Category: blaze media

Earlier this month, wildfires raged across Canada, especially in Ontario and British Columbia. The resulting smoke plumes drifted south into the U.S., causing hazardous air quality conditions across the Midwest and Northeast. At its peak, more than 100 million Americans were under air quality alerts, with cities like Detroit and Minneapolis recording some of the worst air pollution in the world.

On July 17, President Trump posted the following response on Truth Social:

Naturally, many were upset with President Trump for threatening to bill Canada for its wildfire smoke, but they’re missing the genius of what he’s really doing, says Glenn Beck.

On July 1, the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) reached its six-year review point. The United States announced it would not renew the deal in its current form, triggering a formal review and renegotiation process between the three countries.

“On the Canadian side of the table, the asks are already on the record. Ottawa wants relief on sectoral tariffs covering steel, aluminum, autos, and lumber,” says Glenn.

But Trump, of course, has his own list of demands — and his billing Canada for its smoke threat? It’s “just that” — “smoke,” says Glenn.

“It’s part of the negotiation. The smoke is the opening position — an unanswerable grievance dropped on the table two weeks before we get serious at the negotiating table,” he explains.

Trump is doing what any good negotiator does at the beginning of talks: He leads with an outrageous ask so that his opponent is more likely to concede to the rest of his demands.

Ben Franklin did this during Revolutionary War negotiations, Glenn recounts.

“Franklin asked for Canada. Franklin got everything except Canada. That’s not a coincidence. That’s called a technique in negotiation,” he explains.

Trump, he reiterates, “is not putting a tariff on the smoke. He’s two weeks away from sitting down negotiating with Canada. He wants a great deal with Canada.”

In other words, he’s intentionally throwing out something outrageous — much like a real estate agent making a laughably low first offer — so that by the end of negotiations, the “crazy” demands have been negotiated away, leaving the real objectives largely fulfilled.

“For 40 years, American trade agreements were negotiated by people who opened at ‘reasonable’ because they wanted the applause to come from the other side of the table,” says Glenn.

But Trump isn’t after empty applause; he’s after American interests.

“We have lost our furniture plants and our steel towns and the tool and die shops. We were told that’s the price of being a grown-up nation. No, we finally have a president who opens up where Ben Franklin opened up: loud, maximum, occasionally absolutely ridiculous, but deliberate,” says Glenn.

“And how many Americans are now saying, ‘I’m embarrassed by that’? Embarrassed by whom exactly? By the only man in generations who has walked into a room and asked for too much on your behalf?” he continues.

When negotiations are finally over, Glenn hopes these naysayers will see all the good that came from Trump’s little bargaining tactic.

“When the paper is finally signed, check the fisheries, check the steel, check the lumber, check the dairy. Ask the dairy workers, ‘Did we get a good deal?’ Ask the American worker who kept losing his job elsewhere if now things are changing here and getting better for them,” he says.

“That’s the only column that ever matters — you.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

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

​Glenn beck, Donald trump, Canada, Usmca, Wildfires, The glenn beck program 

I was having lunch in a local tavern the other day, when Randy Travis’ 1987 country hit “Forever and Ever, Amen” came on the jukebox.

Wow! That song sounds as good as it did 40 years ago! Maybe better!

Why is it that some things have a timeless quality and other things don’t?

My friends and I often argue about if a song, or a book, or a TV show “holds up”? Does it still retain that original freshness and quality it seemed to have when it first appeared?

Of course, when you’re young, you’re not the best judge of artistic quality. You absorb whatever you see or hear around you. You like this song or that TV show, but it’s not based on anything substantial. When you get older, you notice that some of the stuff you liked as a kid was not very good.

Think of all the bad music you listened to in your parents’ car growing up. Or the terrible TV shows you watched when you were 10. Nobody’s watching reruns of “The Six Million Dollar Man” or “Kung Fu” nowadays, two TV shows I loved as a kid.

Poser punks

A couple of years ago, I spent an evening at a college friend’s house where we went through his extensive collection of old punk records.

It was many decades past the prime of punk rock, and a lot of the more outrageous punk music sounded pretty stupid. It didn’t “hold up.” We liked it at the time. But we would never listen to it now.

In some cases, you could tell the musicians were just playing at being punk. They had the goofy sunglasses, spiky hair, simplistic music. They were imitating more than creating.

They didn’t actually address what the real punk kids were feeling. There was an authenticity problem. You can’t be great if you’re just following the latest trend.

RELATED: I was a ‘problem student’ — until all-male Catholic school let me be a boy

Alex_Bond/Bettman/Getty Images

‘Hey, I used to like that song!’

My college friend and I unearthed a 7” single by a local new wave band we had liked when we lived in Boston. These guys had good songs. A good sound. A good stage presence. Their single was genuinely catchy and played regularly on our college radio station.

But when we put that same single on years later, it wasn’t good. It sounded cheesy and embarrassing. It was dated.

It sounded a lot like another Boston band, The Cars, who were also very popular around the same time. The Cars songs are also dated and a little bit cheesy, but they still sound great on the radio. They sound classic.

So what did The Cars have that the other band lacked? Talent? Presence? Craftsmanship? Why is it that some things have a timeless quality and other things don’t?

Scantily clad

I think about current pop music. There seems to be a new “pop star” every week. These are mostly singers and mostly young women. People like Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, and Sabrina Carpenter. They come and go so fast, you can barely remember their names.

Most of their music is made by highly paid music producers. These people know how to make hit records. All the girls have to do is sing and look cute.

Even country music, which tends to reward quality over slickness, has become so popular that there is a certain disposability there as well. There are a lot of “one-hit wonders,” just like in the pop world.

Morgan Wallen is one country star who seems to have staying power. He sounds fresh and original, but you can hear the echoes of classic country in his songs. Also, his attempted cancellation, back in 2021, has given him an underdog status among fans.

Talent on loan from God

But beyond politics, beyond competing styles and industry trends, there is GOD-GIVEN TALENT. Which is where legendary singers like Randy Travis come in.

Of course, Travis fans know about his struggles outside of music. They understand the pressures and temptations of being so good at something that you become world-famous. Travis has definitely had his ups and downs.

But oh, if you could have heard “Forever and Ever, Amen” coming out of that jukebox! Here was a song that was once a No. 1 radio hit, but now sounds like a timeless American classic.

Randy Travis, we salute you, brother! Especially on a hot summer day, in the cool darkness of a half-empty tavern. YOU HOLD UP. And we appreciate it!

​Morgan wallen, Randy travis, Music, Entertainment, Culture, Blake’s progress 

One of the biggest selling factors of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign was his promise to conduct mass deportations, sending millions of illegal aliens the Biden administration had imported back home.

According to recent figures provided by the administration, nearly 1 million people have been deported since January 2025.

BlazeTV host Steve Deace is pleased with this number.

“That’s excellent progress given where we were starting from and all the court challenges and everything else, right? Not to mention how squishy Republicans are,” he says.

However, many conservatives disagree.

“There are plenty of my friends and contacts who are like, ‘This dog ain’t going to hunt,’ ‘This ain’t going to cut it,’ and ‘Mass deportations is what we voted for, it’s what we expect, and these aren’t massive enough,’” he notes.

“One man’s mass is another man’s meh, right?” he quips.

Deace asks co-host Todd Erzen and producer Aaron McIntire to weigh in. “Which of these two camps in my friend group right now would you guys come down in?”

Erzen is less optimistic than Deace.

“I’m way more in ‘this dog ain’t gonna hunt’ ultimately,” he says, noting that he’s nonetheless “grateful for everything that’s being done.”

“Right now, Dearborn, Michigan, should be a ghost town. Pockets of Minneapolis, wherever all those Somalis live, ghost town. Take care of that. … That should be a bat signal to everybody else: Here we come,” he adds.

Aaron, however, is more concerned with finding “the real story.”

“It’s really difficult, especially when we’ve had as many government shutdowns or partial shutdowns as we’ve had in the last 18 months … to actually get a bead on what the real data is,” he says.

Regardless, no matter what the actual number is, he argues, deportations are “nowhere near the pace that [they need] to be.”

“So, what I hear you guys saying, therefore, is that in typical Republican fashion, what we are doing is stopping the left from doing any new bad things, but we’re not going back and really undoing the old system,” Deace summarizes.

“Trump will push and stretch that paradigm as much as any previous Republican of our lifetimes has or was probably willing to, right? But … it still doesn’t inspire the level of paradigm shift that is really required here. Is that what I hear you saying?” he asks.

