the very people who should be hunting these lone wolves, is shut down because my Democratic colleagues have been throwing a month-long temper tantrum.

At the heart of this meltdown is the fact that many of my Democratic colleagues want open borders. They don’t think we should deport anybody, and they’re holding funding for DHS hostage because they hate the idea that officers at Customs and Border Protection or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) might actually enforce our immigration laws.

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In turn, they’ve made a series of demands to resume funding. Some of the requests were reasonable, and the Trump administration agreed to implement them as soon as possible. For example, all ICE officers will wear body cameras during future operations. They’d do it right now, but it’s hard to buy cameras when Democrats won’t approve their funding.

The remaining Democratic demands are weapons-grade stupid. For example, they want to forbid ICE officers from wearing masks and force them to display their names on their uniforms. These policies would endanger the lives of ICE agents and their families. We can’t expect these law enforcement officers to focus on hunting terrorists when anti-ICE lunatics are following their vehicles or showing up at their churches.

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We all know some Democrats hate President Trump more than the Devil hates holy water, but we’ve seen four apparent terrorist attacks in two weeks. The Department of Homeland Security isn’t a pawn in a political game. We need these officers focused on spotting sleeper cells, not their missing paychecks. 

To my Democratic colleagues: Don’t wait for another attack to get serious about protecting America’s security. Reopen DHS today.

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Tourism has been taking a hit in Sin City — and now comes news of another poker room closure on the Las Vegas Strip.

A Resorts World representative confirmed to Fox News Digital that its poker rooms will be discontinued on March 30. 

“However, we will be introducing new gaming opportunities to replace the poker room,” the representative said.

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The representative did not elaborate on what new gaming offerings would take the room’s place. It currently features No Limit Texas Hold’em, Pot Limit Omaha and mixed games.

The closure will leave just eight poker rooms open on the Las Vegas Strip, according to the blog “Vital Vegas.”

Resorts World announces they will be closing their poker room March 30.  (iStock)

Robby Starbuck, a conservative activist and the host of “The Robby Starbuck Show,” previously told Fox News Digital that in-person gambling is becoming less popular. 

“Now nearly everyone under 40 who bets seems to do it online,” Starbuck said.

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“I don’t know one person under age 40 who goes to Vegas regularly to bet or play slots,” he added. 

“This trend will continue with younger people because, honestly, our minds are wired differently.”

The closure of a poker room by Resorts World (not pictured) will leave just eight poker rooms on the Las Vegas Strip. (Michael Anthony for Fox News Digital)

Las Vegas Strip gaming revenue fell 11% year over year, from $840,093,428 in January 2025 to $747,655,527 in January 2026, according to the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB).

Nevada’s nonrestricted gaming licensees reported a total gaming win of roughly $1.35 billion in January of this year, dropping 6.55% compared to the same month last year, according to the NGCB.

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The online gambling market is expected to reach a projected revenue of $22.2 million by 2030, according to Grand View Research.

Meanwhile, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LCVA) recently released its year-end summary for 2025 as well — and those numbers are worrisome to many.

Over 38 million people visited Las Vegas in 2025 — down 7.5% from 2024. (Ashley J. DiMella/Fox News Digital)

There were 38,545,700 people who visited Sin City — down 7.5% from 2024, the report said. 

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The highest visitation year ever recorded in Las Vegas was in 2019 — with 42,523,700 people coming by.

That was before a dip during the COVID pandemic, according to data that LCVA posted on its website.

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The noted visitor volume in 2025 closely mirrors the levels seen in 2000, 2002 and 2003.

In Haryana, between January 2020 and January 2026, about 18,000 people in the age group of 18 to 45 died due to heart attack. This information was given to the Assembly on Wednesday. The government shared this information in a written reply to a question by a Congress leader in the House.

The MLA had asked, “Since 2020, how many youth aged 18 to 45 years have died due to heart attack in Haryana annually and district wise and has the government conducted any study or survey to find out whether the death of these people has any connection with Covid-19 infection or Covid-19 vaccination and if the answer is yes, then what was the conclusion of such study or survey and what action has been taken by the government in this regard.”

Rohtak has the lowest number of heart attack cases.

The House was told that no such survey was conducted. The government said that according to information received from the districts, 2,394 such cases were registered in 2020. It was told that 3,188 people died in 2021, 2,796 in 2022, 2,886 in 2023, 3,063 in 2024, 3,255 in 2025 and 391 in January 2026 due to heart attack. In this way, a total of 17,973 people died due to heart attack.

