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Apple has had a hard time lately with critical exploits plaguing iPhones all around the world. In mid-February, Google’s Threat Analysis Group discovered a critical zero-day vulnerability in Apple’s iOS software that gave hackers full control of a “small subset” of targeted iPhones. This month, reports revealed that an entire exploit tool kit has been successfully used by hackers in Russia and China. The worst part is that mounting evidence suggests the kit came from the United States, possibly even from our very own government.

Chock-full of vulnerabilities

According to Google’s full report, the exploit tool kit — dubbed Coruna — consists of five exploit chains and 23 exploits in total, all targeted at iPhones running iOS 13 to iOS 17.2.1. Mobile security experts at iVerify corroborated the report, claiming that 42,000 iPhones were affected.

Are there more zero-day vulnerabilities in iOS that we don’t know about? Almost certainly yes.

An exploit chain is the path a hacker can use to bypass a device’s security controls via exploits to gain access. In other words, if your phone’s software was a map, an exploit chain is the route a driver could take through different toll areas to reach the final destination. Even one exploit chain — or route — is enough to break into a device, but the fact that five routes exist within Coruna makes it a sophisticated hacking resource unlike anything security researchers have seen on iOS.

Google notes that Coruna has already been exploited by a “customer of a surveillance company,” as well as foreign nations, namely China and Russia. More alarming than that, however, “multiple threat actors” have also gained access to exploit techniques that can be customized to leverage new and unknown vulnerabilities for future attacks.

Image credit: Google

Where did Coruna come from?

Now that Coruna is out in the open, it only makes sense to wonder where it came from. Its sophisticated nature makes it highly unlikely that an independent hacker threw it together. Instead, several pieces of evidence point toward government intervention.

For starters, the tool kit’s source materials are all written in native English, suggesting English origins. Second, two of the exploits in the chain are linked directly to Operation Triangulation, a hardware vulnerability discovered in Apple’s first-party processing chips by Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky. Russian government officials blamed the NSA for this exploit back in 2023, but the U.S. government denied any connection.

Third, iVerify’s co-founder and COO, Rocky Cole, reportedly called Coruna’s code “superb,” going on to state, “It was elegantly written. It’s fluid and holds together very well. There were comments in the code that, as someone who’s been around the U.S. defense industrial base for years, really are reminiscent of the sort of insider jokes and insider remarks that you might see from a U.S. based coder. Certainly they were native English language speakers.”

For what it’s worth, Kaspersky recently denied that Coruna is linked to the NSA, despite the evidence outlined above. Regardless of the tool kit’s origin, researchers are unsure how it made it into the hands of foreign entities.

RELATED: Apple issues a critical software update for iPhone. Install it now!

Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Bigger signs of Apple’s compromised security

Apple’s iOS mobile platform is notoriously hard for hackers to crack, thanks to its closed nature, often frustrating U.S. criminal investigation agencies with its strong end-to-end encryption practices. The Coruna tool kit, however, changes everything. It’s the biggest collection of exploits to hit iOS since its inception in 2007. It’s also part of a growing trend that undermines Apple’s once-impenetrable software security and privacy protocols.

Just last month, Apple released iOS 26.3 to patch a critical zero-day vulnerability dubbed CVE-2026-20700. Although this remains to be a major threat to iPhone users, this exploit is not part of the Coruna tool kit. These are completely independent issues. Are there more zero-day vulnerabilities in iOS that we don’t know about? Almost certainly yes.

Tips to secure your device

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. As software vulnerabilities become more prevalent, the best way to keep your devices safe and secure is to make sure you always have the latest iOS updates downloaded and installed on your phone, tablet, and laptop.

The exploits in the Coruna tool kit that plagued iOS 13 through 17.2.1, as well as CVE-2026-20700 for iOS 26, have all been patched. If you haven’t updated your iPhone to the newest software, or if you’re not sure which version you have, check for updates by opening the Settings app. Then go to General, Software Update, and make sure you’re on one of these versions, depending on your phone’s model:

iOS 26.3.1 (iPhone 11 and up);iOS 18.7.5 (Phone XS, XS Max, and XR);iOS 16.7.14 (iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X);iOS 15.8.6 (iPhone 6s and 7); oriOS 12.5.8 (iPhone 5s, 6, 6 Plus).

If you want even more protection from exploits and vulnerabilities, you can secure your private data with Apple’s Advanced Data Protection built directly into iCloud. Then for maximum protection, Apple offers Lockdown Mode, though this feature isn’t meant for everybody. Since it will ultimately restrict many of the features and functions of your device, it’s only meant for high-profile cyber-criminal targets like politicians, celebrities, and investigative journalists.

​Tech, Ios exploit, Iphone, Coruna, Cybersecurity, Operation triangulation, Kaspersky 

Events surrounding Iran’s women’s national soccer team continue to attract global attention. It started when the players refused to sing the national anthem before their opening match against South Korea at the 2026 AFC Women’s Asian Cup in Australia — a silent protest that sparked backlash from Iranian officials, who labeled them “wartime traitors,” leading to fears for the women’s safety upon their return.

After the team was eliminated from the tournament, tensions escalated dramatically. Several players escaped team monitoring and sought asylum. Australia granted humanitarian visas to several of the players, allowing them to remain permanently.

But Glenn Beck says there’s a part two to this tragic story the mainstream media is neglecting: the aftermath in Iran.

While some stayed in Australia, several of the players bravely chose to return home.

“Those girls now live under a cloud they didn’t create,” Glenn says, “and the authorities are going to ask them questions. Security services are going to conduct interviews that might last hours or days. None of them sang the national anthem, so they’re all traitors to the regime.”

And then there’s the families of the players to consider.

“Sources say now that in Iran, families find themselves under quiet surveillance. Reports now speculate that some family members may have already been arrested, detained, or questioned,” Glenn says.

“Authoritarian systems protect themselves through pressure, and that pressure spreads outward from any act of defiance. One athlete leaves — the regime has to remind everyone else there’s a cost,” he adds.

That pressure to maintain control is higher than ever right now as the foundations of the regime begin to falter.

“Women are refusing the hijab. Students are marching through the universities. Workers are striking in oil fields and factories, and now athletes, people chosen to represent the nation itself, decide freedom is worth more than the career they were given,” Glenn says.

All it takes is “a few people [stepping] outside the lines” for the masses to realize that “the walls surrounding them might not be so permanent after all,” he says.

“Young girls all across the country will hear about it for decades. They’ll understand exactly what those players risked and exactly why they did it, and somewhere — maybe among the next generation of women — they’ll decide that life under the Islamic Republic is no longer the only future available. And that is how real change begins,” he adds.

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Iranian women’s soccer team, Iran, Blazetv, Blaze media, Iranian regime 

It used to feel good to be a Democrat in California.

Emphasis on used to — and President Trump’s recent State of the Union address illuminated exactly why I left the party.

California is not failing because it cares too much. It is failing because it confuses caring with governing.

In Silicon Valley, voting blue often feels like the default setting.

In many professional circles, especially in technology and venture communities, political alignment is assumed. Fundraisers double as social gatherings.

It feels compassionate, enlightened, on the right side of history.

But that night, the president challenged any member of Congress to stand who believes that the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens. Shockingly, Democrats remained seated, providing a stunning visual of the current values of the Democratic Party.

What changed my mind was not the rhetoric. It was the outcomes. California is the glaring example of the failure of liberal policies.

Three areas illustrate the pattern.

Elections: Confidence is a safeguard

California does not require photo identification to vote in person. A voter provides a name and address and signs the roster. More than 30 states require some form of voter ID, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Countries such as Canada, France, and Germany require identification to vote. A 2023 Gallup poll found roughly three-quarters of Americans support requiring photo identification at the polls, including majorities across party lines.

Even if large-scale fraud is difficult to quantify, administrative failures and inconsistent verification practices fuel public doubt. Visible safeguards deter misconduct and preserve confidence in the system.

When California Democrats treat voter ID as ideological heresy, they weaken the legitimacy of the system they claim to defend.

