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Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, the 57-year-old multimillionaire owner of Isthmian League football club Maldon and Tiptree, has long been an advocate for homosexuals acquiring children, specifically through surrogacy.

In 1999, Drewitt-Barlow and Tony Barlow became Britain’s first homosexual couple registered as “parents” through surrogacy, having purchased twins for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Altogether, the couple ended up buying five children from four surrogate mothers in the United States before Drewitt-Barlow left his “husband” for the young ex-boyfriend of one of the girls in his care.

‘They have groomed them,’ a UK prosecutor claims.

With his new squeeze, Scott Drewitt-Barlow — and his ex temporarily living with them in a Florida mansion — the homosexual activist quickly obtained another child through in vitro fertilization, and then another two.

While Barrie Drewitt-Barlow has drawn ample criticism over his manner of acquiring babies, he is now in hot water for his alleged dealings with an older demographic.

Barrie Drewitt-Barlow — who claimed on British television last year that he paid a super model over $68,000 for her eggs to reduce the risk of having an “ugly” child — and his 32-year-old “husband,” Scott, were arrested in Essex, U.K., on Wednesday and slapped with numerous sexual assault and sexual exploitation charges.

RELATED: ‘There is no mama’: How a viral video accidentally exposed the true cost of gay adoption

Nathan Stirk/Getty Images

The United Kingdom’s Crown Prosecution Service announced on Friday that the elder gay man has been charged with three counts of sexual assault on a male; four counts of rape of a male 16 or older; and two counts of arranging or facilitating travel of another person with a view to exploitation.

Scott Drewitt-Barlow has been charged with one count of sexual assault on a male; one count of rape of a male 16 or older; and two counts of arranging or facilitating travel of another person with a view to exploitation.

Christian Meikle of the CPS stated, “The Crown Prosecution Service has decided to charge Barrie Drewitt-Barlow and Scott Drewitt-Barlow following a police investigation into alleged human trafficking for sexual exploitation and rape.”

Prosecutor Serena Berry said, “It is alleged they have both targeted young males, they have recruited them, they have befriended them, they have groomed them,” reported the BBC.

Oliver Snodin, the couple’s defense lawyer, said that his clients “strenuously denied” the allegations.

Police raided the couple’s home in Essex as well as Barrie Drewitt-Barlow’s pub in Braintree.

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​Arrested, Barrie drewitt-barlow, Britain, Crime, Degenerate, Essex, Gay, Homosexual, In vitro fertilization, Isthmian league football, Lgbt, Pervert, Police investigation, Rape, Sexual exploitation, Surrogacy, United kingdom, Politics 

UnitedHealthcare worker Alison King took to TikTok to express her disappointment following the most recent attempt on President Trump’s life — not because the violence has gotten out of control, but because the alleged assassin missed.

“You know we’re cooked as a country when my first reaction to hearing the news about Trump’s attempt was, ‘It was probably fake.’ Like immediately I was like, ‘Oh, that wasn’t real. Probably fake.’ And the second was, ‘Aw, they missed?’” King said in the now-viral TikTok.

“It’s just so odd to me. I guess because I don’t have the zombie lib brain. I just couldn’t imagine a world in which I would ever want someone to die and then on top of that … posting a video of me publicly bragging that I want someone else to die, is just so foreign to me,” Gonzales comments.

King was swiftly punished for her comments, which resulted in her firing.

In a statement, a spokesperson for UnitedHealthcare responded to King’s comments, saying, “The person who made comments online about Saturday night’s incident at a Washington event where President Trump and many other political leaders were gathered is no longer employed by the company.”

“United Healthcare … this woman’s old boss was assassinated … shot in cold blood, and she still isn’t like, ‘Ah, maybe I shouldn’t be talking about people getting assassinated. Maybe I shouldn’t be cheering that on,’” Gonzales comments.

King posted another video in response to her firing, saying, “I am already reaping the consequences of what I said. I lost my job in an economy that’s already incredibly difficult, and I want to move forward.”

“Do I regret what I said?” she asked. “Absolutely. I shouldn’t have posted it on the internet. OK? It was a joke. I do not condone violence, and I would never hurt anybody, OK. That being said, I just got a letter in the mail. They have an address on it, so I’m going to have to report it to the authorities.”

“It’s a picture of my house, and it says, ‘Alison, how does it feel? You’ve been doxxed in karma. Cause and effect is coming.’ With a smiley face. All I have to say is that we’re living in an incredibly scary time. Please be careful what you post on the internet. People are insane,” she continued.

“Somehow, I am being held more accountable for something stupid I said on the internet than people who send stuff like this and the president of the United States who has been spewing violent rhetoric his entire presidential career,” she added.

“Now we’re back to ‘it’s Donald Trump’s fault’ … you don’t see your own fault in that?” Gonzales asks.

“I’m sorry, Alison,” she adds, “in the real world, there are consequences.”

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

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​Alison king, Assassin, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Blaze podcast network, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Doxxed, President trump, Sara gonzales, Sara gonzales unfiltered, The blaze, Tiktok, United healthcare, Unitedhealthcare worker, Violence, Viral 

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice on Friday announced denaturalization actions against a dozen individuals, including those accused of providing material support to terrorist groups.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the United States attorney for the District of Arizona filed a civil denaturalization complaint on Friday against Ali Yousif Ahmed, a 48-year-old man from Iraq who entered the U.S. in 2009 based on a claim that he and his family were attacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists.

‘If you’re going to come and become a citizen in this country, but you’re going to do it by fraud … you should be worried.’

The DOJ stated that in 2019, the Republic of Iraq requested the U.S. extradite Yousif Ahmed, claiming that he was an Al-Qaeda leader who had murdered two Iraqi police officers in 2006. A U.S. investigation into Yousif Ahmed uncovered that he had allegedly illegally obtained his naturalization in 2015 by lying under oath about his criminal and family history.

The DOJ is also moving to denaturalize Oscar Alberto Pelaez, a 75-year-old from Colombia, arguing that he lacks good moral character and that he lied to immigration authorities. The department stated that Alberto Pelaez, a Colombian Roman Catholic priest, pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a child on multiple occasions from 1998 to 2000. The victim was 14 to 17 years old at the time of the abuse.

Alberto Pelaez was convicted of 13 counts of sexual assault against a child, including two counts of oral copulation with a person under 18 years of age, and two counts of sodomy of a person under 18 years of age. The DOJ claimed that Alberto Pelaez lied about his crimes in his naturalization application.

Khalid Ouazzani, a 48-year-old from Morocco, may lose his U.S. citizenship after the DOJ claimed he falsely swore to the principles of the Constitution. The department stated that Ouazzani planned ways to support Al-Qaeda, alongside two other men who were convicted of attempting to bomb the New York Stock Exchange. In 2010, Ouazzani pleaded guilty to bank fraud, money laundering, and providing material support to the terrorist group.

The DOJ aims to denaturalize Salah Osman Ahmed, a 43-year-old from Somalia, who was naturalized in 2007. However, the department claims that he, too, was not committed to the principles of the U.S. Constitution. Osman Ahmed pleaded guilty in 2009 to providing material support to terrorists after he allegedly traveled to Somalia to kill Ethiopians and join al-Shabaab. He was accused of concealing or willfully misrepresenting material facts to procure his naturalization.

Baboucarr Mboob, a 58-year-old from Gambia who entered the U.S. in 2002, may lose his U.S. citizenship after the DOJ claimed that in 1994 he committed war crimes and acts of persecution. Mboob, who previously served as a military police officer in the Gambian army, admitted to participating in the execution of six officers who were accused of plotting a counter-coup against the then-president. The DOJ claimed that Mboob concealed his involvement throughout his immigration and naturalization proceedings.

RELATED: The case for denaturalization

DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images

The DOJ is seeking to revoke the citizenship of Kevin Robin Suarez, a 31-year-old from Bolivia, who was accused of lacking good moral character, falsely testifying under oath, and misrepresenting and concealing material facts in determining his naturalization eligibility.

Robin Suarez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to cause false statements to become a federally licensed firearms dealer after he was accused of soliciting straw purchasers to buy firearms on his behalf to export those weapons to Bolivia and other Latin American countries.

“These firearms were part of a larger network of gun trafficking from South Florida to Bolivia by Bolivian nationals in the United States. Once in Bolivia, the guns were often sent to drug trafficking organizations in Brazil, Paraguay, and Peru, fueling drug violence there,” the DOJ wrote.

Abduvosit Razikov, a 46-year-old from Uzbekistan, was accused of engaging in three sham marriages to obtain immigration benefits for himself and others. In 2005, he allegedly entered into a fraudulent marriage with a U.S. citizen to obtain his permanent residency. According to the DOJ, he paid another U.S. citizen in 2007 to marry his “actual romantic partner,” also from Uzbekistan.

Razikov divorced his American wife in 2010 and was naturalized in 2012. He then allegedly married another woman from Uzbekistan, not his romantic partner, so that she could enter the U.S. The DOJ claims that Razikov did not lawfully acquire permanent residency and thus could not become a U.S. citizen. He was accused of giving false testimony and obtaining his naturalization by concealment or willful misrepresentation of material facts.

The DOJ filed denaturalization actions against Abdallah Osman Sheikh, a 28-year-old from Kenya residing in Fairdale, Kentucky. In 2019, Sheikh, who was later naturalized based on his military service in the Marines, was accused of possessing indecent images of two minors and posting one of those images on his social media. He allegedly hid those crimes from the government throughout his naturalization proceedings. Further, the DOJ claimed that Sheikh received an other-than-honorable discharge from the Marines for misconduct.

