Michael Daly

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyIn the universal outrage over South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem executing her wire-haired pointer Cricket, another victim of her cruelty seems to have been forgotten: the male goat she dragged to the same gravel pit and shot dead.Based on Noem’s own description of the incident in her upcoming memoir, it seems likely that the animal died a terrifying death. Its crime? It had a “disgusting, musky, rancid” smell and butted her children so they fell down and got their clothes dirty.It’s unclear why Noem, who loves to talk about how she was raised on a farm, was surprised by this behavior: Male goats in rut—a state of arousal during breeding season—become more aggressive and urinate on themselves to generate a smell that only a female of its species could love.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Hulton Archive/GettyThe war is in Gaza, not Vietnam, as it was when Mark Rudd became the iconic leader of the protests that rocked Columbia University more than a half century ago.But 76-year-old Rudd says the anti-war protesters who are now encamped on a lawn in the heart of the Columbia campus share an essential motivation with those of his time.“They're pretty much the same as we were,” Rudd told The Daily Beast. “The basic impetus of the students, I think it's not that complicated. It's that they see a moral tragedy and moral crime going on, and they want to try to do something to stop it.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Jeenah Moon/Pool via Reuters Donald Trump knows how to play to an audience, whether it’s the deluded millions of his MAGA base or the jurors in the first criminal trial of a former president.That was clear on Friday when Trump seized a moment in his criminal trial to seemingly comfort a witness—his still-loyal ex-assistant Rhona Graff.The jury had just finished listening to supermarket tabloid sleaze David Pecker testify about what prosecutors say was a criminal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election by paying hush money to kill potentially damaging stories about Trump.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyA jury will decide whether Donald Trump is guilty of faking business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star.But the fact is that Trump is currently paying hush money to someone else—perfectly legally.That person is his longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who signed a $2 million separation agreement with the Trump Organization as he began a five-month jail term for tax evasion in January 2023.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Scott Olson/Getty ImagesThe latest instance of “Iowa Nice” as practiced by Gov. Kim Reynolds includes empowering the police in her state to arrest undocumented immigrants.She thereby makes Iowa a place for immigrants to avoid when it is in the midst of an ongoing labor shortage.Even if you were a completely legal immigrant in the county, why would you seek to settle in a state when you have to worry about becoming fair game to any cop who pulls you over?Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/YouTube/Getty ImagesThe day before Easter, Pastor Matt Baker of the Trinity Christian Academy in Lake Worth, Florida, emailed the school community to inform them that he was canceling Autism Awareness Week because “the teachings and actions of my Jesus are fully able to do all that this program intends to achieve and so much more.”“Anything that teaches our children to have their identity in anything other than Christ is idolatry and demonic,” he declared, as first reported by WPTV.Baker wanted to make sure there was no room for doubt regarding his edict.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / GettyThe prospect of Eagle Pass, Texas, becoming the first municipality in America to see the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, triggered visions in the border town of big crowds preceded by a big music festival.The city’s marketing and tourism director, Aide Castano, told a 2023 meeting of the Eagle Pass Rotary Club that the city of 28,000 should prepare to host nearly four times its population for the event.“Mark your calendar for the eclipse, get your grocery shopping done, we’re gonna have 100,000 people in Eagle Pass, we’re gonna have millions of dollars in sales for downtown Eagle Pass,” Castano said, according to the recollection of resident Amerika Garcia-Grewall, who attended the meeting.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyA young man was standing by a folding table with a pen and a stack of paper when Claudia Wilde emerged from the Target store in Fairfield, California, last week.“He says, ‘I have a petition… I need you to sign for better roads,’” she told The Daily Beast. “And I said, ‘That’s the name of the petition?’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’”Although the county’s roads do need work, Wilde had not heard any clamoring for improvement. She was aware, however, that a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who bought up more than $800 million of farmland in surrounding Solano County to build a new city were seeking to get a zoning initiative on the ballot in November.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/APOklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters spewed transphobia online on the same afternoon the state medical examiner reported that 16-year-old Nex Benedict died by suicide, allegedly after being bullied over their gender fluidity.Walters was responding on X to a post by Chasten Glezman Buttigieg, husband of U.S. Secretary of Transportation Peter Buttigieg. Chasten had criticized Walters for appointing Chaya Raichik, the virulently anti-trans founder of Libs of TikTok, to an Oklahoma state library advisory board. Chasten wrote that as a parent and a former teacher he wants qualified people in education, not someone who has neither classroom experience nor a degree in education.“Well @ChayaRaichik10 knows the difference between a girl and a boy,” Walters responded on X on Wednesday afternoon. “You, your husband, and the entire Biden administration seem to struggle with that.”Read more at The Daily Beast.