Category: Breitbart
White House makes touching gesture to honor assassinated National Guard member, allegedly by CIA-linked Afghan
President Donald Trump’s administration is honoring fallen National Guard member Spc. Sarah Beckstrom in the wake of her horrific murder just yards away from the White House grounds.
The White House lowered all flags on the grounds to half-staff on Thursday after Beckstrom succumbed to her wounds on November 27, Thanksgiving Day. The suspect is a CIA-linked Afghan national who allegedly shot her and fellow guardsman Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe in Washington, D.C, the day prior.
Beckstrom was only 20 years old.
‘The Biden administration justified bringing the alleged shooter to the United States.’
The proclamation from Trump’s administration extended the honor to “all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, December 4, 2025.”
The flags will also be lowered at American embassies, legations, consular offices, and military facilities across the world.
Flags at the White House are lowered to half-staff in memory of Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom.
May God bless her family, our National Guard heroes, and the United States of America. 🙏🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/OyOGMc0dv3
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) December 4, 2025
Twenty-nine-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who was officially charged with Beckstrom’s murder, also allegedly ambushed 24-year-old Wolfe, who is miraculously expected to recover.
Lakanwal first came to the United States under President Joe Biden’s administration under the program Operation Allies Welcome following the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Lakanwal was also a member of a CIA-backed military operation to hunt down Taliban commanders.
RELATED: Suspect in National Guard shooting was part of CIA-backed unit that hunted down Taliban commanders
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
“In the wake of the disastrous Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration justified bringing the alleged shooter to the United States in September 2021 due to his prior work with the U.S. government, including CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar, which ended shortly following the chaotic evacuation,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
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Do we love the ‘Wicked’ movies because we hate innocence?
As I watched Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked: For Good” last week, I kept thinking about another, very different filmmaker: David Lynch.
Specifically, the Lynch that emerges from Alexandre Philippe’s excellent 2022 documentary “Lynch/Oz,” wherein we discover just how deeply the infamously surreal filmmaker was influenced by one of cinema’s sweetest fantasy films: the original “Wizard of Oz.”
In the era of #WitchTok … a story like ‘Wicked’ has built-in appeal.
Philippe’s film includes footage from a 2001 Q and A in which Lynch confirms the extent of his devotion: “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about ‘The Wizard of Oz.'”
The logic of fairyland
And that shouldn’t be surprising given how much it shows up in his work. From Glinda the Good Witch making an appearance in “Wild at Heart,” to the hazy, dreamlike depiction of suburbia in “Blue Velvet,” his films exist in a dual state between the realm of fairyland and the underworld.
Indeed, Lynch doesn’t reject either. In proper Buddhist fashion, these two forces exist in balance, equally potent and true. There is both good and evil in his world. Neither negates the other’s existence. And when darkness spills over into the light, it may be tragic, but it is also just another part of the world. Like Dorothy, his protagonists find themselves walking deeper into unknown territory. The protagonists of his films truly “aren’t in Kansas anymore.”
“The Wizard of Oz” is potent because it captures the logic of fairyland better than almost any film ever made. Channeling the fairy stories of J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald, it transports the mind to a realm that is more real than real, where even the most dire intrusion of evil can be set right according to simple moral rules.
As G.K. Chesterton famously puts it:
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Wicked good
“Wicked” and its new sequel reject this comforting clarity for something altogether more “adult” and ambiguous. Instead of presenting good and evil as objective realities that can be discerned and defeated, the films show how political authorities manipulate those labels to scapegoat some and exalt others.
They do so by swapping the original’s heroes and villains. The Wonderful Wizard is a cruel tyrant. Glinda is foppish and self-obsessed. Dorothy is the unwitting tool of a corrupt regime. And Elphaba — the so-called Wicked Witch — is reimagined as a sympathetic underdog with a tragic backstory, a manufactured villain invented to keep Oz unified in ire and hatred.
Elphaba exudes a whiff of Milton’s Lucifer — an eternal rebel in a tragic quest to upend the moral order. But unlike “Paradise Lost,” “Wicked” presents rebellion against its all-powerful father figure not as a tragic self-deception, but as a justified response to systemic cruelty.