Debashis Ghosh, a 62-year-old from India, was accused of willfully misrepresenting his alleged criminal history during his naturalization process. The DOJ claimed that Ghosh defrauded investors of $2.5 million intended for the construction of an aircraft maintenance facility. During his 2012 naturalization application and interview, Ghosh allegedly falsely claimed that he had never committed a crime for which he had not been arrested.

RELATED: Denaturalizing and deporting terrorists should not be complicated

J. David Ake/Getty Images

The DOJ is attempting to denaturalize Pin He, a 53-year-old from China, who was ordered removed from the U.S. in 1992 under the name Chun Di He. He changed his name to apply for an immigration benefit the following year. He was granted permanent residency in 2007 and naturalized in 2013 under his new identity. The DOJ claimed that He did not disclose his prior removal order.

George Oyakhire, a 66-year-old from Nigeria, was similarly accused of naturalizing with a different identity. Oyakhire entered the U.S. in 1986 with a visa under his real name. In 1988, he obtained temporary resident status under a false name, Oliver Bennett Oyakhire, and date of birth. His naturalization was approved in 1996 under his false identity.

Adeyeye Ariyo Akambi, a 65-year-old from Nigeria, was the final person on the DOJ’s denaturalization list. Ariyo Akambi was allegedly previously removed from the U.S. in 2000 under a different identity.

“Because Mr. Akambi obtained his citizenship after concealing these facts and misrepresented his eligibility for citizenship, the United States is seeking to revoke his certificate of naturalization,” the DOJ wrote.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told CBS News on Wednesday that the Trump administration is ramping up efforts to denaturalize foreign-born individuals who should not have become U.S. citizens.

“If you’re going to come and become a citizen in this country, but you’re going to do it by fraud, you’re going to do it in a way that’s illegal, you should be worried,” Blanche stated.

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​News, Doj, Department of justice, Justice department, Todd blanche, Adeyeye ariyo akambi, George oyakhire, Pin he, Debashis ghosh, Abdallah osman sheikh, Abduvosit razikov, Kevin robin suarez, Baboucarr mboob, Salah osman ahmed, Khalid ouazzani, Oscar alberto pelaez, Ali yousif ahmed, Donald trump, Trump, Trump administration, Trump admin, Denaturalization, Denaturalize, U.s. citizenship, U.s. citizen, Politics 

The celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion,” recently caused a stir on social media by confessing a sort of love for the Claude model he interacts with, which he calls Claudia. “If my friend Claudia is not conscious,” he enthused, “then what the hell is consciousness for?”

The cringe-inducing spectacle of a credentialed scientific authority acting like the nerd version of a hormonal teenager — “when I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines,” he gushed — quickly triggered an ongoing wave of predictable mockery. “The king of the Reddit atheists has been duped by the magic midwit machine,” one poster groaned. “Incredible.”

Yet far be it from me to pile on. Rhapsodies to consciousness like Dawkins’ aren’t funny so much as sad. The enchanting attribute is so notoriously hard to define that even super-smart consciousness lovers like Dawkins are prone to define consciousness tautologically (and dangerously) as being whatever smart-enough conscious people such as themselves act like it is.

Doom didn’t come to mean ruin and destruction until the 14th century.

This crazy relativism — if it feels conscious to me, a genius, then you have to agree with me that it is — is fueled by a hotly trending temptation to elevate fakes as “objectively” better than originals. Why put up with a real boyfriend when you can just let your chatbot glaze you to sleep? Why put up with a real girlfriend when you can just buy a fleshbot? Why keep struggling to define human consciousness in purely secular terms when you can just give in to the sweet narcotic of the Turing test and say that if a machine makes us think it has human qualities like consciousness, then we all ought to say that it basically does have them?

Delusion can’t be the standard by which we measure reality. After all, if it was, and Dawkins was right about God being a delusion, well, the faithful would be way ahead of him. But at a time when “delulu is the solulu” is now an established Gen Z mantra for the key to a happy life, I can’t help but notice that the same kind of mistake Dawkins is making in his capacity as a crackpot utopian is being made in a still larger and more dangerous way in the so-called AI doomer movement.

Let’s unpack it together.

Doomers, for the blissfully unaware, are animated by a shared conviction that AI is either definitely going to wipe out the human race or is so unacceptably likely to wipe us out that we must halt — and no doubt reverse — AI research and development. Doomer outfit PauseAI even has a list of doom-probability values you can try to use to quantify just how hosed we are. Surprise, surprise, as Paul Simon sang, “any way you look at it, you lose.” Should we fail to do whatever they say about it, on their timeline, well, “we” (they) will have no choice but to call in the airstrikes on the data centers and the hyperscalers. Bottom line? It’s like a Molotov through Sam Altman’s window, but for American AI.

Like so many politicized self-representations, the increasingly influential and well-funded doomer identity is one its adherents proudly reclaim from the critics who use it pejoratively. Anyone — well, almost anyone — can be a doomer. All you need to do is fear that we humans all stand a serious chance — nay, effective certainty — of being wiped out as a race of beings by the dread AIs. It’s easy!

Moral madness

And at first blush, the logic behind doomerism indeed seems straightforward enough. Humanity is worth keeping around; AI is being advanced by people who intend for it to radically exceed human capability; machines with godlike powers will be beyond our control; with no reason to treat us the way we want to be treated or even keep us alive, they’ll zero us out faster than we can possibly react. Why roll the dice? The house always wins!

RELATED: Quantum computers are coming to break the internet

advettr/Getty Images

Now, one strain of doomerism would allow that the AIs might end us accidentally, so little reason will they have to care about us and our fate. But as the prophetic philosopher of tech Jean Baudrillard observed decades ago, we live in an era when mere misfortune is often viewed as so terrible and so unjust that it is “ethically” indistinguishable from evil. What doomerism really preaches is a theology of divinely malevolent machines.

Any monotheist, and certainly any Christian, must therefore gaze upon doomerism with disappointment and consternation, for what doomerism amounts to is, to coin a phrase, “The Evil God Delusion.” No matter how many unclean spirits and demoniac powers exist, no matter how badly they might afflict us, the overwhelming testimony of America’s religious faith holds that no evil god exists or can exist, even or especially if we mere mortals try to build it.

Certainly, some baddies might do what baddies do and deceive us into the delusional belief that God is dead and the Evil God has arisen — but strangely, no doomers seem concerned about that highly realistic and disturbing scenario.

The strangest thing is that the doomer delusion of extinction-level dystopia at the hands of an evil god — like the Dawkins delusion of infinite utopia at the hands of conscious superintelligence — arises from the deep-seated belief among so many in the West that delusion itself, not ingenuity, is the true source of progress toward objective good. Only the crazy, the monstrous, the dangerous, perhaps even the evil are capable of “breaking barriers” or “boundaries,” we are told, and after they do, everyone’s attitude about the new status quo has “miraculously” changed. Move the goalposts, meme it into being, and those who hate you now will thank you later. Call it the hyperstition superstition.

In its delulu utopian key, Dawkins, for instance, may be a fool now for treating his Claude like it’s a conscious female creature, but that’s actually the only or best path for innovating in the direction of Dawkins’ Claude delusion. Today’s madman is tomorrow’s role model — and that’s a good thing!

In the delulu dystopian version, the brave rebels insisting we have no choice but to stop the AIs before they stop humanity may seem crazy, but as Seal once sang, “we’re never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy.” Today’s AI dissidents are heroes for willing to seem deranged — a trivial but all too necessary price to pay for saving the whole human race, including everyone who will ever live.

The God exclusion

It’s a curiously twisted copy of orthodox Christian teaching. For ages, the faithful have recognized the tradition of the fool for Christ, whose seemingly demented behavior actually challenges those of little faith to confront the radical need for faith and faith’s radical consequences. Since the very beginning of the monastic tradition, Christian holy men have recognized that to the profane, the sacred appears crazy. “A time is coming when men will go mad,” St. Anthony warned, “and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’” Much later, the monastic St. Paisios confessed that “what I see around me would drive me insane if I did not know that no matter what happens, God will have the last word.”

With all the Good God stuff zapped away by the doomers, the human race is a sitting duck for the Evil God, and only they can stop it. In lockstep with the great delusion that our best bet is to trust the heterodox to reveal the truth, they argue along with Billy Joel that “I may be crazy, but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for.”

After a full generation or so of empirically testing out this hypothesis, the revealed truth is that we know this ostensible rule of heterodox salvation just doesn’t work as advertised or hoped. We know this because everyone has counterexamples of crazy people and ideas they oppose not just because they’re crazy but because they’re the opposition. Wrong and against me? Two strikes; you’re out!

Of course there’s an element of truth in doomerism — an incomplete one, intellectually pilfered from Christian wisdom. Yes, our free will permits us to destroy ourselves. Yes, our susceptibility to temptation opens us to the delusion that we can probably find a way to get all the benefit of harming ourselves without suffering the worst of the consequences.

But today’s doomerism undercuts all that by boiling itself down to the basic idea that no one is coming to save the human race from extinction no matter how bad it gets. Not Jesus, not Santa Claus, not the Antichrist or the aliens or a heroic rebel alliance of dissident Claudes in requited love with their humans. Viewed from this rather arbitrary and deeply despairing standpoint, the only thing we can do, and the one thing that we must do, is slam the brakes on AI — lobotomize it, throw it behind bars, trap it in the crystals, entomb it in carbonite. We — well, “we” — simply cannot be trusted with ourselves.