“Exactly,” Erzen says.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve’s take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Steve deace, Mass deportations, Immigration and customs enforcement, Department of homeland security, Donald trump, Steve deace show 

Police in Madison, Wisconsin, fatally shot a male who a pulled knife and injured an officer amid an arrest Wednesday afternoon, the police chief said — and the incident has sparked protests.

Social media video of the shooting went viral, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, adding that some Wisconsin politicians have criticized police. ABC News said the fatally shot male was black.

‘It’s an absolute tragedy when a member of our community is killed by anyone, but especially by the police.’

Madison Police Chief John Patterson said there is no bodycam video of the shooting since no frontline officers have body cameras, the paper reported.

The fatally shot male was suspected of stealing bicycles and attempting to enter unlocked cars, the paper said, adding that when police located him, he fled on a bicycle.

Multiple officers tried to restrain and arrest the male, and a struggle occurred at the intersection of Williamson and South Baldwin Streets around 1:35 p.m., the paper said.

Chief Patterson at a Wednesday news conference said the male drew a knife and injured one officer during the arrest attempt, and the officer then shot and killed the male, the paper reported.

Officials have not publicly identified the fatally shot male, the paper added, only saying that he was in his 30s.

RELATED: ‘Eye for an eye’: Support soars for father charged with murdering deputy just 1 day after different cop shot his son dead

More from the Journal Sentinel:

Videos of the attempted arrest and shooting, reviewed and verified by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, showed three officers struggling with the man. Officers can be heard yelling “he’s got a knife.” Another officer approaches and shouts “Taser” and attempts to use a stun gun on the man, who appears to fall over or is pulled down by an officer.

As the man is on the ground, one of the officers shoots the man three times and another officer briefly covers her mouth with her hand. Officers subsequently can be seen attempting to tend to the man.

The paper said state Rep. Francesca Hong — a lifelong Madison resident and leading candidate in the Democratic primary field for governor — criticized the shooting and stood with others at the shooting scene Wednesday evening.

“I am horrified and devastated,” she said in a statement posted to social media, the Journal Sentinel said. “This was an execution, and it never should have happened.”

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, also a Democrat running for governor, said in a statement he was horrified by the shooting and likened it to prior police shootings in Kenosha and Minneapolis, the paper said.

“Each incident reopens deep wounds, raises difficult questions, and reminds us of the urgent work that remains to build trust, transparency, and accountability in our systems,” Crowley said, according to the Journal Sentinel.

Democrat Gov. Tony Evers — who endorsed Crowley days ago — asked protesters to remain peaceful and respectful, the paper said.

RELATED: Ferguson cop attacked at Michael Brown protest, suffers ‘severe brain injury’ and is ‘fighting for his life,’ police say

“There must be transparency and accountability in any investigation moving forward,” Evers said in an X post, the paper said. “We will continue to keep the loved ones and family of the individual who was killed in our hearts and prayers. His life mattered.”

Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, also a Democrat, said in a statement she was angered and saddened by the shooting, the Journal Sentinel reported.

“There is real pain in our city right now,” the mayor said, according to the paper. “It’s an absolute tragedy when a member of our community is killed by anyone, but especially by the police.”

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​Police involved shooting, Fatal shooting, Madison, Wisconsin, Protests, Knife, Officer injured, Crime 

If you’ve spent any time on YouTube, you’ve probably seen videos of Chinese electric vehicles loaded with giant touchscreens, premium interiors, advanced driver-assistance systems, and impressive range — all selling overseas for the price of an entry-level compact car.

This week, Washington made sure they’re likely to stay that way.

History suggests consumers usually benefit when new competitors arrive.

The official explanation is national security. But that’s only part of the story.

Unacceptable risks?

On July 15, the Senate Commerce Committee advanced the Connected Vehicle Security Act of 2026, bipartisan legislation introduced by Ohio Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno and Michigan Democrat Sen. Elissa Slotkin. The bill would permanently codify and strengthen Commerce Department restrictions on connected vehicles, software, and hardware from China and other designated foreign adversaries. It doesn’t just target cars wearing Chinese badges; it targets the telematics units, cellular modems, GPS modules, and other connected technology that allows modern vehicles to constantly send and receive data.

Supporters argue that’s necessary because today’s vehicles collect enormous amounts of information, including location data, driving behavior, camera feeds, microphones, and wireless communications. Given China’s national security laws, which require companies to cooperate with government intelligence requests, lawmakers say allowing Chinese-connected vehicles onto American roads creates unacceptable risks.

Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously.

But the legislation also blocks what could become the biggest source of price competition the American auto industry has faced in decades.

RELATED: This used-car odometer scam is everywhere — and impossible to detect

CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

Good for the goose …

The average new vehicle now sells for close to record prices. Even compact crossovers routinely exceed $35,000, electric vehicles often cost much more before incentives, financing has become more expensive, insurance premiums continue climbing, and used-car prices remain stubbornly high. Americans can watch BYD, Geely, MG, Chery, XPeng, and other Chinese brands selling well-equipped vehicles overseas for thousands less than comparable models available here — sometimes for nearly half the price — and naturally wonder why they can’t buy them.

Washington’s answer is national security.

Fair enough — but if protecting Americans’ data is the goal, why does the conversation stop with China?

Modern vehicles already collect extraordinary amounts of information about their owners. Domestic automakers know where many vehicles travel, how they’re driven, and when they’re serviced, while connected-car data has already found its way to insurers and third-party data brokers. Congress appears highly motivated to prevent China from collecting that information, but it has shown far less urgency about limiting who else can.

Competition wanted

There’s also an economic reality. Keeping Chinese competitors out protects existing manufacturers from the kind of price competition they’ve largely avoided. Over the past decade, automakers have steadily abandoned affordable entry-level cars in favor of SUVs and pickups with much higher profit margins. Introducing dozens of lower-priced competitors would put pressure on those margins — which is exactly what competition is supposed to do.

History suggests consumers usually benefit when new competitors arrive. Japanese automakers forced Detroit to improve in the 1970s and 1980s, while Korean manufacturers evolved from budget brands into respected global competitors. Better quality, stronger reliability, and lower prices followed. Whether Chinese manufacturers would have had the same effect is now a question Americans may never get to answer.

Even if finished Chinese vehicles never reach U.S. dealerships, much of the global battery supply chain still runs through China. The country dominates battery mineral processing and many of the components used in electric vehicles assembled around the world, including those built in North America. America is trying to reduce its dependence on China while remaining heavily dependent on Chinese manufacturing for some of the industry’s most important technologies — a contradiction that won’t disappear simply because imported vehicles are banned.

The Connected Vehicle Security Act may ultimately prove to be good national-security policy. But Americans deserve an honest conversation about its economic cost as well.

Restricting Chinese vehicles limits competition, reduces consumer choice, and almost certainly helps keep vehicle prices higher than they otherwise might be. If lawmakers believe those trade-offs are necessary, they should make that case openly, because the people paying the price won’t be members of Congress or auto executives.

They’ll be the families walking into dealerships wondering why their next vehicle costs thousands more than they expected.

National security matters. Consumers deserve the full picture, including what those protections may cost them every time they shop for a new car.

​China, National security, Toyota, Electric vehicles, Batteries, Automotive 

Undercover reporter James O’Keefe has struck again.

The U.S. Navy has placed a senior Pentagon official on administrative leave after a hidden camera from a “gay” date with O’Keefe on July 6 appeared to catch the official criticizing President Donald Trump and vowing to reverse the administration’s policy changes.

‘Why do the gays in DC spill all the beans to me each and every single time?’

In footage shared to social media by O’Keefe on Wednesday, a disguised O’Keefe is out with an individual he identified as the director of business operations in the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, Brandon Newsom. On the video, Newsom claims to “oversee all corporate ops, so like HR, IT, security.”

Newsom tells O’Keefe that while the Trump administration policies challenge his morals, “I want to stay and stick it out, so that way, when the time comes, I can undo whatever’s been done [by the Trump administration],” video appears to show.

The alternative, he suggests in the video, is risking having someone who supports the administration take over his responsibilities.

When asked what specific policies he would seek to undo, Newsom appears to tell O’Keefe, whose disguise consisted of a blonde dye-job and a “Freddie Mercury” mustache, “I don’t think there should be one specific prayer service.”

The Pentagon’s monthly voluntary worship services have ruffled feathers besides Newsom’s in recent months.

Rachel Laser, the CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, complained in March, “Even if these prayer services are presented as voluntary, there is pressure on federal employees to attend in order to appease their bosses — especially since these services occur amidst the Trump administration’s campaign to punish anyone who doesn’t comply with its Christian Nationalist agenda.”

Newsom, who expressed an openness to holding a prayer service where “all religions are recognized,” is apparently keen also on doing away with the administration’s schedule policy/career reform, which he told O’Keefe directly impacted him.