Family: When the state becomes the decision-maker

Under California law, minors ages 12 and older may consent to certain mental health services without parental notification if deemed mature enough by a provider. State law also allows minors to access reproductive health services confidentially. Recent legislation has expanded confidentiality protections in sensitive areas.

The justification is protection, but the effect is state supremacy in decisions that belong to parents.

The Supreme Court has long recognized parental rights as fundamental. Family authority is the first layer of civil society.

When the state positions itself as the confidential decision-maker in significant medical and psychological matters involving minors, it undermines that sovereignty.

It is not compassionate to expand state authority at the expense of parental sovereignty. It is government overreach into the most intimate sphere of civil society. As the co-founders of Moms for Liberty have put it, “We do not co-parent with the government.”

Compassion cannot justify dissolving the family as the primary unit of accountability.

Fiscal reality: Math still applies

California’s budget rests on a narrow and volatile base. The Legislative Analyst’s Office has documented that the top 1% of earners account for close to half of the state’s personal income tax revenue. That revenue is heavily tied to capital gains and is therefore inherently unstable.

Instead of broadening and stabilizing that base, state leadership has repeatedly targeted it. Wealth-based tax proposals focus on the very taxpayers who fund a disproportionate share of state commitments. Capital is mobile. IRS data shows sustained net out-migration of high-income households from California to states such as Texas and Florida over the past decade.

Then comes execution.

California’s high-speed rail project, approved in 2008 at an estimated $33 billion, is now projected to exceed $100 billion and remains incomplete. Florida, by contrast, expanded Brightline passenger rail through a public-private partnership model that attracted private capital and delivered major segments on time.

Between 2019 and 2023, California spent roughly $24 billion on homelessness programs. During that same period, homelessness rose statewide. In 2024, the California state auditor found the state failed to consistently track whether billions in spending produced measurable results.

The pattern is simple.

Spend expansively. Measure loosely. Promise morally. Deliver inconsistently.

The issue is not the stated goals, but the absence of discipline.

In each case, the rhetoric was noble, and the result was dysfunction.

RELATED: Gavin Newsom’s California is looting Medicaid in broad daylight

Photo by Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images

This is the governing model Kamala Harris rose within and that Gavin Newsom refined over time. Not because they lack intelligence, but because the system they represent rewards virtue-signaling over measurable performance. It resists basic electoral safeguards despite broad public support. It expands state authority into the family. It builds budgets on volatile revenue while accelerating out-migration. It spends billions without demanding outcome verification.

If that framework scales nationally, the consequences will be dire.

I did not leave the Democratic Party because I stopped caring about vulnerable people. I left because I care about institutional durability. Compassion matters. But governing requires discipline. California is not failing because it cares too much. It is failing because it confuses caring with governing. Compassion without competence becomes institutional rot.

If you are a Democrat in California who feels uneasy but cannot quite articulate why, I understand. I defended the language long after I stopped believing in the results. At some point, loyalty to outcomes must matter more than loyalty to a label. It did for me.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​California, California democrats, Gavin newsom, Right side of history, Voter id, Democrats, Radical left, High speed rail, Democratic party, Opinion & analysis, Compassion, Discipline, Illegal aliens, Immigration, Law and order, Budget, Technology, Silicon valley, Family, Education 

A police standoff at a children’s hospital ended tragically Thursday morning, but new, bizarre details about the story have emerged.

Dallas police were conducting an investigation into a man who had an active warrant. They followed him into the parking garage of Children’s Health hospital late at night.

‘He had a gun. He pointed a gun towards officers.’

Police say the man, known as Mike King, went into the parking garage, barricaded himself inside a vehicle, and refused to come out. According to Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux, at that time, police used tear gas to get the suspect out of the vehicle.

“He came out of the vehicle; he had a gun. He pointed a gun towards officers. Officers shot and fired,” Comeaux said, per KDFW.

SWAT medical services attempted to render aid, but the man was pronounced dead at the scene. The suspect reportedly only displayed his gun but did not fire it, and no officers were injured.

It has since been revealed that the man is a longtime member of Texas Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s security detail, pictured with her at several events.

RELATED: Democrats swapped Crockett’s preening for Talarico’s pulpit — and it worked

KTVT showed a payment receipt for a “King, Mike” for $340 on March 28, 2025, for “security services,” allegedly from Crockett. The outlet also showed several images of King standing near Crockett, seemingly as part of her security detail at several events.

The man was wanted by police for impersonating law enforcement officers. He also allegedly drove a replica undercover police vehicle, while using license plates that were allegedly stolen from cars outside a military recruiting office.

According to CBS News, Mike King is not the suspect’s real name, and he had been using several different aliases while conducting his business, which was called Off Duty Police Services. The online platform connected North Texas police officers with off-duty work.

RELATED: ‘An unhealthy obsession’: James Talarico praises trans children as ‘perfect’ and ‘sacred’

Photographer: Dylan Hollingsworth/Bloomberg via Getty Images

According to CBS News’ inside sources, the man also had a previous criminal background.

Rep. Crockett’s office has declined to comment on multiple reports. Blaze News has requested comment from Crockett. This article will be updated with any applicable responses.

Police have not released the man’s real name.

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​News, Crime, Texas, Dallas, Swat, Democrats, Jasmine crockett, Police, Politics 

A new paper finds that LLMs bend toward imitation, non-creation, and, despite requests for fresh takes, put out derivative conclusions.

The paper has some AI observers surprised, while others scramble for explanations. Simply put, the models trained on finite datasets could not originate anything of their own. Worse, all the models, whatever their external or corporate differences, wound up spewing almost the same results. The differences in input, apparently, made little difference in output.

“This research reveals a critical limitation in large language models,” said Yulia Tsvetkov, a lead researcher and author of the study. “Despite their diversity of architectures and training approaches, LLMs produce strikingly homogeneous outputs on open-ended queries, a phenomenon we termed the ‘artificial hivemind.’”

The limitations of the LLMs are baked into the facts of silicon and spirit.

“Hive mind,” believe it or not, is being generous. The LLMs cannot synch in the telepathic sense we attribute to honeybees or ants. All they are capable of is recursion, rehashing their inputs. There is no reflection but that which has been entrained to the models. No wonder they all sound the same.

The group of researchers working at various academic centers, including the Paul Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford University, trained approximately 70 different LLM models on a dataset they dubbed “INFINITY-CHAT.”

The researchers posed 26,000 open-ended questions to the LLMs , breaking out “the different queries that users pose to language models into six high-level categories and 17 fine-grained subcategories such as problem solving or speculative and hypothetical scenarios,” according to their report. “Of the high-level categories, creative content generation (58%) and brainstorming and ideation (15.2%) were among some of the most common — emphasizing users’ reliance on LLMs for direct inspiration and thought.”

There’s another disturbing angle we might consider.

The limitations of the LLMs are baked into the facts of silicon and spirit. Their limitations are unalterable, and they will never achieve “consciousness,” merely simulating it at most. We shouldn’t expect much in terms of pure creativity. But what about the nutritive and psychic value of the material upon which the models were trained? Is part of the problem highlighted in the “Hivemind” study due to the human-made material upon which they were trained?

RELATED: Shock report reveals just how much Gen Zers and Millennials dislike AI

Sakorn Sukkasemsakorn/Getty Images

A particular post on X.com flagged this study. It’s no exaggeration, nor is it meant to disparage the poster, as certainly he is simply following the incentives of our financialized social media conditions, but the post itself reads like LLM-speak. It uses the now-typical “it’s not A, it’s B” turn of phrase so often repeated by AI and those humans interacting with AI.

This effect of humans sinking into lexigraphical and semantic patterns displayed by LLMs was highlighted in another recent study, “Homogenizing effect of large language models on creative diversity.” “While LLMs can produce creative content that might be as good as or even better than human-created content,” the report surmised, “their widespread use risks reducing creative diversity across groups of people.”

Viral catchphrases and shopworn cliches come and go. Not too long ago, you couldn’t turn on the radio or crack a news site without seeing the phrase “it turns out that,” shortly followed by “is a dumpster fire.” We have a dangerous, but also useful, in-built tendency toward imitation. But we have, while LLMs do not, a number of tethers back to reality, back to the visceral and the spiritual.