Witch way?
“Wicked: For Good” takes the ideas of its predecessor even further than mere rebellion. If “Wicked: Part One” is about awakening to the world’s realities and becoming radicalized by them, “Wicked: For Good” is about the cost of selling out — the temptation to compromise with a corrupt system and the soul-crushing despair that follows.
This is where the irony of the film’s title, “Wicked: For Good” comes in. Once a person sees the world for what it truly is, they can’t go back without compromising themselves. They’ve “changed for good.” They’ve awakened and can’t return to sleep.
It’s worth considering why the “Wicked” franchise is so wildly popular. Gregory Maguire’s original 1995 novel has sold 5 million copies. The 2003 stage show it inspired won three Tony Awards and recently became the fourth longest-running Broadway musical ever. And the first film grossed $759 million last winter, with the sequel poised to make even more money.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that this outsize success comes at a time when Wicca and paganism have grown into mainstream cultural forces. In the era of #WitchTok, in which self-proclaimed witches hex politicians and garner billions of views on social media, a story like “Wicked” has built-in appeal. It offers glamorous spell-casting and a romantic tale of resistance to authority.
RELATED: ‘Etsy witches’ reportedly placed curses on Charlie Kirk days before assassination
Photo by The Salt Lake Tribune / Contributor via Getty Images
A bittersweet moral
The temptation of witchcraft is one that always hovers over our enlightened and rationalistic society. Particularly for young women, witchcraft offers a specific form of autonomy and power — over body, spirit, and fate — that patriarchal societies often deny. Many view witchcraft as progressive and empowering; “witchy vibes” have become a badge of identity.
Thus the unsettling imagery of Robert Eggers’ 2015 film “The Witch” comes into focus: A satanic coven kidnaps and kills a Puritan baby, seduces a teenage girl, and gains the power to unsubtly “defy gravity” through a deal with the devil.
“Wicked” is all about this power to transcend. Even as its protagonist grows despairing in the second film and abandons her political quest for the freedom of the wastelands, the film presupposes that it is better to resist or escape a corrupt system than submit to it.
Ultimately, the two films leave their audience with a bittersweet moral: Society is dependent on scapegoats. The Platonic noble lie upon which all societies rest cannot be escaped — but it can be redirected. A new civic myth can be founded that avoids sacrificing the vulnerable and overthrows the demagogues atop Mount Olympus. And the witches play the central role in overturning the world of Oz. Their rebellion sets it free.
But because the films blur the clear, objective distinction between good and evil — even while acknowledging that real evil exists — the characters in “Wicked” often drift in moral grayness, defining themselves mainly in relation to power. The world becomes overbearing, radicalizing, and morally unstable.
Sad truth
This is far afield from the vision of Oz presented in the 1939 film, the one David Lynch venerated as vital to his understanding of the world. But it reflects how modern storytellers often grapple with Oz. Almost every sequel or spin-off struggles to recapture the sincerity of the original. The 1985 sequel “Return to Oz” reimagined the land with a dark-fantasy twist. 2013’s “Oz the Great and Powerful” comes closest to the original tone but centers on fraudulence and trickery.
“Wicked,” too, falls in line with the modern tendency to subvert and complicate traditional stories of good versus evil. “Frozen,” “The Shape of Water,” “Game of Thrones,” and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” all explore morally conflicted worlds where bravery is futile or where Miltonian rebellion is celebrated.
Of course, seeing the stories of our childhood with a jaundiced adult eye can be quite entertaining; it’s perfectly understandable why even those not in covens love these films. They are well-made, well-performed, and especially irresistible to former theater kids (I am one).