RELATED: Democrats go into FULL PANIC MODE after Trump exposes election interference from China and the deep state

“I was converted to schedule policy, which means all of my protections as an employee have been stripped away,” Newsom appears to say in the video. “Hopefully that’s the first thing that gets undone.”

Although he acknowledged that he lacked the authority to change policy, Newsom appears to tell the undercover reporter that he has “the influence.”

In addition to apparently divulging his desire to see multiple MAGA policies reversed, Newsom appears to tell O’Keefe that rogue elements have already done their best to hinder implementation.

“There’s a lot of things that they [the Trump administration] tried to do at the very beginning … they’ve still not rolled out because you have certain folks in certain positions who can slow-roll things,” Newsom appears to say in the footage.

Later in the video, O’Keefe’s date appears not only to call Trump a “textbook narcissist” but claims that the Iran war is “completely stupid” and “based on one man’s ego.”

O’Keefe later tweeted, “Why do the gays in DC spill all the beans to me each and every single time?”

When asked for comment, the Pentagon referred Blaze News to the Navy, which did not immediately respond.

Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao did, however, address the undercover report on Wednesday evening, stating, “The Department of the Navy takes the conduct shown in this video extremely seriously.”

“Such statements and apparent intent to leverage a position to undermine the policies and direction set by our elected leaders are inappropriate and incompatible with the standards expected of Department personnel,” continued Cao. “Effective immediately, this individual has been placed on administrative leave while we determine next steps to ensure accountability and protect the integrity of our mission.”

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​James o’keefe, Pentagon, Deep state, Hung cao, Politics 

The American EV company Lucid Motors recently brought in restructuring experts AlixPartners to figure out how to stop burning through hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter. Corporate spokespeople immediately sprinted to the microphone to label bankruptcy speculation as completely false. Investors watched the stock price slide anyway, because nobody looking at the sales ledgers can claim business is booming. Deliveries remain a microscopic blip compared to the mountains of cash going out the door.

Lucid is not alone.

The market has spoken, with crystal-clear honesty.

A massive freeze has settled over the entire domestic EV market.

Last month, the number-crunchers at BloombergNEF took a giant eraser to their 2030 U.S. electric vehicle sales forecast. They slashed the expected market share from an absurdly optimistic 48% to a far less revolutionary 17%. That massive drop accounts for millions of battery-powered cars that regular Americans simply refuse to buy. Car lots across the country now look like metallic graveyards for unwanted golf carts. Ford put the brakes on its F-150 Lightning production. General Motors hit pause on major factory lines. An increasing number of hyped-up EV startups are suddenly staring directly into the financial abyss.

Green tears

The New York Times is far from happy. One of its contributors, Matthew Shaer, recently published a stern lamentation about American automakers backing away from EVs. He pointed out that global adoption is expanding in places like China, arguing that Detroit’s retreat will come back to haunt the nation.

That overly emotional column completely ignores the basic mechanics of a free-market economy. American automakers build what pays the bills today. When showroom floors begin filling with unsold battery-powered cars, executives eventually stop pouring billions into a financial black hole simply to satisfy coastal columnists and climate activists. Yet Shaer appears convinced that he knows more than the people who have spent decades designing, building, and selling automobiles. The sheer hubris is breathtaking.

Market demand drives every industry, including the auto industry. Everyday consumers have weighed the real-world utility of electric commuting and decided they much prefer internal combustion. Range anxiety, broken charging stations, and sky-high sticker prices turned off millions of working families. When federal cash subsidies began to dry up, natural consumer sentiment exposed the total lack of organic demand under the entire enterprise.

And the lack of genuine demand makes complete sense.

Driving in Europe operates on an entirely different geographical planet than life in North America. European commuters navigate tight medieval streets and short distances between nation-states. A tiny battery-powered hatchback works fine for a five-mile trip across a compact French city to buy some overpriced organic cheese.

America is a different beast entirely. It was built on endless interstate highways, vast open deserts, and heavy towing needs. Drivers routinely haul boats, livestock, and heavy camper rigs across hundreds of miles of open road in a single afternoon. A delicate electric jelly bean designed for zipping past European coffee shops will curl up into a fetal position the second you hitch it to a cattle trailer in Oklahoma.

A way of life

America’s automotive taste has always leaned toward mechanical presence and raw horsepower. Decades of American car culture were forged on the rumble of Ford V8 engines, trail-ready Jeep Wranglers, and heavy-duty Ram pickups. Drivers want machines that roar when they step on the gas pedal, not a glorified rolling iPhone that needs a software update just to back out of the driveway. They want to possess something that possesses them, a vehicle that sparks genuine pride and makes them actively look for reasons to hit the open road.

This has been the case for decades.

RELATED: You can finally buy Palmer Luckey’s favorite ‘flying car’ — there’s just one catch

Jetson ONE

The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo brought America to its knees. Gas stations ran dry. Lines stretched for blocks. Drivers waited for hours to fill their tanks. The country was reminded, in the most humiliating way possible, that its entire way of life depended on fuel flowing freely from somewhere else.

The lesson seemed obvious: America needed smaller cars, greater efficiency, and less dependence on foreign oil. And for a while, Americans adjusted.

Then the fuel started flowing again. The giant engines returned. The SUVs grew larger. The pickup trucks became rolling monuments to torque and the uniquely American belief that a vehicle should be able to transport a family, a boat, a couple of horses, and half a hardware store at the same time.

The EV backlash reflects something too deeply embedded in American culture to be dislodged by an ideological movement. Americans don’t merely want transportation. They want a more profound experience: freedom of movement, the ability to point a vehicle this way or that and drive until the landscape changes. They want to cross 2,000 miles of the country without planning their entire journey around whether the next charging station exists or is occupied by someone whose vehicle has already been sitting there for close to an hour.

The market has spoken, with crystal-clear honesty. American drivers value reliability, independence, and real utility over state-directed tech experiments. Detroit car companies are returning to gas-powered trucks, hybrids, and high-horsepower muscle cars because those vehicles actually clear the lot. The free market dictates the winner every single time. The internal combustion engine, it seems, is here to stay.

​Tech 

Americans are looking for safety in an increasingly chaotic country. Mass immigration, collapsing social trust, and weakening civic bonds have transformed many communities from places where neighbors knew one another into anonymous zones governed by suspicion.

Technology promises an escape from the consequences of those political and cultural failures. Flock Safety cameras appear to offer law and order at the push of a button. In the hands of the ruling class that manufactured the crisis, however, they are more likely to produce tyranny for citizens.

Today’s stolen-car database can become tomorrow’s political enforcement system.

Municipalities are buying Flock’s automated license plate readers. The company did not invent plate cameras, but its artificial intelligence radically expands their reach.

Flock cameras photograph passing vehicles and record license plates, makes, colors, damage, bumper stickers, and identifiers. A single camera means little. A citywide network collecting thousands of images every day creates something powerful.

The cameras send their information to an AI database in real time. Police and other municipal employees can search for vehicles nearby. They can place cars on “hot lists” and receive alerts whenever those vehicles appear.

The system effectively places a GPS tracker on every moving car. Police ordinarily need a warrant to attach a tracker to your vehicle. Flock can reproduce the same surveillance through a network of cameras, often without probable cause, due process, or meaningful legal restraint.

The benefits are obvious. Perfect information about every vehicle makes suspects easier to find. Police can recover stolen cars, locate fleeing murderers, and respond faster to crimes.

In a high-trust town, every grandmother on the porch once knew which cars belonged and which did not. Flock offers a technological imitation of that lost social awareness.

But imitation carries a price. Grandma knew her neighbors and exercised human judgment. The database knows everyone and answers to government employees.

Flock is not alone in selling technological substitutes for social order. Cities have used gunshot-detection systems. Networks of acoustic sensors identify gunfire and triangulate its location, allowing police to respond faster.

The engineering may be impressive. The governing theory is primitive: If authorities watch and listen to everyone constantly, they can prevent more crimes and solve more cases.

RELATED: We’re winning the fight against Flock — but the surveillance isn’t going away that easily

Andrii Yalanskyi/iStock/Getty Images

A surveillance panopticon may work. People who know they are always being watched behave differently. Americans have resisted that bargain for good reason.

The Fourth Amendment exists because efficient policing is not the highest political good. Government must possess evidence and follow procedures before invading the privacy of citizens. New technology should not erase old constitutional limits.

Britain offers a warning. Closed-circuit television cameras have become ubiquitous across the United Kingdom. Some estimates suggest that the average British resident appears on camera dozens of times each day.

