WTF Was Kid Rock Doing on an Apache Helicopter With Pete Hegseth?

Musician Kid Rock reportedly got an AH-64 Apache helicopter ride with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Monday morning.

Ryan Grim of Drop Site posted on X that the musician, whose real name is Robert James Ritchie, flew to Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia on his private jet for the ride. The helicopters usually fly with two pilots, but Ritchie and Hegseth each rode in their own helicopter with one pilot. Apache helicopters aren’t stationed at the military base, raising questions as to where these aircraft came from. A base spokesperson referred questions to Hegseth’s office, according to Grim.

Last month, two Apache helicopters flew over a “No Kings” protest in Nashville, Tennessee, and then performed maneuvers next to Ritchie’s mansion in the suburbs nearby, prompting an investigation and the air crews’ suspension. Days later, Hegseth lifted their suspension and announced that the soldiers would not be punished, posting “Carry on, patriots. 🇺🇸” on X.

Ritchie seems to be hanging out with Cabinet officials a lot these days, having taken part in a bizarre ice bath and workout video with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in February to promote his public health policy. The purpose of the alleged helicopter flights doesn’t seem to be national security, and as of 2022, an Apache helicopter costs $5,171 per hour to operate.

One of the Trump administration’s newest immigration judges said that some women are just a “warm, wet hole.”

Melissa Isaak, an Army veteran and reservist, was hired by the Justice Department on April 8 as a temporary immigration judge. She was permitted to begin hearing cases immediately, according to an announcement from the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

In 2007, Isaak graduated from Barry University School of Law, a low-ranked law school where less than half of recent grads passed the bar exam on their first try. Afterward, she joined the law firm Brock & Stout in Alabama for two years, and in 2009 began her own private practice, self-styled as a “divorce attorney for men,” where she has worked ever since.

She does not have any immigration court experience, but her name was attached to several high-profile, non-divorce cases. Isaak was a defense attorney for three of the January 6 Capitol rioters (she later withdrew from two of the cases), and she also helped Alabama Republican Roy Moore dismiss a defamation suit from a woman who said he molested her when she was 14. That legal saga is still ongoing—an appeals court overturned Moore’s multimillion-dollar win against his accuser late last week.

During an interview with pickup artist Anthony Dream Johnson in 2021, Isaak claimed that “there are two types of women.”

“There are good, solid, valuable women who are major assets to men, if you’re a good woman,” Isaak said. “And then there’s a warm wet hole.”

The following year, she gave a speech on the matter for Johnson’s manosphere convention, 21 Studios’ Make Women Great Again, titled “Divorcing Feminism.”

“If the only thing you have to offer a man is sex, that’s what you are,” Isaak said. “And guess what? Guess who else has a warm, wet hole? Every other woman out there. What a horrible existence.”

She compared that to a “real woman,” a subtype that she said was meant to “catapult a man.”

“We’re powerful women, we are, if we use it in the right way,” Isaak said, specifying the necessity to use that energy for men.

“I’ve had people get offended, and they say, ‘You know, it’s horrible that you say warm, wet hole.’ I mean, well, if you have one and it’s not warm and wet you might want to seek some gynecological intervention,” Isaak said to crickets.

Germany thinks Iran is getting the better of Donald Trump in negotiations.

On Wednesday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told a group of secondary school students in western Germany that “there is a sense that a whole nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, particularly by these so-called Revolutionary Guards,” Bloomberg reports. 

“It is quite obvious that the Americans have absolutely no coherent strategy whatsoever,” Merz said to students in his home district of Marsberg. “And the fundamental problem with these kinds of conflicts is always the same: It is not enough to simply get yourself in—you must also figure out how to get yourself out.”

Merz’s criticism is a bad sign for Trump, who has complained about a lack of support from European powers for his war with Iran. Merz visited Trump last month and seemed to be on good terms with the president at the time, telling the press that “we are on the same page in terms of getting this terrible regime in Iran away.”