According to the data of different districts, the number of such deaths every year in Yamunanagar district from January 2020 to December 2025 was 387, 461, 375, 378, 410 and 389 respectively. In Rohtak district this number was much less and was recorded as 33, 41, 40, 27, 30 and 30 respectively, whereas in Gurugram the numbers were 113, 105, 116, 114, 93 and 83.

The stunning and ominous rise in anti-Semitism in the United States cannot be disputed, but can be resisted. It is particularly the obligation of genuine Christians to participate in the repression through education of the ancient evil. It is the particular obligation of Christian institutions — churches, colleges, publishers and more — to do their part in making this sin once again an obvious source of shame and to help cure those who suffer from it and, where it cannot be cured, to force it back by shaming and shunning into the deepest shadows where it belongs.

Christianity didn’t invent anti-Semitism. It existed before Christ and the empires of the ancient world would target Jews for many reasons. But, once Christianity rose to dominate Europe, anti-Semitism spread alongside and within a vast portion of the Church.

Some, but not enough, of the Church always spoke out against anti-Semitism and its costumed version of today — anti-Zionism — and continues to do so. Saint John Paul the Great and Pope Benedict were the most visible and outspoken opponents of anti-Semitism from within the Catholic Church of my lifetime, but many others have noted the obvious intractable hostility of real Christianity to the sin of hatred embedded in hatred of Jews or their country.

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When Colorado Christian University — originally founded in 1914 as Denver Bible College, but now a flourishing university in Lakewood, Colorado — invited me to a day of teaching, feasting and lectures, I chose as my topic the reasons why Americans of all faiths, or none at all, ought to support Israel. I included in those remarks the obvious: It is sinful for Christians to hate Jews or Israel.

That’s hardly a lightning bolt for even the “slightly churched.” But. I wanted primarily to stress that America is an ally of Israel for non-theological reasons — reasons with which Christians ought to be familiar. It is bad writing to reproduce speeches and brand them columns, but here in condensed form is the argument I made.

First, in a dangerous world, even the dominant superpower — the United States — needs allies, especially as the People’s Republic of China stretches to become a peer in military and intelligence matters as well as economic influence.

The State of Israel is, objectively, the most important ally of the United States. It is a nuclear power. It is the equal of any military on the globe in its ability to strike far and hard and to dominate its region. It’s an intelligence superpower and an engine of technological excellence and ever-increasing breakthroughs. If any country had to pick one strong ally not named the United States, it would pick Israel.

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Israel is also a reliable and fully-integrated-into-our-military ally. Israel takes what the United States makes and improves on it, as had been the case with the F-35 fighter. It sometimes takes the rudiments of a technology and develops them to scale and deploys them, as with Iron Dome and soon Iron Beam. Those advancements will return to America as the Golden Dome and the Golden Beam. Would that Israel got into the ship building business at scale, but we have allies in South Korea and Japan that are doing just that.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Israel shares America’s founding values of individual liberty and democratic governance. Israel is as politically fractious as the U.S., but freedom of speech is as robust there as it is here. Human rights are respected there as they are here. It is a “Western nation” in every respect, despite having to have fought for its very life since the state’s modern founding in 1948.

I also reminded the audience in quick fashion that, as a matter of American law, both constitutional, statutory and treaty-based law, that the United States recognizes Israel as a nation state with all the rights and responsibilities of a nation state.

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“Zionism” — the term originated in the late 19th century movement to re-establish the Jewish homeland in the ancestral lands of the Jews — is not some ideological outlier, but very much a historical movement that culminated in the United Nations’ recognition of Israel as a nation state via actions of both that body’s General Assembly and Security Council. The United States participated in that process and voted for it. While theology might underlay some Americans’ support for Israel, belief in the rule of law is the best and enduring case for most Americans to stand by and with Israel because American law is pledged to respect Israeli nationhood.

After the invasion of Israel by Hamas from Gaza on October 7, 2023, and the massacre and kidnapping that followed, one would have predicted the death of much of anti-Semitism in the West, so awful was the cruelty of that day and so evil and hideous the unmasked face of Jew-hatred.

Instead, and to the shock of many, Israel’s just war to recover its captives and destroy the threat to the state posed by Hamas triggered not just more attacks on it from Hezbollah nested in Lebanon, the Houthis embedded in Yemen and the “head of the snake” in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also a geyser of Jew-hatred in the United States.

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What had been marginal and a marginalized, weird, cultish, and conspiracist belief system suddenly went mainstream and apparently became a much larger phenomenon than most Americans believed possible (or at least seemed that world in the funhouse mirrors of the web.) Antisemitism and the subset of the ancient evil under the name of anti-Zionism is still very much an outlier in American public opinion, but the damage this loathsome ideology has wrought post 10/7 to the collective American psyche is significant as those possessed by this repugnant hatred feel free to express it in public.

