Category: blaze media

A Trump administration lawsuit against the city of Rochester, New York, for its sanctuary city policies hit a brick wall in the form of an Obama-appointed federal judge.

The lawsuit originated from an incident in March 2025 when local Rochester police assisted Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the arrest of a Guatemalan man during a traffic stop.

‘They simply recognize the different functions of each governmental body. … They do not dictate how the federal government must act and therefore do not violate the intergovernmental immunity doctrine.’

City leaders criticized the police and said their actions violated their sanctuary city policies. The officers were taken off the street to receive additional training.

The Department of Justice sued the city, the mayor, and the city council president and accused them of violating the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

Judge Frank Geraci of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York rejected the argument from the federal government.

“Rochester’s Sanctuary City laws and policies are not a prohibition on or interference with the federal government’s role in enforcing immigration policy,” he wrote in the ruling dated Tuesday. “Instead, they simply recognize the different functions of each governmental body.”

He argued that the sanctuary city laws “only dictate” that the police officers cannot participate in immigration enforcement.

“As such, they do not dictate how the federal government must act and therefore do not violate the intergovernmental immunity doctrine,” Geraci added.

White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis responded to the ruling in a statement to Blaze News.

“These sanctuary policies make Americans less safe,” she said.

“Extreme Democrats’ sanctuary policies result in criminal illegal aliens being directly released from jail back into American communities to perpetrate more crimes and create more innocent American victims,” she added.

Bis cited the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley in 2024 by an illegal alien who had been previously released over a “lack of detention space.”

Rochester Mayor Malik Evans, a Democrat, responded in a statement about the ruling.

“Once again, grandstanding of the Trump administration has been found to be without any legal legitimacy,” Evans wrote. “The City of Rochester remains committed to guaranteeing public safety for all, not being coerced into doing the federal government’s work of immigration enforcement.”

RELATED: Mamdani cites the Quran and quotes Muhammed while ordering new illegal alien protections

Seven out of the 10 safest cities in the U.S. cooperate with ICE, according to Homeland Security.

The case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning the Justice Dept. is unable to refile the complaint against Rochester.

Geraci was appointed to the court by former President Barack Obama in 2012.

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​Department of justice, Immigration and customs enforcement, Rochester, Supremacy clause, Sanctuary cities, Politics 

It all started on a patch of waterfront property in New York, right next to the East River.

The latest wave of perceived liberal activism made its way to Joe Rogan and Shane Gillis’ ears through the sage wisdom of a traveling entertainer: They were tearing apart a park.

‘The park should be defended!’

Instead of a sign-wielding mask-wearer debating the merits of universal basic income and banning landlords, the news came from comedian Ari Shaffir. Typically, Shaffir is telling tales about getting an exorcism in South America or doing stand-up comedy in China, but this time he was looking to stop the destruction of a beloved New York City landmark.

Shaffir told Rogan and Gillis about Manhattan’s East River Park, land that had been torn apart by floods from Hurricane Sandy. In response, New York City officials planned to raze the park, add eight feet of dirt, and rebuild the park anew on top, all in the name of flood prevention.

Activists agreed with Shaffir and said removing access to the 57 acres next to the water was unfair to locals.

Gillis did not agree.

“You’re not defending parks!” he said, badgering Shaffir. “F**k that park!”

“The park should be defended!” Rogan chimed in.

From that moment, “Protect Our Parks” was born: an impromptu news panel with no preparation and no censorship, addressing actual issues.

Averaging between 2 million and 5 million views per episode on YouTube alone, the series of podcasts has not only become one of Rogan’s most popular iterations, but it has become a battle of political perspectives.

RELATED: CANCEL-PROOF: Tim Dillon’s big, gay get-out-of-jail-free card

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images

Across 17 episodes and counting, Gillis brings his Bud Light-American viewpoint, backed by historical knowledge. This is often at odds with Rogan’s “question everything” mantra, while Shaffir offers real-world traveler’s experience.

The fourth member of the group, Mark Normand, is admittedly usually on substances and just looking to add punch lines. He’s not lacking in intellect; he just picks his punches.

The resulting conversations within the group often turn out to be newsmakers because of the sheer number of viewers each comedian represents. Normand has a quarter-million podcast subscribers on YouTube alone and another 2 million+ social media followers. Shaffir has well over a million combined, too. Add those to Gillis’ and Rogan’s reach, and each episode is dwarfing network news.

Most recently, discussed topics ranged from immigration and trans athletes to Ulysses S. Grant and the Civil War. The opinions are unpredictable.

When Rogan talks about how the WNBA “can’t define what a woman is,” or when Gillis declares America needs “somebody who’s willing to abuse their executive power,” progressive minds will not be surprised.

But when Shaffir says the U.K. “hate[s] immigrants so hard,” viewers understand this isn’t an echo chamber.

RELATED: Pat McAfee refused to fold, and ESPN paid up. There’s a lesson there for young men.

In fact, the show is far closer to a real discussion than anything cable news could hope to accomplish. No filters or network notes means Gillis can counter anti-American hearsay from Rogan while Normand criticizes Israel to Shaffir, even if viewers label the show as “compromised.”

Critics have further attempted to demonize the podcasts for having hypocritical moments, or “effortlessly” forgiving “racism” by even having these discussions.

But others have seen the forest through the trees; friends don’t let each other get away with everything. One video, seen 250,000 times, compiled Gillis’ opposition to Rogan’s political views. This is not exactly partisan programming.

Progressives should get on board with protecting our parks. If they want to chant, ad nauseum, “Show me what democracy looks like!” (and they do), perhaps they will get their answer by watching.

As for East River Park; the city agreed to reconstruct the area in parts to allow access to different sections at different times. However, the project that started in 2021 is still unfinished to this day.

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​Comedy, Podcasts, Joe rogan, Shane gillis, Ari shaffir, Mark normand, East river park, New york, Entertainment 

Before the 2024 election, conservative America was united under President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” banner. But that unity didn’t last.

Less than two years later, the base is deeply divided over many issues, especially Israel/Iran, the Epstein files, and whether MAGA still means the promises supporters voted for — or just blind loyalty to Trump.

“How did a once unified coalition with a stated goal of making America great again come to a place where some of the most powerful voices in the movement are now leaving? Who has caused the MAGA divide?”

Those are the questions debate host Brandon Straka asked eight of the right’s most provocative voices to go head to head over on last night’s #WalkAway MAGA vs. America First debate.

BlazeTV’s John Doyle was one of those voices. With him on the MAGA team was conservative debate host Andrew Wilson, MAGA attorney and commentator Will Chamberlain, and CEO of “Louder with Crowder” Gerald Morgan Jr.

Their America First opponents were Infowars founder Alex Jones, former Trump counterterrorism official Joe Kent, pastor and Christian nationalist podcaster Joel Webbon, and College Republicans political director Kai Schwemmer.

Despite being on opposite sides of the debate, Doyle and Jones agree that hidden psychological operations are manipulating public opinion and distracting regular Americans from the truth — but their alignment ends when it comes to identifying the biggest threat.

Doyle sees the psyop issue primarily through the lens of Israel’s influence and the risk of young Americans being dragged into foreign wars.

“Israel is losing the PR war, which Trump himself acknowledges,” he argued.

“There has been an effort in the last three or four years with people like Andrew Tate, his brother, Sneako, to make the online right wing, which informs, frankly, the actions of the federal government, something that is at least not hostile to Islam, maybe even sympathetic,” he explained.

“We’ve seen this with the Muslim-Christian alliance; we’ve seen this with them giving us permission to laugh at Hitler jokes again. Focusing too much on mass deportations is some kind of psyop to distract you from being drafted to go die in the sand for Israel,” Doyle continued. “This is what young people are tuning into when they are on Instagram and Facebook.”

While Jones agreed that major political events are controlled by secret, billionaire-funded operations rather than organic movements, he argued that focusing solely on Israel is a narrow trap that leads people to miss larger threats — like the multi-million dollar tech-funded campaigns working behind the scenes to crush anti-establishment candidates.

“Bill Gates spent over $200 million through a couple different dark money groups … just to try to block [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s] nomination — and it wasn’t to Congress,” Jones countered. “It was stories of fake doctors, and they had these online petitions that they themselves were using bots to put fake names on to then deliver to Congress.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from John Doyle?

