Category: blaze media

If you own an LG smart TV, there’s something you need to know: It could be spying on you — even when it is turned off.

According to a recent investigation by Gamers Nexus, LG smart TVs can allegedly continue communicating with external servers even when powered down.

“If you have an Apple TV set-top box, that’s not enough to protect your privacy if you have an LG TV,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray says on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”

“You must unplug the ethernet. And tell it to forget your Wi-Fi information completely,” he adds.

“These also use a technology referred to as automatic content recognition or ACR. So they’re not satisfied with knowing the name of the show or the channel you’re watching,” Gray says. “Instead, they want snapshots of the screen or audio bytes, which are then analyzed by external servers.”

“It also collects data from the users themselves. Get this,” he explains. “It uses microphones as a part of their setup. And it’s capable of recording and transcribing conversations. So then these are sent to LG ad solutions for marketing purposes.”

“But it gets worse. While the collection of usage data is one thing, the researcher uncovered many different areas where the tested TVs captured data that probed a little too deep into your private life,” he continues.

“That included plain-text transcripts of conversations that you’re conducting just in the room with the TV,” he adds, “whether it’s on or off.”

However, Gray points out that it’s not just your smart TV.

“We’ve got our TVs, our phones, our computers, our iPads, our cars, Flock camera, satellites, your refrigerator,” he says.

“It’s all monitoring us, and the problem is, we’re so comfortable with these devices now and we depend on them so much that frankly it’s hard not to think it’s just too late to do anything about it.”

Want more from Pat Gray?

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

​Advertising, Privacy, Spying, Surveillance, Lg smart tv, Pat gray, Blazetv show 

Millions of overseas customers are using American-made AI companies, and they don’t even know it.

A new report released by Anthropic will likely throw a wrench into what is known about the AI race, pointing to the idea that the United States’ adversaries are not as technologically advanced as they purport to be.

‘Over 12.1 million exchanges observed.’

Anthropic explained in a lengthy report that Chinese companies and other international role players are seemingly reliant, to some degree, on the American company’s AI programs.

To that end, multiple Chinese AI companies were discovered to have been forwarding their own customers’ inquiries to Claude and relaying them back to users as if they were their own.

Moonshot AI, which uses the chatbot Kimi, was described as “silently” forwarding customer requests to Claude instead of processing them on its own.

“Moonshot then displayed Claude’s responses to users. These users thought they were using a Kimi model, but received responses from Claude instead,” Anthropic wrote.

Anthropic said that in just a 10-day period, Moonshot relayed almost 300,000 customer requests to the American company, mostly to the AI program Claude Opus. This was done through over 5,000 proxy accounts predominantly located in Singapore and Japan.

DeepSeek, another Chinese AI company, was reportedly caught relaying its inquiries to Anthropic’s Claude too, even when it was a company using its product.

Anthropic said one Chinese company was “almost certainly not made aware” that its data was being relayed to Claude when it used DeepSeek to analyze internal documents that included sensitive information and organizational structure.

RELATED: Hackers are trying to steal money from X users — don’t be one of them

Additionally, requests from an IT operator from a Russian government agency “associated with its Ministry of Defense” were relayed to Anthropic through DeepSeek, which allegedly exposed live credentials for a Russian government database.

Furthermore, a municipal Public Security Bureau in China used DeepSeek, which turned out to be Claude, to build a case management system. An engineer reportedly built a tool that compares a person’s movements against police records and used the national ID number of its citizens.

“Scale of distillation attacks attributable to DeepSeek over 14 days in July 2026: over 12.1 million exchanges observed,” Anthropic wrote.

Another Chinese tech company called Xiaomi was accused of “illicit distillation” — making 400,000 exchanges with Anthropic over the course of 20 days to siphon data to train its own AI models.

RELATED: OpenAI’s newest model is all techies want — but how uncontrollable is it?

CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images

Anthropic also revealed that three Iranian government-aligned accounts were using Claude to “set up influence operations campaigns.”

The campaigns had stated goals to shape public opinion at home and abroad and were working on behalf of the Islamic Culture and Communications Organization under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and the Islamic Propaganda Office of Khorasan Razavi.