“We will talk about the day after, what will happen then, if they are out,” Merz said March 3, less than a week after the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran.

Days later, though, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said the country would not send ships to the region. Last week, Merz said that he and other leaders were not consulted prior to the initial attacks on Iran, adding that he has expressed his concerns to Trump in two separate conversations. 

“If I had known that this would go on for five or six weeks and keep getting worse, I would have made my point to him even more forcefully,” Merz said. Rising fuel prices as a result of the war are affecting economies all around the world, especially Germany, the leading economy in Europe, a point Merz stressed in his remarks. 

“This war against Iran has a direct impact on our economic performance and must therefore be brought to an end as soon as possible,” Merz said.

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has given it the upper hand in the conflict with the U.S., and the world is noticing that Trump hasn’t produced any results from negotiations in Pakistan. The longer this conflict drags on, the worse it reflects on the president.  

A prominent commercial contractor with government ties built a secluded residence in the New Mexico desert for Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein purchased Zorro Ranch from former Democratic Governor Bruce King in 1993. Then he hired Bradbury Stamm Construction, a company better known for building classified facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base, to erect him a mansion on the 10,000-acre property. They also built him a sprawling courtyard, a private airstrip with a hangar and helipad, a ranch office, a firehouse, and a seven-bay heated garage.

Bradbury Stamm is the largest industrial commercial contractor in New Mexico, and is not known for constructing private homes, according to journalist and author Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. Yet they did it anyway. The company’s telephone number was listed under a series of contacts pertaining to Zorro Ranch in Epstein’s personal phone book, according to unredacted pages released by the Justice Department.

Why the company would go out of its way to take on the Zorro Ranch project is not clear, though Valdes-Rodriguez speculates that it could have something to do with Ghislaine Maxwell’s father.

“Bradbury Stamm holds classified construction contracts at the New Mexico nuclear weapons labs that Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, penetrated with backdoored spy software on behalf of Israeli military intelligence in the mid-1980s, per publicly available FBI files and the testimony of Rafael Eitan, the Mossad operations chief who ran Maxwell as an asset,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote. “Bradbury Stamm brings in hundreds of millions each year in contracts.”

Zorro Ranch, located roughly 30 miles south of Santa Fe in the high desert, was rumored to be a hotbed of illicit activity while Epstein held the keys. Some of the notorious child sex offender’s victims, including Virginia Giuffre, claimed they were trafficked at the New Mexico estate.

Emails issued by ranch staffers allege that at least two girls were killed and buried under the building by Epstein’s order, according to documents made public by the Justice Department via the Epstein files. Epstein even contemplated turning the estate into a headquarters for genetic engineering experiments.

The property has since changed hands. In 2023, it was purchased by Donald Huffines, a former Texas state senator now running for comptroller as a self-styled “Trump Republican.” The Huffines family has renamed the site “Rancho San Rafael.”

Federal prosecutors at Trump’s Department of Justice took over a New Mexico investigation at the property in 2019, and it then petered out. In February, New Mexico lawmakers voted unanimously to pursue another investigation into Zorro Ranch, creating a bipartisan “truth commission” to examine the site’s history. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez also ordered his office to reopen the criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch, demanding “immediate access to the complete, unredacted federal case file.”

This article has been updated.

The Department of Justice has reached a second agreement to fork over taxpayer dollars to President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

A brief document filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims Friday stated that the parties had agreed to a settlement “in principle,” but needed more time to finalize the details.

It’s not yet clear how much money Trump intends to hand off to his ally, in addition to the $1.25 million settlement the DOJ agreed to last month.

Friday’s settlement relates to a civil suit Flynn brought against the government, alleging that the U.S. Army had illegally garnished his retirement pay after it found he had accepted compensation from a foreign government source without first seeking approval from the Department of Defense, Lawfare’s Anna Bower wrote on Substack.

Flynn previously alleged he was wrongfully prosecuted for making false statements to federal agents as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election—even though he pleaded guilty to lying, twice.