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A viral “alien disclosure” scandal has been rocking Christian circles after a group of charismatic pastors claimed the government held a secret meeting warning religious leaders about impending UFO revelations involving a fake rapture and a massive deception.

“There’s groups of people meeting to talk about their beliefs about aliens or the government, that’s not new at all. That’s been going on for quite a long time. But the idea that government officials were there and that they were informing these pastors so that the pastors could help the people because the government was about to tell us stuff that was so wild,” Bible teacher Mike Winger tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey.

“They absolutely misled the people into thinking that they had some sort of government-approved inside information, and it was just smoke and mirrors, the whole thing,” he explains.

However, they were actually just meeting with “private Christians who they say are intelligence operators.”

“They like to use that phrase, but they don’t actually work for any government agency or any sort of government at all,” he says.

Rather, these Christians actually just have “theories based upon publicly accessible information.”

“It’s all been declassified info for years. And they just go and they try to put it together in a way that they think tells a story that they believe is true. And the story they believe is true, interestingly enough, is that the government’s going to affirm aliens do exist,” Winger says.

“And they’re going to couple this with propaganda from the government itself to say Christianity is false,” he says, noting that one man in attendance claimed that “there will soon be an alien in the sky who will be a false Jesus, and there’ll be a false rapture event, and they’re going to use this to deceive Christians around the world.”

“These are kooks. These men are kooks,” he continues.

“They try to position themselves as ‘the government has informed us of what’s really coming guys, you need to listen to us, we will be your guides, we’ll be your thought leaders through this turbulent time of disclosure,’” he explains.

“And I was like, this is going to hurt a lot of people,” he continues, adding, “They should not be our thought leaders.”

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​Relatable with allie beth stuckey, Allie beth stuckey, Mike winger, The bible, Ufos, Alien, Christianity, Rapture, Disclosure, Relatable 

Democratic socialist and anti-Zionist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has become the first New York City mayor to boycott the Israel Day Parade since its creation in 1964.

At a security briefing on Thursday for the then-upcoming parade, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, alongside Mamdani, shared details on the security measures that would be implemented in order to ensure the safety of all attendees.

‘I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that the mayor of New York City, a city that has the largest Jewish population outside of the state of Israel, chose not to be here.’

“This Sunday, New Yorkers will see the most extensive security plan that the NYPD has ever put together for the Salute to Israel Parade, including the largest number of officers ever assigned to that detail. Included in that security plan will be the most heavy weapons teams ever, robust camera coverage of the area, and comprehensive screening of everyone entering the parade route including spectators, vendors, participants, and the press,” Tisch said.

Despite the commissioner’s plans to march “proudly” as the honorary grand marshal, Mamdani, when asked his response to critics who say that he can still attend the parade to support Jewish New Yorkers without directly supporting the current Israeli government, replied: “I said on the campaign trail that I wouldn’t be attending the parade, and I’ve made my views on the Israeli government abundantly clear.”

He also said: “I take seriously my responsibility to protect the safety and well-being of every New Yorker and every event, regardless of my attendance.”

The Israel Day Parade, formally called the Israel Day on Fifth, is the largest gathering in support of Israel in the world. It has been held annually in New York City for the past 61 years, with every mayor from Robert F. Wagner Jr. to Eric Adams having marched in it during their time in office. The parade consistently attracts tens of thousands of participants and spectators every year.

The event is also profoundly pro-American, with this year’s theme of “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists” visible in the sea of American and Israeli flags down Fifth Avenue.

Mamdani’s decision comes at a frightening time for Jewish New Yorkers. For the month of April, anti-Semitic hate crimes made up 60% of all reported incidents in the city, while numerous anti-Israel demonstrations — many of which Mamdani has supported — have been held outside synagogues and Jewish institutions.

However, it isn’t as though skipping out on a cultural celebration is a norm for Mamdani. The mayor was in attendance at this year’s St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, during which he compared historical Irish suffering to the “genocide” of Palestinians.

In March, Mamdani attended the Lunar New Year Parade with New York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul. Last year, he appeared at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, India Day Parade, and Pakistan Independence Day Parade.

RELATED: Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accuses NYC Mayor Mamdani of anti-Semitism after his first day in office

kena betancur/AFP/Getty Images

Mamdani also became the first mayor in the city’s history to address an International Workers’ Day rally, also known as May Day, on May 1.

Notable officials and figures who marched in the Israel parade on Sunday include Gov. Hochul, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), former Mayors Eric Adams (D) and Michael Bloomberg (D), Nassau County executive and Republican nominee for governor Bruce Blakeman, and Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, among many others.

“I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that the mayor of New York City, a city that has the largest Jewish population outside of the state of Israel, chose not to be here,” said Lawler, who has been a vocal critic of Mamdani and his administration.

Adams uploaded a video to his official Instagram account Friday publicly announcing his excitement for the parade: “As your mayor, I was proud to march in this parade for all four years I was in office, and this year will be no different. I’ll be right there, marching with tens of thousands of New Yorkers.”

The CEO of the prominent Jewish organization UJA Federation of New York, Eric Goldstein, blasted Mamdani in an open letter Friday.

“You are the first mayor in the history of New York City — home to the largest Jewish diaspora community in the world — to refuse to participate in this parade because you fundamentally reject Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”

Goldstein claims Mamdani’s “refusal to participate this Sunday is not principally grounded in criticism of a particular Israeli government or policy” but rather rooted in a “refusal to acknowledge the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.”

“Your absence — and what it represents — will be long-remembered.”

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The cost of doing business today may be higher than ever, even if it involves fewer humans.

While some major U.S. companies are starting to see the vast costs of their robotic colleagues as prices soar for AI-driven operations, companies are still pushing employees to use more and more AI.

According to executives at computing companies, the cost of AI has now exceeded the typical employee salary totals.

The mantra is that even more AI usage needs to happen.

“For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at chip maker Nvidia, said in early May.

The cost of AI computing, especially when it comes to coding, has come as a surprise to some companies once they start integrating it into their teams and spreading access to their engineers.

Most of the major corporations have been using Anthropic’s Claude, which is seemingly cheap when it comes to image generation, but dollar signs pile up when generating documents or computer code.

As Forbes reported, Uber ran through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. Chief technology officer at the company, Praveen Neppalli Naga, even admitted to spending $1,200 by using AI for a personal demo, with the company’s engineer cost ranging from upwards of $250 per month in usage, all the way up to $2,000 per month.

RELATED: DOJ asked to probe whether Biden officials let Microsoft off easy in exchange for cushy jobs

Huiying Ore/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Between December and March, Uber achieved a 95% usage rate among its engineers to implement AI tools and use Claude for coding.

Over at Microsoft, thousands of its developers were invited to use Claude for coding, but so were project managers, designers, and other employees.

The Verge reported that after starting in just December, the usage has become so popular that the company is making a switch and adopting Microsoft’s own Copilot model into its workflow.

The mantra shared by all of these companies is that even more AI usage needs to happen. Amazon, Uber, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Meta are pushing employees to keep spending tokens.

RELATED: Self-driving trucks are about controlling the roads — not making them safer

Idrees MOHAMMED/AFP/Getty Images

Uber ranked its engineers on internal leaderboards based on Claude code usage. A Meta employee reportedly made a leaderboard titled “Claudenomics” to track which workers were using Claude the most.

Fortune reported that Amazon is pushing employees to “tokenmaxx” and use as many tokens as possible.

As icing on the cake, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said he believes eventually every employee at his company will work alongside 100 AI agents.

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The Democrat hoping to win a seat in the U.S. Senate from Texas for his party for the first time in decades goes to a very unorthodox, woke church.

James Talarico frequently employs religious wording and concepts to justify his far-left agenda, but his church is openly supportive of the extreme LGBTQ+ movement and funding abortion.

The far-left church calls abortion a ‘blessing’ and uses donations to fund the transportation for women to obtain abortions outside of Texas.

Talarico has even preached sermons at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, according to a Daily Wire report.