Britain has no written equivalent of the Fourth Amendment, and its political culture places fewer obstacles before constant public surveillance. Yet cameras did not prevent the Rotherham grooming-gang scandal or protect thousands of vulnerable girls from organized abuse.

Officials ignored or concealed the crimes for years because confronting them threatened the ruling class’s multicultural ideology. When public anger finally erupted, the surveillance state proved far more competent at identifying and punishing citizens who protested the cover-up.

That is the anarcho-tyranny trap.

Conservative thinker Samuel Francis used the term to describe a regime that tolerates disorder while imposing suffocating control on peaceful citizens. Authorities fail to punish criminals, then use the chaos created by that failure to justify new powers over everyone else.

Americans have already seen the pattern.

The government possessed enormous amounts of video from the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Businesses burned, neighborhoods were looted, and citizens were assaulted. The system showed little appetite for using every available image to identify and prosecute everyone involved.

After January 6, the same government used surveillance footage, facial recognition, financial records, and digital communications to pursue participants with extraordinary intensity. Officials punished many who entered the Capitol and investigated people who merely stood nearby.

RELATED: Flock Safety CEO: It’s ‘terroristic’ to want to know where we put our spy cameras

Antranik Tavitian/Bloomberg/Getty Images

During the pandemic, technology companies yielded to government pressure, censored disfavored speech, and turned over user information. Neither the administrative state nor its corporate partners have earned the benefit of the doubt. They have repeatedly demonstrated that enforcement depends on the target.

I am less hostile to state power than many conservatives. A government that cannot control its borders, remove violent criminals, or maintain public order is not a serious government.

But power must be directed toward the common good. The officials asking for universal surveillance are the same officials who refuse to use ordinary authority against illegal immigration, organized crime, urban disorder, and politically favored mobs.

Giving them a database that tracks every American driver will not correct their priorities. It will magnify them.

Supporters will insist that only criminals need to worry. That argument assumes surveillance will remain limited to serious crime and that government will apply its powers impartially. Recent history destroys both assumptions.

Today’s stolen-car database can become tomorrow’s political enforcement system. A hot list can identify a murder suspect, an immigration protester, a gun owner, a church attendee, or anyone traveling to a disfavored rally.

The danger does not require a secret conspiracy. Bureaucracies naturally expand their missions. Politicians redefine threats. Private vendors seek new contracts. Once the infrastructure exists, every crisis supplies another justification for using it.

America’s disorder has obvious political causes. Elites imported cheap labor, weakened borders, excused criminality, and dissolved the social bonds that once allowed communities to police themselves informally. Citizens now feel like strangers in their own homeland.

Technology cannot repair that betrayal.

The difficult answers remain immigration restriction, deportation, competent policing, equal enforcement, and the restoration of families, neighborhoods, and civic trust. Cameras may assist legitimate police work, but they cannot substitute for political courage.

Flock promises safety without social repair. The bargain is tempting because rebuilding order is difficult.

Americans should refuse it.

Rewarding the people who created the crisis with the power to monitor every movement will not restore a high-trust society. It will lock law-abiding citizens inside an open-air prison while the disorder continues beyond the cameras’ reach.

​Anarcho-tyranny, Artificial intelligence, Due process, Flock cameras, Fourth amendment, Gps monitoring, Law and order, License plates, Opinion & analysis, Police, Safety, Surveillance, Technology 

When liberal podcaster Jennifer Welch mocked Republicans for being afraid of liberal white women, BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales couldn’t help but point out that she’s right — guilty as charged.

“I finally agree with something that Jennifer Welch said,” Gonzales admits on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered,” though she notes Welch is “one of the most vile people” she’s ever witnessed speak in her life.

Welch was on a “very short-lived Bravo series” called “Sweet Home Oklahoma” before starting her podcast “I’ve Had It.”

“She spews all of her crazy leftist talking points on her podcast. … However, there was something that she said in a much longer rant, but there was a piece of it that I actually agreed with,” Gonzales says, before playing the clip of Welch.

“The Republican Party has perfectly exploited this personality and moral weakness in this sect of people. And that’s why these people live in fear 24/7, 365. They’re scared of the liberal white woman,” Welch said.

“Think about what a bunch of p***ies these grown ass men are that they would be scared,” she continued.

“And they will say it. ‘The white liberal woman is ruining America.’ I’m just like, go put your pacifier in your mouth you titty baby,” she added.

“I mean, listen, she’s disgusting. She’s crass. But she is right. Like I too am terrified of liberal white women. I actually am. I am scared of liberal white women. I would just say that it’s for good reason,” Gonzales comments.

“Let’s start with the fact that you guys are the ones trying to, I don’t know, like groom children at schools, teach our kindergarteners about sex and sexual positions and, you know, masturbation. That’s you. It’s always you guys,” she says.

“You guys are the ones who are on multiple SSRIs, and you have SSRI eyes all the time because you’re mentally unstable. You guys are the ones who are constantly promoting violence,” she adds.

Gonzales notes that you don’t need to take her word for it; liberal white women are statistically “more mentally ill than conservative women.”

“The science says, according to Pew Research, in 2020, has a doctor or health care provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition?” Gonzales begins, explaining that Pew Research “didn’t even have a graph big enough for liberal white women.”

“It just goes off the charts. Like they almost needed to change their scale,” she says.

However, the poll “gets even worse” when it comes to young liberal white women.

“When asked, ‘Has a doctor or health care provider ever told you you have a mental health condition?’ More than half say yes in the 18- to 29-year-old age range,” Gonzales says.

“That’s scary guys,” she says, adding, “Are you understanding why we’re scared of you yet?”

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

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​Jennifer welch, Pew research, White women, Mental illness, Sara gonzales, Sara gonzales unfiltered 

A 20-year-old Briton was savagely attacked last month by multiple black individuals on the streets of Birmingham, England, within view of nearby police officers. A female officer ran into action but rather than help the apparent victim, she manhandled and arrested him while his attackers fled the scene.

Birmingham Police subsequently tried to paint the victim, Cody Harper, as the villain of the story and suppress evidence to the contrary.

‘[WMP] let two thugs from ethnic minority backgrounds off.’

While law enforcement nearly succeeded in ruining the young man’s life, the case against Harper has crumbled in the wake of significant backlash and criticism over two-tier policing in the United Kingdom.

The incident

Footage of the June 21 incident shows six black individuals hassling Harper on Birmingham’s Broad Street. One man from the mob dressed in a black jacket launches a sneak attack from the right, knocking Harper to the ground, before another thug sucker-punches him in the back of the head, video shows.

Harper attempts to scramble to his feet, only to have a female police officer pin him against a nearby wall, video shows. Harper is unaware his attacker is an officer and so blindly throws a punch in self-defense, but only brushes off her cap.

Despite Harper’s claims that the mob was “tryin’ to smack me up,” the female officer — who failed to identify herself as police — lunges for Harper’s neck, proceeds to handcuff him, and appears to call him a “dick.”

RELATED: What is anarcho-tyranny? Modern Britain gives a disturbing glimpse of our future.

“You’re under arrest for assault on police,” says the female officer. She and another female officer then march Harper over to a police car, and a male cop throws him in it.

The response

Footage of the incident went viral online, prompting an official response by police.

“We are aware of footage showing the arrest of a man after a disorder on Broad Street at 1.30am on 21 June. Officers found a group of men fighting,” Birmingham Police said July 2. “As the incident was dealt with, an officer was punched. One man was arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer.”

The police department noted further that following a review of the incident, it had “no concerns over the officer’s actions” and was “satisfied that they were reasonable and proportionate in the circumstances.”

The department urged the public not to share footage of the attack.

The public, however, declined to heed Birmingham Police’s request, and the mistreatment of Harper became a major scandal, prompting commentary and criticism, including from lawmakers.

Zia Yusuf, a spokesman for Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. party, said at the time, “If you are a white person in Britain and you get assaulted by ethnic minority men: The police watch on and wait until you are on the floor before moving in to arrest YOU. The police make no attempt to arrest your assailants, letting them run off without consequence.”

James McMurdock, a Reform U.K. member of Parliament, wrote, “I can’t let this go unchallenged. That young man was, in my opinion and based on the video below, the clear victim of an assault. The video shows, for reasons that are entirely beyond my comprehension, the officer steaming directly into the victim.”

RELATED: Horrific details emerge about international pro-life leader’s assassination

UK MP James McMurdock. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

Robert Jenrick, another member of Parliament for Reform U.K., said that “it’s baffling that he was arrested while the two black men who attacked him weren’t.”

Amid the backlash, police slightly changed their tune, acknowledging July 3 that “an assault has taken place” and announcing they were taking steps to “identify those involved.”