Their popularity isn’t inherently bad either. They are perfectly fine in isolation. It is only when we contrast them with the clarity and beauty of the original — and place them within the context of our society — that a sad truth emerges: Finding fairyland is hard. Most of us prefer to live in the Lynchian underworld.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are racing to enclose Earth in an orbital computer factory
In Memphis, Tennessee, where Elon Musk’s xAI initiative spun up a “compute factory” of some 32,000 GPUs, the local grid could not sustain the demand. The solution was characteristic of the era: 14 mobile gas turbine generators, parked in a row, burning fossil fuel to feed the machine. It was a scene of brute industrial force, a reminder that the “cloud,” for all its ethereal branding, is a heavy, hot, loud thing. It requires acres of land for the servers, rivers of water for cooling, and enough electricity to power a small nation.
The appetite of AI is proving insatiable. To reach the next plateau of synthetic cognition, we must triple our electrical output and are constrained by our capacity to do so. And so, with the inevitability of water seeking a lower level, the gaze of Silicon Valley has drifted upward. If the earth is too small, too regulated, and too fragile to house the machines of the future, we shall instead build them in the sky.
The high ground of the 21st century is not a hill, but an orbit.
The proposal is startling, in the way that leaps in engineering often are. In late 2025, Musk noted on social media that SpaceX would be “doing” data centers in space. Jeff Bezos, a man who has long viewed the planetary surface as a sort of zoning restriction to be overcome, predicted gigawatt-scale orbital clusters within two decades.
The pitch is seductive: In the vacuum of low-Earth orbit, the sun never sets. There are no clouds, no rain, no neighbors to complain. There are only the burning fusion of the sun and the cold of deep space, which turns out to be the perfect medium for cooling the heated circuits of a neural network.
The vacuum is valuable because it is an infinite heat sink. The sunlight is valuable because it is free voltage. The plan, as outlined by startups such as Starcloud (formerly Lumen Orbit), involves structures that defy terrestrial intuition. These are not the tin-can satellites of the Cold War but solar arrays and radiator panels four kilometers wide, vast shimmering sheets assembled by swarms of robots. These machines, using technology like the MIT-developed TESSERAE tiles, would click together in the silence, building a cathedral of computation that no human hand will touch.
RELATED: Trump leaves Elon Musk’s Grok, xAI off White House list of AI partners
Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
There is a stark beauty to the engineering. On Earth, a data center fights a losing battle against entropy, burning energy to pump heat away. In space, heat can be radiated into the dark. A server rack in orbit, shielded by layers of polymer and perhaps submerged in fluid to dampen the cosmic rays, swims in a bath of eternal starlight, crunching the data beamed up from below. Companies such as NTT and Sky Perfect JSAT envision optical lasers linking these satellites into a single, glowing lattice: a cosmic village of information.
Yet one cannot help but observe its fragility. The modern GPU is a miracle of nanometer-scale lithography, a device so sensitive that a stray alpha particle can induce a chaotic error. The environment of space is hostile, awash in the very radiation that these chips abhor. To place the most delicate artifacts of human civilization into the harshest environment known to physics is a gamble. The engineers speak of “annealing” solar cells and triple-redundant logic. The skeptic notes that a bit-flip in a language model is a nuisance, while a bit-flip in a battle management system is a tragedy.
There is also the matter of the debris. We have already cluttered orbits with the husks of our previous ambitions: spent rocket stages, dead weather satellites, flecks of paint moving at 17,000 miles per hour. To introduce massive, kilometer-scale structures is to invite the Kessler syndrome, a cascade of collisions that could imprison us on the surface for generations. We are proposing to solve the environmental crisis of terrestrial computing by potentially creating an environmental crisis in the exosphere. It is the American way, the frontier way: When one room gets messy, simply move to the next, larger room.
The drive to do this is not merely economic, though the economics are potent. If Starship can lower the cost of launch to under $200 per kilogram, the math begins to close. If energy in space is effectively free, the initial capital outlay is justified by the lack of a monthly utility bill. But the impulse is also older, that of the Russian scientist and mathematician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who called Earth the “cradle” of humanity, which, like a mature human being, eventually we must leave. We are seeing the embryonic stages of the “noosphere,” a sphere of pure mind encircling the planet. By exporting our cognition to the heavens, we are externalizing our logic. The logos of our civilization will physically reside above us, a silent pantheon of servers ordering and facilitating the lives of the creatures below.