The far-left church calls abortion a “blessing” and uses donations to fund the transportation for women to obtain abortions outside of Texas. It also lists Planned Parenthood as one of the organizations that shares the church’s “vision and goals for the world.”

The church also supports Out Youth Austin, a group that runs a transgender summer camp and stocks sexually explicit books for children in its library.

Talarico has been very public about his belief that the Bible supports abortion.

“I say all this in the context of abortion, because before God comes over Mary, and we have the incarnation, God asks for Mary’s consent,” he said in an interview with Joe Rogan. “You cannot force someone to create … so that’s how I come down on that side of the issue.”

That reading of the Bible may not be in line with the vision and goals of traditional Christians in Texas.

The church also sides with Palestinians in Gaza by supporting an organization that lists “Zionism” along with “racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, sexism, queerphobia, transphobia, classism, and ableism.”

RELATED: Stephen Colbert melts down when CBS pulls Talarico interview just months before show ends

Talarico is running against Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has had his own problems in relation to marital infidelity accusations and other various scandals. Paxton has used his office to oppose abortion in Texas.

Paxton has a slight edge over Talarico in the latest polling. If the far-left candidate is able to pull an upset, it would help tremendously toward Democrats winning control of the Senate.

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​Ken paxton, Woke church, James talarico, Us senate race, Politics, Texas 

The House Armed Services Committee released its first draft of the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization bill last week.

Section 224, a provision buried hundreds of pages into the $1.15 trillion defense policy legislation that outlines the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” has generated some controversy on the fringes of Capitol Hill.

‘This provision would flip the script on the current bilateral relationship.’

Committee member Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) is among those who rushed to characterize section 224 as benign, stating that it amounts to a “security agreement” that “will allow for the US to leverage advanced Israeli technologies.”

Some, however, have expressed concerns that the initiative will effectively mean a politically consequential integration of the U.S. and Israeli militaries along with their respective industrial supports.

The legislative proposal

Section 224 of the 2027 NDAA draft would have the secretary of war designate a Pentagon official to oversee the synchronization of “cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel, to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation.”

The designee would, among other things,

identify Israeli-origin or jointly developed technologies that the U.S. could integrate into its systems and programs;facilitate the transition of such technologies from research and development into procurement and acquisition pathways;establish “frameworks for joint ventures, licensing agreements, and United States-based co-production or manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry”; andpromote “joint training exercises and information-sharing mechanisms to enhance operational readiness to deploy jointly developed technologies.”

The section clarifies that the “cooperative efforts” pursued under this technology initiative can be carried out through numerous domains including: counter-unmanned systems; anti-tunneling and subterranean threats; missile and air defense technologies; AI; directed energy; cyber warfare; biotechnology and biomanufacturing; network integration; and defense industrial base cooperation, manufacturing, and co-production.

Backlash

Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, claimed in a recent analysis for Responsible Statecraft that “if fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the U.S. has with any other country in the world.”

RELATED: White House says no worries after report claims rebuilding missile inventory used in Iran strikes will take years

YOAV LEMMER/AFP/Getty Images

While acknowledging that the U.S. has worked closely “with its NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains, most notably via the Defence Production Action Plan,” Freeman said that section 224 would not only “fuse the U.S. and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future” but afford the foreign power “the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in U.S. politics: jobs in the U.S.”

Beyond potentially setting the stage for more Israeli influence over American politics and fusing together the two nations’ military-industrial complexes at a time when the majority of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, Freeman — echoing a colleague at the Quincy Institute — suggested that the initiative will shield the relationship from public scrutiny by migrating it from a visible aid vote in Congress “into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal.”

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Pentagon did not respond to Blaze News’ requests for comment.

Responding to Freeman’s report, departing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) tweeted, “If the provision in the NDAA to integrate/synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries (section 224) makes it out of committee, I’ll offer an amendment to strip it from the bill on the floor.”

“We are a sovereign country,” Massie added in a post Rep. Van Orden suggested was the “dumbest possible take.”

Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.), who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said that he will introduce an amendment in committee to axe section 224. Khanna noted further that “Trump can’t kill the Massie/Khanna partnership no matter how much he posts on Truth Social.”

A New Policy, the PAC founded in 2024 by a pair of Biden staffers who quit over the administration’s support for Israel, is campaigning against section 224.

“At a policy level, this provision would flip the script on the current bilateral relationship, shifting the leverage we currently hold because of our security assistance to Israel over to the Government of Israel who would be able to hold key [Department of Defense] capabilities hostage through the integration of Israeli technologies into the DOD supply chain,” states the PAC’s template letter to members of the House Armed Services Committee. “Section 224 also assumes a commonality of national security interests between Israel and the U.S., which, as the current conflict with Iran clearly demonstrates, does not exist.”

Code Pink, the leftist group co-founded by former Democrat political activist Jodie Evans, has also seized upon section 224 as a cause du jour, calling upon Congress to reject “US integration with the Israeli military.”

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​Military industrial complex, Military, Israel, United states, Technology, Manufacturing, Business, Israeli, Ndaa, Section 224, Politics 

California used to be a land of promise that produced fine Americans who mocked D.C. elites, a former U.S. Marine officer says.

In the face of failed state and federal leadership in the Democratic Party, an ex-soldier has a message for inland communities.

The coastal cities and elites are supported by the inland residents, says security expert and veteran Adam Castillo.

‘I’m tired of being the butt of jokes for MAGA.’

In an interview with Blaze News, Castillo explained that he found opportunity in Myanmar after being left as an “unemployed veteran as part of that massive sequestering period by the Obama administration around 2013.”

Promises from the Barack Obama administration of finding jobs for veterans turned into nothing more than a check-box item for hiring managers, Castillo claimed, who would then say, “Hey, we we interviewed a veteran,” and move on.

Castillo ran a security company during Myanmar’s 2021 coup d’état, which taught him a valuable lesson: things can be done properly with the right leadership, even under the harshest conditions.

It is that experience that brought Castillo to believe the inland communities of California should be the focus for Republicans while the rest of the state crumbles around them.

“To be frank, who do you think supports these coastal cities? The inland desert communities, right? We’re the ones commuting to the cities to make sure they’re run, to make sure that the sanitation infrastructure is run [and] the electricity is run,” Castillo declared.

RELATED: Self-driving trucks are about controlling the roads — not making them safer

George Rose/Getty Images

Republicans and conservatives should start with town councils, school boards, and the like before splintering outward into state legislatures, Castillo suggested.

“When you start going inland, specifically into the deserts, this is where it gets really conservative. … They are the power of California.”

“What we need to concentrate on in terms of organization at the community level is the inland communities, not the coastal cities,” he went on.

“School board, city council, mayor, state legislator, then congressman, then senator,” Castillo said.

For the coastal elites, Castillo says the voters need to deal with the consequences of their elections for a bit longer.

“I think we just let the liberal coastal cities rot,” the former officer bluntly stated. “Honestly. They’re already rotting. So let them continue to rot. They do not represent us. They don’t even have that many representatives.”

RELATED: The left spots fake reality only when Hollywood gets hurt

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While Castillo’s remarks could be seen as divisive or jarring by some, he remained confident that a Republican governor in 2026 and beyond would set an amazing precedent in smaller communities and provide much-needed inspiration.

In the end, his belief that Californians can still recapture their glory years serves as his ongoing motivation.

“I’m tired of being the butt of jokes for other states. I’m tired of being the butt of jokes for MAGA,” he concluded.

“We’re Californians. We were better than you people,” he said of D.C. elites. “We were born better than you people. It’s about time we reclaim our seat at that power.”

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The Supreme Court of the United States has shut down the National Football League’s attempt to keep a major lawsuit hidden behind closed-door arbitration — which began when Brian Flores interviewed for a head coach job with the Broncos.

“This is a bizarre story — has been going on for years and years and years and years,” BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere comments on “Stu and Dave Do America.”