The work was a portion of a nine-part “international influence” portfolio and included a complete organizational plan for the funeral of Iran’s supreme leader.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Artificial intelligence, China, Iran, Russia, Anthropic, Claude, Tech 

Abdul El-Sayed has made no secret of whom he believes Democrats should represent.

Speaking to the United Auto Workers this summer, the newly minted Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan declared that it was “damn past time” for his party to be “firmly on the side of working people.”

The credentialed left wants the working class’ grievances but has little interest in its virtues.

El-Sayed is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America; he calls himself a capitalist. But the Bernie Sanders ally has emerged as one of the most prominent figures on the insurgent economic left, campaigning against corporate power and billionaires while promising an economy that works for working people.

His own path to the barricades was somewhat less proletarian. El-Sayed is a Rhodes Scholar with a medical degree from Columbia and a doctorate from Oxford. And these days he’s hardly an outlier.

Let’s do lunch box

Once upon a time, the phrase “working class” evoked a very specific image. A guy named Sal with calloused hands, a steel lunch box, and a bad back, punching a timecard at seven in the morning to make sure his children could buy decent shoes.

According to a fresh report from the Pew Research Center, 60% of Americans now say “working class” describes them well. That includes half of college graduates and, remarkably, half of upper-income Americans.

So who exactly counts as working class anymore?

Historically, the answer was more complicated than Sal and his lunch box. In the old Marxian sense, the proletariat consisted broadly of people who survived by selling their labor rather than living from property or capital. By that definition, an adjunct professor with three degrees and an anemic bank account may have a better claim to proletarian status than the plumber who owns his own company and employs three other plumbers.

But that isn’t what most Americans came to picture when they heard the words “working class.”

Over the course of the 20th century, the phrase acquired a cultural meaning as well as an economic one. It came to evoke factory workers, mechanics, tradesmen, construction crews, waitresses, truckers — people who worked with their hands, collected an hourly wage, or made a living without accumulating a wall full of credentials.

The educated precariat

Now the two meanings are colliding. The modern socialist left has revived something closer to the older economic definition. Its emerging constituency includes a peculiar new proletariat: highly educated Americans with plenty of credentials but not necessarily much money.

Nate Silver recently dug into the numbers behind the Democratic Socialists of America and found exactly this pattern. According to the DSA’s own 2021 membership survey, 80% of members age 25 and older had bachelor’s degrees, while 45% reported household incomes below $60,000.

Political analyst Ruy Teixeira calls them the “educated precariat.” They got the degrees, but the economic status supposedly waiting on the other side never quite materialized.

What survived was their sense of entitlement to tell other people how things should be run. The credentialed precariat may have lost the salary and corner office, but not the conviction that the people who went to college should be telling the people who didn’t what’s good for them.

And so they didn’t merely join the working class. They appointed themselves its representatives.

RELATED: America’s young are being recruited into socialism — one dance party at a time

Bettman/Michael Tullberg/Getty Images

Prole drift

Teixeira notes that non-college working-class Americans are conspicuously absent from DSA activism. Socialist candidates, he argues, tend to find their greatest strength in white professional-class areas rather than working-class black and Hispanic ones.

The credentialed left speaks constantly in the name of workers while increasingly inhabiting a different cultural universe from the blue-collar Americans it claims to represent. They took the old Marxian categories, ran them through a dry cleaner, and turned class struggle into a boutique political identity tailor-made for the credentialed precariat.

The people who know the most about class struggle increasingly seem to know the fewest actual people who change tires, hang drywall, drive trucks, or repair furnaces. Meanwhile, the guy who actually owns the steel lunch box is increasingly voting Republican.

Pew found that 67% of Republicans identify as working class, compared with 55% of Democrats. Even among upper-income Americans, 61% of Republicans call themselves working class, compared with just 38% of Democrats. Among college graduates, Republicans are also more likely than Democrats to claim the label.

Stolen valor

That helps explain why the left and right increasingly seem to be speaking different languages when they talk about class. The socialist left sees class primarily through economic insecurity and the relationship between labor and capital. The credentialed left wants the working class’ grievances but has little interest in its virtues. Exploitation, insecurity, and victimhood confer moral status. Self-reliance, toughness, family obligation, and the stubborn conviction that a man ought to solve his own problems do not fit nearly as comfortably into the progressive worldview.