There is a geopolitical texture to this as well. The concept of “sovereign cloud” takes on a new meaning when the data center is orbiting over international waters. Intelligence agencies and defense contractors are quietly investing, sensing that the high ground of the 21st century is not a hill, but an orbit. To control the compute is to control the speed of thought.
Whether this will work remains to be seen. The history of spaceflight is a graveyard of optimistic PowerPoints. It is possible that the radiation will act as a slow acid on the silicon, that the robotic assembly will jam, that the cost will remain stubbornly high. But the momentum is real. The mobile gas turbines in Memphis are a stopgap. The data centers consuming the aquifers of Arizona are a liability. The logic of the market and the machine points upward.
We stand at a peculiar intersection. We are attempting to use the most primal forces of the solar system, the burning star and the freezing void, to power our most refined tools. It is a grand, ambitious, and entirely human endeavor. We are building a computer in a jar and hanging the jar in the sky, hoping that the view will be clear enough to see the future.
Noncitizen Kansas mayor accused of voter fraud has cast dozens of ballots since 2000, documents show
A Kansas mayor who is not a U.S. citizen, despite residing in the state for most of his life, has been accused of illegally voting “multiple times” — and documents obtained by Blaze News seem to support those allegations.
Last month, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach (R) held a press conference to announce that Coldwater Mayor Jose “Joe” Ceballos, 54, had been charged with three counts of voting without being qualified and three counts of election perjury, all felonies.
He could face more than five years behind bars if convicted. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, added that a conviction would also prompt “removal proceedings” for Ceballos.
Ceballos appears to have cast a ballot at least once every year or every other year, beginning on August 1, 2000.
“In Kansas, it is against the law to vote if you are not a U.S. citizen. We allege that Mr. Ceballos did it multiple times,” Kobach said.
Voter registration applications and voting history records sent to Blaze News in response to a public records request seem to confirm Kobach’s allegations.
The two voter registration applications for Ceballos, one dated April 1999 and the other December 2012, indicate he established Kansas residency all the way back in 1986.
Both documents asked the applicant to confirm U.S citizenship. “I Swear or Affirm that I am a citizen of the United States,” the 1999 application states.
On the 2012 application, the “yes” box next to the question “are you a citizen of the United States of America?” is marked. The signature section then reiterates: “I swear or affirm that I am a citizen of the United States and a Kansas resident.”
Ceballos appears to have signed the 1999 application as “Joe” Ceballos and the 2012 application as Jose. He did not register for a party on either application.
RELATED: Noncitizen Kansas mayor accused of illegally voting ‘multiple times’ after winning re-election
Screenshot of documents sent to Blaze News
Screenshot of documents sent to Blaze News
The criminal complaint filed November 5 stated that Ceballos is “not a citizen of the United States,” and DHS noted that he received a green card in 1990 but remains a citizen of Mexico.
He was convicted of battery in 1995, according to DHS.
Moreover, Ceballos’ voting history revealed that he participated in dozens of primary and general elections since 2000, the earliest records the Comanche County clerk claimed to have.
According to the records, Ceballos cast a ballot at least once every year or every other year, beginning on August 1, 2000. The records indicate Ceballos voted in November 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024.
It is unclear why a Republican Party affiliation was recorded for votes cast in the November 2004 and 2024 general elections.
RELATED: Thousands of possible illegal aliens found on Texas voter rolls, officials say
Screenshot of documents sent to Blaze News
Allegations that Ceballos had voted first made headlines after he won re-election as Coldwater mayor on November 4, and City Attorney Skip Herd claimed that Ceballos had applied for U.S. citizenship just this year.
“He applied for citizenship in February of this year and, through that, raised the issue of whether he was a legal citizen,” Herd said.
Ceballos admitted to the Wichita Eagle that he did come to America as a child — the outlet described him as being “undocumented” at the time — and that he has since voted in every local, state, and federal election since 1991. However, he explained that he simply misunderstood the law, believing that the “permanent resident” designation on his green card meant that he was a citizen.
