The Iran war dominated every headline from Friday through Monday. The 48-hour ultimatum. The Strait of Hormuz. The power plant threats. All of it is real and all of it matters — but while the media’s cameras were pointed at the Persian Gulf, a remarkable amount of other news happened that your regular news feed almost certainly buried.
Here is your 72-hour catch-up.
Elon Musk offered to pay 50,000 TSA workers out of his own pocket. On Saturday morning, Musk posted on X that he would like to personally cover the salaries of every TSA officer working without pay during the Democrat-imposed DHS shutdown — now in its 35th day. Senate Democrats have blocked DHS funding five times. The national TSA call-out rate hit 38 percent at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson on a single day last week. Workers are visiting food pantries. One union leader reported officers who cannot afford copayments for their children’s cancer treatments.
The legal path for Musk’s offer is complicated — federal law restricts outside compensation for government employees — but the gesture exposed the contrast that matters: a private citizen is trying harder to help these workers than the party that has blocked their paychecks five times in a row. The one Democrat who has voted with Republicans to end the shutdown? John Fetterman. The other 46 Senate Democrats held firm.
Planned Parenthood of Illinois was ordered to pay $500,000 to settle a federal civil rights case for racially discriminating against its own white employees. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that the organization violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by segregating employees by race in mandatory diversity training sessions, telling white employees that “white supremacy is exerted at every level of oppression,” and denying white employees paid time off that was granted to Black colleagues. This is not an allegation — it is a confirmed federal finding. The same organization that lectures America about racial equity ran racially segregated meetings and distributed benefits unequally based on skin color. The EEOC noticed.
Kamala Harris is losing the battle in her own home state. A new UC Berkeley/Politico poll of California Democrats shows Harris running fourth in the 2028 presidential primary in the state she represented in the Senate for six years — trailing Gavin Newsom 28 to 14 percent. Among the party’s own policy influencers and activist class, she receives 2 percent. And here is the detail that tells you everything about where the Democratic bench actually stands: 59 percent of California Democrats say they are not excited about Gavin Newsom either. The two most famous Democrats in the most Democratic state in the country cannot generate majority enthusiasm in their own party — in their own state — after losing the White House four months ago.
House Republicans voted 212 to zero to deport anyone who harms a federal law enforcement working animal. The BOWOW Act — the Bill to Outlaw Wounding of Official Working Animals — passed on a near-party-line vote inspired by a 2025 incident at Dulles Airport in which a 70-year-old Egyptian national kicked Freddie, a 25-pound CBP beagle, hard enough to lift him off the ground during a baggage inspection. Freddie recovered. Congress responded. Every single Republican voted yes. One hundred and ninety Democrats voted no. The bill now goes to the Senate. This shows you how hard Democrats are willing to go to protect illegal aliens over everyone–including animals.
Trump’s America First movement opened a new front — in Hungary. CPAC Hungary kicked off this weekend with Trump sending a video address delivering his “complete and total endorsement” of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ahead of Hungary’s April elections. The conference drew nationalist leaders from across the Western world: Javier Milei from Argentina, Geert Wilders from the Netherlands, Alice Weidel from Germany’s AfD, and Herbert Kickl from Austria. Orbán told the crowd: “If we win here, we will not only defend Hungary, but we will break down the progressives’ gate in Brussels.” The movement that began with one American election in 2016 is now contesting governments on three continents.
And one more — this one from earlier in the weekend that deserves more attention than it received. Bloomberg published a year-long investigation confirming that Mojtaba Khamenei — the man who just became Iran’s Supreme Leader — has built a global property empire worth an estimated $480 million, including eleven luxury mansions on London’s Billionaires’ Row, two apartments fifty yards from the Israeli Embassy in Kensington, a five-star Hilton hotel in Frankfurt, a golf resort in Mallorca, a castle hotel in the Austrian Alps, and a penthouse in Toronto. A counter-terrorism specialist reviewed the Kensington apartments and called them “a permanent surveillance platform” and “a serious security breach.” None of the properties are in Khamenei’s name — they run through a network of shell companies funded by Iranian oil revenues. The man now leading a regime built on anti-Western Islamic ideology has been quietly buying up the West since 2011.
That is your 72 hours. The media gave you the Strait of Hormuz. We gave you the rest.