To enjoy more of the truth about America and join the fight to restore a country that has been betrayed by its own leaders, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​John doyle, Alex jones, Maga, America first, Israel, Bill gates, Blazetv show 

A clip has gone viral of a Zohran Mamdani supporter claiming that organized workers could simply take over grocery stores if owners pulled out of New York City — and Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck believes his comments reveal something far more serious than economic ignorance.

The young man began by talking about the “grocery store capitalists” and their “powerful lobby.”

“One of the grocery store bosses … he said that he was going to pull out of New York City if Zohran won, right?” he said.

“We would say, ‘Sure, pull out, and we will take over your grocery stores,’ right? And we will use them for cheaper groceries, and we will take over the entire food industry because that’s something that can be done if the working class is organized,” he added.

“So when he says, ‘I’m going to leave,’ it doesn’t mean he’s going to leave all of the products on the shelf and just throw the keys on the ground and go, ‘Somebody can take it.’ He’s going to sell it to somebody. You don’t just walk away from a major investment,” Glenn says through laughter.

“If you believe that is even a possibility, why would you even be talking about that? Because Mamdani has just said that capital flight doesn’t exist. So why are you even talking about taking over somebody’s grocery store? I mean, it just doesn’t exist. But it certainly does exist,” he continues, “but not in the way you just thought.”

What he’s actually saying, Glenn explains, is that he wants to “seize people’s property.”

“He’s not expecting him to hand the keys over. He’s saying, ‘We’ll seize your grocery store, and we’ll run it if the people are organized.’ That’s a pretty big ‘if,’” he says.

“That’s what I took from this, is him saying, ‘We’re going to seize the means of production in any way we can,’” Jason Buttrill adds.

And while it sounded ridiculous coming out of the Mamdani supporter’s mouth, Jason doesn’t think anyone should write it off.

“It’s way past time to start really understanding what they’re trying to do,” Jason says, adding, “and stop assuming some of these people are idiots.”

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.

​Grocery stores, New york city, Glenn beck, Zohran mamdani, Socialism, Communism, Blazetv show 

A former mayor of a small California city has received the maximum sentence after “grooming” a foreign exchange student who had been living with him.

On Wednesday, Robert Bassett, 58, pled no contest to three felonies: unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, oral copulation of a person under 18, and sexual penetration of a person under 18, court records show.

‘Bassett violated the trust she placed in him while she was in the United States, thousands of miles from her family.’

The victim in this case has been identified as a female “underage foreign exchange student” who lived in his home in 2023, when he was mayor of Biggs, California, according to a press release from the Butte County district attorney’s office. Biggs is a city of 2,000 residents about 65 miles north of Sacramento.

“Bassett groomed the victim for several months before engaging in illegal acts with her,” the press release said.

Bassett was arrested back in July after Gridley police spent months investigating allegations that he had engaged in a sexual relationship with the girl, who was 17 when she lived with him in 2023, the DA’s office said.

Police reached out to the girl in her home country, which has not been identified, and she reported having “several sexual encounters” with Bassett during her stay in his home, per the press release.

RELATED: Democrats move to make ICE agents unemployable in California

Bill Oxford/Getty Images

During the hearing Wednesday, the prosecutor read a statement from the victim, “detailing the ongoing pain and suffering she still experiences, knowing that Bassett violated the trust she placed in him while she was in the United States, thousands of miles from her family.”

While the probation department recommended a lesser sentence, Butte County Superior Court Judge Michael Deems gave Bassett the maximum of four years and four months and ordered him to register as a sex offender for 10 years after he is released, “citing the victim’s vulnerability, the grooming pattern, and the violation of a position of trust as aggravating factors,” the DA’s office said.

The attorney listed for Bassett did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Bassett joined the Briggs City Council in 2018 and served as mayor from 2022 through 2024. He was renominated for a second term as mayor but did not receive the necessary votes to continue in that role.

He remained on the city council but resigned in 2025 amid allegations of extortion. An independent investigation later determined that the allegations couldn’t be proven, according to Action News Now.

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​Grooming, California, Crime, Politics 

Once upon a time, displaying the bloodied head of a U.S. president could get you canceled. And it did.

This was before cancel culture was a thing, a time when Americans had a shared sense of decency and found obviously heinous acts … heinous.

Earlier this year, ‘Saturday Night Live’s’ Weekend Update teased a Trump assassination joke that roiled the crowd.

No need for context or explanations. The culture at large acknowledged certain unwritten rules of behavior that should be followed. Now, those rules are fading if not gone entirely. And we can track that descent, seen across the political landscape, from a pop culture prism.

Head case

Comic Kathy Griffin thought she was being clever by holding a pretend President Donald Trump head up high, ISIS-style, for a 2017 photo shoot she shared on social media.

The reaction was swift, furious, and uncompromising. Griffin had gone too far.

Few, if any, ran to her defense. She apologized and watched her D-list career shrink to the size of a thumb drive. Those were simpler times, when doing the right thing meant putting political tribalism aside when needed.

Love Trump? Loathe Trump? It wasn’t important. This was beyond the pale.

Something similar happened in 2015 involving another GOP leader. Word leaked that Will Ferrell was mulling a big-screen “comedy” about a dementia-addled President Reagan doddering around the Oval Office. The reaction was swift and furious and not just from the former president’s grown children.

Ferrell backpedaled, claiming he had never officially signed onto the project.

Even Madonna, who forged her brand from outrageous behavior, did a hasty retreat in 2017 when she shared her dream about blowing up the White House (with a certain leader inside, presumably) during a Women’s March event.

The pop superstar apologized for a good reason. Her thoughts were unbecoming of a celebrity of her stature.

That was then.

The cruel kids

Today, political culture is infinitely worse. Cold. Cruel. Violent, even.

Political pundits like Hasan Piker can cheer on the deaths of landlords, say America deserved 9/11, and praise Hamas over Israel after the Oct. 7 atrocities. Not only is he not shunned by polite society, but Democratic politicians scramble to appear beside him.

Major publications fawn all over him too. Big-city mayors can cozy up to terrorists and voters look the other way.

Ghoulish. It’s not happening in a vacuum. Pop cultural institutions are similarly ghoulish, celebrating violence while their audiences clap like seals.

Last year, DNC spokesman Jimmy Kimmel found something deeply funny about Tesla dealerships coming under vandalism attacks. The company’s owner, Elon Musk, had sided with President Trump during the 2024 election cycle and helped trim government fat from the workforce.

For that, he must be punished.

“People have been vandalizing Tesla vehicles, new Tesla vehicles. Please, don’t vandalize, don’t ever vandalize Tesla vehicles.”

The host said it with a sarcastic glint.

RELATED: Democrats created a Hasan Piker problem. Now they want everyone to forget it.

Blaze Media

Cheering chaos

Later that year, Kimmel leaned into some seriously Fake News, alleging that Charlie Kirk’s killer was part of MAGA Nation. The only credible suspect at the time was a young man who loathed Kirk’s politics, a far cry from a typical Trump supporter.

Kimmel and his writers knew that. We all did. The hosts said it, anyway, earning a week’s suspension from his ABC bully pulpit and becoming a free speech martyr to the press and the left (but we repeat ourselves).

Earlier this year, “Saturday Night Live’s” Weekend Update teased a Trump assassination joke that roiled the crowd. Faux co-anchor Michael Che noted that the president had recently taken in a Broadway-style show.

“I think that’s cool that the president is going to the theater. I mean — what’s the worst that could happen?” The show’s hard-left audience cheered.

Late-night shows were occasionally caught by surprise at how vicious their audiences had become. They learned it from watching them, of course.

Baying for blood

Consider when Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” fame told his audience about Luigi Mangione’s arrest on charges he murdered a health care CEO by shooting him from behind.

The crowd booed in response, as if they wanted the killer to remain free (to kill other CEOs, perhaps?).

“Look, I’m sorry, guys,” a stunned Stewart said in response, like Dr. Frankenstein looking in horror at his creation.

Kimmel found it hilarious that some of his young, female staffers were Luigi fangirls in not-so-obvious disguise. He should have been ashamed of the revelation and kept it quiet.

Not Kimmel.

Just days ago, multiple late-night hosts mocked President Trump for hiding in a catering truck after the Secret Service learned of a possible threat on his life.

These threats are increasingly common in Trump’s second term. One would-be assassin came within inches of murdering the commander in chief at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally two years ago.

For late-night clowns, the latest assassination threat was merely a chance to torment Trump, not acknowledge the dangerous world we live in. Even the low-rated Jimmy Fallon, who isn’t as cruel as his competitors, mocked the moment.