Flores’ lawsuit alleges that Broncos officials did not take him seriously as a candidate for the job because he’s African-American, as they showed up hung over and an hour late to interview him.

However, the Broncos released a statement that Flores’ allegations were not true and that he was a serious candidate.

“Now, what’s interesting about this is the reason why the background of all this is what’s called the Rooney Rule. Basically, it was an idea a while ago. They said there weren’t enough African-American coaches, and they said, ‘Hey, well, one way we can do that is force teams to interview African-American candidates for every job,’” Stu explains.

“The way they measure this and the way the complaint is sort of formed is, well, about 60%, let’s say, of the league’s players are African-Americans. So therefore, they say 60% of the coaches should be African-Americans,” he continues.

Stu points out that despite the statistics, there are wildly different skill sets used in each position.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this at all, but Andy Reid has a different build than, let’s say, [DK] Metcalf,” he says.

“It’s one of those things where you don’t need to be an incredible athlete to be a coach. So all of us whiteys go into coaching,” he adds.

Not only do the positions require different skill sets, but African-Americans are only 11% of the American population.

“They’re hiring to the best jobs available — the players — at seven times the representation of the population. That does not strike me as racist,” Stu says.

“I think they’re picking on merit because they want money and they want the best players on the field, and the best players typically wind up being African-American for whatever reason,” he adds.

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​Stu and dave do america, Stu burguiere, Dave landau, Brian flores, The nfl, Rooney rule, Dk metcalf, Andy reid, Denver broncos 

A Michigan man was caught on video attacking and attempting to kidnap a 14-year-old girl last month, and the Kentwood Police Department said in a statement that it wasn’t the only assault he allegedly committed that day.

“A 66-year-old female reported that while working in her yard between 5 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on May 12, 2026, a male suspect stopped his vehicle, engaged her in conversation, made unwanted advances, and physically assaulted her,” police said.

‘I think he chose me because he saw me as a woman alone.’

Mary Raab, the first alleged victim, told WOOD-TV she was planting flowers by her mailbox when a man approached and told her that he was struggling because his brother had died.

“He got out and said, ‘I have had this very traumatic incident happen to me, my brother passed away, and I am in deep grief, and I do not know how to deal with it,'” Raab said.

Raab added, “I am thinking, ‘Well, this is very weird.'”

Raab said the man then asked her if he could use her restroom and wash his hands. Raab said she declined and directed him to a local gas station.

“I went to shake his hand, and then he put his arms around me and went to kiss me on the mouth, and I turned my head away, and he planted his lips between my jawbone and my neck,” Raab said.

She continued, “He made it kind of difficult to break out of his embrace.”

Raab added, “It is violating somebody’s space; why do you think you have the right to do that?”

“I think he chose me because he saw me as a woman alone. He was definitely testing me to see how vulnerable I was, and luckily I was calm enough and level-headed enough to make him go away without having anything devastating and dramatic happen,” Raab said.

At around 6:40 p.m., police officers responded to a report of an attempted kidnapping.

Video appears to show a dark-colored SUV pulling up alongside a teen before a man jumps out of the vehicle, runs toward her, and assaults her.

“A 14-year-old female reported that the suspect stopped his vehicle, approached her, physically assaulted her, and attempted to restrain her while she was walking on the sidewalk,” the statement read.

Police said the victim was able to fight off the suspect, who fled the crime scene in his vehicle.

Court records obtained by WWMT-TV noted that the girl told investigators the suspect grabbed her and told her, “I got you,” before she fought him off.

Police described the teen’s acts as “heroic.”

“That victim absolutely saved her own life that day; she did amazing things and fought hard and made that suspect jump back in the car and take off,” Kentwood Police Department Captain Tim Wierenga told WOOD.

Investigators interviewed witnesses, utilized license plate information, and obtained surveillance video from a resident. Detectives determined that the same suspect committed the assault and attempted kidnapping.

Police identified the suspect as 29-year-old John Moore and arrested him within 24 hours of the alleged crimes.

Records from the Kent County Correctional Facility show that Moore was arrested and booked on May 13. Moore is being held on $140,000 bail.

Moore was charged with unlawful imprisonment and assault and battery.

Citing records from the Kent County Sheriff’s Office, the New York Post reported that Moore also was hit with two probation violations.

“Obviously age didn’t matter to him; he was just looking for a victim,” Raab said. “But I am glad that I kept my head. I am glad I didn’t let him into my house.”

RELATED: Teen abducted from Dallas Mavericks game tells harrowing story of being sex-trafficked, raped — and how God saved her

WOOD reported that Moore had been previously arrested for being a “bathroom peeper who recorded an upskirt video” at a grocery store in September 2023.

WOOD at the time reported that a woman was in a restroom stall of the store when she noticed Moore “peering down at her from the next stall over.”

Surveillance cameras also caught Moore recording an upskirt video in the store’s common area and “crouching down behind the victim” to position his cell phone to record up the shopper’s dress, according to WOOD.

In 2025, Moore allegedly sexually assaulted women at a different grocery store.

Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker told WOOD that Moore walked around the store telling female customers they had spiders on their backs and then grabbed their buttocks.

Three women reported that Moore assaulted them, Becker said.

Moore was sentenced to time served; he had already spent six months in jail. Moore also was given three years of probation and ordered to register as a sex offender.

Moore’s public defender at a hearing called him “kind” and “gentle,” WOOD reported.

“He’s kind, and he’s gentle, and he’s patient,” attorney Laura Joyce said of Moore. “And I don’t think these crimes are reflective of the person that he is.”

“I think that he’s had a reckoning while he’s been in jail regarding some potential substance abuse issues that he has to handle,” Joyce added.

Those who witnessed suspicious activity related to the case or the suspect are urged to contact the Kentwood Police Department at 616-656-6580 or send an anonymous tip through Silent Observer at 616-774-2345.

The Kentwood Police Department did not immediately respond to Blaze News‘ request for comment.

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​Kidnapping attempt, Michigan, Sex offender, Assault, Arrest, Repeat offender, Crime 

New York City Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly unveiled housing agenda called Fix the City represents a dramatic expansion of government power over private property — honing in on “the worst landlords in New York City” as a target.

“When necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers. And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards,” he explained.

“Stewards that include community land trusts, nonprofits, or even the tenants themselves,” he added.

“Pat Gray Unleashed” executive producer Keith Malinak is shocked to hear the cheers from the crowd during Mamdani’s speech, calling them “good little communists.”

“Wow, so they’re going to redistribute wealth. They’re going to take the property from the landowner and give it to the tenant,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray comments.

Mamdani also recently quoted former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, telling a crowd, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

He quickly caveated, “If anything, my friends, it seems that you eventually need a socialist to clean up the mess.”

However, Gray doesn’t see it the same way as Mamdani.

“It’s worse than I imagined, I think. It’s even worse,” he says. “And it’s unabashed. And it’s unashamed. He’s just fully embracing Marxism.”

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​Communism, Housing plan, Keith malinak, Margaret thatcher, Marxism, New york city, Pat gray, Socialism, The blaze, Zohran mamdani, Pat gray unleashed 

Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee hoping to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, has in recent months polled relatively well and enjoyed the support of fellow travelers in D.C. despite a series of scandals — including one scandal that prompted multiple members of his campaign to jump ship.

Platner has managed, for instance, to maintain the support of Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton (Mass.), Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), and Sen. Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), even after it was revealed he previously identified as a communist, branded rural white Americans as racists, suggested that service members worried about being raped should buy “Kevlar underwear,” smeared all police officers as “bastards,” mocked Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and adorned himself with an apparent “totenkopf” tattoo reminiscent of the skull image popularized by Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel elite guard.

‘He is an issue.’

While Platner’s campaign has always been plagued by controversy, it appears to finally have become too much for some Democrats to bear — especially after it was revealed that the married candidate sent at least six women sexually explicit texts.