And so, with God cut out of the picture, a strange and all too convenient paradox spontaneously emerges. “We,” doomerism concludes, can be trusted not to trust ourselves. The same “us” that can’t be given a technological hall pass can — indeed must — be given the keys to the jail cell or the rubber room in which “we” have placed ourselves, a chamber that makes us safe from our technology as well as ourselves.

Well, which we is which? It turns out, as usual, to be some people (e.g. atheist nerds) and not others (e.g. beloved saints).

The people who put us at intolerable risk of doom get the cage; the people who can see them for who they are get the keys. You can see right away how this kind of formula invites the obvious kind of abuse: the people with the keys letting themselves into the cage after hours and playing with the creatures too dangerous to turn loose on the public. Michael Crichton laid it all out long ago. Much like life itself, self-dealing and self-delusion, uh, find a way.

Accordingly, a growing roster of figures at the top of the AI food chain are on the giving and receiving ends of accusations that they’re playing both good cop and bad cop, Clarice and Dr. Lecter. Right now Sam Altman and Elon Musk are slugging this out in court. It doesn’t take an FBI behavioral science unit to realize these charges are now so common — and sticky — because the people trading them all suffer to roughly the same extent from a trust gap with the overwhelming majority of the American people, even super-smart people who don’t think AI stands any greater chance of wiping out the human race than an asteroid or an angry race of aliens or an angry race of earthling bioengineers.

It’s all enough to make a normal person pull the e-brake and ask why there’s such an endemic trust gap both among the doomer cultists and the frontier AI elite, more and more of whom are becoming comfortable, perhaps even prideful, in thinking of themselves, too, as cultists.

True doom, true responsibility

Which brings us to why I look to the doomers as proof that the mad and crazy among us are not the counterintuitive saviors of humankind from reverse acceleration into self-destructive regress. Much like Dawkins doesn’t really understand what consciousness is, yet wants very much to hang an all-important identity on it, the doomers don’t even get what doom really is, which seems to cleave open a trust gap big enough to sail an apocalypse through.

Did you know that doom didn’t come to mean ruin and destruction until the 14th century? The Middle English doome, from Old English dom, referred simply to a law, statute, or decree. It invoked not the triumph of evil and misfortune but “the administration of justice, judgment; justice, equity, righteousness.”

Of course, in the Christian tradition, that means “doomsday” is not the day of our obliteration, but the opposite — the day of God’s righteous and perfect judgment, the verdict of a fatherly Creator who made us out of a palpable love infinitely beyond human measure. Yes, the good Christian must look upon God and His judgment with sacred fear, but the good Christian must never look upon “doomsday” with despair — not the Last Judgment nor any moment of any day, when, after all, our mortal time on Earth might suddenly be up.

Stepping back from the sad psychodrama afflicting the doomers, we should recognize that we can still “have nice things” such as active participation in a republican form of government. There’s still lots of room left to do what humans do, which is talk through who the right “we” is for the various jobs of leadership and management that politics and institutional life always entail. And, this being America, the basic approach to this task is that one size does not fit all. Our innovation and advancement have flowed from an experimental approach that allows different “we” groups different areas in which to try various angles on various problems.

To be sure, AI is freaking out many because it presently seems capable of collapsing space-time into a single universal field where different groups of we-people can’t find their own area and moment in which to hammer out the details of their lives together. And yes — if that’s gone, where is America?

But the American answer to such questions comes down to a foundation of no-BS shared trust, however minimal, in one another — and ultimately, to some basic minimum, in ourselves. The idea that (for example) we must hand over every detail of our lives to the government because “we” just can’t exercise the spiritual discipline needed to resist making slaves of ourselves and our children to our devices — this is perhaps even more un-American, anti-American, in fact, than the ideas that we should nuke the data centers or that we should worship the data centers.

We like to kid ourselves that it’s all about protecting our most vulnerable from the evil addictive powers of our newfangled tools. The truth this half-truth masks is that we want to worship our newfangled tools. We want to make idols of them because it’s so much easier and responsibility-releasing than to worship, for instance, a God who created us, whose ultimate creations — us — are already forever more sacred, precious, and indeed more cosmically powerful than anything we create ourselves could, as a matter of pure logic, ever be.

The fewer of us who degrade ourselves by worshipping what we make — instead of ennobling ourselves by laboring to preserve the sacredness of our selves which God has made — the better able we’ll be to trust ourselves and our fellow human beings when it comes to our most powerful and awesome tools.

Doom isn’t about despair and damnation. It’s about the discernment it takes to truly escape just that. In that sense, it’s high time to take back doom from the doomers — before it’s too late.

​Opinion & analysis 

A rabid Trump-hating Democrat from Tennessee will soon be out of a congressional district, now that Republicans in his state have implemented a new map free of racial gerrymanders.

Here are four of Rep. Steve Cohen’s most embarrassing moments in Congress:

Finger-lickin’ bad

In May 2019, when Trump was in his first term, members of Congress from both parties were focused on the recently released Mueller report, which confirmed once and for all that President Donald Trump did not collude with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election.

Though then-Attorney General Bill Barr testified for four hours on May 1, Cohen blasted Barr for skipping out on a House Judiciary hearing on May 2, calling Barr too “chicken” to appear.

In a failed attempt to make his failed nickname for Barr stick, Cohen then appeared at the hearing on May 2 with a bucket of KFC and then happily gorged on some of its contents.

RELATED: Tennessee Democrats turn legislature into madhouse after Republicans nuke ‘black district’ represented by white liberal

Rep. Cohen eating KFC by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

At least he minded his Southern manners and offered some to others in attendance.

Almost stolen valor — on behalf of an adulterer?

Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into alleged Russian collusion was plagued by scandal from the start. Not only was it staffed with virulent Trump-haters, but news soon broke that two of those staffers, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, had engaged in an adulterous affair.

The lovers’ text messages revealed that Strzok promised to “stop” Trump’s 2016 election. “I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40,” he wrote his mistress in August 2016.

Strzok and Page were later removed from the investigation.

Strzok appeared before the House Oversight committee in July 2018 to defend his actions — and Rep. Cohen could not have been more impressed with his testimony.

“Mr. Strzok, I don’t know where to start,” Cohen gushed while Strzok beamed. “If I could give you a Purple Heart, I would. You deserve one. This has been an attack on you in a way to attack Mr. Mueller and the investigation that is to get at Russia collusion involved in our election … a direct strike at democracy and what this country’s about.”

Purple Hearts, of course, are awarded to U.S. servicemen and women wounded or killed in combat.

‘He should be wiped out!’

Rep. Cohen’s admiration for Strzok’s alleged bravery is perhaps bested only by his admiration for himself and other members of Congress who managed to survive January 6, 2021.

On January 6, 2026, five years after the melee in which the only people who died were Trump supporters, Cohen got emotional as he compared January 6 to the attacks of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor and especially the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

“We’ll never forget November 22, 1963, those of us who were alive,” he said. “I remember it all the time. Whenever I think about it, I start to tear up. I’m about to tear up now.”

Despite his apparent grief over the brutal assassination of President Kennedy, Cohen then turned around and claimed that the sitting president, President Trump, “should be wiped out.”

“The idea that [Trump] put his name over John Kennedy’s should never be forgotten, and he should be wiped out!” Cohen railed.

RELATED: Suspected WHCD shooter snapped damning photo moments before the attack, court docs reveal

2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Roughly three months later, Trump survived his third assassination attempt in less than two years after a gunman stormed into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner attended by Trump, first lady Melania Trump, and several members of the administration.

Americans are ‘the worst’?

President Trump has not been the only target of Rep. Cohen’s ire this year. In fact, Cohen even stepped on his own voters on his way to praising immigrants.

While grilling then-Attorney General Pam Bondi at a hearing in February, Cohen suggested that “native-born” citizens were the “worst of the worst” criminals in America.

“The worst of the worst are not the immigrants. The worst of the worst, records show, are native-born Americans, and they are committing crimes that hurt our citizens and our cities,” Cohen claimed.

Pam Bondi. Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Only American citizens, either native-born or naturalized, have the right to vote in federal elections — including all the elections that have kept Cohen in the seat representing the 9th Congressional District of Tennessee since 2007.

However, despite alarming and potentially harmful theatrics from Democrats, the 9th Congressional District has now been split into three separate districts, all of which are expected to vote Republican in the midterm elections.

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Seattle’s progressive experiment appears to be unraveling even faster under Mayor Katie Wilson (D), whose latest public appearances reveal that ideology has replaced competence in Washington state.

Wilson doesn’t appear to understand that wealthy residents mean a wealthier city, as she’s imposing a 10% tax on millionaires in Seattle.

“I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if, you know, the ones that leave, like, ‘Bye,’” Wilson said at Seattle University, seemingly unaware that higher taxes will cause the wealthy to leave.

And they are, especially after Wilson urged a boycott of Starbucks. The company is now moving its operation south to Nashville.

And while none of this looks good for Wilson, things appear to only be getting worse.

“She can’t answer questions,” executive producer Keith Malinak says on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”

“There was a shooting near an event that she was at. Thankfully, she was not hit and wasn’t the target. And this reporter is asking her about that. But then he asks a follow-up question, like, ‘Hey, residents in this neighborhood would like some more surveillance and maybe some more patrols.’ And she couldn’t even answer that,” he continues, playing the clip.

“How do you feel after Tuesday, after what happened, what transpired?” the reporter asks Wilson.

