Hours after former President Donald Trump narrowly avoided a second assassination attempt, NBC News’ Lester Holt fanned the flames of violence by blaming Trump’s “rhetoric” rather than the suspected would-be assassin, who once praised Holt.

United States Secret Service agents fired shots at a man on Sunday after they discovered him allegedly staked out in a bush at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach armed with a scoped “AK-47-style rifle.” A suspect was later apprehended by authorities and remains in custody.

This was the second assassination attempt on Trump’s life.

Within days of Trump surviving the first assassination attempt in July that left a father of two dead, Democrats and the media implored the nation to “lower the temperature” (while ignoring their own role in “stoking the flames of hatred against Trump and his supporters,” as my colleague Jordan Boyd points out). It was a short-lived plea, because the left returned to their assassination prep campaign playbook almost immediately, calling Trump the next Hitler, a “threat to democracy” and an “existential danger” to the country.

Keeping in line with his fellow propagandists, Holt took to the air on Sunday to blame Trump for the attempted assassination by linking him to unsubstantiated bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio.

“Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail itself,” Holt said. “Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance, continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in [Springfield] Ohio. This weekend, there were new bomb

When Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul held a state capitol-steps press conference in early June to announce “forgery” charges against two former attorneys and an aide to former President Donald Trump for an alleged crime that took place nearly four years ago, it felt like the fix was in. 

New unsealed documents in Dane County Circuit Court suggest the real forgery is Kaul’s politically weaponized investigation into Trump allies involved in the 2020 alternative electors contingency plan — what Kaul and corporate media have falsely billed as a “fake electors scheme.”

The filing, first reported on Thursday by Wisconsin conservative talk show host Vicki McKenna and conservative activist Eric O’Keefe, sheds light on another dark prosecution that looks a lot like Wisconsin’s infamous John Doe investigation. That leftist prosecutor-led star chamber of more than a decade ago was declared a “perfect storm of wrongs” by the state’s supreme court and used as a national blueprint for the left’s penchant for weaponized justice. 

While Kaul’s early June press conference — covered by news outlets across the country — was orchestrated for maximum exposure, his move to seal the subpoenas and silence the defendants was designed to keep the full story in the dark. More than three months after the attorney general’s office sought and received the secret subpoenas, the key documents have finally been unsealed. The raised curtain exposes a prosecutor going against his own justice department to pursue a political prosecution. 

‘Gag Order’ 

A motion to quash the subpoena, filed by

The release of a new Ridley Scott movie is a time of excitement and trepidation. The 86-year-old acclaimed director of “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” “Gladiator,” “Black Hawk Down,” “The Martian,” and “The Last Duel” remains one of the greatest directors of all time, even though he’s released more clunkers than masterpieces in the past 20 years. 

His most recent film, last year’s “Napoleon,” is no exception to this. The massive historical epic from Apple TV+ was released to theaters last fall to poor critical reception and low box office draw. Audiences were expecting a serious exploration of the life of one of history’s most controversial figures but were treated instead to a confusing, truncated story about toxic masculinity and toxic relationships masquerading as a period epic. 

But I’ve reserved my judgment on the film. I waited 10 months to form a coherent opinion on it, until the surprise release of its director’s cut on Apple TV+ last month, with the hope that an extended cut would loosen the film up and improve it. Unfortunately, “Napoleon: The Director’s Cut” mostly exists to double down on the parts of the film that don’t work. 

Both the theatrical and director’s cuts of the film are monsters. At three and a half hours, the longer cut still feels packed to the gills in its ambition to document the rise and fall of the famous French emperor. Unfortunately, the film mostly succeeds at adding more scenes rather than condensing decades of history into a coherent narrative.