Amy Gertner — Platner’s wife since 2023 — discovered the trove of debauched extramarital texts, then brought them to the attention of her husband’s Senate campaign during the vetting process last year, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

“The United States Senate is not a training ground for redemption,” Genevieve McDonald, the former Democratic state representative who resigned as political director of Platner’s campaign in October, told the Times. “It is a place for proven leaders with moral clarity and integrity.”

McDonald claimed that Platner sent sexually graphic texts to as many as a dozen women.

After current and former campaign officials confirmed the exchanges to the Times, Platner’s campaign confirmed to Politico that the candidate had indeed sent the texts.

RELATED: Squad-endorsed candidate once reportedly volunteered with group tied to al-Qaeda and testified for terrorist ‘blind cleric’

Graeme Sloan/Getty Images

Morris Katz — a strategist for Platner’s campaign who wrote that he wanted to use images of his penis in a 2020 children’s book — said of the reports about his boss’ wandering eye, “It’s no one’s f**king business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office.”

Gertner — who receives money from the campaign for serving as its volunteer coordinator — tried on Saturday to turn her husband’s scandal on the media, noting in a video statement shared online by Platner, “It makes me really angry, disappointed, and I find it really shameful that there’s a group of media outlets and people who are willing to spread gossip instead of talking about real issues that Graham is running on.”

After insinuating that questions about Platner’s trustworthiness and fidelity aren’t relevant to the race, Gertner said that she and her husband went to marriage counseling and that she doesn’t “want a perfect marriage.”

Like Gertner, Rep. Ro Khanna reaffirmed his support for Platner, stating on Saturday that he was proud of Collins’ challenger “for having a vision for a new deal for our time.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), however, adopted a different tone, telling ABC News when asked on Sunday whether Platner might be jeopardizing Senate control for the Democrats, “Yes, I have concerns. That guy has questions to answer.”

Levar Stoney, the former Democratic mayor of Richmond, Virginia, similarly knocked Platner, writing, “I can’t help but think that if this candidate were a person of color or a woman, my party would be asking them to consider stepping aside immediately. A Nazi tattoo! Now this. I want Democrats to take back the Senate — but not like this.”

Prior to the revelations about Platner’s sexting exploits, some Democrats were already airing their concerns about his candidacy.

“I think when we’re talking about moral clarity and what we want to see from Democrats, I think he is an issue,” former Biden press office chief of staff Yemisi Egbewole, told Fox News’ Bill Melugin last week.

Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) also denounced Platner last week, telling CNN, “I’ve been clear about Graham Platner. I find that tattoo and his commentary about it to be personally disqualifying.”

“I hope Maine voters agree with me,” continued Auchincloss. “I think it would be a mistake for the Democratic Party to think that Graham Platner’s brand of the Democratic Party is what wins us durable majorities throughout this country.”

Over the weekend, the Maine Wire reported that Platner appeared to have an account on the messaging application Kik — long a cesspool for perverts and child exploitation — with the username “phustle0331.”

CNN later confirmed that the account, which features a photo of a partially naked individual with tattoos identical to those sported by the Democratic candidate, belongs to Platner, the same person Sen. Warren said last month was her “kind of man.”

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​Graham platner, Democrats, Senate, Maine, Susan collins, Sex scandal, Sexual, Infidelity, Adultery, Ro khanna, Politics 

Artificial intelligence usage at a single company spiraled out of control and led to a half-billion-dollar bill, according to a recent report.

A consultant is sounding the alarm on what could become the norm for companies in the near future: paying for AI integration may not be all it is made out to be.

One token is equal to approximately four written characters in English text.

An AI consultant recently provided Axios with a stunning revelation that has sparked intrigue across the globe. According to the unnamed insider, one of the consultant’s clients spent approximately $500 million in a single month on AI usage.

These costs reportedly piled up because the company failed to put usage limits on its employees who have AI licenses for the large language model Claude.

Anthropic, Claude’s operator, has different pricing structures that go up to $25 per million tokens. This may seem low, but one token is equal to approximately four written characters in English text or “0.75 words,” Anthropic says on its website.

This of course includes punctuation marks.

Token consumption can be quite heavy when it comes to documents. For example, a PDF costs ~125,000 tokens, a large document is ~25,000 tokens, and a webpage is listed at ~2,500 tokens.

RELATED: The Trump phone is here — and so is the controversy. Is it any good?

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Images through Claude Vision are calculated using a formula based on picture size in pixels. The formula is width * height / 750.

For example, a YouTube thumbnail is 1280 × 720 pixels and would therefore cost about 1,229 tokens. While it might end up costing just under $5 to produce around 1,000 average-sized images, the high costs are believed to stem from the scale of employee usage as well as when Claude is used to code.

The unnamed company — which was described in a LinkedIn post as a U.S. corporation — reportedly gave employees unfettered access with zero spending caps or usage limits.

RELATED: Google’s AI overhaul of Search will overfish the internet to extinction

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Without any guardrails in place, a company that creates documents or webpages or even performs coding with AI could be passively spending tens of thousands of dollars.

One chief technology officer told Axios that employees had been using AI for some of the most trivial tasks, which included checking the weather. Token plans may not be as they seem and are not “all you can eat” buffets, the CTO said.

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​Return, Ai, Chatbot, Anthropic, Claude, Tech 

America is turning 250, and for the first time in years, its capital is starting to look the part.

Political insider Ken Farnaso has lived in Washington for 13 years. In that time, he never once saw a certain D.C. fountain turned on. Last week, he watched it run for the first time.

“Honestly, I don’t think many Washingtonians thought it would ever come back. … It’s more beautiful than I expected,” he wrote on X.

‘D.C. is looking beautiful. The fountains are almost all open.’

The transformation extends well beyond one fountain.

In July 2024, the phrase “HAMAS IS COMIN” was spray-painted onto the Christopher Columbus Memorial Fountain during large-scale demonstrations in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress. The perpetrator later pled guilty to misdemeanor destruction of government property.

The U.S. Department of the Interior noted on X that the Christopher Columbus Memorial Fountain “has been dry since before the first iPhone launched,” but today, that same fountain is gleaming white stone again.

The White House official account has been making the before-and-after contrast explicit, posting side-by-side images of Columbus Circle by Union Station — once graffiti-covered, pristine today — captioned simply: “Decline is a choice.“

Since January, a quiet but visible transformation has been under way in D.C.’s public spaces — dried-up fountains restored, graffiti-tagged monuments scrubbed clean, parks that had grown shabby suddenly tended again.

The scope stretches across the city: Lafayette Square, Freedom Plaza, Meridian Hill Park, and six other historic fountains that had gone dark are being brought back to life, while nine more — including the World War II Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial — are receiving mechanical upgrades.

At a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Trump touted the results. “D.C. is looking beautiful. The fountains are almost all open,” he said.

RELATED: 13 DC police officials placed on leave, pending termination amid crime stat manipulation scandal

Meridian Hill ParkBlaze News

Not everyone is cheering. Critics have zeroed in on the funding source: At least $60 million in National Park Service entrance fees — collected from visitors at parks across the country — is being channeled toward D.C. projects.

Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, called them “Trump’s vanity projects and the stuff that he can see from his golden throne off the Lincoln Bedroom,” arguing that crumbling infrastructure elsewhere in the park system should take priority.

The $60 million, however, comes not from the National Park Service’s main budget, but from a separate self-funded pool — entrance fees that, by law, the agency can redirect at its discretion to sites that don’t collect their own fees, like the National Mall.

That congressional budget, meanwhile, is hardly starved: Congress appropriated $3.27 billion for the National Park Service in fiscal year 2026 — 54% more than the Trump administration itself requested.

The Department of the Interior pushed back on the criticism directly, saying D.C. residents are “experiencing working fountains across the district for the first time in decades, all thanks to President Donald J. Trump” and that the agency has been addressing deferred maintenance “throughout the country.”