On the right, those virtues have become inseparable from working-class identity. It means taking pride in earning your keep and putting family before corporate diversity initiatives. Above all, it means despising the condescension of credentialed bureaucrats.

An independent contractor running a two-man framing crew might clear six figures in a good year, yet he has zero in common with a university administrator making the exact same salary. One builds real structures that stand against the wind; the other drafts policy documents designed to justify their own redundant existence.

True working-class Americans — the blue-collar workers who actually do physical labor — deserve better than sharing an identity pool with credentialed cosplayers. A diesel mechanic working 12-hour shifts under a hoisted truck engine lives in a completely different galaxy from a brand strategist working remotely from a coffee shop while identifying as a member of the proletariat. A fundamental difference exists between working for a living and belonging to the working class.

The modern left spent decades treating the four-year degree as the ticket to a better life, only to turn around and loot the cultural prestige of the blue-collar lifestyle when those credentials failed to deliver what so many graduates expected. Conservatives don’t need to own factories to champion the working class. They simply honor the dignity of hard work and the common sense of people who fix things when they break.

The credentialed class can speak in the name of the working class all it wants. That doesn’t mean the working class asked it to.

​Bernie sanders, Class struggle, Democratic socialists, Democrats, Labor, Nate silver, Republicans, Blue collar, Lifestyle, Abdul el-sayed 

Sydney Sweeney’s latest ad has some of the world’s top female athletes crying foul.

The actress stripped down for a new campaign promoting sports prediction market Novig, strategically covering herself with footballs, boxing gloves, and other sporting equipment beneath the tagline “Just Sports.”

‘I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this.’

Poor sports

The joke didn’t land with everyone.

The 58-second ad is an obvious appeal to male sports bettors. Sweeney appears nude but covered throughout, delivering betting-related lines as sporting equipment conveniently keeps the commercial suitable for YouTube.

Female athletes have accused the campaign of sexualizing women’s sports and undermining the women who have spent their lives competing in them.

British athlete Lucy Davis was among those unimpressed. “I don’t know wtf Sydney Sweeney was doing, but it’s 2026,” she posted, per Variety. “Stop sexualizing women in sport.”

Remarks on Davis’ social media called her a “new age feminist” and noted she is no stranger to provocative images either.

NCAA gymnast Gracie Kramer was also mocked by readers after she said “Idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like,” alongside her highlight reel.

Both men and women took issue with Kramer’s remarks given her sexualized photos, with one comment on Instagram joking, “How dare you pose with a basketball when you’re not a professional basketball player.”

Sweeney appeared to call out the athletes for their hypocrisy soon thereafter.

RELATED: ‘DISGUSTING’: Megyn Kelly rips into ‘Euphoria’ clip with Sydney Sweeney

Body positive

On her Instagram story, Sweeney shared photos of former UFC champion Ronda Rousey, as well as tennis players Serena Williams and Caroline Wozniacki — in addition to male athletes — who have all posed nude for ESPN’s “Body” issue.

This was followed by Sweeney posting her own ad.

On the Novig website, Sweeney described the ad as “embracing a fun idea,” while noting she is an equity holder in the company.

“The concept is simple: cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports. The campaign brings that idea to life with confidence, humor, and a playful edge,” Sweeney’s statement added.

RELATED: OnlyFans models are offended by Sydney Sweeney mocking their degeneracy on her TV show

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

Tut-tutting Titmus

Additional Sweeney detractors included Aussie Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus, who said she was “infuriated” by Sweeney’s ad.

“I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this,” Titmus said, per the Guardian. “Not only is it a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft, but every woman who enjoys sports for what it really is — teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity. How do we live in a world where monetising a woman’s body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing?”

Moreover, British sprinter Amy Hunt said, “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” in a post-race interview with BBC Sport.

She was immediately criticized for apparent hypocrisy on her social media photos, as well.