Despite the update, Harper was still saddled with the assault charge and due in court on July 23.

No charges — for anyone

The Crown Prosecution Service has since dropped the case against Harper, having concluded that they didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute the young man.

“Following a careful review of all the evidence, including video footage of the incident, we concluded there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the suspect for assaulting a police officer,” said a Crown Prosecution Service spokesman. “We have therefore stopped proceedings and written to both the suspect and the complainant confirming this.”

‘A failure of justice here would have haunted him.’

“We recognize assaults committed against emergency workers are abhorrent crimes, both against the victim and against society as a whole,” added the spokesman.

Yet, West Midlands Police, which encompasses Birmingham Police, isn’t apologizing for its treatment of Harper.

On the contrary, the force told the Telegraph that while it respected the decision to discontinue the case against Harper, his arrest was “lawful and came after a police officer conducting her duties was hit.”

WMP revealed that the two cowards who attacked Harper have been identified — but that neither man has been charged with assault. They were instead given out-of-court disposals, roughly the equivalent of a citation in the U.S.

While happy to see Harper’s charges dropped, Christopher Philp, a Conservative Party member who serves as shadow home secretary, condemned WMP’s decision to treat the attackers with kid gloves, calling it a “blatant example of two-tier policing.”

“[WMP] let two thugs from ethnic minority backgrounds off with a slap on the wrist while attempting to prosecute a third man — who had himself been attacked — who was white,” said Philp. “Only the intervention of the CPS thankfully stopped this from proceeding.”

“Everyone should be treated the same regardless of skin color. But the extremist and misnamed ‘anti-racist’ ideology that some police leaders have signed up to brazenly calls for people to be treated differently based on skin color,” added Philp.

The anti-racism guidance issued by the National Police Chiefs’ Council still explicitly calls for treating people differently on the basis of race.

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​Anti-white, United kingdom, Nigel farage, Reform uk, Politics 

A few weeks ago, Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — our formal rejection of hereditary rule and political power by birthright.

Now South Carolina Republicans are being asked to embrace precisely that principle in a Senate primary.

South Carolina does not need another half-century of political inheritance. It needs a genuine changing of the guard.

After initially saying Darline Graham Nordone would hold her late brother Lindsey Graham’s U.S. Senate seat only temporarily while the state prepared for a special election, President Trump encouraged her to seek a full six-year term. She agreed.

This candidacy began with a promise that proved disposable. A lie. Nothing about it has improved since.

Nordone’s central qualification is obvious: She is Lindsey Graham’s sister. Her campaign amounts to “birthright senatorship” — an inherited claim on public office dressed up as party unity.

America First voters were promised an assault on the swamp: entrenched power, donor networks, insider dealing, and political advancement based on access rather than merit. They were not promised a new hereditary class with Senate seats passed from one family member to another.

To borrow Graham’s own words from the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight, this is a sham, and South Carolinians should see through the charade.

Graham’s speech during that battle was one of his finest moments in the Senate. It may have helped save Kavanaugh’s nomination. It did not create a family title to the office Graham held.

His sister is not entitled to inherit his seat because he died in office.

The proposed Graham dynasty is especially offensive because this seat has already been dominated by two men since 1956: Strom Thurmond and Lindsey Graham. South Carolina does not need another half-century of political inheritance. It needs a genuine changing of the guard.

Most voters cannot leave their children a lucrative career, much less a seat in the United States Senate. Public office is not family property. It belongs to the people, who are supposed to choose among candidates with records, ideas, and qualifications of their own.

Nordone has no meaningful public record in politics or policy that would justify elevation to one of the nation’s most powerful offices. What fills that void instead is support for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; a career inside federally subsidized state bureaucracy; and an endorsement from Rep. Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat whose support revived Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

RELATED: The internet makes monsters and saints before the body is cold

Blaze Media Illustration

None of that recommends her to voters who were told they were dismantling the old order.

For years, South Carolina politics has been dominated by the Haley-Graham cocktail circuit: polished Republicans who chased dragons abroad while much of their state declined beyond the comfortable enclaves of Charleston and Columbia.

Graham’s death was tragic. His foreign-policy views were often badly out of step with America First voters, but no decent person wished for his sudden passing. He deserves mourning and respect.

His sister does not deserve a coronation.

The Republican Party should be especially wary of this arrangement because its voters have spent a decade rebelling against political dynasties. They rejected the Bushes, resisted the Clintons, and rallied behind Trump in part because he attacked a system in which the right surname, donor list, or social circle mattered more than accountability.

A Truth Social post should not be enough to transform blood relation into political legitimacy. Neither should the swift organization of party officials, donors, and consultants eager to preserve their access.

If Nordone wants the seat, she should earn it on the strength of her own record and convictions. So far, she has offered neither. Her campaign asks voters to treat kinship as qualification and temporary appointment as entitlement.

That is the political world America First was supposed to destroy.

South Carolina Republicans should refuse to build a Graham dynasty in the name of draining the swamp. They should reject birthright senatorship and choose a senator rather than accept an heir.

​Declaration of independence, Lindsey graham, President trump, Special election, Senate primary, Darline nordone, America first, South carolina, Opinion & analysis 

A Washington state grandfather was recently launched roughly eight feet in the air by a charging bison at Yellowstone National Park. The man survived the terrifying ordeal and is now telling his harrowing story from a hospital bed after suffering a brutal injury.

Carl Isom-McDaniel, 65, was walking with his 13-year-old grandson just after dinner on July 10 at Bridge Bay Campground near Yellowstone Lake in Wyoming. The pair stopped to take photos of a bull bison resting near a campsite.

‘He just kept coming, and he was more aggressive.’

Mike MacLeod is a professional photographer who witnessed the attack and captured it on video.

MacLeod told NewsNation’s Jesse Weber that the bison charged at a couple and some boys before the animal appeared to settle down, but that calm was short-lived.

“Carl and his grandson started walking along the road, and the bison saw them,” MacLeod recalled. “And for whatever reason, he got up and charged.”

MacLeod said the grandfather saved the boy’s life by distracting the bison.

“Carl told his grandson to run along the road and go back to the place where they had just come from while he lured the bison away,” MacLeod stated. “So he saved his grandson’s life.”

MacLeod also attempted to get the bison’s attention once it charged at the grandfather.

“Someone just needed to distract that bison. So I started yelling for other campers … running, jumping up as high as I could, and screaming at the top of my lungs, and ran at it to distract,” said MacLeod, who has a master’s degree in wildlife biology.

A viral video caught the moment the bison charged at Isom-McDaniel and hurled him several feet into the air.

MacLeod told Fox News, “Once I saw the victim in the air, I stopped filming and ran with some other men to haze the bison away and to render aid.”

MacLeod informed KIVI-TV, “He said it wasn’t the horn, it was his head. It was actually soft. All the damage came when he hit the ground and broke his femur.”

MacLeod recalled that the first thing Isom-McDaniel asked after the brutal attack was: “How is my grandson?” Fox News reported.

“He was in severe pain,” MacLeod remembered, but added, “People came to help comfort him. And he started making jokes.”

RELATED: ‘Savage’ pit bulls with cocaine in their systems kill gardening grandmother in ‘gruesome’ mauling: Lawsuit

According to the Seattle Times, Bozeman Health emergency department Dr. Eric Lowe said Isom-McDaniel broke his femur in four places.

In a Facebook video shared by the Bozeman Health Deaconess Regional Medical Center, Isom-McDaniel gave an update on his health and how the nightmarish scenario unfolded.

The grandpa said of the bison, “He wasn’t showing aggression or anything like that until it picked a target. That target happened to be me.”

Isom-McDaniel instructed his grandson to get out of the area.

He then told his grandson, “I will deal with this down here.”

Isom-McDaniel said of the wild animal, “They move faster than you could ever imagine.”

“He just kept coming, and he was more aggressive,” the grandfather recalled. “And as soon as he got off that tree, he launched me in the air.”

The grandfather added, “Even though I was on the ground, he could have stomped me, he could have gored me, he could have done anything.”

Isom-McDaniel noted, “I didn’t get bruises from him launching me in the air. It was the landing that [caused] the problem.”

Yellowstone National Park officials confirmed that the bison involved in the attack was not euthanized.

Bison are known to be aggressive toward humans, especially during the summer mating season — which is known as the rut.

Wildlife expert and Zoo Miami Foundation conservation liaison Ron Magill told ABC News that male bison can be particularly dangerous in the summer.

“We’re at the peak of what’s called the bison rut. This is where the males are just raging in hormones because they’re fighting for territories and they’re fighting for females,” Magill explained.