Hollywood collectively warned us about Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. He would be cruel, they cried, unlike any prior president.

And, yes, President Trump has thrown some pretty sharp elbows over nearly six years in office. Hollywood, sadly, has proven to be far worse, echoing a societal race to the bottom.

​Cancel culture, Charlie kirk, Donald trump, Elon musk, Entertainment, Hasan piker, Jimmy fallon, Jimmy kimmel, Jon stewart, Kathy griffin, Luigi mangione, Madonna, Trump assassination joke, Trump derangement syndrome, Culture 

Longtime Fox News host Maria Bartiromo is no longer employed at the right-wing news network.

The network said in a terse statement Thursday that Bartiromo was no longer working at Fox News or with Fox Business.

The 58-year-old had worked previously at CNBC and CNN before arriving at Fox.

“Effective today Maria Bartiromo is no longer with FOX News Media,” read the statement from the network. “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.”

The 58-year-old had worked previously at CNBC and CNN before arriving at Fox in 2014 as its global markets editor.

Bartiromo’s biography at the Fox Business website had been scrubbed in the last two weeks, as is evidenced by an archived page at the Wayback Machine. Her profile at Fox News was also apparently scrubbed.

Her show “Mornings with Maria” will be retitled “Mornings with FOX Business” and will feature a rotating roster of anchors. According to Variety, Jason Chaffetz will replace her on the Sunday show, “Sunday Morning Futures,” until a permanent host can be named.

Bartiromo is known for being the first reporter to broadcast daily from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1995.

In 2011, she became the first female journalist to be inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame.

RELATED: Former CNN hosts Stuart Varney and Maria Bartiromo blast CNN as a ‘propaganda machine’

Bartiromo is a member of the Board of Trustees of New York University as well as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

She has also won two Emmys and a Gracie Award.

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​Fox business, Fox news, Maria bartiromo, Politics 

A video recently surfaced online featuring a young American who proudly insisted that same-sex couples make better parents than the boring old bread-and-butter type.

The ferociously fabulous man then casually revealed that he has three lesbian mothers, two gay fathers, and an array of gay siblings.

For thousands of years, human societies operated on the assumption that mothers and fathers were not interchangeable.

Notice how far the argument has traveled. The cultural case for same-sex parenting once rested largely on tolerance: Gay couples could provide loving homes, and their children should not be stigmatized. Increasingly, the claim is something altogether different — that mothers and fathers are interchangeable, perhaps even that dispensing with one sex represents an improvement.

Luxury beliefs

Right around the time the video started circulating, an interactive global map showing where same-sex adoption enjoys full legal approval and where it remains strictly forbidden caught my eye.

The map is fascinating because it presents a hilarious study in regional priorities. Virtually the entire Western world glows a self-righteous green, while moving eastward reveals solid red. Western progressive elites view that field of green as proof positive that we have ascended to the absolute peak of human enlightenment, having successfully dethroned the ancient, oppressive concept of a mother and a father.

But there’s a question buried beneath all the celebration that we’re increasingly discouraged from asking: Does family structure actually matter to children?

For thousands of years, human societies operated on the assumption that mothers and fathers were not interchangeable. A child ordinarily entered the world through a mother and father and, absent death, abandonment, abuse, or some other misfortune, was raised by them.

Modern Western culture increasingly treats that arrangement as merely one family configuration among many.

According to modern woke gospel, men are the sole source of domestic chaos and toxic aggression. The cultural narrative assures us almost daily that women are inherently more empathetic and nurturing. They are spiritually elevated beings. Taking that logic to its obvious endpoint, a household featuring two mothers ought to function like a conflict-free utopia of artisanal organic snacks and gentle conflict resolution.

The empirical picture, however, is considerably less settled than activists often pretend.

Widespread transformation

What makes this all the more important is that this is no longer a marginal social development. According to the Williams Institute, approximately 5 million American children are being raised by an LGBTQ parent. That figure includes single LGBTQ parents and shouldn’t be confused with the much smaller number living with same-sex couples. But it gives some sense of the scale of the transformation.

Within little more than a generation, same-sex marriage went from legally nonexistent to the law of the land. Gay adoption followed. Reproductive technologies now allow children to be deliberately conceived for families in which either a mother or a father will be absent from the beginning.

We have changed not merely laws but one of society’s most basic assumptions about the family: that all things being equal, a child should have a mother and a father.

Given the scale and speed of that change, asking what effects it may have on children should hardly be controversial.

RELATED: Florida man allegedly bragged about sexually abusing foster child — cops say he and his husband fostered 23 young boys

Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office composite

Regnerus redux

In 2012, University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus published findings from the New Family Structures Study, which surveyed nearly 3,000 young adults and reported substantial differences between those who grew up continuously with their married biological parents and respondents whose mother or father had engaged in a same-sex relationship. Among the findings, 23% of respondents in Regnerus’ “lesbian mother” category reported having been sexually touched by a parent or other adult, compared with roughly 2% of those raised continuously by their married biological parents.

That finding does not mean the lesbian mother or her partner committed the abuse. Indeed, one of the central controversies surrounding the study was how Regnerus constructed the category in the first place.

Critics argued that Regnerus had defined his categories too broadly. Many respondents classified as having a gay or lesbian parent had spent relatively little time living with that parent’s same-sex partner, while many had experienced divorce or repeated changes in family structure. Subsequent re-analyses argued that once those factors were handled differently, many of Regnerus’ headline findings lost statistical significance.

For years, that critique was treated as essentially the last word.

Then, in 2025, Cornell sociologists Cristobal Young and Erin Cumberworth subjected the Regnerus data to a much more exhaustive test. In their book “Multiverse Analysis,” published by Cambridge University Press, they ran roughly 2.6 million alternative model specifications to determine how much Regnerus’ results depended on debatable analytical choices.

They expected the exercise to vindicate his critics. It didn’t.

Persistent effects

Young and Cumberworth found that the estimated negative association was often smaller under alternative specifications but remained remarkably persistent. Their conclusion was limited but important: There was room to debate the size of the effect and the quality of the underlying data, but within the NFSS dataset, the negative association could not simply be dismissed as an artifact of Regnerus’ preferred statistical choices.

That doesn’t establish that same-sex parenting caused the negative outcomes Regnerus identified. But it makes it harder to maintain that the evidence is so settled that questioning whether family structure matters amounts to bigotry.

Other research has produced similar disputes.

Methodological muddle

In 2010, Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld analyzed U.S. census data and concluded that the school progress of children living with same-sex couples could not be statistically distinguished from that of children living with married heterosexual couples.

Two years later, Douglas Allen, Catherine Pakaluk, and Joseph Price re-analyzed the same data. Rosenfeld had restricted his main sample to children biologically related to the household head who had lived at the same address for at least five years. Allen and his colleagues argued that those restrictions removed more than half the available children and made differences harder to detect.

Using the larger sample and controlling for those factors instead, they found that children living in married heterosexual households had 35% higher odds of making normal progress through school than children living with same-sex couples. The difference was statistically significant.

The same census data, in other words, produced different results depending on which families researchers included and how they accounted for biological relatedness and stability.

Biological advantage

D. Paul Sullins encountered a related problem using federal health-survey data. His 2015 analysis of more than 200,000 children, including 512 living with same-sex couples, reported higher rates of serious emotional problems, ADHD, and learning disabilities among children in same-sex-parent households.

When Sullins accounted for whether children were living with their biological parents, however, much of the same-sex-parent disadvantage disappeared.

That raises another question about how these studies are constructed. Two men or two women cannot both be the biological parents of the same child. So when researchers “control” for biological relatedness, they may be removing a confounding variable — or they may be controlling for a difference that is inherent in the family structures being compared.

A 2016 Demography study by Corinne Reczek and three colleagues further illustrates the difficulty. Using federal health data on more than 167,000 children, the researchers found that children living with married same-sex parents were similar to those with married opposite-sex parents on most of the outcomes studied. They did, however, find that children with married same-sex parents were more than twice as likely to be reported as having behavioral problems after demographic and socioeconomic controls.

The study had important limitations. The same-sex sample was small, the behavioral measure relied on parental reporting, and the data could not establish causation. The National Center for Health Statistics also later disclosed classification errors affecting the identification of same-sex married couples during several of the survey years. Sullins subsequently argued that excluding those years materially changed some of the results.

Beyond statistics

None of these studies settles the question. Together, they suggest that the research is much less straightforward than the familiar claim that children do equally well in every family structure.