How much of everything we’ve been reading over the last few decades has already been vastly watered down or filtered through, first, the criteria of market competition; second, government coercion and outright censorship; and lastly, through the highly dramatic corporate homogenizing process referred to as consolidation?

The alarm surrounding this latest “Hivemind” study will die down. Perhaps the models will be rejiggered to allow for output more convincing to human observers. But the more critical question, concerning how our own deteriorating capacities for discernment may have contributed to the ways these machines were modeled, will remain uncomfortable. We should try to unravel the mysteries of our own recent degeneration by looking at ourselves first.

​Tech 

Half a century after the book “Why Johnny Can’t Read” sounded an alarm about the rise of illiteracy in the U.S., the problem has only gotten worse. A quarter of all young adults, many of them high-school graduates, are now functionally illiterate. Unable to read more than basic, short sentences, their prospects in today’s information economy are bleak.

This crisis gave rise to a movement that embraced the science of reading and produced a surprising success story in the Deep South, a region dogged by the highest rates of childhood illiteracy in the nation. State leaders and education reformers in Mississippi and Louisiana led a remarkable improvement in elementary reading scores that now rank among the highest in the nation.

Advocates estimate that about half of the state’s districts are experimenting with or rolling out higher-quality curricula.

The turnaround was a long slog, requiring a heavy hand from the state to win buy-in for a wholesale transformation of curricula, teaching methods, accountability, and more. Former state education chief Carey Wright called it the “Mississippi Marathon.” One of the biggest questions in public education now is whether the southern surge can spread nationwide, turning millions of struggling students into proficient readers with a brighter future.

But such a top-down approach is running into resistance, particularly in blue states like New York and Illinois, where strong teachers’ unions have fought to preserve local control over schools. And nowhere is the political battle over who runs the classroom more pronounced than in Massachusetts, which has long boasted the nation’s best public schools.

Massachusetts’ governor is expected to sign a literacy bill in the coming months, making it one of about a dozen states to mandate adoption of curricula based on the science of reading in elementary grades. Laws in another 30 states merely encourage its use. Although these laws suggest a big step forward for the nation, Massachusetts illustrates the challenges ahead in some states — many of the educators responsible for implementing the mandated reforms see them as an affront to local control of classrooms.

The influential Massachusetts Teachers Association led the campaign against the legislation, suffering a rare defeat at the statehouse. At least 300 superintendents, principals, and teachers in about 40 Massachusetts districts also signed a letter opposing the mandate, arguing that local educators know what’s best for students.

The pushback in Massachusetts raises concerns among advocates about whether the reforms, especially the evidence-based curriculum and teacher training, will be fully implemented across the state. ExcelinEd, an advocacy group chaired by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), has identified many science-of-reading policies, big and small, that have helped states boost literacy rates. The group’s research found that the difference between states with the biggest reading gains and those that floundered boils down to how thoroughly they implemented most of the reforms.

“We know what works, and we have state exemplars like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida that have actually done it,” said ExcelinEd senior policy fellow Christy Hovanetz. “So unless more states are willing to do the hard work, we’re not going to see improved outcomes for our kids. And that severely impacts our economic prosperity and future. So yes, I’m concerned.”

RELATED: My school’s AI challenge raised a scary question: What do students need me for?

SiberianArt/Getty Images

State versus local control

In the United States, most school districts call the shots regarding the curriculum — the crucial teaching materials that determine how kids are taught. Although research shows that the quality of curricula makes a big difference in whether Johnny and Jill learn to read, this area of public education remains largely unregulated by most states, leaving 13,000 districts to pick instructional materials based on convenience, corporate marketing, or price. And nobody knows what curricula most districts use since only six states require such disclosure, according to Karen Vaites of the Curriculum Insight Project.

Science-of-reading advocates say local control over curricula isn’t working. Consider fourth-graders, about the age when children’s reading skills strongly predict their future academic success or failure. In 2024, 40% of fourth-graders across the nation scored below the basic level, up from 34% in 2019 and nearly matching levels in 1992, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard in testing. These students have trouble reading aloud, recognizing and decoding many grade-level words, and thus comprehending the meaning of text. They will struggle in all their classes through high school if they aren’t reading well in elementary school.

States like Massachusetts are responding with mandates that require districts to pick from a menu of approved curricula backed by research showing their effectiveness. The Massachusetts Teachers Association doesn’t dispute that there’s a literacy crisis. But the union opposed the mandate, casting it as a form of government overreach in complex curricular matters best left to trained educators.

“Our members have opposed legislated curriculum mandates for literacy education because they know losing flexibility to do their jobs and restricting their professional judgment inevitably means some students will continue to struggle with learning to read and write,” MTA President Max Page and Vice President Deb McCarthy said in a statement to RealClearInvestigations. “The law in Massachusetts will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to implement, and that money would be better spent on hiring staff and increasing professional development opportunities for educators.”

The union says it supports the voluntary adoption of evidence-based curricula by districts, which has been spurred on by grants from programs like Literacy Launch. Advocates estimate that about half of the state’s districts are experimenting with or rolling out higher-quality curricula. The other half are still using less effective instructional materials, including Lucy Calkins’ popular Units of Study, which is based on the principles of a teaching strategy called Balanced Literacy.

Failed reform efforts

Balanced Literacy emerged during the “reading wars” of the 1990s in an attempt to address the nation’s literacy decline. At the time, the prominent approach to instruction, called Whole Language, required students to learn words and sentences by looking at simple picture books as they were read aloud and, if needed, guess at pronunciation and meaning by the story’s context and images. Experts hoped that this loosely structured method would inspire a love of reading.

While it worked for some students, critics said the lack of any explicit instruction in methods to decode words left many students struggling. Balanced Literacy came about as a compromise, adding a dash of phonics to help these students sound out words while keeping the fundamentals of the Whole Language strategy.

States with new literacy laws are not all doing a good job of vetting curricula to ensure they give districts the strongest options.

De’Shawn Washington, winner of the 2024 Teacher of the Year award in Massachusetts, saw the damage Balanced Literacy’s Units of Study did to his elementary students. In his Boston and Lexington classrooms, students who were already proficient readers advanced at a fast clip. But most students, who were one or two grade levels behind because they didn’t have exposure to reading at home or suffered from a disability, learned at a much slower pace, if at all. A few of his third-graders were unable to read books for kindergarteners or write their names. Washington did his best to supplement Units of Study with more phonics, but it wasn’t much help.

“The struggling readers tended to get left behind, and the disparity between them and the proficient readers widened,” said Washington, whose experience turned him into an advocate of Massachusetts’ mandate.

Calkins, a professor at Columbia, has publicly acknowledged her curriculum’s shortcomings. Yet Units of Study remains entrenched in more than two dozen Massachusetts districts, which are part of the “widespread” resistance to literacy reforms, including in Boston Public Schools, says Darci Burns, executive director of HILL for Literacy, which trains Massachusetts teachers in evidence-based literacy practices.

Burns says many of the gatekeepers of instructional materials, such as assistant superintendents and directors of curriculum, were trained to use Balanced Literacy and remain wedded to it like a religion. Teachers like its unscripted approach, giving them more freedom. Burns predicts they will try to skirt the mandate rather than support it.

“These districts might adopt a reading program that’s the most aligned with Balanced Literacy,” Burns told RCI. “And then they’ll go through the motions, but they won’t really do it.”

RELATED: Kentucky’s school choice push could trigger a domino effect

Olekcil Mach/Getty Images

The science of reading

In 2000, a National Reading Panel of top experts was set up to distill what several hundred gold-standard studies revealed about literacy instruction. Although the panel didn’t explicitly reject Balanced Literacy, it found that a more structured approach to instruction in five areas was the most effective: phonemic awareness (learning word sounds), phonics (matching sounds to letters), fluency (reading aloud), vocabulary (learning word meanings), and comprehension (gleaning the meaning of text).

The science-of-reading movement was built on these five pillars, with Massachusetts and other states incorporating them into legislation. Although more recent research has brought new insights — leading scholar Louisa Moats says language skills need much more emphasis in the five pillars — they remain the best approach to improved literacy.