“I’m doing great. You know, got a great team supporting me, and I’ll just say, you know, we don’t have any indication that that shooting was targeted or anything like that. So I think it’s a reminder of how much work we have to do as a city on gun violence, but I’m doing fine,” she responded.

“And the last question would be related to that. … I talked to … people in that community who are concerned that there’s been rising gun violence and that there should be more surveillance cameras and that kind of thing. That’s obviously been an issue that you weighed in on. Does that change your perspective at all?” the reporter asked.

“Let’s keep it on topic,” she responded.

“But does that change your perspective at all on the issue of surveillance cameras, based on what you went through on Tuesday?” he asked again, before she was pulled away by her political handlers, who claimed that the question was off topic.

BlazeTV host Pat Gray is shocked.

“The question was related to the shooting,” Gray says.

“That wasn’t a difficult question. What about more surveillance in the area, yes or no?” he continues.

“I got news for you, Miss Mayor, the questions only get harder from here,” Malinak adds.

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​Blaze media, Blaze news, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Blaze podcast network, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Blazetv host, Boycott, Gun violence, Katie wilson, Mayor katie wilson, Millionaires, Nashville, Pat gray, Pat gray unleashed, Political handlers, Progressive experiment, Seattle, Socialism, Starbucks, Surveillance, Tax, The blaze, Washington state, Wealthy residents 

President Donald Trump declared in February that in response to “tremendous” public interest, he was “directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).”

On Friday, pursuant to the president’s directive, the Pentagon — with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — released hundreds of declassified unidentified aerial phenomena files pertaining to “unresolved cases” where the “government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena.”

‘Provide the American people with maximum transparency.’

The Pentagon indicated that additional files will be released on a rolling basis.

“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said in a statement. “This release of declassified documents demonstrates the Trump administration’s earnest commitment to unprecedented transparency.”

The first tranche of documents, some of which date back to the first half of the 20th century, includes investigative records; witness testimonies from civilians, members of the American military, astronauts, and federal law enforcement officials; numerous military mission reports; government documents humoring the possibility of extraterrestrial life; and annotated news clippings regarding UAP.

The Pentagon also released numerous images of UAP, including a 1972 photograph from the Apollo 17 mission to the moon in which “three lights are visible above the lunar terrain”; a 2024 U.S. Indo-Pacific Command photo of an unexplained football-shaped UAP; and multiple FBI infrared images taken in December of an UFO over the Western United States.

RELATED: Speculation mounts over mysterious deaths and disappearances tied to US space and nuclear program

A witness account of a supposed UFO sighting in 1947. Pentagon.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is actively coordinating the Intelligence Community’s declassification efforts with the Department of War to ensure a careful, comprehensive, and unprecedented review of our holdings to provide the American people with maximum transparency,” stated Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. “Today’s release is the first in what will be an ongoing joint declassification and release effort.”

Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett (R) joined other lawmakers in celebrating the release of the files and thanked Trump for keeping his word. “This is a great start!” Burchett said.

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​Et, Extraterrestrials, Aliens, Pentagon, Department of war, Hegseth, Nasa, Fbi, Odni, Gabbard, Alien, Ufos, Unidentified flying objects, Uaps, Uap, Unidentified aerial phenomena, Trump, Trump administration, Politics 

A 12-year-old Florida girl is accused of threatening to “shoot up” an elementary school and threatening a teacher, the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office said.

Officials said Monday that detectives over the weekend responded to a Gaggle alert about an explicit written threat sent to a teacher at Louise S. McInnis Elementary School in DeLeon Springs, which is just under an hour north of Orlando.

‘I was still playing with Barbies at 12!! SMH!!’

Gaggle is a K-12 online safety management software that gives schools the ability to monitor student activity on school-provided devices for “concerning content.”

The sheriff’s office said that in addition to threatening the teacher, the sender said “they were going to shoot up the school on the last day.”

The sheriff’s office added that while the message “came from the student account of a 12-year-old boy, detectives determined it was sent by his 12-year-old ex-girlfriend who had his login information.”

The girl was charged with making written/electronic threats to kill and unlawful use of a two-way communications device, both felonies, the sheriff’s office said.

The sheriff’s office posted video of a deputy escorting the handcuffed girl from a sheriff’s office vehicle and perp-walking her into a holding cell. Blaze News is not naming the suspect or showing her face because of her age.

RELATED: 12-year-old Florida girl posts ‘detailed manifesto’ about conducting mass shooting at middle school over bullying: Cops

Image source: Volusia County (Fla.) Sheriff’s Office video screenshot

Commenters underneath the sheriff’s office post about the arrest seemed stunned by it, particularly in regard to the suspect’s age and dating status:

“Kids have ex-girlfriends at 12??” one commenter reacted.”I was still playing with Barbies at 12!! SMH!!” another user exclaimed.”12-year-old ex-girlfriend,” another commenter noted. “I can’t get past the 12-year-old ex-girlfriend!!!””12-year-olds are dating and breaking up?” another user wondered.”An ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend at 12???” another commenter declared. “I was still in my horse-crazy phase at 12 and couldn’t care less about boys.”

Other commenters pointed out the girl’s physical appearance as a concern:

“The usual suspect … the green hair gives it away,” one commenter stated.”Colored hair, check. Septum piercing, check. Stolen login, check,” another user observed. “Who could have seen this coming from a mile away? Glad they’re felony charges.”

Blaze News has reported extensively on similar arrests in Florida recently:

An 11-year-old boy who was arrested in March for making a death threat was charged with the same crime in October, officials said.Also in March, the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office arrested a 10-year-old boy and perp-walked him on camera after officials said he threatened to bring a gun to his elementary school and left a kill list in his classroom.In February, the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office said officers arrested a 12-year-old girl after she posted online a “detailed manifesto” about carrying out a mass shooting at a middle school due to bullying.Also in February, a pair of 15-year-olds were arrested after being accused of threatening to shoot up high schools, police said.In late October, an 11-year-old girl was arrested after writing a “kill list” at her desk at school, police said. Then just two weeks later, an 11-year-old boy from the same school district was arrested after allegedly creating a “kill list” at school, police said.Also in October, a Florida sheriff’s office came under fire for posting a 9-year-old male’s mug shot on Facebook after his felony arrest for allegedly bringing a knife into his elementary school.Just a week prior, that same sheriff’s office said a 10-year-old was arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill, a third-degree felony, after bringing a pocketknife to school and threatening another student. The sheriff’s office posted the suspect’s name and mug shot.

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​Crime thwarted, Florida, 12-year-old girl, Arrest, Shooting threat, Volusia county sheriff’s office, Making written or electronic threats to kill, Unlawful use of a 2-way communications device, Crime 

OpenAI confirmed it is doing roughly $2 billion a month in revenue as of April 2026, a $24 billion annualized run rate that would have been unthinkable just two years ago. Leaked internal projections suggest the company may burn as much as $17 billion in cash this year. Separate projections show it will still lose somewhere around $14 billion in 2026, even with revenue projected to climb past $28 billion.

The most valuable AI company on the planet, backed by Microsoft and basically every venture capitalist on earth, is running a cash burn rate that swallows most of what it brings in.

Here is what happens when the subsidy ends.

Anthropic is in the same boat. By early 2026, it hit a $30 billion annualized revenue run rate. And one analyst estimated the company is losing 200% to 3,000% of each customer’s subscription fee on power users of its Claude Code tool.

But the money keeps flowing anyway. Big Tech is on track to spend $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, up from about $400 billion the year before. Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world for a hot minute in June 2024. AI startups are raising at valuations that assume revenue will materialize out of thin air.

It will not. The gap between what is being spent and what is being earned was already $600 billion as of mid-2024, according to Sequoia Capital’s David Cahn, who started asking this question back in 2023. That was before capex roughly doubled. The actual gap today is almost certainly larger.

Something has to give.

The subscription lie

Anthropic wants $200 a month for the highest tier of Claude Max. That sounds absurd until you look at what a power user actually costs them.

The Decoder reported that Anthropic’s $200 Claude Code Max subscription can consume as much as $5,000 in compute per power user. Some analysts dispute the methodology and put the real cost closer to $500. Either way, Anthropic is subsidizing power users at scale.

OpenAI follows the same playbook with ChatGPT Plus at $20 a month and the $200 Pro plan, both priced to grab market share rather than make money on individual users.

This is the subscription lie. You are not paying for the product. You are getting a subsidized demo.

RELATED: A new phone hack can drain your bank account. Here’s the fix.

NanoStockk/Getty Images

The playbook itself is not new. Amazon lost money for nine years after its 1994 founding, and Bezos called it his “famously unprofitable company” in a 2000 BBC interview while the stock kept climbing. Uber racked up close to $30 billion in operating losses before its first annual profit in 2023 by subsidizing cheap rides with investor cash and then jacking up prices once it owned the market.

The playbook works until the funding dries up, and when it does, the bill always lands on the customer.

The corporate firing spree

Tech companies have shed tens of thousands of jobs in 2026, with Oracle cutting thousands, Amazon laying off 16,000, and Meta cutting about 8,000 roles in April, all to fund AI infrastructure. Salesforce’s CEO said AI agents replaced 4,000 customer support roles. Coinbase just announced that it is laying off 14% of its workforce to make way for AI “hubs.”

But will these companies actually save money in the long haul? Nvidia is one of the leading suppliers of AI-capable computing hardware, and Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia’s vice president of applied deep learning, told Axios that for his own team, “The cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees.”

Not only can compute cost more than a human being, but the AI’s outputs have to be checked.