An additional $13.1 million is going toward the National Mall Reflecting Pool — a project that has drawn scrutiny of its own. Trump awarded a no-bid contract to a Virginia firm, and costs have ballooned from the original $1.8 million estimate to $13.1 million. Historic preservationists have filed suit, alleging that the blue coating being applied is “altering the historic character” of the pool without proper review.

RELATED: Trump reveals plans for ‘Independence Arch’ for 250th US anniversary — and it’s MASSIVE

Columbus CircleBlaze News

When Blaze News visited the newly restored fountains, not everyone in the crowd was a Trump supporter — but that didn’t seem to matter much. One D.C. resident said he hadn’t voted for Trump but that the restored fountains were a welcome sight regardless. “It’s the small things,” he said. “D.C. is my home, and it’s nice to have them back.”

A longtime Washingtonian nearby didn’t need much more than a look around. “I haven’t seen it like this for years,” she said. “It’s a beautiful day out.”

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​Dc, Decline, National mall, National park service, Politics 

Do you matter? Does what you do matter? Are you doing anything at all? Does your will have any impact on the world? Are you living with vitality?

Or are you just a hamster on a wheel in a little cage in the back of a middle school classroom thinking you are doing something when really you are just wasting your time here until lights out?

Because we can all do it, we forget that it’s special. It’s so ordinary, we forget it’s extraordinary.

To answer the first question: You do matter, and what you do matters. It doesn’t matter who you are; you matter, and you have an impact on the world. Maybe it’s a big one, or maybe it’s a little one. But even something as simple as saying good morning and smiling to the cashier who rings up your pack of cigarettes and full tank of gas is some kind of something or some kind of impact on someone else’s world.

Hamster wheel

But are you living with vitality? That’s not quite as simple. That bit about the hamster wasting time dinking around on the wheel — that’s certainly a depressing scene, but it’s a feeling all too common in a world in which many of our physical needs are satisfied whether we really do anything at all.

Everyone matters in our world, and everyone matters to someone. That’s a fact. But everyone doesn’t feel like they do, and many don’t feel like they are living a very vital life either. The hamster-wheel job that’s stable and hard to lose, the climate-controlled car that tells you when to slow down. An uneventful and seemingly predictable life finished off with some controlled simulated struggle at the gym three nights a week without an end, a shock, or a surprise in sight.

Some people dull the pain of the malaise with drugs, others zone out with Netflix or the internet.

Family matters

Still others seem to think that the only way to feel alive in our age is by seeking out extremes: dangerous travel, feats of endurance, and any other pursuit risking life and limb.

Fine for those who have the opportunity, I suppose. But honestly, vitality can be found much closer to home.

The real truth is that the most vital thing you can do in the year 2026 is something that just about everyone can do: raise a family.

Falling in love, getting married, having children, and raising a family is the last real, and completely real, thing on planet Earth.

It doesn’t matter if everything becomes entirely fake. It doesn’t matter if everyone has fake jobs, if no one owns anything for longer than six months, if all the food is processed, if all the appliances are designed with planned obsolescence in mind, and if AI takes care of just about all our needs. The entire world could be completely fake. But one last real thing will remain: family.

And it is the realness of the family that matters and that makes it so vital. When we raise a family, we are completely crucial. Our decisions determine real-world outcomes, both short term and long term. The family is not a theory or spreadsheet. It’s not a surrogate activity that stands in simply for the sake of simulating some kind of other struggle.

The family is real.

RELATED: Why I’m not worried about AI ‘replacing’ me

Universal Images Archive/Getty Images

Royal reproduction

A looming intuition in our postmodern, anti-vitalistic ennui is the feeling that we don’t have any control. Our health insurance policies, our jobs, the new charges that don’t make any sense on the phone bill, the screwed up politics, the fact that you can’t even talk to someone who speaks English on the phone anymore when you need something fixed, and that nothing seems to last very long either, and no one cares.

But of course, there is one domain where we are monarchs no matter how lowly our job or how faceless the large systems that govern our society may be.

The family.

A mother is a queen, and a father is a king. What Mom and Dad say goes. Mom and Dad don’t answer to anyone. They don’t need to ask permission, and they won’t be reprimanded by HR. When you are a parent, you are a monarch of a micro-kingdom. That might sound weird, but that’s the way to think about it. You dictate the religion, the calendar, the diet, the schedule, the language, the attitude, and everything about family life.

Dynasty building

It’s here, in this domain, where the most potent and impactful kind of vitalism still lives and will always live. Cultivating new life is the definition of impacting the world and the future. Yes, your kingdom might be small, but your impact is total, and it’s all yours.

Your vision is what matters. You are in control. What could possibly be more vital than conceiving children, naming them, raising them, teaching them, and then eventually sending them off to do the same things with the tools and ways they learned from you? You are creating a dynasty.

Because we can all do it, we forget that it’s special. It’s so ordinary, we forget it’s extraordinary. We might devote so much time and energy to thinking about money, influence, stability, the markets, the Middle East, geopolitics, sports, and work, but by far the most real and most vital thing you can do in 2026 is a seemingly most ordinary thing.

Raise a family.

​Men’s style, Fatherhood, Parenthood, Culture, Family, Lifestyle 

Joy Behar’s elitist meltdown on “The View” exposed exactly why disconnected celebrities fail ordinary American families. She hysterically claimed “we’re all going to die” because President Trump launched TrumpRx.gov to slash prescription drug prices.

While Behar lectures from her insulated bubble, millions of parents are choosing between groceries and lifesaving medicine for their sick children.

Reducing prescription drug prices by cutting out middlemen and forcing better pricing is not a death sentence. It is relief.

Behar warned viewers that the president uses TrumpRx to “put his name” on prescription drugs. Then, as a consequence, she declared, “we’re all going to die.”

Seriously?

Co-host Sunny Hostin piled on.

“He is not doing this out of the goodness of his heart,” Hostin told ABC’s nationwide audience. “He’s doing this to make money.”

No, President Trump does not profit from TrumpRx. The president receives no royalties, fees, or equity. TrumpRx is not a private entity. Several websites refer to it as “the government’s drug purchasing portal.” As anyone can see from the website address, trumprx.gov, it is a government operation.

TrumpRx delivers real relief through direct-to-consumer discounts, most favored nation pricing, and partnerships such as Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, which cut out middlemen and deliver major savings.

Consider children and individuals with serious medical needs.

Regeneron’s groundbreaking gene therapy, Otarmeni, treats a rare genetic form of deafness. Under the TrumpRx deal, it is available at no cost to American families, restoring a child’s hearing without bankrupting parents.

Families facing juvenile idiopathic arthritis or pediatric Crohn’s disease can access Humira through TrumpRx for about $950 per dose instead of nearly $7,000. That life-changing savings allows children to stay active and avoid debilitating pain.

Fertility drugs like Gonal-F dropped from hundreds of dollars to as little as $168 per pen, helping families begin the journey of conceiving and starting a family. Bevespi Aerosphere, an inhaler used to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, fell from $458 to $51. Airsupra, an inhaler used to treat asthma symptoms and attacks, dropped from $504 to $201. Trulicity, used to manage type 2 diabetes, fell from $987 to $389.

RELATED: ‘The View’ co-host has bizarre response to ‘lifelong progressive’ Whitney Cummings refusing to vote for pedophiles

Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg/Getty Images

For many families, those savings are immediate and concrete.

TrumpRx also lowers costs on dozens of other brand-name and generic medications for diabetes, asthma, migraines, and rare diseases that strike children and adults. Parents no longer have to skip refills because the price is impossible. Behar’s reflexive hatred of Trump blinds her to the suffering of working families crushed by prior high prices.

That is the real scandal.

The women of “The View” are not angry that medicine costs too much. They are angry that Trump found a way to cut costs and gets the credit for it. Their politics matter more than the families who benefit.

For a nurse, that is impossible to stomach. Families do not care whether a lower price arrives with Trump’s name attached to it. They care whether they can fill the prescription, pay the mortgage, and keep their child healthy.

TrumpRx is not perfect. No government program is. But reducing prescription drug prices by cutting out middlemen and forcing better pricing is not a death sentence. It is relief.