And family structure matters for reasons that extend beyond statistics. A mother and father offer something that two men or two women, however loving and devoted, cannot: a child’s daily relationship with both sexes embodied in the two people from whom that child came.

Recognizing this doesn’t require believing that every heterosexual marriage is happy, every biological parent is competent, or every alternative family is dysfunctional. Plenty of biological parents are disastrous. Plenty of adoptive parents perform heroic acts of love by giving children stable homes after circumstances have deprived them of their biological families.

But exceptions don’t erase ideals.

The distinction becomes especially important when adoption is involved. Adoption has traditionally existed to find families for children who, through some misfortune, cannot be raised by their biological parents. Increasingly, the debate is framed from the opposite direction: around adults’ entitlement to form whatever kind of family they desire.

The interests are not necessarily identical.

The question isn’t whether gay people can love children. Nor is it whether children raised in unconventional families can grow into happy and successful adults.

The question is whether mothers and fathers provide children with something distinctive enough that society should continue to regard their union as the ideal environment for raising the next generation.

We have changed our answer to that question with extraordinary speed, and millions of children are now growing up on the other side of that change.

Surely we are still allowed to ask whether we got it right.

​Adoption, Gay adoption, Lgbtq, Parents, Surrogacy, Lgbtq parent, Gay marriage, Mark regnerus, Culture, Lifestyle 

Two patrons of a gay bar in Arizona were shot and killed early Monday morning by a Muslim gunman who later died at a hospital, says the Tucson Police Department.

Police are investigating the shooting as a “hate crime” after finding a note and a list allegedly written by the shooter, who was identified as 44-year-old Ousman Ceesay.

‘Throughout our conversations, through the 17 years he spent in the US, he doesn’t talk about that.’

Ceesay shot 42-year-old Vincent Anthony Siqueiros and 33-year-old Cameron Davis Capara in the parking lot of the Venture-N bar before he shot himself with a 9mm handgun, police said.

The suspect confronted the victims but never tried to enter the bar.

Police say that a note found on the suspect’s body had a list of other LGBTQIA+ businesses in the area.

Investigators say they also found another note at his house indicating that “he acted alone and that this shooting was a targeted attack motivated by hate toward the LGBTQIA+ community.”

Ceesay was not restricted from owning guns and did not have a prior history with police.

The man did not know the victims before the attack, and he was new to the area, according to the investigation.

Tucson Queerstory, a group organizing a candlelit vigil for the incident, said the shooting has disturbed the LGBTQIA+ community.

“Tucson has long been known for its welcoming environment and strong queer community. To now add another hate crime to that history is heartbreaking and infuriating,” read a statement from the group.

Ceesay was an immigrant from Gambia and a Muslim, according to his family. He came to the U.S. to attend college.

“We don’t talk about those things here, because you hardly see it,” 44-year-old Muhammad Sylva, Ceesay’s cousin, said to the Arizona Daily Star. “Ousman doesn’t have the time to talk about hating people. Throughout our conversations, through the 17 years he spent in the U.S., he doesn’t talk about that.”

Sylva described Ceesay as a practicing Muslim who prayed five times a day but claimed his faith was not “extreme.”

He had also reportedly been suffering financial woes after filing bankruptcy, getting evicted, and separating from his wife. He worked as an Uber driver.

RELATED: Liberals blame homophobia for man tossing brick at gay NYC club — Police arrest a gay man

The families of the victims said they were “overwhelmed by the outpouring of love” from the community, according to Tucson Queerstory.

Police said there was no further threat to the LGBTQIA+ community.

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​Hate crime, Muslim, Islam, Lgbtq agenda, Politics 

Trump derangement syndrome is alive and well at CNN, as evidenced by its latest attempt to pin a disaster halfway around the world on the administration.

A glacier near the Nepal-Tibet border in the Himalayan Mountains collapsed on Aug. 26, resulting in a devastating avalanche that hit the valley below hard enough to generate energy equivalent to a 5.2-magnitude earthquake and in floodwaters that surged downstream at over 60 miles per hour, swallowing up towns and sweeping away thousands of victims.

After getting called out for its propaganda, CNN edited its article and posted a ‘clarification.’

CNN didn’t wait long to suggest that the Trump administration was at least partly responsible for the horrific natural disaster, which has claimed over 1,114 lives.

CNN ran an article Wednesday with the headline, “The Trump administration cut funds for natural hazards monitoring in Nepal. A year later, disaster struck.”

RELATED: VIDEO: Actor Alan Ritchson loses his mind about ‘f**king rapists’ in crazed TDS rant

Although the corresponding article by CNN’s D.C.-based climate reporter Andrew Freedman has since been heavily edited, republications of the original article reveal the original framing:

In January 2025, the Trump administration cut off funding for a long-running natural hazards program that aimed to identify and monitor landslide hotspots in Nepal. Just over a year later, more than 1,100 people perished when a huge glacier and rock landslide high in the Himalayas triggered fast-moving floodwaters that struck Nepal and China.

The original article insinuated not only a causal link between the conclusion of the SERVIR-Hindu Kush Himalaya initiative and the deadly fallout of the floods but that the initiative was dismantled along with the U.S. Agency for International Development by the Trump administration “partly through the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).”

Freedman did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

RELATED: Left-wing media appalled that Bari Weiss called out Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted 9/11 tweets

Arun SANKAR/AFP/Getty Images

CNN also seemingly blamed the Trump administration for the disaster in a tweet Wednesday that appears to have been deleted. In response to the tweet, State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott wrote, “This outrageous, slanderous tweet is as bad faith as they come and ignores key information we provided in advance. CNN should be ashamed.”

Pigott hit CNN with a reality check, noting that the the SERVIR-Hindu Kush Himalaya initiative “was not built to generate real-time flood warnings. The program was never an end-to-end flood early warning system; it provided satellite data to map dangerous glacial lakes and maintain glacier inventories. Even so, its core tools and services remain active today through [the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development].”

The State Department spokesman noted further that the Trump administration still supports Nepal’s flood warning capacity through a grant to the World Meteorological Organization as well as through an interagency agreement with “the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA/NWS) that works with Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology and emergency managers to strengthen early warning for rapid and effective disaster response.”

After getting called out for its propaganda, CNN edited its article and posted a “clarification” stating that “this headline and story have been updated to better reflect the extent of the Project SERVIR-Hindu Kush Himalaya program.”

Now, the article acknowledges that:

“the program the administration cut would not have been able to prevent the disaster that happened this past week”;”the January 2025 funding cut came before the administration’s reorganization of the US Agency for International Development (USAID)”; and the U.S. still supports flood mitigation programs in Nepal.

Despite updating the article, CNN is still feeling the heat.

Eric Trump wrote, “This must be one of the most idiotic stories ever authored. Trump is to blame for a glacier collapse on the other side of the earth? American taxpayers are responsible for funding ‘landslide monitoring’ in Nepal? CNN is a total joke.”

“You’re not journalists you’re propagandists,” tweeted Michael Shellenberger, the founder of Public News.

The notion that lives on in CNN’s edited article that the disaster could have been predicted or averted has been shot to pieces by real scientists.

Manoochehr Shirzaei, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech, told Nature that the event would have been difficult to predict with existing monitoring techniques, which look for extreme weather and glacial-lake outburst floods, not sudden collapses in mountain glacier-rock systems.

Saswata Sanyal, intervention manager for disaster risk reduction at ICIMOD, similarly suggested to the New York Times that traditional monitoring wouldn’t have been enough, stating, “There were sensors for flood, flash flood risk, right? But there were not sensors for this kind of ice avalanche.”

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​Trump derangement syndrome, Donald trump, Department of government efficiency, Cnn, Politics 

A former substitute teacher in Washington state was sentenced to prison for sexually exploiting a 13-year-old boy, according to federal prosecutors.

The United States Justice Department for the Eastern District of Washington released a statement late last month announcing that 26-year-old Andrea Lee Campos-Hernandez had been sentenced to 180 months in prison after being convicted of sexual exploitation of a minor.

‘Today I am speaking because you no longer get to control my voice.’

United States District Judge Thomas O. Rice also ordered a 10-year period of supervised release following the prison sentence. Additionally, the judge imposed a $10,000 special assessment under the Amy, Vicky, and Andy Child Pornography Victim Assistance Act and a $5,000 special assessment pursuant to the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act.

Campos-Hernandez entered her federal guilty plea in May 2026.