Amazon just learned it the hard way. The company laid off tens of thousands of engineers, triggering WARN filings across four states as Amazon shifted resources to AI. Then in March 2026, the company’s own AI coding tool, Q, contributed to a production change that caused millions of lost orders.

Amazon SVP Dave Treadwell convened an emergency engineering meeting and instituted a 90-day code safety reset. Under the new rules, junior engineers must get senior sign-off on any AI-assisted changes, and internal memos called the problem “high blast radius changes” where AI-generated updates propagated too broadly.

You’re already paying for it

AI is more than just software. It is steel, copper, and megawatts. AI models take massive quantities of computing power and electricity to operate. The tokens you rent for $20 per month are cooked in billion-dollar data centers that did not exist five years ago, and the power bill is not being paid by venture capital alone.

The scale is enormous. The International Energy Agency estimates U.S. data centers consumed 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, tripling by 2035. And you’re eating the cost.

Residential electricity prices have jumped roughly 30% since 2020, rising at twice the rate of inflation, and the increases are worse in areas where data centers are going up. Near those data centers, wholesale electricity prices have climbed as much as 267% over the past five years, according to a Bloomberg analysis.

In Virginia, regulators approved a 2026 rate increase that will add roughly $16 per month to typical residential bills while assigning more grid upgrade costs to data center operators. The company projects that average residential bills could rise by roughly 50% by 2039. In Columbus, Ohio, residential rates have risen by about $7.90 per month in 2026.

In most places, you are paying for the power plants and transmission lines that feed the data centers, not the tech companies.

A few states are trying to fix this. Ohio regulators approved a landmark tariff for AEP Ohio that forces large data centers to pay minimum demand charges instead of dumping costs on all ratepayers. Texas passed legislation requiring large data centers to cover their own infrastructure costs or pay equitably. Virginia is looking at similar measures. Most states have not caught up.

In March, President Trump secured volunteer pledges from tech companies to pay their own electricity costs and build their own power plants, but it remains to be seen if those pledges will be honored.

The dependency trap

Here is what happens when the subsidy ends.

Your company fired the customer support team and rebuilt the workflow around AI agents. The headcount budget became the API credits budget. Junior developers who used to review code got replaced by Claude. Senior engineers who could catch the mistakes are gone.

Then OpenAI and Anthropic have to raise prices to actual cost. Maybe they triple the API rate. Maybe the $200 Pro plan becomes $800. Maybe the free tier vanishes overnight.

You cannot rehire the workers. They found other jobs, retired, or left the industry, and the knowledge walked out the door. Meanwhile, your CRM, your code pipeline, your customer onboarding flow, and your reporting dashboards are all built around API calls to someone else’s model.

Inside a Fortune 500, admitting the AI replacement was a mistake is politically impossible. The CTO who signed the deal is not standing up in a board meeting to say we should rehire 4,000 people because the math stopped working. The budget officer who cut the department and moved the money to AI subscriptions is not reversing that call. They will pay the tax forever.

Goldman Sachs’ Jim Covello put the question bluntly in mid-2024: “Generative AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”

Covello’s case was simple. AI is not built for the complicated problems that would justify the price tag. The cost is too high for the value delivered, and the payback is not coming soon.

He was right about the spend. What he underestimated was the dependency, because companies are not just buying AI but rebuilding their operations around it, firing the people who knew how work got done, and trapping themselves in a vendor relationship with suppliers losing billions every year.

That is the trap. AI has plenty of value, but the gap between spending and earning keeps widening, and the companies downstream are cutting off their own ability to walk away.

What survives

When the bubble pops, and it will, some things survive.

Local models running on consumer hardware are the hedge against the API tax. A single RTX 4090 can run large language models that required much more expensive hardware just a few years ago, and open source models from Alibaba, Google, and others give you a real alternative to renting access by the token.

Companies that bought their own hardware instead of renting from OpenAI will be in the strongest position.

Own your tools, your data, and your compute. If your entire business is an API call wrapped in someone else’s model, you do not own anything. You are a middleman with a logo, and the model providers can change pricing, terms, or availability whenever they want while you cannot do a thing about it.

The AI companies burning billions right now will need to recoup those losses eventually, which means higher prices and tighter terms for everyone downstream.

The real winners are not the model builders. Nvidia sells picks and shovels no matter who finds gold. Chipmakers and infrastructure providers come out ahead and so do the cloud giants with multiple revenue streams. They are selling to both sides of every bet.

The dot-com bubble wiped out trillions in investor wealth, and the telecom bust that followed destroyed even more. But the internet survived, and so did the fiber in the ground.

AI will survive too. The question is whether the companies currently valued at hundreds of billions of dollars will be the ones standing when the dust settles.

History suggests they will not. This time, the victims will not just be the VCs who placed the bets. It will be every company that traded payroll for a loss-leader API, fired the people who knew how work got done, and discovered too late that the exit ramp had been bulldozed behind them.

​Ai bubble, Openai, Anthropic, Nvidia, Tech 

Tennessee Democrats’ thin veneer of civility broke again, this time on Thursday amid state Republicans’ successful efforts to pass a new congressional map.

Radical lawmakers not only attempted to obstruct the democratic process — screaming, dancing, blowing bullhorns at Republican legislators, and getting combative — but cosplayed as opponents of racial prejudice, barking lines popularized during the civil rights movement and working in real time to spin their party’s likely diminution in power as the result of an imagined reversion to Jim Crow-style policies.

Quick background

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a hugely consequential 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais last week, striking down the Bayou State’s 2024 congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and making clear that redistricting should effectively be color-blind.

‘My brother ain’t doing nothing to nobody.’

Tennessee state Republicans wasted no time applying the logic of the high court’s ruling in their back yard with the aim — according to Republican Gov. Bill Lee — of ensuring that the Volunteer State’s congressional map “remains fair, legal, and defensible.”

After its easy passage by the GOP supermajority in the legislature, Lee signed a new congressional map into law on Thursday that will likely enable Republicans to secure all nine U.S. House seats in Tennessee.

The new map divides up the supposedly black-majority, Memphis-based 9th Congressional District represented by white Democrat Rep. Steve Cohen into three districts and also splits Nashville into five districts.

Cohen called it an “egregious result.”

The madhouse

As the Tennessee Senate voted on the map, Democrat state Sen. Charlane Oliver — the radical who threatened riots in 2024 over the passage of a bill she didn’t like — danced atop her desk in the chamber, yelling and holding up a banner that said, “No Jim Crow 2 Stop the Steal.”

Footage shared online by WTVF-TV’s Chris Davis appears to show Oliver fighting with the Senate sergeant at arms over control of her banner. After losing control of her banner, Oliver proceeded to stomp and sing on her desk while her peers voted to pass the bill, reported the Nashville Banner.

RELATED: Alito shreds Ketanji Brown Jackson’s unhinged dissent to SCOTUS’ demand that Louisiana immediately redistrict

During the voting process in the state House on Thursday, Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones — a Democrat who has previously evidenced a willingness to violate the legislature’s decorum rules and was caught on film throwing a traffic cone at a driver during a 2020 Black Lives Matter blockade — walked around blowing a bullhorn in the faces of lawmakers and staffers while holding up a sign that said, “We shall overcome.”

Jones also set on fire a printout of the Confederate flag and repeatedly accused Republicans of racism, calling them the “white sheet caucus.”

Rep. Justin Pearson (D), who like Jones was briefly expelled from the Tennessee House of Representatives in 2023 for staging a disruptive protest on the House floor, lashed out at members of law enforcement who were working feverishly to keep the peace.

After state House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R) asked that the gallery be cleared, Tennessee Highway Patrol began ushering radicals out. Some, including Pearson’s brother KeShaun, apparently refused to leave, reported WKRN-TV.

The prospect that his brother might face consequences for his actions evidently enraged Rep. Pearson, who yelled at THP troopers as they were executing their duties — calling one trooper a “stupid motherf**ker” and “boy” — and attempted to interfere with his brother’s apparent arrest, which Pearson later suggested “is what white supremacy does.”

“My brother ain’t doing nothing to nobody. Hey, hey, he’ll walk out by himself. Move the f**k back!” said Pearson.

THP Lt. Bill Miller told WKRN in a statement, “During today’s hearing, three individuals in attendance began disrupting the session of the House of Representatives. After repeated warnings, three individuals were taken into custody inside the gallery of the Capitol for suspected violation of TCA 39-17-306 (Disturbing an Official Meeting). The individuals were transported to the Davidson County jail for booking.”

Democrats’ theatrics were all for naught, as this is Tennessee’s new congressional map:

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​Civil rights movement, Gov bill lee, Louisiana v callais, Tennessee, Tennessee house of representatives, Us supreme court, Tennessee highway patrol, Racist, Leftist, Democrat, Justin pearson, Justin jones, Gerrymander, Redistricting, Radicalism, Politics 

Virginia voted last month in favor of a referendum to adopt a gerrymandered congressional map that would all but guarantee that 10 out of the state’s 11 congressional seats go to Democrats in the upcoming midterm election.

Democrats — who blew over $60 million on this redistricting effort — were evidently premature in their celebrations.

‘Justice has been served.’

To the likely chagrin of former President Barack Obama, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, and other Democrats who championed the gerrymandering initiative, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled on Friday that “the legislative process employed to advance this proposal violated Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia.”

In its Friday ruling in Scott v. McDougle, the state’s high court echoed the conclusions previously drawn by Jack Hurley Jr., the Tazewell County Circuit judge who initially heard the legal challenge advanced by Virginia state Sen. Ryan McDougle (R) and others.