Yet two decades after the panel’s findings, most universities still haven’t read the memo. Signaling the challenges of wholesale reform, only a quarter of teacher preparation programs cover all five pillars, denying most instructors the training they need to be effective.

This leaves educators in an unusual position — unlike most professionals, they are not trained in, and sometimes reject, the best practices of their trade. It’s another knock on the relevance of higher education that Massachusetts and other states are now addressing by requiring teacher preparation to include the five pillars.

“Most teachers don’t know the science of reading — that the point of phonemic awareness is to facilitate word recognition with an alphabetic writing system, or that the primary comprehension enabler is vocabulary,” said Moats. “I don’t want my grandkids in a classroom where the teacher has the autonomy to do whatever the hell she wants, because I have seen the results of that.”

The five pillars may be on solid footing, but the curricula based on them are a work in progress. Some are comprehensive, others are too narrowly focused on the foundational skills like phonics and don’t include enough reading and writing; some don’t focus enough on building students’ knowledge about subjects like history and science, which is key to reading comprehension; some haven’t been around long enough to have a proven track record.

States with new literacy laws are not all doing a good job of vetting curricula to ensure they give districts the strongest options, says Vaites of the Curriculum Insight Project. The varying quality of curricula has given ammunition to critics of mandates, such as Superintendent Julie Hackett, whose affluent Lexington district in Massachusetts uses Units of Study.

Southern states found that a new curriculum isn’t worth much unless teachers are trained to master it.

“We’ve done some looking into results around districts that have adopted new curricula, and we are not seeing the results that would necessarily justify” spending up to $1 million to buy new instructional materials, Hackett said at an MTA event.

Vaites wrote that Hackett’s concerns are overblown. Although Massachusetts’ current list isn’t perfect, it does offer comprehensive programs covering the five pillars, with an emphasis on reading books and building knowledge.

“Most of the curricula on Massachusetts’ list are pretty good, and now with the mandate, most people think that state leaders are savvy enough to make it even better,” Vaites told RCI.

Arduous training

Southern states found that a new curriculum isn’t worth much unless teachers are trained to master it. Washington, the former teacher, says adopting a new curriculum is a lot of work, and classes and coaching give teachers more confidence about handling such a big transition.

“The training shifts the conversation away from resistance because teachers realize they are not going into this new situation blind and that there’s a big investment being made to improve the profession,” Washington said.

The bills in Massachusetts offer training to all teachers rather than requiring it, as 18 other states, including Louisiana, have done, according to ExcelinEd’s literacy policy tracker. If that’s a concession to opponents, so is the decision by Massachusetts lawmakers not to adopt another reform that has proven effective in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other states: retaining third-graders who can’t read at or near grade level from promotion.

It’s a highly controversial policy that parents almost always oppose, despite the long-term literacy benefits, according to a study of Mississippi that found retention “led to substantially higher ELA scores in sixth grade.”

In all, ExcelinEd has identified 18 reforms, including dyslexia screening and parental notification of reading problems, that the most successful states have implemented. Given the heavy lift, it’s not surprising that some states have stumbled.

Of the 15 states that had adopted most of the 18 policies by 2019, 10 outpaced the national average in fourth-grade NAEP reading scores by 2024, with Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina far out in front, according to Hovanetz, the policy fellow. These 10 states illustrate the effectiveness of the reforms.

But test scores in four of the 15 states declined more than the nation’s did, and Michigan tied, showing the difficulty of implementing the reforms. Among the backsliding states, Hovanetz says, New Mexico didn’t train and deploy all of its reading coaches, and Oklahoma and North Carolina ended their third-grade retention policy.

“States get a whole bunch of constituent calls saying, ‘It’s not fair you’re retaining my kid.’ Then they back off of the policy and lose any momentum that they had gained,” says Hovanetz, a former Florida education official.

RELATED: Florida teachers’ unions would rather play politics than do their jobs

Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images

Minnesota illustrates how things can go wrong when districts are encouraged, rather than mandated, to adopt evidence-based curricula and teacher training.

“Some teachers took the training. Not everyone did, and when they went back to their schools, teachers didn’t have the instructional materials to support what they learned in training, and they might not have had a leader at the school to support them,” Hovanetz said. “So Minnesota probably wasted a whole lot of money.”

A number of other states haven’t bothered to pass meaningful science-of-reading laws. They include liberal states like Washington and Illinois and more conservative states like Montana and Maine.

In Massachusetts, a conference committee is reconciling the two bills, with the rollout of reforms set for 2027. The Senate bill requires districts to regularly assess K-3 students’ reading abilities and create improvement plans for those who score significantly below grade level. It’s a measure of accountability that advocates hope will produce positive results in a state that’s moving backwards in literacy on the NAEP test.

In another concession to opponents of the mandate, lawmakers gave districts a narrow escape hatch. They can apply for a waiver from the mandate if their alternative curriculum is backed by research evidence. While the waiver could open the door to the adoption of Calkins’ revised Units of Study, it will have to pass muster with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Mary Tamer, who convened the Mass Reads coalition of 40 education groups to support the legislation she helped write, is bullish about adopting reforms. Despite the opposition, she says the political momentum, underscored by the unanimous votes for the literacy bills in both the House and Senate, is strong enough to compel most districts to buy in.

“Our expectation is that districts will move toward evidence-based instruction as quickly as they can because it’s proven to teach children how to read,” she said. “And that is our goal here.”

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

​Literacy crisis, Literacy rates, Teachers unions, Red states, Learn to read, Public schools, Reading programs, Curricula, Balanced literacy, Reading wars, Opinion & analysis, Realclearinvestigation 

After CNN botched some recent coverage, BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is enjoying “watching the death spiral that CNN is having to deal with in real time and the ways that they are trying to stay relevant.”

“All the cool kids are on Instagram, right? And CNN is like, ‘Oh, oh, hold on a second. Hold on a second. We’re new. We’re hip. We’re cool with the youths. What if we started uploading these totally not staged and impromptu selfie videos,’” Gonzales mocks, before playing a CNN selfie video of Jake Tapper.

“See that fancy ceiling? I’m at the House of Representatives. I wanted to show you something. So, in 1890, journalist Charles Kincaid shot and killed, ultimately, Congressman William Taulbee of Kentucky. And right here, you can see the bloodstains,” Tapper said.

“That is Jake Tapper. He’s realized, ‘Oh crap, nobody’s watching, and the kids are not watching because everything I do is boring,’” Gonzales comments.

“You might think this is a Jake Tapper problem. It’s not. This is apparently CNN’s new strategy across all of their social platforms with all of their anchors,” she adds, before playing a selfie video of CNN anchor Dana Bash.

“I just got off the phone with President Trump, who gave himself a 15 out of 10 on how the war is going so far,” Bash said while sitting in her car.

“This is not genuine. This is not authentic. This is CNN’s last desperate gasp here, OK? And it’s just not working. It’s not working for you, Dana,” Gonzales says.

“Some CNN consultant … got paid however the hell much money they got paid to be like, ‘OK, hold on. Hold on. I got it. Selfie videos. Selfie videos. That’s going to save you guys,’” Gonzales jokes. “Everyone wants to hear what Jake Tapper thinks while he’s driving down the f**king road.”

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Sara gonzales unfiltered, Sara gonzales, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Jake tapper, Dana bash, Mamdani, Cnn 

An alumni group is questioning the academic value of a course on offer at the taxpayer-subsidized University of Virginia — a course taught by a non-straight poet who apparently encourages students to consult animals about their supposed oppression.

The Jefferson Council, an alumni group “committed to leading the University of Virginia back to Thomas Jefferson’s legacy of freedom and excellence,” noted Wednesday on X, “A course titled ‘Ecofeminist Poetry & Poetics’ being taught this spring at the University of Virginia has students ‘listen’ to plants and animals to better understand how ‘settler colonialism’ and slavery ‘thrive off of the intrinsic interconnectedness between species.'”

‘Birds, goats, willow oaks, and lichen will accompany us through the semester.’

“This is a real taxpayer-funded class,” the group continued. “Is this what higher education has become?”