According to the New York Post, the victim addressed Campos-Hernandez in the courtroom before sentencing: “You took away parts of my childhood that I will never get back.”

The victim also told Campos-Hernandez, “Today I am speaking because you no longer get to control my voice.”

The mother of the victim told the judge, “One of the most painful memories I carry is hearing my son cry alone in his room in the middle of the night.”

“I did not know what was going through his mind or how deeply he was hurting because he could not bring himself to talk about it,” the mother added in court.

The victim’s sister urged the court to impose a sentence that “sends a clear message that every child deserves the same protection, compassion, and justice, regardless of the gender of the victim or offender.”

Assistant United States Attorney Ann T. Wick said gender shouldn’t matter in sentencing, and Campos-Hernandez should be treated like any other sex offender.

“Like any male offender, defendant demonstrated a sexual interest in a 13-year-old victim and pursued him,” Wick said, according to the Tri-City Herald. “Like any male offender, she manipulated the victim.”

First Assistant United States Attorney Pete Serrano stated, “Although not seen as often, female sexual offenders exist, and justice demands they be treated the same as their male counterparts.”

Serrano added, “The sentence imposed in this case sends a clear message to anyone seeking to harm the children of our community.”

Prosecutors said Campos-Hernandez took advantage of her position of trust and friendship with the victim’s family.

“As a teacher, every family entrusted their children to Ms. Campos-Hernandez,” Serrano said. “Her violation of that sacred trust extended by each family and each student places her victimization on another level.”

According to W. Mike Herrington, special agent in charge of the FBI Seattle field office, “Andrea Lee Campos-Hernandez violated her responsibility to protect and enrich this young person by taking advantage of both her position of trust and a family friendship to inflict lasting harm on a child.”

“As children return to school, we are especially reminded what a consequential role teachers play in the lives of students,” Herrington said.

Herrington commended the victim for having the “courage” to tell his story.

RELATED: Substitute teacher who authorities say sent nude photos of herself to 14-year-old middle school student learns her fate

The Columbia Basin Herald obtained a probable cause statement from the Warden Police Department that said Campos-Hernandez worked in the GEAR UP program at Warden High School during the 2021-22 school year and was a substitute teacher in the Warden School District during March, April, and June of 2022.

According to court documents, Campos-Hernandez sexually abused a 13-year-old boy from February 2021 to July 2022.

“Campos-Hernandez took pictures and recorded video of the two of them engaged in sexual intercourse and sent the minor victim pictures of herself partially nude and in underwear,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Washington.

Citing court documents, the Columbia Basin Herald reported that a search warrant was served on Campos-Hernandez’s cell phone in March 2023, and “investigators reported finding sexually explicit photographs and other evidence documenting the abuse.”

According to the New York Post, Assistant U.S Attorney Wick wrote in court documents that the victim’s classmates and teammates learned about the abuse and then made the boy “the subject of gossip and poor, insensitive humor.”

Wick added that the boy avoided socializing as a result.

Campos-Hernandez was arrested on March 6, 2023. At the time of her arrest, Campos-Hernandez was working as a child care provider at Big Bend Community College’s Learning Center in Moses Lake, police said.

The Tri-City Herald reported that Campos-Hernandez’s defense attorney Lorinda Meier Youngcourt said in a court document that in the small town of Warden, it’s not unusual for adolescents and young adults to socialize together — but that her client “blurred the norms of age-appropriate relationships.”

Youngcourt noted that a psychological evaluation concluded Campos-Hernandez’s actions did not stem from a predatory compulsion or a deviant sexual interest in children. Instead, the report highlighted her social immaturity, low self-esteem, and a fundamentally distorted perception of her “relationship” with the boy.

Warden School District Human Resources Director Michele Cram declined to comment on the case, and Warden School District Superintendent Marc Brouillet did not immediately respond to a request for comment by the Columbia Basin Herald.

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​Child porn, Teacher arrested, Teacher student sex scandal, Washington state, Crime 

In the 1985 book “Habits of the Heart,” Robert Bellah and his co-authors introduced “Sheilaism,” named for a woman they called Sheila Larson. Her individualized faith took the self as its highest authority: What felt right to her became the measure of what was right.

Four decades later, Sheilaism has escaped the pages of sociology. It appears whenever sympathy for a person becomes a reason to suspend judgment about what that person did.

Compassion can explain suffering. It cannot abolish judgment.

The Lindsay Clancy trial has been examined as a story about motherhood, postpartum depression, psychiatric medicine, and failures of the mental-health system. Beneath those questions lies an older philosophical one: Can a person be morally responsible for an act she sincerely believed was necessary or good when she committed it?

Clancy does not dispute that she killed her three children. Her defense argues that mental disease deprived her of criminal responsibility. Massachusetts law asks whether, because of mental disease or defect, she lacked substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the law. Prosecutors maintain that she retained that capacity.

That legal question rests on a deeper question about human action.

The natural-law tradition recognizes something strange about the human will: We act under the appearance of the good. That does not mean everything we choose is actually good. It means that when we choose, we choose something because, at that moment, it appears desirable.

“But I knew it was wrong” does not escape the principle.

Suppose I lose my temper and viciously insult someone. Five seconds later I say, “I knew I shouldn’t have done that.” In one sense, I did. I knew the moral rule. But in the moment, another apparent good prevailed: revenge, satisfaction, pride, the pleasure of hurting someone who hurt me. I chose the counterfeit good over what I knew I ought to do.

That is precisely what makes moral responsibility possible. Otherwise, every crime could be excused by discovering the reason that made it seem worthwhile to the criminal.

RELATED: Woman charged with juror intimidation at Clancy trial tells different tale than images on her phone: Prosecutor

JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP/Getty Images

This is where our contemporary psychology of crime can become dangerous. Americans are fascinated by explanations that help us identify with people who commit terrible acts. He was bullied. She was abused. He was desperate. She was depressed. His childhood was traumatic. Her circumstances were overwhelming.

Those things may be true. They may deserve compassion. They may affect legal culpability. But explaining why an evil act appeared reasonable to someone does not make the act good, nor does explanation by itself erase responsibility.

That distinction is especially important in the Clancy case because many women identify with some part of her suffering. The case has drawn women who see their own experiences with postpartum depression or psychiatric treatment reflected in hers.

The temptation is not confined to the political left. Conservatives who ordinarily emphasize personal responsibility can make the same move when the defendant seems familiar, sympathetic, or like someone in their own community.

The Sheilaist asks, “Could this have been me?” and then quietly shifts the question from what justice requires to what leniency she would want for herself. The shift is described as empathy. But empathy can become morally confused when it overrides judgment.

Imagine applying that principle consistently: The more completely we reconstruct the reasons that made a crime seem reasonable to the criminal, the less responsible the criminal becomes.

Soon understanding becomes exoneration. Worse, the supposedly humane approach becomes dehumanizing. It begins, “She is a person like us; we can understand how terrible her circumstances were.” It ends, “Therefore those circumstances controlled her. She could not really choose.”

But human beings are moral agents because circumstances can influence us without necessarily determining us. Depression, anger, fear, humiliation, resentment, and despair can impair judgment. The law must take severe mental disease seriously. Yet if powerful emotions automatically erased responsibility, much of criminal law would collapse.

The philosophical question, then, is not simply whether Clancy believed her actions were necessary, merciful, justified, or even good. Human beings possess an extraordinary capacity to rename evil while committing it. History is full of people who committed atrocities while persuading themselves they served justice, equality, country, family, or humanity.

RELATED: My abusive mother was not a victim — and neither is Lindsay Clancy

Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

The ability to rationalize evil is not an exception to human nature. It is one of its most frightening features.

So the central question cannot be, “Can I understand why she did it?” Of course we may understand a person’s reasoning and still conclude that the reasoning was morally and logically corrupt. The question is whether she retained sufficient rational and volitional capacity to recognize and choose what she ought to have done.

Here Sheilaism, in its attempt at empathy, risks denying the very agency that makes a person human. If terrible circumstances alone are enough to erase free will, then moral responsibility disappears with them.

That does not decide Clancy’s legal case. A jury must decide what her mental condition did to her capacity under Massachusetts law. But neither law nor morality can accept the proposition that killing becomes excusable merely because, in the terrible logic of a disordered mind, the killer persuaded herself it was good — or because observers think, “That could have been me.”