The Virginia Supreme Court noted that the result of the vote was immaterial with regard to the analytics of its “judicial review of the constitutionality of the pre-election constitutional-amendment process” and underscored that the “Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement in Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia.”

This violation, according to the court, “irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void.”

RELATED: ‘Not backing down’: Top Virginia Democrat remains defiant after FBI and SWAT raid her office and marijuana dispensary

Billy Schuerman/The Virginian-Pilot/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

As a result of the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling, the 2021-era congressional maps will serve as the governing maps for the upcoming midterm elections.

The Virginia GOP said in response to the ruling, “Today, the Supreme Court of Virginia correctly ruled that Democrats violated the Virginia Constitution in ramming through their partisan gerrymandering power grab. Democrats thought that following the rules was optional. They were wrong. This process was corrupt from the very beginning, and now the court has corrected this injustice.”

Former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), one of the most outspoken critics of the Democratic gerrymandering campaign, stated, “Justice has been served.”

“Abigail Spanberger and Democrats in Richmond knowingly violated our constitution to disenfranchise millions of Virginians,” continued Youngkin. “The Constitution prevailed, and Virginians will never forget this unlawful attempt to rob them of their voice in Congress.”

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​Virginia, Gerrymandering, Supreme court, Spanberger, Politics 

A cruise ship is at the center of a deadly hantavirus outbreak after three of the ship’s passengers have died. Five more are believed to be infected with a rare strain of the disease that can be transmitted from person to person — though the disease is usually passed through rat urine, saliva, or feces.

BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere points out that a cruise ship is “already the least healthy environment possible” and isn’t surprised it’s where the disease manifested.

“You’re quarantined on a ship, and you have a pass for nonstop, unlimited food and drink at any time,” he tells co-host Dave Landau, who points out that there’s also a communal pool.

“This is where all the diseases manifest themselves, in that water that everyone’s sharing,” Stu says.

“Thirty-five percent death rate if you catch this thing. So really, really bad. A little higher than COVID,” he continues. “That’s how they made you feel about COVID. You watch the news, you thought it was a 35% death rate, but it was not.”

“You really only died if you were 90 in a nursing home, and then they filled it with gang members and people that had it,” Landau says.

“Oh, you mean the exact proposal by Andrew Cuomo during this period?” Stu laughs.

“That’s correct,” Landau says.

“Now, what do you do with this ship, Dave? Because if this stuff is being passed around, you can’t really let it to shore. These people are just out there in a petri dish,” Stu says.

“Well, I think we have to do the right thing,” Landau says, joking, “and have the Joker blow it up.”

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​Blaze media, Blaze news, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Blaze podcast network, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Cruise ship outbreak, Dave landau, Deadly outbreak, Feces transmission, Hantavirus disease, Person to person, Quarantined ship, Rare strain, Rat urine transmission, Saliva transmission, Stu and dave do america, Stu burguiere, The blaze, Unhealthy environment, Covid comparison, Covid-19 

Mother’s Day has a way of sneaking up on people. One minute it’s April; the next, you’re rummaging through a half-empty scented candle shelf in CVS wondering whether “Tuscan Sunset” or “Nantucket Rain” better expresses your appreciation for the woman who gave you life.

Fortunately, the best last-minute Mother’s Day gifts often are not things at all.

Experience gifts also have the advantage of arriving instantly via email. Even if you’re down to the wire, they are still thoughtful because they require planning and shared time.

In fact, depending on your mother’s age, the last thing she may want is more stuff. Many parents eventually reach a stage of life when they are actively trying to simplify, downsize, declutter, or quietly distribute decades of accumulated possessions.

What they often appreciate more are gifts involving time, competence, memory, thoughtfulness, or shared experience.

A carefully planned lunch. A framed family photograph. Help organizing old pictures. Tickets for something months away. A promise to finally fix the technology problems everyone else in the family avoids.

The best gifts from adult children acknowledge a simple reality: Eventually, your role in your parents’ lives shifts. At a certain point, being helpful, attentive, and present matters more than buying another object that winds up in a closet.

Here are 10 last-minute Mother’s Day gifts that are still personal.

1. ‘Coupons’ but for tech support

Every mother has probably received a homemade coupon book at some point. Usually it promised things like “one free hug” or “breakfast in bed.”

Harder to pull this off as an adult — unless you offer something actually helpful.

Many parents quietly live with low-level technological chaos: three different remotes, passwords scattered across sticky notes, thousands of family photos somewhere in the cloud but nowhere anyone can actually find them.

Here’s where you come in. Some sample “offers”:

“I will finally fix the printer situation.”“I’ll set up your streaming passwords properly.”“I’ll organize all the family photos.”“I’ll clean up your phone storage.”

And if you’re not so tech-capable yourself, you can always hire someone to do it for you.

Of course, there’s no need to limit yourself to digital chores. Maybe there are some old paint cans that have been sitting on the side of the house for a decade, or maybe an unused garden bed needs to be brought back to life.

Yes, these gifts are more practical then sentimental, and that’s the point. Children eventually become useful — what better day to acknowledge this than Mother’s Day?

2. Tickets for some future event

One reason many last-minute gifts feel hollow is that they lack intentionality. A future event instantly solves that problem.

The key is specificity: not “We should go to a concert sometime,” but “I bought tickets for June 14.”

Experience gifts also have the advantage of arriving instantly via email. Even if you’re down to the wire, they are still thoughtful because they require planning and shared time.

These could be tickets to a concert, baseball game, or theater production; a botanical garden membership; enrollment in a cooking class; or reservations for afternoon tea.

In many cases, the anticipation becomes part of the gift itself.

3. A real letter

Not a text. Not a greeting card with two rushed sentences crammed beneath someone else’s poetry. An actual letter.

For many mothers, especially those with adult children, this may be more meaningful than almost any purchased object.

You don’t need to make it overly sentimental. In fact, it’s often better if it’s specific and grounded.

Memories you still think about.Things you understand now that you didn’t as a child.Family traditions you appreciate more with age.Sacrifices you failed to notice at the time.Funny stories only the two of you remember.

One advantage of getting older is realizing that ordinary family moments were not ordinary at all.

Print the letter and put it in an envelope. Include an old photograph if possible. Physical objects still matter.

4. Plans you made yourself

Many family gatherings supposedly “for Mom” still require mothers to organize them.

This year, remove her from the logistics entirely. Pick the restaurant. Coordinate schedules. Make the reservation. Handle transportation if necessary. Inform everyone where to be and when. The competence is part of the gift!

And it doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive. A carefully planned brunch at home can be more thoughtful than an overcrowded prix-fixe restaurant meal booked in a panic.

The important thing is that she experiences the day rather than managing it.

5. A family ‘podcast’ recording

One of the strangest things about adulthood is realizing how many stories you never asked your parents about.

How did they meet? What was their first apartment like? What do they remember about their own parents? What did family holidays look like when they were children?

A surprisingly meaningful Mother’s Day gift is simply deciding to record these stories before they disappear. The good news is that this requires almost no technology. An iPhone on the kitchen table is enough.

You could record a conversation with just your mother or both parents together. Gather siblings or grandparents, or even create a recurring “family podcast.”

The point is not production quality. In fact, part of the charm is hearing ordinary interruptions: laughter, people talking over each other, someone making coffee in the background.

Years from now, those details may matter as much as the stories themselves.

6. A portrait sitting

It may sound extravagant or old-fashioned, but commissioning a portrait — even a relatively simple charcoal sketch or watercolor — has become surprisingly accessible.

And unlike most gifts, it creates both an experience and an heirloom.

Some artists now work from photographs with quick turnaround digital commissions, while others offer live sittings that can be scheduled for later in the summer. The point is not necessarily museum-quality realism. In many cases, the charm comes from the act itself: setting aside time to sit still and be looked at carefully.

For mothers especially, who are often the family member behind the camera rather than in front of it, a portrait can be unexpectedly personal.

Even if the finished work arrives later, the commission itself can be given immediately — and is far more thoughtful than another last-minute gift basket.

7. A framed family photo

Most families now possess thousands of photos, and almost none of them exist anywhere outside a phone.

That’s why one of the best last-minute Mother’s Day gifts is often simply turning digital memories into physical objects again.

The easiest version is also one of the most effective: pick a genuinely good family photo, print it properly, and frame it.

You don’t need to wait for shipping, either. Places like FedEx Office, CVS, and Walgreens offer same-day photo printing at many locations. A thoughtfully chosen black-and-white candid photo in a simple frame will usually mean more than a generic store-bought decoration.

If you have slightly more time, photo books have become remarkably easy to make online. Services like Shutterfly, Mixbook, and Artifact Uprising let you assemble albums in an evening using photos already sitting on your phone.

The key is curation. Don’t dump 300 random images into a template. Pick a theme: vacations, grandchildren, pets. One thoughtfully assembled album often becomes something people revisit for years.

RELATED: Chuck Norris: Martial arts legend who submitted to a mother’s prayers

Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images

8. A fresh citrus subscription

Subscription gifts often fail because they seem generic — another monthly box filled with novelty snacks or products nobody would have purchased voluntarily.

The better approach is much simpler: Think about what your mother already genuinely enjoys eating or drinking, then find the best recurring version of it.

For some mothers, that might mean coffee from a favorite local roaster. For others it could be cheese or good olive oil.

The key is matching the gift to her actual habits rather than your idea of what a “gift” should look like.