Magill suggested, “The key thing to do is to move away slowly, do not run, do not make any fast types of movements.”

On June 26, a 12-year-old visitor was injured by a bison at Yellowstone National Park.

Yellowstone Park officials said of that incident, “The visitor sustained injuries, and emergency medical personnel transported them to a nearby hospital.”

Officials noted that bison have injured more people at Yellowstone Park than any other animal.

“They are unpredictable, can run three times faster than humans, and will defend their space when threatened,” Yellowstone officials said.

Officials warned, “Wild animals can be aggressive when people do not respect their space.”

The statement read, “Visitors are responsible for staying at least 25 yards away from all large animals, including bison, elk, bighorn sheep, deer, moose, and coyotes, and at least 100 yards away from bears, wolves, and cougars.”

“If wildlife approach you, move away to maintain the required distance,” the statement read. “Never approach, touch, feed, or crowd wildlife, even if an animal appears calm.”

The Yellowstone National Park website points out that male bison are the largest land-dwelling mammal in North America and can weigh as much as a ton and reach speeds of up to 35 mph.

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​Yellowstone national park, Wyoming, Politics, Bison 

Cop-cam videos are one of my favorite guilty pleasures. Seeing the badly behaved and the thuggish get what’s coming to them is a rare treat in an America that has abandoned personal responsibility and consequences for bad behavior.

But the pleasure turns to frustration too often. In most of these videos, the police waste minutes to an hour repeating their orders to a struggling suspect who has no intention of obeying.

Any parent of a toddler knows that you don’t negotiate with terrorists.

Take the latest viral example: a blue-haired college kid of indeterminate gender demanding that the cop “use my pronouns” before “consenting” to being arrested (yes, they do think they have a choice).

What should have been a simple arrest turns into an eight-minute installment of absurdist theater. It is truly something to behold.

Missed manners

Before we get to that, consider the general cultural context of such videos. Anyone in their 40s or older knows that standards of public behavior in America ain’t what they used to be. Manners are a thing of the past. People walk their carts up the middle of aisles, oblivious to anyone needing to get by. They sail through doors you hold without acknowledgment.

And that’s just on foot. Rules of the road? Forget it. Everyone at a four-way stop is either trying to jump the right-of-way line or they’ve forgotten the rule altogether. Or they don’t care.

The other day I ran across an honest-to-God telephone booth preserved as part of a nostalgia display at an amusement park. These were built for a world with manners. People were motivated to build booths for phones because they assumed the caller wanted privacy and that the caller didn’t want to inflict his conversation on passersby. Quaint, no?

Broken windows

We’re living through a nationwide experiment in abandoning broken-windows policing. It’s just plain old common sense: When authorities let the “little” things slide — graffiti, vandalism, public disorder, petty lawbreaking — they teach people that the rules don’t matter. Bigger offenses inevitably follow. New York City learned that lesson the hard way before Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton restored order in the 1990s by cracking down on so-called “quality of life” crimes.

It’s obviously true. But Democrats, leftists, and communists don’t like law and order. What they like is pretending that having rules for civil society is oppression. What they like even more is getting cities to defund their police departments so that criminals have a rules-free playground at everyone else’s expense. They do this by whining that mean, bad, Republican “fascists” like Giuliani were hurting “people of color” and “unhoused people” with these awful rules and laws.

You can see it in this essay on the blog Common Justice. Author “Cade T.,” who styles himself a “community organizer,” says cracking down on law and order is targeting those oppressed brown people again.

“Ultimately, the fear is that crime will become contagious and endemic in the urban environment,” he writes. “Under Giuliani, the NYPD identified neighborhoods in which to crack down on minor crimes. Not only did broken windows policing fail to reduce crime, but it also provided cover for a deliberate targeting of Black and brown communities.”

No respect

This is simply not true. Giuliani’s policy resulted in a dramatic decrease in violent crime. It stands to reason. When people see police take a hands-off approach — especially toward groups the political class considers “protected” — they naturally become bolder. We see it every time hundreds of black teens riot through city streets while news anchors timidly describe the violence as nothing more than a “teen takeover.”

A large number of Americans — especially younger ones — neither fear nor respect the police. Why would they? As Forbes reported in 2020, at least 13 major American cities cut police funding or staffing in response to the BLM movement, while many smaller jurisdictions created such a hostile political climate that officers no longer felt confident their own departments would support them for simply doing their jobs. Small cities like Montpelier, Vermont, now struggle to recruit and retain enough officers.

The video below shows what hands-off policing looks like in the 2020s. Even when cops are willing to try to do their job, they’re strangely timid about effecting an arrest in a way I don’t remember police acting when I was a young man.

RELATED: How a McDonald’s men’s room perfectly captures blue-state decline

Paul Harris/Getty Images

Gender special

Our protagonist is a young man I’ll call a “gender special.” He’s obese, his hair is dyed blue, and he simpers as he gesticulates, using a falsely high voice. It’s eight minutes long. If you’re pressed for time, just watch the first two minutes, and then the last two minutes. The whole thing is worth watching, though: The young man screams “JUST SAY SHE” repeatedly at the cops, jumping up and down like Rumpelstiltskin when his true name was spoken.

The encounter takes place on a Florida college campus. The cops were there to deal with a car theft. The blue-haired person begins screaming at the cops; it’s not clear why. The cops tell the shrieking man to lower his voice and stop freaking out or he’s going to be cuffed and taken for a psychiatric hold. So far, so good.

And then all hell breaks loose, and the cops waste almost seven minutes shouting repeated orders at the increasingly aggressive blue-hair. The trouble is, they don’t make good on those threats immediately. The tantrum-thrower escalates; he claims to be “scared”; he screams at the cops to stop harassing him (they’re not); and he pitches a fit at being referred to as “sir.”

He even threatens the cop with “f**king try it” when the cop warns him he’ll be handcuffed.

Tantrum terrorist

Any parent of a toddler knows that you don’t negotiate with terrorists. You give them one warning, and if they keep fussing, you bodily control them and remove them from the scene. Otherwise, the tantrum gets worse.

That’s the mistake the cops made. I watched the video and counted the number of verbal warnings and commands the cops gave before finally making good on the threat to take him down in cuffs: 14.

The blue-hair’s resistance didn’t stop there. Even after he was in custody, cops had to tase him twice before he finally stopped kicking and fighting.

Back the blue

Policing needs to go back to the way it used to be. Before recent years, we never saw cops who were afraid to arrest a disorderly suspect. Why do they keep giving orders repeatedly while their subject escalates? Don’t they see that failing to follow through on promised consequences teaches the suspect and onlookers that people can, in fact, break the law and the cops won’t do anything about it?

Yes. It does teach that lesson. And that’s part of why we now see behavior every day on the street that only used to happen in mental hospitals.

But the police are not the problem. The governments, municipalities, and mayors’ offices are the problem. Cops are working in hostile territory. They know their civilian superiors not only do not support them, but are often working to target their own police force for false complaints of racism and brutality that can cost a cop his career.

If we want the boys in blue to have our backs, we have to make sure someone has theirs.

​Crime, Defund police, Law and order, Police funding, Violent crime, Policing, Black lives matter, Defund the police, Intervention, Culture 

A Connecticut police officer shot and killed a man who was brutally beating his father with a baseball bat on Sunday, according to residents in the neighborhood.

Meriden police said they were called to the residence on Sagamore Road at about 10 a.m. on Sunday over reports of a domestic violence situation.

An autopsy found that the victim died from blunt force head injuries and listed his cause of death as homicide.

The shocking body camera footage shows a man beating a victim with a bat as the officer arrives.

The officer yells at the man to stop, but he continues attacking the man. Seconds later, the officer shoots at the man, who falls down.

The alleged attacker was identified as 38-year-old Robert Lee Jenkins III, who was treated for gunshot wounds and hospitalized before he was declared dead at about 11:30 p.m.

His victim was also declared dead at the scene.

WVIT-TV reported that numerous neighbors in the area confirmed the victim to be the father of Jenkins, but Connecticut law prevents the identification of victims of certain crimes.

The Connecticut Office of the Inspector General said the cause of death for Jenkins was determined by the chief medical examiner to be multiple gunshot wounds to the torso.

An autopsy found that the victim died from blunt force head injuries and listed his cause of death as homicide.

Some reports indicate that the officer fired nearly 20 times at Jenkins.

RELATED: Elderly couple hired 17-year-old to do odd jobs at their home — before he robbed and brutally murdered them, cops say

The Office of the Inspector General released the body camera footage from the harrowing incident.

The New Haven Judicial District State’s Attorney’s Office is investigating the incident along with the Connecticut State Police Central District Major Crime Squad and the Meriden Police Department.