The description for the graduate course on the UVA English department’s website — which contains quotes from identitarian feminist and LGBT activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs — states:

This interdisciplinary course will interweave brief readings from ecofeminist theory, ecopoetics, and black and indigenous environmental theories with books of contemporary ecofeminist poetry. This curriculum will encourage each of us to see what happens when we “rethink and re-feel,” writes Gumbs, our own “relations, possibilities, and practices” in conversation with the more-than-human world.

The course syllabus notes that “birds, goats, willow oaks, and lichen will accompany us through the semester as we too attempt to listen across species,” reported the College Fix.

University records show that associate professor Brian Teare, a “queer”-identifying climate alarmist who specializes in environmental humanities and “queer theory,” has taught versions of the ecofeminist course for several years.

RELATED: Why do state schools bankroll people who despise the state?

Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images

John Gardner, president of the Jefferson Council, told the College Fix, “It is surprising to the extent that such an inane and clearly agenda-based politicized course could find its way into the curricula of any respectable institute of higher learning.”

“It is not surprising to the extent that over the past decade or more the increasingly left-wing politicized faculties of most universities have turned their curricula into woke fantasylands,” added Gardner.

‘It is more suitable to be a course taught in Orwell’s “1984.”‘

Teare and the university did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Gardner referred to three other radical courses at the university that warrant concern: “Women and Gender in the Deaf World”; “Gender, Body Image, and Social Activism”; and “Queer Judaism,” which poses the question, “What if we approached Judaism as a queer religion?”

“There are many others with the common theme that they are mostly narrowly focused on allegedly marginalized ‘identity groups’ based on race, gender, or ethnicity and are often intended to promote a predetermined agenda,” said Gardner.

The alumni group’s president noted that Thomas Jefferson founded the university because “he felt it was important to have an educated and informed citizenry to sustain a successful republic.”

Gardner suggested that courses like Teare’s “are not meant to follow truth, but to advance a political/social agenda. It is more suitable to be a course taught in Orwell’s ‘1984’ than at Mr. Jefferson’s university.”

In 2025, UVA received over $338 million dollars in funding from the state.

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​Education, University, Woke, Leftism, Feminist, Queer, Homosexual, Propaganda, Indoctrination, Thomas jefferson, History, University of virginia, Uva, Virginia, Educator, Brian teare, Animals, Politics 

A 22-year-old man allegedly attacked a 94-year-old woman who was sitting in a rocking chair on her front porch and brutally raped her in broad daylight, police say.

The suspect, identified as Jeremiah Taylor, had numerous allegations of sexual assault in his background, including one against his own foster mother.

‘I don’t know what word you really use. I’m really dumbfounded to try to explain it.’

The Baton Rouge Police Dept. said officers responded to a report of a sexual assault on March 5 and identified a suspect within minutes of releasing images to the public the next day.

Taylor was initially booked on charges of first-degree rape, second-degree battery, and cruelty to the infirm. He is being held at the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. He is being held without bond.

Baton Rouge Police Chief T.J. Morse said the evidence against Taylor is overwhelming.

“When you’re looking at one of the most vulnerable parts of our population, the elderly, to take advantage of them in this way, horrendous, unacceptable,” Morse said. “I don’t know what word you really use. I’m really dumbfounded to try to explain it.”

WLBT-TV reported that sources indicated the victim suffered broken bones during the assault.

Morse also expressed frustration that Taylor had a violent criminal history but had been released from jail in January after the most recent arrest was dismissed by a district attorney.

“It is a source of contention. It is a source of frustration on our department and with our officers,” he added. “Why this has happened is some questions that I would love you all to ask the rest of the judicial system.”

Taylor had prior arrests for simple burglary, first-degree rape, theft, and second-degree battery.

After an investigation, he was charged with raping another victim three times, one of which was the day after he was released from jail in January.

RELATED: Long Island mom raped in front of her daughter during brutal home invasion. Police have arrested a 14-year-old suspect.

A WBRZ-TV report showed that a man matching Taylor’s description was caught on video appearing to stalk another woman before she walked into her house, and he turned around immediately.

Another woman who said she had been his foster mother during the COVID pandemic claimed that he had sexually assaulted her as she slept.

“Jeremiah was with me maybe six to eight months before he thought it was OK to inappropriately touch me,” the woman said to WBRZ.

She says she pressed charges but believes nothing happened because he was underage at the time.

He was accused of raping a family member as well, but those charges were dropped when the victim could not be located by the district attorney.

Taylor had two words to say when reporters asked him if he raped the 94-year-old woman as accused.

“F**k no,” he said.

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​Jeremiah taylor rape, 94-year-old raped, Baton rouge rapist, Failed criminal system, Crime 

It may be one of the most remarkable technological breakthroughs in human history. Ask the American public, though, and you’ll hear something else entirely about artificial intelligence.

A recent NBC News survey asked registered voters how they feel about a range of public figures and political topics. The results were striking. While Pope Leo posted a net favorability rating of +34, artificial intelligence came in at -20. That puts AI near the bottom of the list, ranking ahead of only the Democratic Party and Iran. According to the poll, only 26% responded “positive” to AI, while 46% responded “negative.”

Who designs the systems? Whose values do they embed? Who gets accountability when they fail? The public does not have satisfying answers, and the industry hasn’t given them many.

Think about that for a moment.

A technology widely touted as capable of curing diseases, discovering new materials, and unlocking unprecedented productivity is viewed more negatively than every U.S. politician and institution included in the poll.

Artificial intelligence may be revolutionary, but unless its architects confront the distrust surrounding it, AI risks losing the public confidence it will ultimately depend on.

A perfect storm of distrust

As someone who follows AI closely, I can’t point to a single cause of the unease. It looks more like a perfect storm.

For decades, science fiction trained audiences to associate AI with dystopia. From “2001: A Space Odyssey” to “The Terminator,” AI often appears as the moment humanity loses control of its own creation. Fiction isn’t the whole story, but it primes the public to expect the worst.

Many Americans also worry about what AI will do to the workforce. Automation has threatened certain industries for years, but AI scales the threat. It now appears poised to hit huge swaths of white-collar work, including creative fields and even decision-making roles once assumed to require human judgment.

Then came the explosion of what critics call “AI slop.” Across the internet, AI-generated articles, videos, images, and posts flood the feed. Much of it is low-effort content built to attract clicks, not provide value. The internet already buckles under misinformation and spam. AI has supercharged this problem.

Americans also distrust the companies building these systems. The left has long been skeptical of massive corporations wielding too much power. The right grew more suspicious after years of fights over social media censorship and ideological activism. ESG efforts, which used corporate power to reshape incentives around political priorities, only reinforced the sense that tech and finance elites want to run the country by proxy.

In short, both sides now distrust many of the institutions developing artificial intelligence. That is a bad position for an industry trying to introduce world-changing technology.

When the experts sound the alarm

Public unease also draws fuel from the people closest to the machine. Several prominent voices in the AI world have issued stark warnings about risk.

Elon Musk has suggested there may be “only a 20% chance of annihilation” from future advanced AI systems. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has cited a 25% chance AI development goes “really, really badly.” Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “godfather of AI,” has floated human extinction-level risk in the 10% to 20% range over the coming decades.

When the builders of a technology openly speculate about catastrophic outcomes, it’s not surprising the public grows uneasy. To the average voter, it can sound like civilization is playing Russian roulette — and the people loading the cylinder are asking to be trusted.

RELATED: Ex-NFL player asked ChatGPT for advice after allegedly murdering his fiancée

Photo by Wesley Hitt/Getty Images

Power, control, and fear of the unknown

Beyond jobs and misinformation, a deeper concern lies underneath: AI is becoming an infrastructure of decision-making.

Algorithms already shape what news we see, what products we buy, and what ideas spread online. As AI grows more capable, it will influence public opinion, political discourse, and cultural norms even more.

In authoritarian systems, that becomes an obvious tool of surveillance and control. But even in a constitutional republic, concentrating that much power in a handful of corporations — or in government — raises hard questions. Who designs the systems? Whose values do they embed? Who gets accountability when they fail? The public does not have satisfying answers, and the industry hasn’t given them many.