Behar and Hostin can sneer from the studio. Parents at the pharmacy counter know better.

​Asthma, Diabetes, Joy behar, Opinion & analysis, Politics, Regeneron, Sunny hostin, The view, Trumprx, Prescription drug prices, Big pharma 

Critics are raving about Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi film “Disclosure Day,” which is set to hit theaters June 12. Some are calling it his “best film in 20 years.”

But because the film coincides with the government’s declassification of UFO-related files, conspiracy theories are buzzing.

One popular theory posits that “Disclosure Day” is being deliberately hyped to generate more viewership because the film is secretly designed to prepare the public for real alien/UFO disclosure.

While Glenn Beck acknowledges the suspicious circumstances surrounding the film — the globally famous Spielberg coming out of retirement with a movie about disclosure right when the government is talking more about UFOs — he doesn’t believe “the chief storyteller of the modern age” is secretly working with the government or aliens on a big psyop.

While governments have long worked with Hollywood storytellers, including Spielberg, to generate propaganda that shapes public opinion, he believes “Disclosure Day” is likely just Spielberg “reading the room.”

“He might have just seen, oh, everybody’s paranoid about all of this stuff,” Glenn says.

But Glenn argues that even if the theory is true and “Disclosure Day” is some kind of soft propaganda or predictive programming, that still wouldn’t be the most important thing about the film.

“Here’s something I think is more interesting and more important than Spielberg working with the Pentagon or the CIA or aliens,” he says. “I believe this movie and Steven Spielberg may actually represent the end of a human era.”

In the very near future, “you’re not going to need Steven Spielberg anymore,” Glenn says.

“As government, power centers, advertisers, anyone else that’s trying to get you to buy something, act a certain way, believe something, just come over to their side of thinking, wear the mask, don’t wear the mask … you don’t need Hollywood or a Spielberg anymore because you now have the algorithm.”

There’s only one thing that’s truly with us all the time — in our beds, cars, pockets/purses, bathrooms, desks, etc. — our cell phones.

“And your phone studies you all the time,” Glenn says.

“What makes you angry? What makes you laugh? What scares you? What keeps you watching? What kind of voice do you trust? What headlines make your pulse jump? It tracks all of it.”

When that kind of scary, detailed data is combined with artificial intelligence, the result is something truly dystopian.

Effective persuasion no longer requires a creative genius like Steven Spielberg because your data married to AI make a “far more powerful” tool.

“The old system of broadcasting one message like I’m doing right now to millions of people — this is over,” says Glenn. “The new system builds millions of custom messages for individual people.”

“That’s a gigantic shift, probably the biggest shift in culture, propaganda, in thinking.”

Glenn warns that right now we are in an age that will witness “the death of free will.”

Soon, our opinions, passions, decisions, and beliefs won’t stem from our own thinking; they’ll stem from the content the algorithm curated for us.

And this content will be wildly different for each person.

“One [person] gets stories about hidden corruption, UFO disclosures, and secret programs; the other gets stories about safety and experts and the dangers of misinformation,” Glenn illustrates. “Both people become more emotionally certain and hardened; both believe they discovered that truth on their own, but the machine has studied them and is feeding that to them like lab rats.”

Unlike “human propagandists” that have been “manipulating crowds for a very long time,” the machine “never sleeps” and can “[run] billions of tiny emotional experiments every single day.”

“Maybe this is why Spielberg’s movie is landing at exactly the right moment,” Glenn says, “because beneath all of the UFO or UAP fascination now sits the biggest question humans have ever asked. … What is real?”

To hear more of Glenn’s analysis, watch the video above.

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​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Disclosure, Steven spielberg 

Microsoft’s leftist roots run deep, from its problematic co-founder Bill Gates and his “philanthropic” ventures to its partnership that gave birth to MSNBC — recently rebranded to MS NOW — which regularly spews left-wing talking points dressed up as actual facts. It even went out of its way to stuff leftist news stories into the widgets bar of every Windows computer via its MSN news aggregator, a service that prioritizes left-wing content over the right. That’s all about to change, though, as a string of complaints over Windows’ waning security and stability lead Microsoft to make its operating system a little more user-friendly, and the MSN feed is one of the first bad ideas on the chopping block.

A brief history of MSN

Microsoft launched the Microsoft Network all the way back in 1995, and the company has crammed it into the desktop operating system ever since. Debuting on Windows 95, it started as an online dial-up service meant to compete directly with the early internet juggernaut that was AOL.

One year later, Microsoft secured a lucrative joint venture with NBC News. In an effort to consolidate power across established cable TV and the new internet machine, the companies formed MSNBC. The nexus of their partnership saw that NBC News continued to provide 24-hour news coverage through conventional channels while Microsoft delivered those stories to its online users, boosting viewership ratings for both brands on the way to the top.

By 1998, Microsoft spun the MSN brand out into the news aggregation service known today as MSN.com. For maximum visibility, Microsoft set MSN as the homepage of its Internet Explorer browser, which, at the time, dominated the web with a 90% market share over second-place competitor Netscape Navigator. You can even see an early version of the original MSN.com thanks to web archives.

Microsoft ultimately walked away from MSNBC in 2012, selling its stake in the partnership to pursue its own venture. No longer in need of NBC’s reporting alone, Microsoft became an independent news distributor under MSN.com. This move would give Microsoft full control over which news outlets it chose to feature, as well as the right to hoard the spoils of its ad revenue from these stories. To make MSN virtually unavoidable, Microsoft injected its media influence into the Windows task bar in late versions of Windows 10 and all of Windows 11 under the name Microsoft Start. Now, any time you glance down at the task bar on your Windows PC, you’ll see messages from MSN that cover weather, finances, “breaking news,” and other topics, all begging for you to click and read.

Today, the MSN feed is one giant leftist propaganda billboard meant to promote any outlet that doesn’t espouse right-leaning ideas or values. What’s worse is that Microsoft can use this baked-in “feature” to serve left-wing content by default to Windows machines at workplaces, schools, and homes around the nation. Everywhere.

Screenshot by Zach Laidlaw/Windows 11

Microsoft’s mission to win back user trust

Unfortunately for Microsoft, a series of blunders have left users unhappy with the company’s portfolio of platforms and services. Here are just a few of its recent mistakes.

Windows has suffered from several critical bugs since the start of the year, all chipping away at OS security and eroding user trust.Microsoft’s aggressive push to inject its AI platform, Copilot, into every app and service has been poorly received, with users complaining about its ubiquitous integration that has only complicated usability.Xbox has suffered from major annual losses, with significant drops in hardware earnings and a small drop in software revenue.Where Windows once dominated the low-tier and mid-tier PC market, Apple’s new affordable Macbook Neo poses a significant threat to a computer segment that Microsoft historically kept mostly to itself.

In short, Microsoft is feeling the heat of competition, self-inflicted failures, and customer dissatisfaction on multiple fronts, and the only way to earn back user trust is to fix some of its more egregious mistakes. One of these is Windows’ user experience.

A new ‘Start’ for Windows

Microsoft Start is divided into two sections — the “Discover” view is powered by MSN propaganda, and the “Widgets” view shows only pertinent information without political commentary. By default, Microsoft Start opens to the Discover feed, filled with news stories designed to capture your attention. It’s clickbait. Meanwhile, the more useful Widgets are hidden behind an extra click; the default widgets include useful information, like weather, sports, finances, events near you, and a couple of other stragglers.

In an upcoming Windows update, Microsoft Start will show the Widgets view first, with the Discover feed as optional. Don’t get too excited, though. Microsoft will continue to pack left-wing stories into Microsoft Start, but on the upside, users can soon ignore it wholesale, making PCs a little less politically intrusive.

When asked about the decision, Microsoft said, “We’re working to make Widgets feel less distracting and overwhelming by making the experience quiet by default. To do this, we’re testing a new set of default settings designed to reduce unexpected alerts and visual interruptions.”