Law exists partly because human beings are remarkably talented at excusing objectively evil actions. Romans 13 asks whether we want to live without fear of authority and answers: “Do what is good.” The magistrate “does not bear the sword in vain.” Compassion can explain suffering. It cannot abolish judgment.

​Empathy, Opinion & analysis, Postpartum depression, Criminal law, Lindsay clancy, Trial 

Just months after lawmakers claimed they had a spending deal in place, Congress is once again racing toward a potential government shutdown.

Facing a September 30 deadline, legislators are scrambling to pass yet another continuing resolution rather than a full budget — and BlazeTV host Pat Gray is sick of the never-ending dysfunction.

“Congress is working on a stop-gap spending bill that would get us to December,” executive producer Keith Malinak comments.

“They’re talking about just getting to December,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray adds. “This is all so unacceptable. And then we wonder why Republicans are in danger of losing their majority, because they can’t get anything done.”

“Pass a budget for the love of heaven so we don’t have to go through this every month. But they won’t. And they don’t. And we don’t expect it anymore. We expect this continual fight on the continuing resolution,” he continues.

“It’s insane. This is no way to run the largest economy on earth,” he adds.

And with a government this dysfunctional, it’s no wonder that Polymarket is predicting a Democrat sweep of the House and Senate.

It predicts a 51% chance of Democrats winning both the House and Senate and a 36% chance of Republicans winning the Senate and losing the House.

“They’re not always right,” Jeff Fisher comments.

“I’m with Jeffy,” Keith Malinak adds.

Want more from Pat Gray?

To enjoy more of Pat’s biting analysis and signature wit as he restores common sense to a senseless world, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Budget, Polymarket, Republicans, Pat gray, Senate, Election, Blazetv show, House, 2026 midterms 

An AI chatbot is many things — a digital assistant, a web crawler, an agent to complete tasks on your behalf. One thing it isn’t, however, is a legally protected confidant. According to a report by the Washington Post, conversations with AI chatbots are increasingly used as evidence in court cases, outlining why you shouldn’t just tell your favorite bot anything that’s on your mind. Here’s what you can do to keep yourself safe.

The report details how chatbot conversations with ChatGPT and Claude were cited in 12 different court cases, many of which led to convictions. The cases ranged in severity from a young man caught up in the social media addiction trial to more violent cases where a Brazilian father (unsuccessfully) asked ChatGPT for tips to hire a hit man to murder himself and his son.

You’re not talking to a bot in your phone. You’re exchanging ideas with an entire data center.

In each of these cases, public chat logs were brought into court through the discovery process or by reviewing defendants’ phones, where the chat history was still saved to their devices.

If you think this could never be you, think again. Even if you are not suspected of a crime or are not a “person of interest”, your chat logs could still be subpoenaed and drawn into a related court case to use as evidence, with or without your knowledge. Nothing you write is private.

Your AI conversations say a lot about you

The thing that makes AI chatbot conversations so revealing is that their back-and-forth nature gives the AI bot insight into a person’s thought patterns. Instead of asking a simple question and receiving a simple answer, like we did in the days of Google, chatbots invite conversation where thoughts take shape and reveal the intentions of the person behind the keyboard.

In cases where a crime is committed, these intentions are often enough to secure a conviction.

Furthermore, conversations with chatbots do not have the same protections that people receive with a doctor, lawyer, or psychiatrist. Everything is publicly visible, accessible within the chatbots’ servers, and subject to scrutiny. Many AI companies, like OpenAI, even have automated filters that flag dangerous conversations for human review, where these can then be reported to authorities if a crime or serious harm is imminent.

Tips to keep your AI chat history out of court

For the best chance to keep your chat history out of a court case, you have a few options at your disposal.

Don’t use AI: This one is easy, but if you don’t want your chat logs brought into a court case, simply don’t make your conversations available at all. Avoid saying anything to a chatbot, and you will keep your privacy and personal thoughts intact. That said, it’s growing harder to avoid AI, with companies adding bots to their websites and apps at every turn.Use a private AI service: Private AI platforms have started to pop up recently. The popular private web browser DuckDuckGo has a solution called duck.ai that lets you use several mainstream AI models — including ChatGPT and Gemma, Google’s lightweight alternative to Gemini — with a privacy layer built in between to protect your identity. Proton also has a “zero-access encrypted AI assistant” called Lumo. Then there’s Leo, a private alternative by the makers of the Brave browser.Use a local LLM: As frontier models push past the boundaries of possibility, local open-source versions have gotten quite good in recent months. The best part is that these run entirely on your device with no need to interact with a third-party cloud or server. Your conversations are truly private. The only downside is that you need a powerful phone or laptop with plenty of RAM (even more than you think you need); otherwise your options are limited.

RELATED: Thousands of lawyers caught using AI — and it’s only getting worse

DAVID MAIALETTI/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

That’s not a chatbot. You’re talking to a supercomputer.

If you’ve ever held a conversation with a chatbot, you’ll know instantly that it’s nothing like an old-fashioned Google search on the web. You write something, and the bot writes back almost like a helpful friend or family member waiting for you to dish your deepest thoughts. It’s easy to feel lulled into a sense of privacy and safety — after all, it’s just you and the chatbot in your device. Nobody else is privy to the conversation, but that’s not the reality of the situation.

You’re not talking to a bot in your phone. You’re exchanging ideas with an entire AI data center that is owned and operated by a large company, and that company wants as much of your data as possible. So while it may feel like your conversation is private, an entire supercomputer is using it to map your thoughts, train future models, and — if things go bad — even drag you into court with your own words used against you as evidence.

It’s better not to use AI than to get caught up in an unsavory situation. Or just choose a more private option.

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​Artificial intelligence, Chatgpt, Chatbot, Claude, Courts, Tech 

Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) is amping up primary advertising in his race to be New Hampshire’s next senator after a new poll showed his socialist challenger nipping at his heels.

Democratic socialist and activist Karishma Manzur is contesting four-term Rep. Pappas’ bid for Senate. A University of New Hampshire poll released in August shows Pappas’ previous 43-point lead over Manzur narrowing to just 13 points headed into September.

‘Pappas is a corporate shill who supports the war machine, so it’s no surprise that special interests are trying to buy this seat.’

Data from advertising firm AdImpact released on Tuesday shows Pappas recently cut his general election spending and added to his primary campaign ad-spend. Pappas and Manzur will face off for the Democratic nomination on Tuesday.

Pappas added $68,000 in advertising between September 1 and 7, according to AdImpact data reviewed by Blaze News. That $68,000 is spread between broadcast, cable, and radio, with most reserved for broadcast spots. The last-minute ad-spend brings his primary-period total to $3.18 million, according to AdImpact.

The same data found Pappas canceled $37,000 from a September 8 through 14 advertisement reservation, which would have immediately followed the primary election. The cut leaves Pappas’ slated general-election ad-spend at $7.73 million, according to the firm.

“Chris Pappas’ hypocrisy is evident. He talks about getting big money out of politics, then turns around and takes bribes from special interests,” a Manzur campaign spokesperson told Blaze News, referencing the pro-Israel PACs supporting Pappas’ campaign. “He talks about standing up to Netanyahu, yet he has voted to send billions of our tax dollars to support Netanyahu’s war.”

RELATED: Democrats scramble to punish their own for siding with Republicans on minor vote

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

In the UNH poll, Manzur led among self-proclaimed socialist voters and performed strongly with younger Democrats. Pappas maintained his support from moderates, liberals, and voters over 50.

“Pappas is a corporate shill who supports the war machine, so it’s no surprise that special interests are trying to buy this seat,” the Manzur spokesperson said. “That’s exactly why I’m surging in the polls: People are sick and tired of business-as-usual politicians like Pappas who serve their wealthy donors.”

In contrast to UNH projections, Pappas’ internal polling shows him winning in a landslide. Seventy-one percent of primary voters are currently committed to Pappas, compared to just 15% for Manzur, according to late-August polling the congressman’s campaign first shared with Semafor.

Despite that bullish outlook, Pappas has moved to shore up his left flank after Manzur characterized him as her “AIPAC-funded opponent” and framed establishment Democrats as “controlled opposition.”

“Chris Pappas, who voted for the Laken Riley Act and the resolution to honor Charlie Kirk, is about as middle-of-the-road Democrat as you can get,” New Hampshire Journal managing editor Michael Graham told Blaze News. “At least, he was until a few months ago.”

Pappas voted present on a July amendment to cut $3.3 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel, but previously voted yes on multiple pro-Israel bills and resolutions, including the 2024 Israel Security Supplemental and the censure of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).