The AI industry should pay attention

Despite the excitement in Silicon Valley and Washington, the NBC poll reveals a simple truth: Much of the public does not trust AI. For the companies racing to build ever more powerful systems, that should be a wake-up call.

The industry often sells AI in near-utopian terms: medicine, energy breakthroughs, scientific discovery. Those gains may come. But many Americans see something else. They see massive data centers consuming energy while the internet fills with synthetic garbage. They see tech firms raising and spending billions while ordinary life gets harder. They see executives talking openly about betting civilization on tools they admit they don’t fully control.

If AI’s architects want public buy-in, they will have to address these fears directly.

A good place to start would be a clear public commitment to the constitutional principles Americans still expect: free speech, individual liberty, and personal autonomy. If AI will play a larger role in shaping information and decisions, the public needs confidence that these systems will protect fundamental freedoms rather than erode them.

AI will be shaped, in part, by trust. Right now, that trust is in short supply.

​Ai, Ai slop, Artificial intelligence, Elon musk, Dario amodei, Geoffrey hinton, Ai takeover, Ai approval, Opinion & analysis, Public opinion poll, Nbc news poll 

As the military conflict between the United States and Iran approaches its third week, many are asking questions like, “How many warheads do we have left?”; “How many missiles do they have left?”; “What is this going to cost?”; and “What is this going to do to oil?” says Glenn Beck.

While these kinds of questions are only natural, the bigger concern, he says, is “what [we’re] fighting.”

“I’m not making a case to fight Iran or this war or anything,” he assures.

But “you have to understand what you’re dealing with.”

And what we’re dealing with is an apocalyptic form of Islam known as “Twelver Shi’ism.”

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn exposes this radical theology that has guided Iran’s top leaders, military operations, and possibly even its lethal responses to Trump and Israel’s joint attacks.

“The name [Twelver Shi’ism] comes from their belief in the 12th Imam — divinely appointed leader … that succeeded Muhammad. … Muhammad was the first; the 12th one, Muhammad al-Mahdi, he was believed to have disappeared in the ninth century in a well when he was a child,” Glenn explains.

“According to the Twelver belief, he’s going to climb out of that well, and he’s going to return in the end days, OK? And when he returns, he’s going to establish a perfect Islamic justice that will oversee the entire world; he’s going to defeat all evil; he will convert everyone to Islam; and he’ll rule from Jerusalem, and the world’s transformed,” he continues, emphasizing the parallels in Christian end-times prophecies.

But what does this have to do with the current conflict with Iran?

“[Twelvers] truly believe that they can hasten [Mahdi’s] return if they plunge the world into chaos. … That crisis prepares the ground for the final victory of Islam,” says Glenn, drawing a parallel to Revelation’s prophetic warnings of “global upheaval, wars, famine, [and] pestilence” followed by “a powerful figure … promising peace and justice,” who is actually the Antichrist — “the deceiver.”

“The hero in one story looks very much like the villain of the other story.”

Even though “not every Shia Muslim believes in accelerating chaos … the most powerful clerical authorities in Iran do believe it,” says Glenn.

“In fact, Iran’s leadership, they frame the military mission in these terms,” he adds, noting that Iran’s “armies reference the Mahdi directly” and are taught that “they’re preparing for the Mahdi’s return.”

Even Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — the central religious and political leader of the Iranian regime that drove out the Shah in 1979 — thought the “Twelvers were too dangerous,” despite believing in hastening the return of the Madhi through chaos.

“The ones [Khomeini] said were too dangerous because they were so unpredictable and could get everybody killed … those are the people that are in charge of [Iran] right now,” Glenn warns.

“That’s not religious speculation. This is state ideology. And these are the people that are arming the terrorist groups and sending signals to sleeper cells possibly here in America.”

Currently, Iran is actively launching missile and drone strikes on several of its Arab neighbors, which seems counterintuitive to us.

But we have to “stop thinking like a Westerner,” says Glenn.

If Iran’s goal is to “get everybody at war with each other,” starting with “setting the Arab world on fire” makes sense in its grand scheme to hasten the Mahdi’s return.

“So we have to ask ourself: Who are we actually dealing with?”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Twelver shi’ism, Iran, Iran war, Blazetv, Blaze media, Mahdi, Islam, End times 

Quentin Tarantino is going way out of his comfort zone with his next project.

No grind-house gore, 1970s-style banter, or even bare feet. Tarantino’s new project is a play, not a movie. “The Popinjay Cavalier,” to open in London’s West End next year, is an 1830s-set comic farce.

‘We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy.’

It sounds like a twee Wes Anderson project, but it’s merely the Oscar winner stretching his creative wings for a new kind of story, all the while stalling on what his 10th and final film will be.

Here’s guessing Rosanna Arquette won’t be invited to opening night …

Crock lobster

Should late-night TV shows go the “legal notes” route? We’ve already seen “The View” adopt that survival strategy after one too many Fake News stories.

Colbert and Co. are often just as bad, and this week, they’re even worse. The usual late-night suspects ripped into Team Trump for spending way too much on surf and turf. The phony narrative ignored historical precedent. The U.S. military routinely treats soldiers to great grub to thank them for putting their lives on the line.

To hear folks like Seth Meyers tell it, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is eating large 24/7 with a greasy lobster bib around his Fox News neck.

Here’s Kimmel pushing the false narrative to its illogical conclusion:

Again, just in September, [Hegseth] spent $2 million of taxpayer money on Alaskan king crab. He spent $6.9 million on lobster tail. $140,000 on doughnuts. $124,000 on ice cream machines. $26,000 on sushi preparation tables. And $15.1 million on ribeye steak. What is this, “My 600-Pound Defense Department”?

Stop it, you’re killing us!

RELATED: Tarantino torches ‘Pulp Fiction’ actress for crying ‘racist’ — 30 years later: ‘You took the money’

Photo by Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images

Too ‘Late’

When you’ve lost Variety, it’s not a good sign.

Legacy outlets like the Hollywood Reporter and Variety routinely carry late-night TV hosts’ water. They regurgitate their tepid punch lines while protecting them against serial fact-checks.

But Variety did something unexpected this week. The rag mocked Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” for becoming a never-ending ego trip in his final weeks on the air.

The show’s focus on its own host’s misfortune has become outsized and a bit dramatic, especially because so many other institutions are in crisis: With everything else going on in the world, we have to go through a months-long celebration of life for a comedian whose job is coming to an end?

The site’s readers were not happy with the column. The Facebook comments section uniformly raged against the op-ed. We could have warned them. Never expect things to go smoothly when you peek your head outside the progressive bubble …

Gay abandon

Margaret Cho can’t get her talking points straight.

The lesbian comic savaged you-know-who while accepting an award from the website Queerty.

“It’s a f**king nightmare, we’re in a f**king war, they want to draft people for this incontinent child molester who doesn’t even know what he wants out of anything. It’s just insane.”

She also said the trans community faces a genocide under President Trump. A few beats later, she changed her tone so violently that a few in the crowd may have suffered whiplash.

“So what we have to do as gay adults, if you’re a gay adult, you have to stand up and be proud. Throw your shoulders back and look happy all the time. Because trans kids will see you, gay kids will see you, and they will see you and they will say, ‘Hey, that person made it. They’re happy. Maybe I can grow up to be like them, maybe I can be like that happy person.’”

Right. Because nobody sounds happier than Margaret Cho …

The Docter is in

My, have things changed at the Mouse House.

Disney animators saw themselves as the tip of the woke spear not long ago. Animators injected sexual themes into kiddie fare, purportedly to change young hearts and minds. Or, as one infamous Disney employee described it, the company’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda.”

A few mega-flops later, Disney is singing a different tune. Screaming it, to be precise. The company stripped a trans character from its Pixar TV series “Win or Lose.” Recent sequels like “Inside Out 2” and “Moana 2” delivered joyous fun without the woke lectures.

Now, veteran Pixar director Pete Docter is delivering the smackdown on those demanding that Disney sexualize its content. Docter previously helmed “Monsters, Inc.” and “Up,” among notable Pixar projects, and he explained to the Wall Street Journal why the company removed gay themes from its 2025 dud release, “Elio.”