Get rid of MSN now

The refreshed Microsoft Start is currently only available in preview builds of Windows for developers. However, you don’t have to wait to banish the MSN feed from your taskbar. If you really want to kick it to the curb now, open Microsoft Start, click on the Settings gear at the bottom, uncheck the green toggle beside “Discover,” and that’s it! Microsoft Start will now default to the widgets view, which you can customize to your liking.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Windows 11

You’re now free from leftist propaganda, at least in this section of your Windows PC.

​Tech 

An Oklahoma homeowner was arrested and jailed after fatally shooting a squatter in his vacant residence earlier this month — and an attorney is saying a self-defense claim may be difficult to prove.

Timothy Smith, 59, is facing charges of first-degree manslaughter and reckless conduct with a firearm after shooting a squatter in his vacant house in Oklahoma City on May 1, KOCO-TV reported.

‘At trial, I’m sure the defense will be self-defense. What’s going to make that difficult? He told the police that he didn’t see a weapon in the hand of the victim.’

Smith on Friday remained behind bars in the Oklahoma County Detention Center. Jail information indicates Smith’s next court date is June 18 and that he’s also charged with assault and battery with a deadly weapon.

Smith told detectives he and his daughter checked on his house after having previous issues there with homeless people, KOCO reported.

Smith entered the home with a gun and found Justin King in the back bedroom with a woman, the station said.

Smith and his daughter told the pair to leave, but Smith said King stepped toward him, KOCO reported.

With that, Smith aimed at “the area” of King, and the gunshot struck King in the neck, the station said.

Criminal defense attorney Ed Blau told KOCO a self-defense claim on Smith’s part is complicated because Smith was not living in the home at the time of the shooting.

“There’s not the death penalty for squatting in the state of Oklahoma,” Blau told the station. “You can’t just take a gun in and shoot somebody.”

Blau added to the station that a self-defense argument also may be difficult to prove because Smith admitted to detectives that he did not feel threatened.

RELATED: Couple returns from vacation to find squatters who ate their brisket, drank their alcohol, and left meth in car, police say

“It would be difficult to have a stand-your-ground defense hold up,” Blau noted to KOCO.

The attorney added to the station that “at trial, I’m sure the defense will be self-defense. What’s going to make that difficult? He told the police that he didn’t see a weapon in the hand of the victim.”

Blau also told KOCO that while Oklahoma’s Castle Doctrine allows homeowners to use force against intruders in their primary residences, it’s different for vacant houses.

“If a trespasser or a burglar breaks in or comes into your home that you live in, and you’re there, you can pretty much shoot them or do whatever you want to with them because of the Castle Doctrine here in Oklahoma,” Blau told the station. “In a situation like this, an abandoned house, it’s much different. You can’t go in, put yourself in a situation, and say, ‘This is my house, so I felt I had the right to shoot him.'”

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​Squatter, Fatal shooting, Oklahoma, Homeowner shoots squatter, Manslaughter, Oklahoma city, Castle doctrine, Self-defense, Arrest, Crime 

Rural America was once a refuge from radical leftists. Fewer amenities and job opportunities were a price some conservatives were willing to pay if it meant their traditional values and patriotism didn’t have to compete with progressivism.

But those pastoral sanctuaries are being blotted out one by one thanks to two new phenomena: hicklibs and fail-libs.

“As media and universities became more radical, their disciples moved into rural America through government-mandated institutions like schools and libraries,” says BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre.

“Thus the hicklib was born.”

A hicklib, MacIntyre explains, is “usually a social outcast, a failson who needs a moral explanation for why he hates the community he never fit into.”

“His resentment searches for a theory that will dignify his rage, and the progressive missionaries installed in his local institutions are happy to provide one,” he says.

The message is one of moral superiority: America is evil; those who disagree are “racist, sexist, backwards religious fanatics, destroying the lives of minorities”; and “white Christian culture” is the real evil in the world.

“The hicklib’s failures to fit in become proof of moral superiority,” says MacIntyre.

Having found a solution to his inferiority complex, he sets out on a new mission.

“The hicklib shows up at town council meetings in a Black Lives Matter shirt to denounce minority oppression in a community with no actual black people. That absence naturally becomes further proof of the town’s intolerance,” says MacIntyre.

“He loudly organizes Pride events attended by two other hicklibs. That little clique stages protests, distributes flyers, and imitates urban activist rituals. By practicing the sacraments of their faith, they hope to summon the spirit of the age to judge their reactionary little town.”

The hicklib, MacIntyre argues, has become a “plague” for rural communities.

But as plagues often do, the hicklib has evolved.

“As the value of college degrees collapse, a new breed is emerging: the fail-lib,” says MacIntyre.

Unlike the failure-to-launch hicklib, the fail-lib is outwardly successful.

“The fail-lib worked hard in high school and gave progressive teachers every approved answer. She wrote her college entrance essay on the oppression of trans women of color in coal mining. On campus, she became an activist. She secured a degree in some woke humanities discipline and earned straight A’s by repeating everything her communist professor told her,” MacIntyre illustrates.

But despite her academic success, the fail-lib fails to land the “cushy corporate HR job” her expensive college degree promised her. Turns out, college degrees no longer come with the status they used to, and the “poor, oppressed immigrants” she’s long defended are now the preferred candidates.

Instead of moving to a big, liberal city like she planned, the fail-lib is forced to dwell among the rural “townies” she disdains.

She “was promised luxury and elite influence; now she serves the people she despises while searching for any opportunity to make their lives worse,” says MacIntyre, speculating that the rise of artificial intelligence will only “intensify this problem.”

“The fail-lib might make less money than you; she may be less respected than you; she may even be despised by the townies she once mocked, but in her heart, she knows she’s superior, and nothing could ever convince her otherwise.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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What happens when a government can order technology companies to create a back door into encrypted communications that even they cannot access?

A rare cross-border coalition of Canadian civil-liberties advocates and Republican lawmakers is warning that Canada’s proposed surveillance legislation could threaten privacy rights on both sides of the border.

‘Privacy is not a luxury in a free society.’

Sweeping vulnerability

Supporters of proposed Bill C-22 say such powers are necessary to help law enforcement investigate terrorists, organized crime, and other serious threats in an age of encrypted messaging. Critics counter that once a vulnerability is built into a system, it cannot be confined to one country, one agency, or one investigation.

Last Friday, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms presented a petition to the office of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. More than 40,000 people signed the petition opposing Bill C-22, which would expand the government’s ability to obtain electronic communications and other digital evidence during criminal and national security investigations.

US opposition

VPN providers are already threatening to leave the Canadian market if the bill becomes law. In a May 7 letter, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, warned Canada’s Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree that the legislation could jeopardize privacy rights in both countries.

“Canada’s Bill C-22, currently under consideration in Parliament, would drastically expand Canada’s surveillance and data access powers in ways that create significant cross-border risks to the security and data privacy of Americans,” the lawmakers wrote.

“We write to express our concerns that, if enacted, Bill C-22 would allow Canadian government officials to compel American companies to build backdoors into their encrypted systems, thereby introducing systemic vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers, foreign adversaries, and cybercriminals.”

The lawmakers also warned that the bill’s language is sufficiently broad to permit secret ministerial orders.

“If a U.S.-based provider is forced to redesign its system to facilitate Canadian authorized access to content that is currently inaccessible even to the provider itself, the resulting capability cannot be geographically limited,” they wrote. “This directly threatens the privacy of U.S. persons who expect and depend upon robust encryption to protect sensitive communications, health data, financial records, and personal correspondence from unwarranted intrusion.”

RELATED: Albertans are ready to vote on Canadian secession — so why is their premier stalling?

Separatist leader Mitch Sylvestre at a rally in front of the Elections Alberta headquarters in Edmonton, Canada. Henry Marken/Getty Images

Stark terms

At a Friday news conference before submitting the petition to Carney, JCCF board member John Robson, a prominent Ottawa historian and journalist, described the bill in stark terms.