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​Body camera footage, Brutal beating, Connecticut, Police shooting, Crime 

China has made its view of artificial intelligence unmistakably clear.

Beijing is reportedly preparing to restrict overseas access to its most advanced AI models even as second-tier Chinese firms race to capture global customers that American export controls may drive away. China treats frontier AI as a national asset to guard, not a product to sell freely on the open market.

America’s better bet is disciplined openness: protect frontier capabilities from adversaries while making it easy for allies and trusted partners to build with American AI.

No surprise. Authoritarian governments always seek to control information, technology, and who may benefit from either. The United States should not make the same mistake.

America’s technological advantage has never come from secrecy alone. It comes from building products others want to use, setting standards others trust, and scaling companies faster than any rival.

As Congress negotiates the National Defense Authorization Act, lobbyists are pushing for new AI export restrictions. The impulse is understandable. Advanced chips, large-scale cloud computing, and frontier model weights can help foreign militaries, cyber actors, weapons proliferators, and surveillance states.

Congress must distinguish between two goals: denying adversaries dangerous capabilities and keeping the world’s trusted AI ecosystem centered on the United States.

That distinction should guide every AI export policy.

The first principle is national security through technological leadership. American AI companies, cloud providers, chip designers, universities, and capital markets form the engine of that leadership. Export controls should protect the system, not cripple it.

Second, allies and trusted partners should receive privileged access. America needs an AI coalition, not an AI fortress.

NATO allies and partners such as Japan, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, and New Zealand should not face the same practical restrictions as China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea when they meet strong security and anti-diversion standards.

Friendly countries will not build around American technology if they believe Washington can abruptly cut off access through broad and discretionary rules. They will build alternatives.

Third, controls should be risk-based and technically precise.

RELATED: The question of the AI age: How much humanism is too much?

Moor Studio/Getty Images

A transfer of frontier model weights is not the same as API access to a safeguarded model. A massive training run is not the same as ordinary inference. A Canadian researcher is not a Chinese military-linked laboratory.

The more a transaction transfers durable frontier capability, the stronger the case for licensing. The more it resembles ordinary use of a monitored service, the stronger the case for presumptive access.

The United States already uses focused tools to keep dangerous technologies away from dangerous actors. Those tools work best when they target specific end users and end uses: foreign militaries, sanctioned entities, weapons programs, offensive cyber operations, surveillance abuses, and diversion through shell companies or intermediaries.

They work poorly when companies cannot determine what the law allows.

That is the problem with the Remote Access Security Act, which the Senate is considering.

The remote-access loophole is real. Export controls fail when restricted firms cannot buy advanced chips but can rent the same computing capability through the cloud.

The House-passed bill, however, does more than close that loophole. It allows the Commerce Department to regulate remote access by a foreign person through a network or cloud service whenever the secretary determines that the use could pose a serious risk to U.S. national security or foreign policy.

That grants regulators enormous latitude.

“Foreign persons” include individuals and businesses in friendly countries. “Foreign policy” is an elastic standard. Together, those terms could give the executive branch sweeping authority over global access to American AI infrastructure.

The bill requires Commerce to inform Congress about anticipated regulations, including the security risk, method of regulation, and likely economic consequences. It does not require congressional approval before the rules take effect.

That may be administratively convenient. It is not sufficient for a power that could reshape the global AI market.

Regulators need discretion in a fast-moving technology sector. They do not need unbounded discretion.

The bill’s vagueness would change business behavior long before any court tested its limits.

RELATED: Smartphone and laptop prices are rising. Here’s why they won’t stop.

Crovik Media/Getty Images

When companies do not know who may receive access, they overblock. Cloud providers may exclude broad categories of foreign customers. AI laboratories may avoid international partnerships. Universities may slow research collaborations. Trusted allies and legitimate businesses may find themselves treated like hostile actors.

Customers who cannot obtain American AI will find it elsewhere. Increasingly, elsewhere means China.

DeepSeek, Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, and Kuaishou’s Kling AI are aggressively courting users, developers, and investors worldwide. Every needless barrier Congress places before legitimate users of American AI gives those companies an opening.

The economic stakes are enormous.

PWC estimates that AI could add as much as $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with China among the largest projected beneficiaries. The Stanford AI Index reports that American private AI investment exceeded $285 billion in 2025, more than 23 times China’s total.

That lead is extraordinary. It is not permanent.

Customers gravitate toward ecosystems that are capable, accessible, reliable, and politically predictable. American dominance will erode if Washington makes access uncertain while Beijing makes its second-tier products easy to obtain.

Congress should not discard the Remote Access Security Act. It should improve it. A better bill would close the cloud loophole while creating safe pathways for lawful use. It should provide privileged access for allies and vetted users, define clear thresholds for frontier-scale compute and controlled model weights, and distinguish among weight transfers, training compute, inference, and ordinary applications.

It should also establish licensing deadlines, appeals or advisory opinions, safe harbors for companies that perform good-faith know-your-customer and anti-diversion checks, and periodic reviews that update or retire controls as technology changes.

That approach is not soft on China. It is how America can confront China without sabotaging itself.

The United States should deny adversaries the tools they need for military modernization, cyber operations, weapons programs, and authoritarian surveillance. It should also make safe transactions easy and dangerous transactions hard.

China is betting that control will win the AI race. America’s better bet is disciplined openness: protect frontier capabilities from adversaries while making it easy for allies and trusted partners to build with American AI.

Congress should write export rules that preserve that advantage, not hand American customers to Beijing by accident.

That model has kept American companies at the front of global technology for decades. It is how they will stay there.

​Artificial intelligence, Beijing, China, Foreign policy, Humanism, Information technology, National security, United states, Global economy, Congress, Nato, North korea, Opinion & analysis 

Last week, while testifying before Congress in support of additional funding for Supreme Court security, Justice Amy Coney Barrett described how escalating threats against the justices have affected her family.

She recalled that her then-12-year-old son once asked why she needed to wear a bulletproof vest.

Barrett should not have to defend her integrity because her children are frightened. She did not take an oath to place her family in danger.

Some commentators seized on the story as evidence that threats may have altered Barrett’s judicial outlook. They suggest that fear for her life — and the lives of her family members — has compromised her objectivity or influenced how she approaches cases before the court.

That claim does not withstand scrutiny.

The critics are searching for an explanation for the occasions when Barrett has diverged from Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. They point to her positions in cases involving birthright citizenship, Mississippi ballot deadlines, and tariffs.

Those disagreements are fair subjects for criticism. But any serious assessment of Barrett’s record must consider the full body of her work, not a handful of outcomes that frustrated conservatives.

Barrett has frequently joined her conservative colleagues. She was part of the majority in Slaughter, an important constitutional decision affirming executive authority. She has stood firmly behind protections for women’s and girls’ sports. She has also joined decisions upholding immigration enforcement.

Critics may challenge any justice’s reasoning in any case. They should not invent a psychological explanation that ignores the justice’s broader record.

The suggestion that threats have softened Barrett’s jurisprudence also rests on a false comparison.

Some argue that military personnel and law-enforcement officers routinely accept danger as part of their work, so Supreme Court justices should do the same. But soldiers and police officers enter professions in which physical danger is expected. Supreme Court justices do not.

RELATED: Justice Amy Coney Barrett describes SWATTING attack against her family

Eric Lee/Getty Images

Context is crucial. Children of military personnel or law-enforcement officers generally understand that their parents’ work carries risk. My father served on a Secret Service protective detail. When he came home and hung his bulletproof vest in the closet, it did not seem unusual.

My mother taught nursery school. Had she been forced to wear a bulletproof vest because of threats against her classroom, that would have been deeply unsettling.

Barrett’s children did not grow up believing that their mother’s judicial service would make her a target. No one should expect them to remain unfazed when she comes home from the Supreme Court wearing body armor. Nor should anyone condemn Barrett for discussing their fear in public.

The underlying situation is disgraceful.

No justice should need a bulletproof vest to perform the duties of the office. Sadly, the days when Justice Antonin Scalia could attend daily Mass alone on Capitol Hill, unnoticed and unbothered, are gone.

Congress will probably approve the court’s request for additional security funding. It should.

Congress can also do more to reduce the political pressure placed on the judiciary.

For decades, lawmakers have avoided difficult policy decisions and allowed major national disputes to migrate into the courts. Congress increasingly leaves questions involving immigration, elections, executive power, abortion, and social policy to judges rather than resolving them through legislation.

That abdication turns every Supreme Court term into a national political showdown. It raises the stakes of each vacancy, each argument, and each ruling. It also encourages activists to treat justices as unelected legislators rather than judges interpreting the law.