“We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy,” he said.

Here’s betting some Disney employees might need some after hearing that quote.

​Hollywood, Celebrities, Entertainment, Culture, Jimmy kimmel, Quentin tarantino, Pete hegseth, Margaret cho, Movies, Tv, Toto recall 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani proudly announced the creation of the Office for LGBTQIA+ Affairs and nominated a transgender-identifying male to lead it.

Mamdani said that New York City had the highest number of “queer” people of any city in the U.S. during the announcement Friday. Attorney Taylor Brown will be the first transgender person to lead an agency or office in New York City.

‘With Taylor Brown as director of the new Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs, the city’s queer community will not only be celebrated, but protected at every turn.’

“New York City is proud of its LGBTQIA+ community and will refuse to deny health care, safety, or dignity to anyone on the basis of their identity,” Mamdani said in a statement. “With Taylor Brown as director of the new Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs, the city’s queer community will not only be celebrated, but protected at every turn.”

Brown said the office would protect members of the LGBTQIA+ community from “hostile actors” in his statement.

“New York has given me everything — life-saving health care, education, a home, a career, my chosen family, and a life of purpose. I am so proud to serve this city as the inaugural director of the Mayor’s Office for LGBTQIA+ Affairs,” he said.

“I will work every day to ensure that the doors of New York City remain open to all and to continue New York City’s legacy as a beacon of opportunity and hope for those who have been ignored, discriminated against, and intentionally excluded,” Brown added.

The office will absorb the previous NYC Unity Project established under the de Blasio administration.

RELATED: ‘Tax them to the white meat!’ Mamdani’s new ‘equity officer’ posted now-deleted X posts against white women.

Mamdani said the office will also work to make sure transgender and other LGBTQ+ members get as many city services as possible.

Trans activists previously praised Mamdani for naming Abby Stein, a transgender-identifying man, ex-Orthodox Jew, and activist, to his transition team.

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​Mamdani transgender, Office for lgbtqia affairs, Trans lawyer taylor brown, Lgtbqia agenda, Politics 

Want to make yourself the center of attention — without people thinking you’re a bad person?

“Jealous Type” singer Doja Cat has revealed a trick long-favored by celebrities when weighing in on the latest scandal — and you don’t even have to know anything about the topic at hand.

Welcome to the wonderful world of virtue signaling.

‘What I was doing yesterday was virtue signaling … something that I could leverage.’

The pop star’s revelation came after actor Timothée Chalamet appeared on a CNN & Variety town hall, where he ruffled feathers with his passing remarks on the commercial irrelevance of opera and ballet.

“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or, you know, things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive!'” Chalamet said to co-host Matthew McConaughey.

Whiny dancer

The comments prompted backlash from many in the entertainment industry, including Doja Cat — real name Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini — who lashed out at Chalamet in a TikTok video.

After mocking the actor, she claimed that “people [do] give a f**k” about opera and ballet, and she praised its decorum.

“You show up in a nice outfit. You sit the f**k down and shut the f**k up,” she said. “That’s the usual etiquette around those things. Maybe learn something from that.”

Mea culpa

Just one day later, however, Dlamini was singing a different tune.

“I know nothing about opera. I know nothing about ballet,” she offered in a short, contrite follow-up.

“I’ve never been to a ballet. I’ve never seen an opera,” she revealed. “And I took it upon myself yesterday to kind of give it to the man because there is a culture based around outrage and things like that, and people want to feel like they’re part of something. It’s a need to connect, whether good or bad,” she added.

Dlamini then took her confession a step further and told fans she was only doing it for views.

RELATED: Timothée Chalamet is right: Opera and ballet are dying — and you’ll never guess why

Rare honesty

The blunt confession was a rare moment of honesty in a culture generally concerned with trading outrage for clicks.

“What I was doing yesterday was virtue signaling because I wanted to connect, and I knew that Timothée’s goof-up was something that I could leverage in order for people to connect with me and f**k with me,” the Los Angeles native went on.

“And it’s easy. It’s a modern way to garner clicks, likes, approval, and all kinds of things like that from people. And so I did that yesterday, and I didn’t really think about why I was doing it.”

RELATED: Gene Simmons’ advice for celeb activists Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo: ‘Shut the f**k up’

Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

‘Wanted a hug’

“That was the perfect material for me to seem sincere. But the truth is, I don’t know anything about opera. I don’t know anything about ballet, and I’ve never been to either shows,” she said.

The 30-year-old also displayed some vulnerability when she discussed the deeper motivations behind her reaction.

“I think I just wanted a hug. I think that’s all that I wanted. I wanted a hug. I wanted to feel like I was part of something bigger than myself. I wanted to be pat on the back the way everybody else is patting each other on the back in the comments sections. And I wanted to look like a hero, and that’s what happened. And when I got it, I didn’t like it so much,” she said.

The half-Jewish, half-South African has been wildly successful over just five studio albums. She has gone platinum five times between 2019 and 2023, with her music gaining recognition in Switzerland, Sweden, and Great Britain.

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​Align, Virtue signaling, Celebrity, Hollywood, Los angeles, Tiktok, Ballet, Social media, Entertainment 

Former NFL coach Tony Dungy says he’s looking ahead in faith after learning he will not return to NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” this fall following 17 years on the broadcast.

“I have been informed by NBC that I won’t be back with FNIA this fall and it has given me time to reflect and also to look ahead. It’s disappointing news but I want to thank my NBC family for making the last 17 years so special. I’ll have lasting memories of my time there, especially with Rodney Harrison who has become a tremendous friend,” Dungy posted on X.

“God has always directed me in these moments and while I’m not sure what the next step will be for me — whether it will be in football, in broadcasting, or getting more involved in church and community outreach — I know God has plans for my life and I can’t wait to see them unfold,” he continued.

“And I am reminded of one of my favorite verses in the Bible — Romans 8:28. ‘God works all things for His good for those who love the Lord,’” he added.

“Seventeen years on NBC always shocked me. NBC is probably the most secular television network we have in America. I think they used Tony Dungy and the NFL used Tony Dungy to try to signal that ‘hey, we’re not anti-Christian,’” BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock says on “Jason Whitlock Harmony.”

“And now NBC and the NFL, I think, are kind of done with the biblical worldview — the Christian worldview — and so they have removed Tony Dungy,” he adds.

“I was surprised, just because, as you pointed out, he’s been there 17 years,” Anthony Walker tells Whitlock.

“I think it was a few years ago he started becoming even more vocal about his stance against abortion, about, you know, saving unborn children and went to a few rallies, public speeches, and faced a lot of criticism because of that,” Walker explains.

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​Fearless with jason whitlock, Fearless, Jason whitlock, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Tony dungy, Christianity, Sunday night football, Nbc, Nfl, National football league, Jason whitlock harmony 

Outrage from the mother of an eighth-grade student at a New York middle school has led to a teacher being fired over a “racist” joke he made about slavery.

Dorothy Hall went to the media and demanded action be taken against the teacher from Gaskill Preparatory School, a public middle school in Niagara Falls, New York. She said her son is scared of returning to school out of fear of retaliation.

‘Invoking the suffering of enslaved people to entertain oneself is a blatant violation of dignity and a direct assault on the humanity of African American students.’

“He’s afraid of being retaliated against,” she said to WKBW-TV. “And I’m asking for the community to come together with me and my son, as well as the other student, because she absolutely didn’t have to deal with that either as a child. Nobody should have to deal with it, but especially as a child.”

Hall initially said her complaint was not taken seriously by the district.

“I’m reaching out to my community because I need for the science teacher, first of all, to be terminated. As of today, he’s only suspended with pay,” she said.

The Niagara Falls branch of the NAACP released a lengthy statement in support of her cause.

“Let’s be clear: This is not a joke. This is a racist insult rooted in the brutal history of slavery, inflicted on children by someone entrusted to educate them. It is harmful. And it is absolutely unacceptable,” reads the NAACP statement in part.