“I haven’t seen Mexico since I was four,” he said. “I don’t speak Spanish anymore. If I get deported, it would wreck my life.”
His attorney, Jess Hoeme, indicated that since Ceballos did not intend to vote illegally, “he’ll beat this” case with the jury.
Records from the Comanche County clerk’s office revealed that Ceballos’ voter registration was canceled on October 17, 2025. Those records further showed that he had been registered to vote in federal elections since at least February 2003, that he was at some point registered as a Republican, and that he filed a change of address in 2013.
Ceballos told the Eagle that he “probably” voted for Kobach to be state AG and for Donald Trump to be president every time they ran, even though in general, the twice-elected mayor is rather indifferent to politics.
“If politics comes up in Coldwater, I generally just get up and walk out,” Ceballos said.
RELATED: Trump plans major shake-up of how Americans vote ahead of 2026 midterm elections
Screenshot of documents sent to Blaze News
Ceballos, who received nearly 83% of the vote from fellow Coldwater residents just a few weeks ago, enjoys continued support from his community.
“As a mayor, he’s done a wonderful job,” said Britt Lenertz, president of the Coldwater City Council. “As a city councilmember, he’s done a wonderful job. He’s always put our community first in everything he does.”
In an official statement, Lenertz acknowledged that the allegations were “concerning” but called for patience as the legal process unfolds: “We will allow the proper legal process to take its course before making any further comments. It’s important that we respect both due process and the integrity of our local government.”
Longtime friend Ryan Swayze described Ceballos as good-hearted and well-intentioned but also a bit naive. Swayze and his dad as well as Ceballos’ old special-education teacher all partially blame themselves for not explaining to Ceballos during his formative years the differences between permanent residents and U.S. citizens.
Ceballos did not respond to Blaze News’ request for comment, but he did hint to the Wichita Eagle that the charges have greatly affected his well-being.
“I’m scared,” he told the outlet. “I’m not sleeping.”
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TRUMP SLAMS THE DOOR: Immigration Frozen From 19 High-Risk Nations, Could Extend to 30
Trump promised stricter screening.
How police nailed driver accused of doing donuts in stolen car amid street takeover — even after giving cops the slip
A northwest Washington state sheriff’s deputy spotted a black sports car taking over the intersection of 112th Street South and Pacific Avenue South doing donuts around 12:30 a.m. Saturday, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office said. The intersection appears to be in Parkland, which is about 20 minutes south of Tacoma.
However, as the deputy approached the intersection, the vehicle took off, officials said.
Deputies knocked on the door of a residence, and a male answered and claimed his friend had dropped off the Corvette earlier and did not know anything about it, officials said.
The deputy attempted a traffic stop, but the vehicle failed to stop, and the deputy was unable to catch up to it, officials said.
The deputy used his radio to share the vehicle’s direction of travel, and a sergeant picked up the pursuit — but lost sight of the car, officials said.
However, the sergeant later learned a black Corvette was listed as stolen and numerous other jurisdictions had similar encounters with the vehicle but were unable to catch it, officials said.
About an hour later, another deputy spotted a black Corvette in the area where police lost sight of it, officials said, adding that the Corvette matched the description of the vehicle that eluded deputies earlier.
Deputies soon learned the Corvette was stolen — and was the same vehicle they had been chasing, officials said.
Deputies knocked on the door of a residence, and a male answered and claimed his friend had dropped off the Corvette earlier and did not know anything about it, officials said.
But a bit more investigation revealed that the male being questioned had a social media account containing videos of him driving the stolen Corvette and doing donuts and other reckless driving crimes, officials said.
Image source: Pierce County (Wa.) Sheriff’s Office bodycam video screenshot
Deputies arrested the 21-year-old suspect for eluding, possession of a stolen vehicle, and obstruction of a law enforcement officer, officials said, adding that the male also had warrants in another jurisdiction for reckless driving and unlawful exhibition of speed.
“It’s probably not a good idea to record yourself in a stolen vehicle doing donuts — and then post it to your social media,” Dep. Carly Cappetto wisely warned on the sheriff’s office clip.
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