“I’m here on Parliament Hill today because we are delivering a petition with 42,344 signatures asking Parliament not to proceed with Bill C-22 … because [Prime Minister Mark Carney] is the moving force behind this bill, and we’re hoping to persuade him that all these signatures from Canadians across the country … represent legitimate, serious concerns about the scope of this bill,” Robson said.

Robson noted that many Canadians and the constitutional scholars at the JCCF “are concerned about Bill C-22 because it would require service providers to compile Canadians’ electronic data, to develop systems for extracting information from it and turning it over to the government.”

“It’s not that Canadians … are against law enforcement having appropriate powers, including to fight organized crime,” Robson said.

“It’s one more ham-fisted way of targeting ordinary, law-abiding people instead of adopting tailored measures suitable to the real crime problems. And privacy is not a luxury in a free society.”

​Canada, Mark carney, Digital surveillance, Vpns, Privacy, Hackers, Jim jordan, Lifestyle 

As soon as polls closed in Texas on Tuesday, the Associated Press called a decisive victory for state Attorney General Ken Paxton, presumably ending Sen. John Cornyn’s 35-year political career. The 30-point margin was also another feather in Donald Trump’s cap.

“Last night was very powerful,” the president said at the start of Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting at the White House. In an earlier Truth Social post, he called Cornyn a friend and promised to headline “big, beautiful rallies” for Paxton in the upcoming months.

For the rest of the day, Trump posted screenshots of news outlets covering a 100% success rate in primary endorsements so far this year.

‘It’s an all time total collapse and embarrassment for the GOP establishment.’

In addition to showcasing Trump’s endorsement weight, the runoff election results also exposed the weakness of the Senate Republican establishment. For months, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Tim Scott took to the morning news shows extolling Cornyn’s virtues while insisting that he was the key to keeping Texas safely red. The NRSC posted lists of Paxton’s various personal and professional scandals, as Cornyn called his opponent an embarrassment.

In his concession speech Tuesday night, Cornyn committed to supporting Paxton as the party’s nominee, despite spending months calling him scandal-ridden and morally unqualified to hold office. Chastened Senate Republicans are likewise reversing course.

“A vote for Ken Paxton in November is a vote for a safer, stronger, and more prosperous America. He has my endorsement and support,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) posted to X on Tuesday night. He had previously endorsed Cornyn. “[James] Talarico is too radical for Texas. Ken will be a key member of our Senate Republican majority fighting for America First.”

The same night, the NRSC deleted every critical post of Paxton it had made over the past year, even though its statement on the general election does not mention him by name. Some conservative activists now want the organization to clean house. Breitbart News Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle personally tagged NRSC staffers in posts on X, needling them for backing the wrong horse.

“It’s an all time total collapse and embarrassment for the GOP establishment,” Boyle wrote.

The NRSC faced a dilemma that Paxton’s backers will now confront. One of the most senior Republicans in the Senate, Cornyn has been a GOP fundraising heavyweight — a potentially significant factor in what is shaping up to be a strong Democratic year. He was also a former NRSC chair in 2010 and 2012. He could have largely funded his own race.

Paxton, however, will need party money to keep pace with newly emboldened Democrats who are pouring money into Talarico’s campaign. Furthermore, Paxton’s impeachment, messy divorce, and fraud allegations provide plenty of fodder for Democrat attack ads.

RELATED: JD Vance might be unstoppable in 2028

Akos Stiller/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Trump delivered his endorsement for Paxton on May 19 on Truth Social, after early voting had already begun in Texas. He did not notify the NRSC or Senate Republicans in advance of his post.

“He essentially let them know he didn’t care about their preferences at all,” Josh Blank, director of research for the Texas Politics Project, told RCP. “From a Republican elite perspective, not only does it look like you have to spend more money in Texas now, but you have to convince your donors that Ken Paxton is a good vehicle for that money — and Paxton has a challenging past to reconcile.”

As if on cue, the first Talarico ad dropped by Democrats detailed the many controversies that have dogged Paxton’s career. His wife filed for divorce in 2025, citing adultery. Former staffers have testified that he used his office to convince a friend to give his mistress a job.

In 2023, the Texas House of Representatives impeached Paxton on 20 articles for bribery, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power, but the state Senate voted to acquit and reinstate him. In 2024, he paid $300,000 and completed community service to settle an indictment for securities fraud.

Nevertheless, Cornyn’s re-election bid was already flailing even before Trump weighed in. Conservative voters were not enamored with his 2022 efforts to pass a bipartisan red-flag law. Last year, the National Association for Gun Rights PAC endorsed Paxton. In 2023, Cornyn suggested Trump might not be electable any more, a comment he walked back in 2024 and last year. But Trump remembered.

“I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” Trump wrote in a congratulatory post for Paxton.

Despite outspending the Paxton campaign 17-1 in advertising alone, Cornyn remained in a statistical tie with his opponent for most of his campaign.

“I think Paxton probably still could have won without Trump’s endorsement, but not at that magnitude. It was a blowout,” Conservative Partnership Institute Vice President of programs Rachel Bovard told RCP. “The Senate Republican conference is the chummiest place in America. Their political loyalties are to each other. So I think the dynamic is going to shift a little bit. The conference is being remade, and I don’t know that it’s going to be much help to Trump for the rest of the year.”

RELATED: How Trump can fix his endorsement problem

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

From the beginning of Paxton’s bid, it became clear that the race would become about who could relate better to Trump. Cornyn was never the thorn in the president’s side that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) or Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) often were.

But things came to a head when some media reports indicated that Trump was about to endorse Cornyn, at the urging of Senate Republicans. Then Paxton delivered a public promise to drop his campaign if the Senate passed the SAVE America Act, a voting reform bill that would require proof of identity and citizenship to vote.

“That was a pivotal moment in this election cycle,” Blank said. “Paxton demonstrated to Trump the lengths he would go to support his agenda and a key distinction between himself and Cornyn.”

The SAVE America Act passed the House but has not yet moved through the Senate. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has said there is not enough support in the Senate to use a filibuster to pass the bill. Cornyn was one of several institutionalist members who said it is important to keep the 60-vote threshold, even if it means not passing the legislation. In March, Trump insisted that he would not sign any legislation until Congress passed the SAVE America Act, and he told the Senate to “kill the filibuster” to get it done.

“Cornyn long held that he did not think the filibuster should be changed because he held a certain amount of fealty to the institution of the U.S. Senate. Paxton demonstrated his fealty to the president, and that was ultimately much more persuasive,” Blank said.

Some analysts say this further cements Trump’s political kingmaker status, at least within the Republican Party, even while his popularity is sinking.

“There is zero doubt tonight that Donald Trump is in complete and total control of the Republican Party,” pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz posted on X on Tuesday night.

He can beat just about any Republican in just about any state in just about any primary. He is chief strategist, chief advocate, and chief voice of the GOP. His name may not be on the ballot in November, but make no mistake: Nothing and no one will have a bigger impact on voter behavior.

Trump’s involvement hardly guarantees Paxton’s win in November. The attorney general has advantages with name recognition and his record of winning statewide elections in the past. But Talarico is surging with his own fundraising, and Texas Republicans sometimes have a turnout problem in years when Trump is not on the ballot.

“We would expect most Cornyn-supporting Republican voters to support Ken Paxton come November, because they’ve voted for him in the past,” Blank said. “But if even a small share of Republicans decide that Ken Paxton is ethically unfit for office, as John Cornyn argued and spent nearly $100 million promoting, that makes a competitive election that much more competitive.”

In a Wednesday appearance on “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” Thune described the GOP’s newfound advocacy for Paxton.

“Obviously, we are making the pivot,” Thune said.

“He’s all-in, ready to go for the fall election, and not taking any time off, already on the phone raising money and all the things you’re going to have to do to be successful.”

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

​Ken paxton, Texas, James talarico, John cornyn, Donald trump, Gop, Senate republicans, Save act, Opinion & analysis