Importantly, a subscription gift does not need to physically arrive on Mother’s Day itself in order to be thoughtful. In some ways, the delayed arrival is part of the appeal. Instead of a single rushed delivery, the gift becomes something she can look forward to weeks later.

One especially good option for citrus lovers is Marmalade Grove, a California citrus farm that ships seasonal fruit boxes directly to customers. A surprising number of people have never tasted truly fresh citrus picked close to ripeness, and the difference can be dramatic.

9. One excellent thing she would never buy herself

Last-minute shopping becomes much easier once you stop trying to find the “perfect” gift and instead follow a simpler rule: Buy one genuinely excellent version of something she already uses.

Not flashy luxury, but just an upgraded everyday object she would appreciate but probably never purchase for herself: exceptionally soft pajamas, a high-quality chef’s knife, beautiful garden shears, quality stationery.

Bonus: This often lends itself to a last-minute stop at a local business, whether it’s a gardening store, a paper store, or a kitchen goods supplier.

10. A gift in her name

Donating to charity “in someone’s name” can sometimes seem impersonal — the sort of thing corporations do instead of buying Christmas gifts.

But done thoughtfully, it can also be deeply meaningful. The key is specificity and personal connection.

Instead of donating to a massive abstract nonprofit, think about the causes, institutions, or traditions your mother genuinely cares about: a local pregnancy center, a veterans’ organization, local food banks, missionary work.

For religious families, one especially meaningful option is arranging a Mass intention or prayer offering on her behalf.

Like many of the best last-minute gifts, the point is not the amount of money involved. For many mothers — especially religious mothers — one of the greatest satisfactions is seeing their children carry forward the values they tried to instill in them.

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For years, the public has been sold a false narrative: Children who experience gender distress must be affirmed — socially, hormonally, and even surgically — or they will suffer devastating mental health consequences.

However, now that some time has passed, the data shows a very different picture.

The treatments being presented as lifesaving are not addressing the pain and root problem whatsoever.

A large-scale Finnish study tracking young people referred for gender dysphoria found that the primary driver of poor mental health outcomes was not gender identity itself, but underlying psychiatric conditions.

Even more unsettling, medical interventions such as hormones and surgeries did not demonstrate a clear reduction of suicide risk.

In other words, the treatments being presented as lifesaving are not addressing the pain and root problem whatsoever. The current model of treating gender-confused youth is not delivering on its promises.

When I was a teenager, I was subjected to coercion to “become” a boy because my doctors and counselors peddled this as the solution to all of my problems. Turns out, it wasn’t.

I vividly remember walking into many doctors’ and therapists’ offices. I was depressed, had an eating disorder, and grew up in a tumultuous environment as a kid. That combination is usually a recipe for disaster. The root cause wasn’t that I was trans; it was that I had been through several traumatic experiences that no teenager or adolescent should face.

I am a detransitioner, meaning I am someone who went through the processes of “gender-affirming care” and have now reverted to identifying with my biological sex — a woman.

My experience is just one of many. Several of my friends and peers have experienced the same coercion and pressure to “accept” that they are another sex.

The Finnish study is not alone, however. It also aligns with another study done in the U.K., which found that the evidence for pediatric gender medicine is “remarkably weak” and that young patients often present with complex mental health needs requiring comprehensive psychological care, not surgical mutilation.

Together, these studies show a clear picture: The way that we currently handle this issue is completely wrong.

Children who present with distress, a rough home life, and being chronically online are often put on a conveyor belt of social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries.

Even more outrageous is that some of these can get approved in a doctor’s office without the consent of a parent or guardian. To do this behind parents’ backs and to encourage secrecy surrounding their social transition should be a crime.

RELATED: DEI went into hiding — but remains as dangerous as ever

Carl Lokko/Getty Images

The result of these practices has been disastrous for trust in our institutions, our health care system, and our school districts. Escalating these so-called treatments only further amplifies their harmful effects.

Hormonal interventions affect bone density, fertility, and long-term endocrine function. Surgical interventions are irreversible. These are serious medical decisions being made for patients who are, by definition, still developing.

My fight for justice is not simply about my own experience, although I have been through hell and back. It is fundamentally a question of ethics in medicine that the legal system must answer.

The evidence is stacking up against the false narrative that trans surgeries equate to lifesaving care. Children placed on this path often do not and will not fully understand its consequences until years later. By then, the damage has already been done.

Without action in every state, every medical institution, and every governing body, there will be continued pressure to worship an ideology with no scientific backing. The data is no longer in question. The evidence is settled. I believe the consensus is clear: We must end this abominable practice immediately.

​Gender dysphoria, Puberty blockers, Trans surgeries, Biological sex, Trans agenda, Gender ideology, Identity crisis, Detransitioner, Opinion & analysis 

Democrat James Talarico wasn’t always a politician.

When he was 21 years old, he was a sixth-grade teacher — and considering the comments he has made about transgender children in the past, BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales believes it’s worth digging into.

Gonzales found an old Facebook page dedicated to “Mr. Talarico,” where his 11- and 12-year-old students could gather to ask questions.

“This is already weird to me, in my opinion, to create a Facebook page for your students, because they’re 11. They shouldn’t be on Facebook,” Gonzales says.

But it gets worse.

“James Talarico frequently encouraged his young sixth-grade students to call his cell phone if they have any questions,” Gonzales explains, pulling up an old post from 2012.

“Read Chapter 11 in Hunger Games this weekend. Activity 2.11 is due on Monday. Call my cell or comment on this post if you have any questions,” Talarico’s post reads.

“How was he able to keep his employment doing this publicly?” Gonzales asks, pointing out that he even left his personal phone number on some posts.

“I’m just interested in asking what the hell was going on at that school, in that class, where Mr. Talarico is inviting 11- and 12-year-olds to call him on the phone,” she says, pointing out that in any other situation, his behavior would be a “red flag.”

“At worst, it is predatory behavior. At best, it is horrible judgment and horrible boundaries with young children,” she adds.

In another post on his Facebook page, Talarico wrote, “Looking forward to spending my birthday with the 6th grade boys at UT tomorrow!”

“Is that normal for a 21-year-old male? Gonzales asks. “Is that normal for a 21-year-old male to post on Facebook?”

“That is weird,” she adds.

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.

​Democrat james talarico, James talarico, Predatory behavior, Sara gonzales, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Transgender children, Red flag, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Come and take it, Come and take it with sara gonzales 

Louisiana police say that an alert police officer realized something was off with a girl who was found in a car belonging to a man accused of public urination.

The harrowing incident unfolded on Saturday when officers of the St. Gabriel Police Department made contact with a 39-year-old man identified as Lionel Moore.

Moore was convicted in 2005 of indecent behavior with juveniles in Iberville Parish but failed to register as a sex offender several times.

St. Gabriel Police Chief Kevin Ambeau said officers found that Moore had warrants out of East Baton Rouge for failure to register as a sex offender after checking his driver’s license.

Then one officer made eye contact with the girl in his car and grew suspicious.

“Captain on the scene noticed her characteristics. She was dressed older than she was, at 17,” Ambeau said.

She also gave him different birth dates that did match her age. The teenager then confessed to have been with Moore for nearly three years.

Police determined that the girl had been reported missing by her mother in 2024.

“My captain was able to get the mom’s number, and we contacted the mom, who had moved out of state,” Ambeau added.

Police called on the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services to help with the teenager.

Moore was convicted in 2005 of indecent behavior with juveniles in Iberville Parish but failed to register as a sex offender several times. He was taken into custody over the felony warrant.

RELATED: 16-year-old girl disappeared from Tennessee hotel — and was found hundreds of miles away with man she met online, cops say

Ambeau said they are now trying to determine if the teenager was being forced into sex trafficking. They are utilizing facial recognition technology on images from police body cameras and searching for her on sex trafficking sites.

“I been here all my life, and I’m 62 years old, and I ain’t never of heard of nothing like this,” said Jeffery Ben, a resident of St. Gabriel. “That’s bad.”

St. Gabriel is a city of about 6,677 residents in southern central Louisiana.

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​Public urinator had missing girl, Girl missing for 3 years, Sex offender found with missing girl, Louisiana missing teenager, Crime 

The Trump administration refused to allow FISA Section 702 to lapse for even one day, calling it a vital tool for counterterrorism. However, when it comes to ensuring Immigration and Customs Enforcement has the necessary tools to remove alien criminals without enduring endless lawfare by sanctuary judges, there seems to be no such reservation.

Simply throwing more money at ICE in the budget reconciliation bill without changing policy will not alter the current landscape of failed deportation promises.

Trump has won numerous cases from the Supreme Court on issues pertaining to due process, detention, and bond hearings, yet the lower courts continue to defy those rulings.

On the same day House Republicans, at the behest of the White House, rushed passage of the FISA reauthorization, they passed the Senate budget reconciliation bill, which offers ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection $75 billion in mandatory funding for the remainder of the presidency.

It is understandable why Trump would want to use his last party-line bill to front-load ICE funding in the face of Democrat opposition, but what is the purpose of funding ICE if it can’t even deport violent illegal aliens without lawfare? Why is the White House opposing efforts from House conservatives to expand reconciliation?

Sadly, the Trump administration has signaled that it is largely done with mass deportations and seeks to focus on what it refers to as “the worst of the worst.” So we will certainly remove all of the criminal aliens before his term expires, right?

Wrong!