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So it is long past time for Americans, and especially mainstream Christian Americans, to make the theological case against anti-Semitism — it is a grave sin, indeed, for Catholics, a “mortal sin” — and just as importantly if not more so, the secular case for being pro-Zionist laid out in brief above.

America needs a healthy polity, one free of all racial and religion-based hatred, and it needs allies as strong and reliable as Israel. The two arguments cannot be made often enough in too many places, but both ought to be made especially on and within any institution identifying itself as “Christian.” I thank Colorado Christian University for giving me the opportunity to do so.

Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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Former FBI Director James Comey has been called many things by critics and fans alike. However, it appears that his stab at being a pop singer did not pan out. Comey recently raised eyebrows with an account of his singing Beyoncé’s “Sandcastles” to FBI officials in a classified briefing … only to be met by a stony silence.

It appears that some of his agents may have viewed the occasion as grounds for intervention rather than for rendition. In fairness to the agents, they were likely unaware of Comey’s use of beaches to uncover hidden intelligence and messages.

Comey has periodically popped up in the press with bizarre or self-edifying posts. However, this one left many scratching their heads. Yet, it was vintage Comey, including a surprising admission about his handling of classified information.

Comey recalled the moment from a classified FBI briefing when he realized that a secret program being discussed was named after a favorite song. He wrote:

JAMES COMEY ADMITS TO SINGING BEYONCÉ SONG DURING SENSITIVE FBI BRIEFING

Former FBI Director James Comey just loves singing tunes, but that might have caused a slip of the tongue. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

“One morning, I was sitting at the head of a big table in a crowded room to get briefed on a particular piece of work. The briefer started by saying, the operation was codenamed ‘Sandcastles.’ Now, this was 2016, and you may know that Beyoncé’s album ‘Lemonade’ had come out with a track called ‘Sandcastles.’ So, I said, ‘Oh, like the Beyoncé song.’ Blank stares all around the FBI conference room. So, I did the natural thing. I think I sang, ‘We rebuild sand castles that washed away.’ Nope, nothing — dead silence. ‘Never mind,’ I said, “‘continue.’ Only when I got home and told my family the story did I get the reaction I was looking for. When I write, I listen to classical or jazz because, in ways I can’t explain, the music unlocks something. It frees me.”

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It also apparently freed Comey from security protocols. His charming story included the fact that, disappointed by his audience at the FBI, he decided to repeat it to his family. In doing so, he may have revealed the code name of a classified FBI program to uncleared individuals in an unsecured location. This is no indication from Comey whether the code name was considered sensitive information by the FBI before his encore performance.

The Justice Department has fought in court to withhold code names as sensitive national security matters, including during Comey’s tenure as director.

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For example, in N.Y. Times v. DOJ, 2023, it was uncontested that the FBI could withhold code names because “specific code names that [the] FBI used for certain FBI programs’ and that disclosure of these things ‘would risk circumvention of the law by revealing FBI processes and potential issues related to relationships with foreign countries.”

This is not the first time Comey has raised concerns of his violation of FBI protocols and procedures regarding classified material. The Justice Department inspector general issued a scathing account of how, after being fired by President Donald Trump, Comey improperly removed FBI files and then arranged for the information to be leaked to the media to undermine Trump.

The media immediately came to his defense despite his having led investigations into leakers in the past. On CNN and MSNBC, legal experts dismissed the arguments that this was improper or FBI material.

The memos clearly reveal that Comey was likely aware they contained possible classified information. Comey wrote in a Jan. 7, 2017, memo that “I am  not sure of the proper classification, so I have chosen secret.” The four memos, including two given to his friend to leak to the media, were later found to be classified.

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Comey has periodically popped up in the press with bizarre or self-edifying posts. However, this one left many scratching their heads. 

What was notable about the leaks was Comey’s obsession with his own public persona. He took FBI material to bolster his image with the media. He later published “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” which portrayed him in heroic terms without addressing allegations that he was a leaker. During his term as director, the Justice Department investigated and prosecuted FBI personnel for leaks. The “higher loyalty” shown by Comey often seemed to be his blind loyalty to his own image.  

Comey has previously recounted his obsession with Taylor Swift as well as Beyoncé, but insists that “I can’t explain, the music unlocks something. It frees me.”

Given his history of leaks and other violations, it may be time to try a new musical genre. It appears that pop is a bit too liberating for James Comey.

In the meantime, Comey may be misinterpreting tears of joy rather than regret when he made it to the line from “Sandcastles”: “I made you cry when I walked away.”

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