“This was an act of racial degradation directed at children who should never be forced to carry the weight of America’s most violent history within the walls of their classroom,” the organization added. “Invoking the suffering of enslaved people to entertain oneself is a blatant violation of dignity and a direct assault on the humanity of African-American students. It reveals a mindset that devalues African-American life, ignores historical trauma, and undermines any trust that families place in our public school system.”

RELATED: Elementary school librarian scolds first lady for sending ‘racist’ Dr. Seuss books

“I need accountability and justice. That’s what I need — my son needs. I don’t need. My son needs it,” Hall added.

The last records available indicate that more than $19K is spent per child in the Niagara Falls City School District.

Only 28% of students in the district are proficient in reading, while even fewer, 23%, are proficient in math.

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U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro excoriated a federal judge for blocking subpoenas served by the Justice Department against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

James Boasberg, U.S. District Court chief judge for Washington, D.C., ruled Friday that the Dept. of Justice had no legal basis to issue the subpoenas in the investigation into renovation of the aged offices of the Federal Reserve.

‘Jerome Powell today is now bathed in immunity, preventing my office from investigating the Federal Reserve.’

President Donald Trump has accused Powell of mismanaging the renovation and tried unsuccessfully to pressure Powell to step down from his office. Boasberg, who has been accused of bias by the Trump administration, accused the president of seeking the investigation in order to force Powell out.

“A mountain of evidence suggests that the Government served these subpoenas on the Board to pressure its Chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning,” the judge said in his ruling.

Pirro vehemently criticized the judgment in comments to the media.

“The American public is fed up with public moneys that seem to go into a black hole, especially in D.C. where no one is held accountable,” Pirro said.

“One of the age-old tools that all prosecutors have to investigate any crime, including cost overruns, is a grand jury subpoena. Today, however, in Washington, an activist judge has taken that tool away from us,” she added.

“As a result, Jerome Powell today is now bathed in immunity, preventing my office from investigating the Federal Reserve. This is wrong, and it is without legal authority,” she continued.

She indicated that the Justice Dept. intended to appeal the order from Boasberg.

The judge added that Pirro did not provide enough evidence for the accusation in his opinion.

“On the other side of the scale, the Government has produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime; indeed, its justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual,” Boasberg wrote.

RELATED: Pam Bondi slaps Judge Boasberg with misconduct allegations

Powell also accused the administration of seeking the investigation to influence him.

“No one — certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve — is above the law,” Powell said in January. “But this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure.”

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Singer Gwen Stefani grew up in a Catholic household but drifted away from the Church as an adult — until an unexpected prayer brought her closer to God than she ever thought possible.

The No Doubt co-founder and multi-platinum solo artist recently opened up about her newfound faith with Jeff Cavins from Christian prayer and meditation app Hallow.

‘Please, God, let my mom have a baby.’

Stefani said her shift came 12 years ago, after talking to an acquaintance who had converted to Judaism despite a non-religious upbringing in Israel.

Wake-up call

“He was studying the Torah, and he had this big epiphany, … and he starts talking to me about the Torah. And I was desperate at this point, too, during all this. I really wanted to have another baby,” Stefani told Cavins. “I really did. And I couldn’t.”

After describing the teachings of the Torah as “waking me up,” she recalled talking to her then-8-year-old son about why he was unlikely to get his wish for a younger sibling.

“I’m sorry, your mommy’s too old,” she told him.

He then shocked her with a spontaneous prayer: “Please, God, let my mom have a baby.”

“I never taught him that,” Stefani marveled as she remembered the moment.

RELATED: Country star Blake Shelton says he found God in 2019: ‘I had one of those moments that you hear people talk about’

Running to God

To Stefani’s surprise, she learned she was pregnant just four weeks later.

“I was pregnant with Apollo, who I had at 44 years old naturally, totally a full-on gift. And that was the first miracle,” she explained.

“You can run from God, or you can run to God,” Cavins responded, with Stefani noting that she was always taught to run toward him.

The 56-year-old also revealed during her interview that the closest she feels to God is when she is doing music.

“Honestly, it’s ’cause I’m desperate for him because I’m like, I’m about ready to go on stage, and I’m not nervous, but I just want God to use me. I just want people to see God’s light through me,” she explained.

RELATED: ‘I’m Japanese and I didn’t know it’: Singer Gwen Stefani defends fascination with the Asian country, faces questions about cultural appropriation

December 2000. Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

Daily practice

Stefani went on to say that she discovered the Hallow app during the COVID-19 lockdown and became so attached to the idea of daily prayer, she would have fears that one day the app would shut down and she wouldn’t be able to use it.

Now, she is doing work with the Christian prayer app, recently releasing videos like a 40-day Lent prayer challenge in which she encourages users of the app to pray every day leading up to Easter.

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While rabid defenders of illegal immigration often claim immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson tells Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“The problem that I don’t understand is, first, people will say, you know, illegal immigrants, they don’t commit crimes half at the number that the citizen actually commits, and yet, we’re seeing people now killed on the streets, robbed, raped, etc., etc., by illegals,” Glenn tells Attkisson.

“I’m not saying all illegals are like this. … But we have lost the ability to seemingly even care about the crime if it’s an illegal doing it,” he adds.

“I’m so surprised that more people haven’t reported this. And I started reporting it at CBS News, and I’ve continued at full measure. So, we’ll go over a couple of facts because this is hard evidence,” Attkisson replies.

“There’s really hard evidence that a lot of people are ignoring for some reason that came in a 2018 analysis by the GAO, and it looked at how many illegal immigrants are in our prisons and jails. That’s a great hard measure of how many, compared to U.S. citizens, are caught committing crimes and serving time,” she explains.

Attkisson tells Glenn that in 2011, “The criminal alien proportion of the total estimated federal inmate population was 25%.”

“This is even before the big surge. One in four federal inmates was an illegal immigrant. But they only accounted for something like less than 7% of the population. So they’re committing crimes, if you look at the data in prisons and jails, at a huge rate compared to U.S. citizens,” she explains.

“And, by the way, that’s partial data because not all prisons and jails were reporting illegal immigrants,” she adds.

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As the Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating a possible terrorist shooting at Old Dominion University, the Democratic governor of Virginia is getting hit with backlash over her statements about the incident.

One person was killed and two others were injured when an armed man attacked on Thursday, but other students were able to “subdue” him and kill him, according to the FBI. The deceased victim was later identified as Lt. Col. Brandon Shah, an ODU professor of military science.

‘She won’t say it now because she’s a Democrat politician. That’s how evil and depraved she and her party have become.’

Authorities have identified the deceased alleged shooter as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a former member of the Army National Guard who was previously convicted of trying to provide support to the ISIS terror group.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger offered a statement that did not acknowledge the alleged killer or his likely motivation.

“Lt. Col. Brandon Shah was killed today in his classroom at Old Dominion University. A devoted ROTC instructor, Lt. Col. Shah didn’t just lead a life of service to our country, he taught and led others to follow that path,” she posted.

“I am grateful for his example, deeply saddened by his death, and praying for his family. Amid this tragedy, I thank the brave students, first responders, and law enforcement officers who responded quickly to today’s horrific attack,” she added.

Spanberger was immediately assailed online by her critics.

“There was a time when this woman — a former CIA colleague of mine — would have unapologetically said ‘Brandon Shah was killed today by an Islamic terrorist …,'” former CIA officer Bryan Dean Wright posted. “She won’t say it now because she’s a Democrat politician. That’s how evil and depraved she and her party have become.”

“If you only read the Governor of Virginia’s post, you’d have no idea he was murdered by a terrorist because of his service and love of country. Purposeful omission. You’re a disgrace,” Fox News podcast host Riley Gaines said.

“WHO killed him? And why are you afraid to say it??” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas replied.

RELATED: Heroic students subdued suspected terrorist in Old Dominion attack and ‘rendered him no longer alive,’ says FBI

“She can’t even say this was an act of terrorism. So pathetic, especially … since she has the largest naval base in her state,” radio show host Jeanne Ives said.

Spanberger campaigned as a moderate Democrat, but since she got into office she has implemented sweeping far-left policies that include an effort to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts.

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