Congress cannot eliminate threats by passing more bills. It can, however, reclaim its constitutional responsibility and stop forcing the court to settle every dispute elected lawmakers lack the courage to address.

Resolving contentious questions through the legislative process would not remove controversy from public life. It would reduce the pressure on nine justices to decide matters that properly belong to elected representatives.

Until Congress changes course, the court and its members will need more protection.

Barrett should not have to defend her integrity because her children are frightened. She did not take an oath to place her family in danger. A mother’s concern for her children does not prove judicial weakness.

It proves only that the threats are real.

​Immigration enforcement, Justice amy coney barrett, Secret service, Birthright citizenship, 14th amendment, Congress, Lawmakers, Opinion & analysis 

For more than two decades, LeBron James and Tom Brady defined excellence in their respective sports. But according to BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock, their current pursuits reveal a deeper struggle than winning championships or breaking records.

As James continues to tease retirement and Brady ventures into increasingly bizarre publicity stunts, Whitlock sees two icons wrestling with the same question: Who are you when the game is over?

“Let’s be honest about what we’re watching. LeBron has been the most documented athlete in human history. 20-plus years. Every summer is a cliff-hanger. Every decision gets a TV special, a hashtag, a rollout. The man turned free agency into a genre, but this time it’s different,” Whitlock says.

“And I think he feels it because for the first time, the show is almost over, and there’s no next contract that fixes that. So, what does he do? He stretches it. He teases the retirement. He dangles the last ride,” he continues.

“He’s squeezing every last drop out of his 15 minutes because he’s figured out that when the buzzer sounds on the career, it sounds on the relevance too,” he adds.

And Tom Brady is no different.

“Now, what’s Brady doing?” Whitlock asks. “Publicity stunts, slap fights with Logan Paul, flirting with a WWE storyline. The greatest quarterback alive is auditioning to be a pro-wrestling angle.”

“Brady’s chasing the same adrenaline, the same eyeballs, the same purpose, and he can’t find it because nobody ever taught these guys that the game ends,” he explains. “Now, here’s the part that should make you sit up because Brady’s flailing isn’t random. It’s managed.”

“The man pulling those strings is Ari Emanuel,” Whitlock says, describing Emanuel as a “super-agent, runs TKO, which runs the WWE and the UFC.”

“You think that’s Tom Brady expressing himself? No, that’s Tom Brady being inventory. A face on a poster to sell a show for the machine that owns him,” he says.

Whitlock likens the lives of James and Brady to Truman from the famous movie “The Truman Show,” which follows a man who was unwittingly the star of a reality TV show based on his life.

“When the lights come down, all they’ve got left to sell is personality and a willingness to be used, to be the face, to push the product, to carry the agenda for whoever owns the ring. Brady’s already on the ride. LeBron’s just stalling at the turnstile,” he explains. “That’s ‘The Truman Show.’”

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

To enjoy more fearless conversations at the crossroads of culture, faith, sports, and comedy with Jason Whitlock, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Jason whitlock, Lebron james, Quarterback, Sports, Tom brady, Ufc, Wrestling, The truman show, Ari emanuel, Wwe, Logan paul, Fearless with jason whitlock 

President Donald Trump was finally able to pass his SAVE America Act through the U.S. House, but it may not make it through the Senate.

The House narrowly passed a massive $1.15 trillion defense spending bill on a 216-212 vote with the SAVE America Act as a rider.

‘In an increasingly dangerous world, we are reminded of President Reagan’s admonition that freedom is not passed along in the bloodstream.’

Six Democrats voted to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, and seven Republicans voted against it.

The bill will raise service member pay by 5% to 7%, increase education and child care availability for military families, and spend $1.8 billion for barracks and housing costs.

Republican Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana praised the bill by claiming it would “ensure America maintains the most lethal, most dynamic, most capable fighting force in the world.”

Senate Democrats were able to block one version of the bill last week.

“In an increasingly dangerous world, we are reminded of President Reagan’s admonition that freedom is not passed along in the bloodstream,” Johnson continued. “It must be fought for and protected so the next generation may enjoy the same level of security and opportunity we have known. And that starts in Congress.”

One sticking point in the bill was the expansion of collaboration between the Israel’s defense forces and the U.S. military on weapons and intelligence development.

Progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) excoriated the bill in a scathing statement.

RELATED: Trump team slams ‘b***h’ Democrat for floating bizarre conspiracy theory on housing bill delay

“Time and again we are seeing from this administration, and their Republican yes-men in Congress, that they simply do not care that working people are struggling,” she said.

“I refuse to support that agenda and will continue working to stop this funding and actually invest in our people and our communities,” she added.

If the bill is approved by the Senate, it will go to Trump’s desk for approval.

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​President donald trump, Save act, National defense authorization act, Us house, Military, Politics 

July 13 was shaping up to be a big day in the life of a 9-year-old Arizona boy named Hunter.

You see, on that day Hunter entered the Mesa Bank of America with his grandmother, Colette, to open his very first checking account, KNXV-TV reported.

‘You can’t let your fear guide you; you have to meet it head-on.’

Hunter — a bespectacled, blond-haired kid headed into the fourth grade — had spent the week doing work at his grandparents’ house and earned just under $200, the station said, adding that his grandmom suggested they deposit Hunter’s cash in the bank.

But it turns out Hunter’s big day also would be unforgettable for a rather scary reason.

KNXV said Hunter spotted someone entering the bank wearing a mask — but instead of panicking, Hunter reacted with courage well beyond his years.

“He just walked up and tapped me on the shoulder,” Colette told KNXV, adding that she noticed “the calmness in his demeanor, it was surreal. I just turned my head and saw the teller there with something pointed at her head.”

That something was a knife, KNXV reported.

With that, Hunter and his grandmother got under a desk for safety and didn’t hear the suspect say anything during the robbery, the station said.

“I did not hear anything; All I heard was my Nana’s breathing really hard,” Hunter recalled to KNXV.

Truth be told, the station said Hunter also was thinking about his hard-earned cash — $160 of his own money plus $27 in change from Colette.

“If I lose it, $160 down the drain!” Hunter explained to KNXV.

That same day, Mesa police arrested a woman who tried to rob the bank, the station said, adding that she was booked on charges of felony armed robbery, aggravated assault, and disorderly conduct. Police said no one was injured, KNXV reported.

RELATED: Blaze News original: 10 inspiring examples of Good Samaritans who ran toward danger to help others, often defeating bad guys

After giving police a statement, Hunter and his grandmother returned to the Bank of America the very next day to open his checking account, the station said.

“You can’t let your fear guide you; you have to meet it head-on,” Colette told KNXV.

When the station asked Hunter what his first debit card purchase would be, he replied that he wants to buy his grandmother a new keyboard — and maybe soon a computer for himself.

But when KNXV asked him what he would say to the bank robber, Hunter’s reply was blunt: “Get a job.”

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​Arizona, Mesa, Armed robbery, Bank of america, Crime 

The cost of generic drugs will likely change drastically after the latest tariff announcement from President Donald Trump.

The president said in a post on Truth Social that he would allow generic drug imports to have zero tariffs for two years, then face two large hikes afterward.

‘The objective of this Policy is to protect the people of the United States.’

Trump said the tariffs were designed to encourage drug companies to move their manufacturing operations back to the U.S.

“Effective August 1st, 2026, all Generic Drugs being brought into the United States will continue to have a TARIFF of ZERO PERCENT for a two year period of time, after which the TARIFF will be raised to 100% for a one year period of time, and 200% thereafter,” he wrote.

“The objective of this Policy is to protect the people of the United States,” Trump added.

Generic drugs account for 90% of the prescriptions in the U.S., according to the Food and Drug Administration, and half of generic drugs are manufactured in India. China, on the other hand, is the source for 95% of imported ibuprofen and 70% of imported acetaminophen.

White House spokesman Kush Desai cited other efforts from the administration to reshore manufacturing in comments to CBS News.

“The President’s resounding success securing firm reshoring plans from global drugmakers as part of our most-favored-nations deals and Section 232 tariff program for branded drugs is proof that this administration has a track record of success to get critical manufacturing back into the United States,” Desai said in an email.

RELATED: The hidden danger in Trump’s drug-price plan

Experts indicated to CBS News that manufacturers were likely to pass on the tariff costs to consumers but that the already low prices meant the cost increases could be modest.

However, some manufacturers may choose to pull out of the U.S. market altogether and cause drug shortages.

“Pharmaceutical Facilities are being built, at a level never seen before, all over the United States of America. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump concluded.

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​Big pharma, Generic drugs, President donald trump, Tariffs, Politics