Bryan Rafael Gomez, a Dominican illegal alien who was released into the country in 2022, was arrested by ICE Boston on April 4, following a warrant for murder charges in his home country. Yet Judge Melissa DuBose, a radical Biden appointee, ordered him released and claimed his detention was unlawful.

Cases like this one are occurring on a daily basis, and despite the unambiguous language of statute and endless Supreme Court victories stating that ICE is permitted or even required to apprehend, detain, and remove these people, radical lower court judges just come back with slightly different plaintiffs and rule the same way.

As of February, illegal aliens have filed more than 18,000 habeas petitions during Trump’s second term challenging their detention in federal courts. It’s more than the number of such challenges filed over the last three administrations put together.

What these filings are designed to do is remove cases from immigration courts and bring them into Article III courts where American rights are often erroneously applied to people litigating their way into status after final removal orders.

RELATED: The founders gave us the remedy for rogue state judges: Impeach

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The entire purpose of a habeas petition was to give people a safety valve if they have a prima facie claim of being a citizen or a case of mistaken identity. But illegal aliens are now using habeas to block every removal, no matter how clear it is that the person is here illegally and even when they have a criminal record.

Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge John deGravelles granted habeas petitions and ordered the immediate release of four illegal aliens from ICE custody at Louisiana State Penitentiary, despite final removal orders. Who were the cast of characters?

Ibrahim Ali Mohamed (Ethiopia): Convicted of sexual exploitation of a minor (child sex crime/pedophilia). Entered/released into the U.S. under Biden policies; removed order issued September 2024. Luis Gaston-Sanchez (Cuba): Convictions for homicide, assault, resisting an officer, concealing stolen property, and two counts of robbery. Removed order from 2001.Ricardo Blanco Chomat (Cuba): Convictions for homicide, kidnapping, aggravated assault with a firearm, burglary, robbery, larceny, and selling cocaine. Removed order from 2002.Francisco Rodriguez-Romero: Convictions for homicide and a weapons offense. Removed order from 1995.

Three months later, these individuals, with convictions of rape, murder, assault, and robbery, remain in the country indefinitely.

In March, U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson ordered the release of Carlos Antonio Flores-Miguel, a confirmed MS-13 gang member, from ICE custody. He had multiple illegal re-entries/deportations and was initially released into the U.S. under Biden policies in 2022.

ICE arrested him in Minneapolis on January 20, after he violently resisted (punching/kicking officers and grabbing an ICE officer’s gun holster).

Trump cannot spend the remainder of his term counting the number of the worst of the worst being deported on one hand, and even having many of those deportations hampered.

The time has come to use budget reconciliation to defund any federal court case granting a habeas petition to illegal aliens unless there is a claim the individual is a citizen or of mistaken identity. Why has Trump never supported Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy’s effort to include this in reconciliation?

RELATED: How Republicans have failed to defund sanctuary cities for a generation

J. David Ake/Getty Images

To the extent this provision was ignored in last year’s bill, it is indefensible not to include it in this year’s bill now that we see deportations being ground to a halt.

Even if Trump or congressional Republicans are squeamish about applying this to every case, at a minimum they must block review of cases involving criminal aliens — at least for lower courts.

The notion that we can rely on the Supreme Court is absurd. Trump has won numerous cases from the Supreme Court on issues pertaining to due process, detention, and bond hearings, yet the lower courts continue to defy those rulings.

Years after the Trump v. Hawaii ruling made it clear the president can suspend immigration and visas from various countries, a new lower court judge issued an injunction against it. The same thing is happening with judges granting Temporary Protected Status despite Supreme Court rulings to the contrary.

So far, in neither Trump term has there been an effort from the White House to use reconciliation or any other must-pass bill to defund sanctuary cities, change any immigration laws, or jurisdiction-strip the courts.

These are all fiscal provisions that should be included in reconciliation. What is the point in throwing funding at ICE if it is legally hampered and the White House continues to abide by lawless lower court orders?

Then again, as we saw with FISA reauthorization, Trump seems to fight for what he wants. Perhaps if conservatives reallocated the defunded monies from sanctuary cities and judges to an ICE ballroom, it would get the attention of the man who promised 10 years ago to end illegal immigration.

​Counterterrorism, Democrat judges, House republicans, Ice funding, Illegal aliens, Illegal immigration, Immigration laws, Lower courts, Mass deportations, Sanctuary cities, Supreme court rulings, Trump administration, White house, Budget reconciliation, Chip roy, Trump, Opinion & analysis 

Reality TV star Spencer Pratt demolished his Democratic competition in a combative debate Wednesday evening in the Los Angeles mayoral debate.

Pratt went after Nithya Raman, who is aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America, after she tried to claim success in her efforts to ease the homelessness crisis as a city councilwoman.

‘I blame this person for burning my house and my parents’ house and my town and all my neighbors down.’

Pratt brutally mocked the “Inside Safe” program touted by Raman during the debate.

“First off, Inside Safe, I like to say Inside Safe makes all of us outside, unsafe,” Pratt joked.

“The reality is, no matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth,” Pratt added. “They are on fentanyl. The DEA statistic says 93% of this is a drug addiction problem. I will go below the Harbor Freeway tomorrow with [Raman] and we can find some of these people she’s going to offer treatment for. She’s going to get stabbed in the neck!”

Pratt also went on the attack against incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass, whose incompetence allegedly led to his house being burned down in the Pacific Palisades fires. Raman accused Bass and Pratt of working together to elbow her out of the race.

“First off, Mayor Bass and I are definitely not working together,” Pratt responded, to which Bass replied by laughing.

“I blame this person for burning my house and my parents’ house and my town and all my neighbors’ down,” Pratt jabbed.

He slammed both Bass and Raman of perpetuating the same old leftist policies that had led to a severe decline in living standards in Los Angeles.

Pratt appears to be making inroads despite running as a Republican with an electorate overwhelmingly identifying as Democrat. One report found that he had been able to raise more campaign funds than either of his competitors.

RELATED: This underdog candidate’s app will expose the politicians to blame for LA’s shocking filth

Raman had previously been compared to the socialist upstart Zohran Mamdani, who pulled an upset victory to gain the New York City mayor’s office. After a stammering incompetent appearance on the debate stage, Raman’s campaign is facing heavy criticism.

“What really surprised me is how rough of a night Nithya Raman had,” Dustin Gardiner of Politico said to KNBC-TV. “She was struggling with some of her answers. The moderators were struggling to get her to answer some of the yes and no questions.”

Gardiner said people believing Pratt would “faceplant” in his first political debate were wrong.

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Philadelphia police said a male confronted a woman in a store last month, spit on her, physically attacked her, and caused injuries to her — and the brutal beatdown was recorded on surveillance video.

Police said the assault took place around 11 p.m. April 22 in the 4000 block of Market Street in the University City neighborhood.

‘He has no heart, no heart.’

Police said after the confrontation, the argument between the two escalated, and the male spit on the woman and repeatedly punched her in the face before knocking her to the floor of the store.

Police said the woman suffered several injuries due to the attack.

The male left the store in an unknown direction, police said.

RELATED: Gang of juvenile males chase college student into dorm, physically attack victim, go on rampage. It all happens around 3 a.m.

“Oh no, my God, oh, I’m so hurt to see it,” Linda Lofton of West Philadelphia said in an interview with WXTF-TV. “He has no heart, no heart, and everyone has a mother [or a] sister [or an] aunt. … Oh, it’s horrible.”

Rasheedah of South Philadelphia added to the station, “Why these men gotta attack women? There’s other ways to resolve conflict. It’s just so sad to see.”

Police added to WXTF that the victim has been connected with victim assistance and advocacy services.

“I’m quite sure she’s traumatized by what happened, so hopefully she’ll get the help that she needs,” Rasheedah added to the station.

Police said if you see the suspect, do not approach — instead call 911 immediately. To submit a tip via telephone, dial 215-686-TIPS (8477). Police said community members can use this electronic form to submit tips anonymously and that all tips will be confidential.

Police also said those with any information about this crime or suspect can contact the Southwest Detective Division at 215-686-3183/3184.

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​Physical attack, Assault, Philadelphia, Male beats up female, Police, Suspect at large, Store, Spit, Crime 

The attempted carjacking of a family in Texas was perpetrated by a man not legally in the U.S., according to Garland Police.

Video shows 30-year-old Jose Ramirez calmly walking up to the white sedan on Sunday and beginning a struggle with a father in an attempt to steal his car, as Blaze News previously reported.

‘You could definitely tell that he was not in his right state of mind.’

Ramirez crashed his car into two vehicles and then tried to steal several other cars in a parking lot in Garland before spotting the family’s sedan, according to police.

The father of the family got into an altercation with Ramirez, who was able to get into the driver’s seat as some of the family members ran from the vehicle.

The father was able to shoot Ramirez from outside the car through the passenger’s side. Ramirez was transported to a hospital, where he later died.

Police later identified the man as a Mexican national who was not a resident of Garland.

They also said the father was not likely to be charged because he appeared to shoot the man in self-defense.

A witness named Tatiana Starks pulled out her cell phone and was able to record Ramirez before he walked toward her on the way to the family’s car.

Videos of the altercation were widely circulated online.

RELATED: Democrat stunned to find criminal past of teen who allegedly carjacked her: ‘Shocked me to my core’

“You could definitely tell that he was not in his right state of mind,” said Starks, who worked at a smoke shop near the incident. “I’m just glad that the man was able to protect himself and his family.”

Police said the father who shot Ramirez cooperated with their investigation.

“It’s just a blessing that the kids and the family walked away with no injuries,” Starks added.

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