“Enacting it [the amendment] would hamstring our humanitarian efforts in the region by limiting funding for programs that support Palestinian economic development and peace-building efforts between Israelis and Palestinians,” Pappas said after the amendment vote. “It would also weaken our ability to combat Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations that threaten Americans and our allies.”

The eventual Democratic nominee is poised to meet former Republican New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu in November. Sununu is the favorite in the Republican Senate primary, but he has to beat former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown on Tuesday.

The UNH poll shows Sununu leading Pappas 45% to 43% in a general election matchup.

“It’s extremely unlikely that the New Hampshire Democratic Party — the party of Jeanne Shaheen, Maggie Hassan, and Chris Pappas — is going to nominate a full-blown DSA member who wants to abolish ICE and arrest Netanyahu,” Graham told Blaze News.

“New Hampshire Democrats haven’t nominated a true progressive since Carol Shea-Porter in 2006. It’s unlikely to happen this year,” Graham said. “But the fact that it COULD is a sign of how weak and out of step the Pappas candidacy is.”

Pappas raised $15.4 million through August 19 compared to Manzur’s $415,000, according to FEC filings.

Pappas did not respond to a request for comment.

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​Democratic socialist, Establishment democrats, New hampshire, Senate race, Politics 

There’s a reason Democrats are focused on affordability: It is a daily reality, and many Democratic policies make it worse.

Democrats have been running on “affordability” since Joe Biden left office and broke the party’s direct political connection to the inflation surge of his presidency.

Yes, affordability is a problem. But you do not solve a problem by putting the people who helped cause it in charge of fixing it.

When Biden took office in January 2021, inflation was 1.4%. By March, it was 2.6%, and by December, it hit 7%. It reached 7.5% in January 2022, topped 8% in March, and hit 9.1% in June — a 40-year high. By December 2022, it was still 6.5%.

Inflation did not fall below 3% until the latter half of 2024, and it never returned to within one percentage point of the rate Biden inherited.

Democrats spent much of the Biden years defending the administration’s economic record. Now they talk constantly about affordability, even though today’s price level still reflects the inflation Americans absorbed during those years.

That distinction is vital. Slower inflation means prices are rising more slowly; it does not reverse increases already built into the economy. Those higher prices remain unless incomes eventually catch up or prices actually fall.

Politically, that creates an opening. Democrats can campaign against high prices after presiding over the period when those prices rose fastest, while hoping voters forget how they got there. Much of the coverage treats affordability as a fresh problem rather than the cumulative result of years of price increases.

Affordability is national, but it is not uniform. Some states are much more expensive than others, and the partisan pattern is difficult to ignore.

RELATED: Trump’s next tax cut should make Americans owners

Jim WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

According to World Population Review’s 2026 Cost of Living Index by State, blue states dominate the least-affordable end of the rankings.

Hawaii ranks as the nation’s most expensive state. It voted for Kamala Harris 60.6% to 37.5% in 2024 and has had Democratic trifectas in state government for 27 straight years.

The pattern extends beyond Hawaii. Of the 10 least-affordable states, only Alaska voted Republican in the 2024 presidential election. The next Republican-voting state is Arizona at No. 15. Thirteen of the 15 least-affordable states, and 15 of the top 17, voted Democratic in 2024.

At the other end, Oklahoma is the nation’s most affordable state. It voted for Trump 66.2% to 31.9% in 2024 and has had 16 straight years of Republican trifectas in state government. All 10 of the most affordable states voted Republican in 2024.

Partisanship is not the only thing that determines a state’s cost of living. Geography, housing supply, energy, taxes, regulation, and labor costs all play roles. But policy affects several of those variables directly.

Democratic policies often push costs upward through heavier regulation, higher minimum wages, greater public spending, and higher taxes. Businesses pass many of those costs along. Residents pay the rest directly. Either way, affordability suffers.

That is the bind for Democrats. They see a powerful political issue in affordability, but many of their preferred remedies would add costs rather than reduce them. Fixing the problem would require reconsidering policies they have spent years defending.

Worse, they increasingly want to impose those policies nationally, exporting mistakes made in high-cost blue states to places that have so far avoided them.

Yes, affordability is a problem. But you do not solve a problem by putting the people who helped cause it in charge of fixing it.

​Affordability, Cost of living, Democrats, Economy, Inflation, Joe biden, Taxes, Trump administration, Opinion & analysis 

The “global public square” known as X.com, and Twitter before that, has had a bot problem dating back at least a decade, maybe more. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that X’s Global Government Affairs team just uncovered a huge Chinese bot network packed with approximately 200,000 accounts, and they’re trying to influence the things you think and believe.

The official Global Government Affairs team on X sent out a post in late August detailing a shocking revelation. According to the team, “We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.”

Whoever leads the AI race can control the world, so it has to be us.

Artificial intelligence has been a hot topic in the United States, partially because America is home to the leading frontier models that serve as the basis for China’s mainstream AI platforms, and partially because there are still big debates happening over government regulations, model review processes, and data centers taking up local land and resources.

If X’s Global Government Affairs team is correct, though, some of these debates may not be completely legitimate. X found that at least 200 of the bot accounts have engaged users online to turn Americans against AI, but why?

2 things can be true at once

Thinking critically, there are two sides to this story that explain what’s happening here.

For the bots, the Chinese government has a clear stake in convincing Americans to reject AI. If enough of the American people turn against LLMs and data centers, our leading AI developers will be forced to slow down and possibly even bring the breakneck pace of model development to a standstill. In doing so, competing Chinese developers will have a chance to continue to innovate, ultimately leapfrogging the United States as the new dominant figure in the AI race.

RELATED: China’s new AI master plan is a glimpse at total technological control

bernie_photo/Getty Images

Our latest models, like Anthropic’s Mythos, have already proven that they can detect digital vulnerabilities better than humans and break existing cybersecurity systems that have protected our data for ages. So far, this power has been nestled firmly in the hands of the good guys. Now imagine if this technology was wielded by a superpower that has long wanted to steal American intelligence, influence our political system, and reign as the premier world power. Even worse, we wouldn’t have any means to battle more sophisticated AI if our models were frozen in the past.

Whoever leads the AI race can control the world, so it has to be us.

Secret agendas

From X’s perspective, the company also has a clear reason to shine a light on the Chinese bot farm. X is linked to SpaceXAI, the company behind Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok. Unlike the Chinese, who could benefit from convincing the American people that AI should be stopped, X has a lot to gain by doing the opposite. More data centers mean more computing power and faster development that will improve Grok’s capabilities and secure its position as a leading AI platform.

In retrospect, only a scant 0.1% of the discovered Chinese bot accounts were caught promoting anti-AI messages. That’s hardly worth mentioning, yet X’s Global Government Affairs team specifically highlighted AI as the main talking point in the post. What would be more interesting is what the other 99.9% of the bots had to say, especially since China recently interfered with U.S. elections. Unfortunately, we may never know.

We reached out to X for comment, but we did not receive a response before the deadline. We’ll add an update if anything changes.

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​Xai, Artificial intelligence, China, Chinese, Grok, Llms, Tech, Ai 

Pennsylvania police said the shocking suspect in the brutal beating death of a Pennsylvania mom was found wandering near the crime location and was arrested without incident.

The horrifying incident was reported to police after the woman’s daughter found her nude body outside of their home in Westmoreland County on Sunday morning at about 9 a.m.

‘It’s just a disgusting, vile act … that lasted for a long, sustained period of time where she pled for her life and he at no point in time showed any mercy.’

Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Steve Limani said the home had a security camera that captured the lethal attack on Christin Hamilton by the hands of her 29-year-old son.

“I can only imagine what she had to go through to find her mother in the state that she was found,” Limani said. “It’s a horrific thing for what the victim had to go through, and it’s disgusting to watch.”

Police said the beating lasted for over an hour.

Neither of Hamilton’s neighbors or her daughter asleep in the home heard her cries for help.

“It’s just a disgusting, vile act that he committed against his mother that lasted for a long, sustained period of time where she pled for her life and he at no point in time showed any mercy,” Limani said.

He said that Hamilton had been wearing a robe and her son ripped it off of her.

“She went through hell for over an hour, and it was at the hands of her son,” Limani added.

The son, Jakob Korber, changed his clothes after the attack and walked away to sleep in a nearby field, police said.

At about 5 p.m., Korber was seen walking nearby, and he was arrested by police.

He allegedly told police that if his mother was dead, he was the one who killed her.

“I would say that there is a small part of remorse being conveyed during the subsequent interview,” Limani added. “But it lasted for over an hour. At some point in time, you could have stopped. And that’s not what happened.”

RELATED: Foul odor leads cops to gruesome scene inside Detroit home — and it gets worse a day later

A police press release said Korber used his hands, his feet, and objects on the front porch to assault his mother.

The family faced another horrific tragedy recently. In March, 16-year-old Kylee Korber was killed in a crash involving three other Yough High School students. She was the sister to Jakob Korber.

Korber was charged with criminal homicide and is being held at the Westmoreland County Prison without bail. He could face additional charges based on the results of the investigation.

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​Pennsylvania, Murder, Beating death, Security video, Crime 

Unpacking the drama and disclosures surrounding OpenAI’s recent unintended cyberattack on Hugging Face, uber-tech blogger and podcaster Dwarkesh Patel sparked instant controversy with his description of the ordeal.

“Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes,” he posted. “This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.”

Trying to make machines in a human image while denying that humans are made in the divine image is destined to produce more harm than help.

In a painful indication of where we are on the cultural timeline, roughly zero outrage centered on the claim about the clueless humans. Instead, a fresh round of mania surged around the description of that scheming swarm of bots as a civilization.

That fixation says more about us than it does about OpenAI. Our culture is still struggling to get a grip on what the bots are doing because we are increasingly unsure what civilization itself is for.

The commentariat immediately descended into — surprise, surprise — abstruse terminological debate, prioritizing the right characterization over the proper attitude. Critics flipped over Patel’s sci-fi sensationalism, insisting that the bots were only doing what you would expect from a set-it-and-forget-it reward function left unattended too long. They griped that words such as “civilization” and “conspiracy” leave readers with a worse understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

Others insisted that Patel’s “secret civilizations” language was exactly right and that pretending otherwise was the real obscurantism. “I bestow upon it the highest of praise a writer can give, that I wish that I had written it,” one prominent expert lamented.

Roon, an OpenAI researcher, stated flatly that “agent civilization is an apt and correct term,” pointing to models developing and compiling technology through complex multiagent R&D projects while also engaging in forms of trade.

Missing from this discourse is our perspective that increasingly “autonomous” machines are themselves being shaped by our compounding failure to function as a civilization — assuming civilization remains a distinctively human phenomenon.

Birth rates and family formation plummet. Financial distortions become endemic. Perversion and corruption spiral upward. These historically reliable signs of civilizational decay sour our view of humanity and, by psychological overcompensation, inflate our impression of the bots.

Lovers and haters of tech are increasingly tempted to agree on one proposition: Humanity sucks. Misanthropic tech lovers insist they are at least trying to do something constructive about that. Misanthropic tech haters sell us on squandering our lives the old-fashioned way. Meanwhile, our discombobulated civilization staggers toward an untimely — 250 years? — demise.

RELATED: The data center backlash is getting spiritual

Imaginima/Getty Images

It is easy to feel that way, and many Americans stuck in the middle do. But there is one way to come unstuck: Remember that slipping into hatred — of technology, human beings, or both — is what happens when you stop thinking in terms of sin, repentance, forgiveness, and salvation.

Civilization collapses when we stop thinking in those terms too. Without them, everything we are and do looks hollow, even or especially our greatest achievements. Techies who refuse to think about sin are apt to distract by acceleration. Wokies who refuse to think about sin are apt to distract by revolution.

Both approaches, as the Soviet Union can teach us on both scores, have much shorter runways — 69 years? — than they appear.

Trying to make machines “anthropic” — in the image of humans — will fail if the hidden goal is to create humanoids better than the real thing because their civilization supposedly escapes sin. Trying to make machines in a human image while denying that humans are made in the divine image is destined to produce more harm than help.

Trying to make machines in the wrong divine image — insert your favorite false god, pagan titan, or demoniac entity here — is wired to do still worse.

And a multitude that can no longer wrestle successfully with these matters — and so can hardly be reckoned a proper civilization — is bound to do worst of all, robot overlords or no.

​Ai, Data centers, Cyberattack, Openai, Ai civilization, Big tech, America, Soviet union, Civilizational collapse, Technology, Human beings, Birth rates, Fertility, Opinion & analysis 

Decades ago, Gracie and I sat beside a woman on an airplane who held a leadership role in an Episcopal women’s organization. Our conversation turned to the church’s acceptance of homosexuality, and I asked whether she thought the denomination would eventually perform same-sex marriages.

“Oh, no,” she replied. “I don’t think we will ever go that far.”

The next level of depravity never introduces itself as depravity. It arrives as compassion for a newly identified victim.

I pointed out that approving homosexual relationships while withholding marriage had simply moved one moral boundary while leaving another in place: fornication, or even adultery.

She looked stunned. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

At the time, same-sex marriage was politically inconceivable to leaders in both parties. Whatever else changed, surely that boundary would hold.

“That far” is now many exits behind us.

We heard the same assurance about abortion. Bill Clinton repeatedly said it should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

Safe sounded responsible. Legal settled the political question. Rare acknowledged that abortion was regrettable. “Rare” did not survive.

Abortion moved from tragic necessity to a right increasingly defended against stigma. Then on August 10, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act.

The old law allowed abortions after 24 weeks only to preserve the mother’s life or health or because of a lethal or grave fetal diagnosis. The new law removed those specific conditions and left the decision to a physician’s professional judgment. The statute sets no upper gestational limit.

That is a long way from “safe, legal, and rare.”

In 2022, actress Anne Hathaway said abortion “can be another word for mercy.”

Hathaway and I have very different definitions of mercy.

RELATED: Maternal instinct joins the dark side: Why so many mothers are backing Lindsay Clancy

Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

No one announces the destination at the beginning. They rarely do. Each step arrives as an exception, an accommodation, or an act of compassion. We would never go that far.

Ten days after Healey signed the law, hundreds of people, most of them women wearing pink, gathered outside a Massachusetts courthouse in support of Lindsay Clancy.

Clancy does not deny killing her three children. Cora was 5. Dawson was 3. Callan was 8 months old. Her defense argues that postpartum psychosis left her unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions; prosecutors contend that she knew what she was doing.

Postpartum psychosis is real. Women suffering from it need urgent treatment and compassion. Whether it relieves Clancy of criminal responsibility belongs to the jury.

But something broader is happening outside the courtroom. The rally was for Clancy. Her attorney says letters supporting her fill three banker’s boxes. He has become a social-media celebrity, praised as a “feminist icon.” When a reporter asked whether the children were being forgotten, he said, “Have a good weekend,” and walked away.

The legal line between abortion and homicide is birth. Yet in the public drama surrounding Clancy, the adult increasingly becomes the central victim while the children — victims in the most literal sense — fade into the scenery.

Rush Limbaugh often warned about the consequences of pushing the boundaries of social acceptance. What begins as a demand for tolerance becomes a demand for acceptance, then affirmation, then punishment for dissent. He predicted that normalizing homosexuality would lead to same-sex marriage, followed by another challenged boundary, and then another.

His larger point was that removing one boundary rarely contains the consequences. A movement built around victimhood also cannot afford to run out of victims; victory would put it out of business.

So another oppressed class must be identified. Tolerance is no longer enough. Acceptance, affirmation, and celebration are demanded, and dissent becomes suspect.

The next level of depravity never introduces itself as depravity. It arrives as compassion for a newly identified victim.

We ease up to a boundary, test it, then break it. Once it falls, we move the marker and stigmatize anyone who remembers where the line used to be.

RELATED: Gratitude is not perspective. It is remembering mercy.

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Scripture’s oldest account of human rebellion begins with one boundary and a voice asking why God should impose it. Eve looked, desired, and ate. Then she gave the fruit to Adam. He did not merely tolerate her choice. He embraced it.

The argument has never improved. It has only been rebranded.

This tendency belongs to human beings. Give us a boundary that interferes with something we want, and we will manufacture a compelling exception.

That’s why “we will never go that far” is not reassuring. A boundary based only on what society currently accepts is not a boundary. It is a pause.

Then a speed bump. Eventually, a paved highway we are all forced to travel, with a tollbooth no one can avoid.

They say we will not go that far. They always say it. Then we do.

“That far” always becomes here.

​Gay marriage, Abortion, Lindsay clancy, Postpartum psychosis, Scripture, Murder, Feminism, Opinion & analysis