Likewise, Australian water polo player Tilly Kearns wrote on a post: “I absolutely fking hate Sydney Sweeney’s new sports ad,” Kearns said, before getting similar treatment as the other Sweeney critics on her own revealing post.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Sydney sweeney, Woke, Feminist, Entertainment 

A statutory review committee in the Netherlands has issued a lengthy statement defending the “termination of life” of a 1-year-old child.

The incident of euthanasia occurred late last year and involved a child described as “nearly two years old.”

This second group also claimed that ‘there was no continuous unbearable suffering’ and that ‘reasonable alternative solutions existed.’

The New York Times reported on the incident in June, though specifics regarding the case were then scant. At the time, Minister of Health Sophie Hermans merely acknowledged that a case for euthanizing a child between 1 and 12 had been sent to a committee for review the previous year and that a “termination of life” had followed.

The horrifying, heartbreaking details have since been released by a group called the Review Committee for Late Termination of Pregnancy and Termination of Life in Newborns and Children Aged 1 to 12 Years.

According to the committee, the child was born prematurely and had severe epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and brain damage as well as other debilitating conditions.

Citing the physician who treated and ultimately euthanized the child, the committee said the child endured regular seizures, a sleep disorder, side effects from medication, difficulty swallowing and breathing, and increased risk of infection.

Based on the physician’s assessment, the committee claimed that “the likelihood of death at a very young age due to complications was considered very high.”

RELATED: The unbearable burden may still be worth bearing

CorbalanStudio/Getty Images

The committee repeatedly argued that the euthanizing physician did everything by the book in accordance with the 2024 statute change permitting the euthanization of children between 1 and 12 in limited circumstances. According to the committee, the parents requested the termination of life for their child and their position on the matter remained “consistent.”

The committee also said doctors “outside the region” were consulted for a second opinion. This second group of doctors concurred that the child was suffering and that the child’s situation was “irreversible” and that “there was no realistic chance of improvement.”

However, this second group also claimed that “there was no continuous unbearable suffering” and that “reasonable alternative solutions existed,” such as other medications and palliative care. According to the committee, the doctor indicated that he attempted the interventions the second group recommended but that the child’s condition only worsened.

The doctor then consulted yet another “outside” doctor, who agreed that ending the child’s life was the only way to alleviate the suffering.

Citing the physician, the committee seemed confident in the predicted future of the child and implied that the child would be a burden to care for:

“The child was severely multiply (intellectually and motorically) disabled, and the prognosis was that the child would remain dependent on care for life for all activities of daily living.””The child suffered from conditions with a limited life expectancy, without any prospect of improvement in quality of life.””The suffering was determined by the permanent, severe brain damage with no prospect of any reasonable degree of development and the eventual permanent lack of any possibility of self-reliance.”

In a section titled “execution,” the committee recounted the death of the child. “At the parents’ request, the doctor chose a method in which the child was gently put to sleep,” the statement said. Then after falling into “a very deep state of sedation,” the child died.

The committee acknowledged that the child could not and therefore did not consent to the euthanasia.

“In view of all the above facts, circumstances, and considerations, the committee is of the opinion that the physician acted with due care,” the committee determined.

Eduard Verhagen, a professor of pediatric palliative care at UMCG in Groningen, supports the committee’s conclusion: “It is good that the committee reached such a well-considered judgment. Many physicians and parents will benefit from this in the future.”

The case will still be reviewed by the Public Prosecution Service.

H/T: LifeNews.com

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Euthanasia, Netherlands, Politics 

In the year after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the grief surrounding his death has been compounded by a wave of attacks directed at his widow, Erika Kirk.

For BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey, the left’s widespread celebration of Kirk’s assassination isn’t surprising, considering they are already “godless.”

However, what does surprise Stuckey is that many of the attacks on Erika have come from those who “profess to be Christians.”

“I think what has shocked the conscience for me is people, even people who profess to be Christians, the just relentless attacks against Erika,” Stuckey tells Christian apologist Frank Turek.

“And whether or not you agree with her politics or whether or not you like her, whether or not you have personal feelings about her, just the callousness towards her,” she explains.

While Stuckey notes that she doesn’t “call everything demonic,” the attacks on Erika have felt especially “dark and depraved.”

“The way that people have targeted her in the wake of Charlie’s death … it’s demoralized me in some ways,” she adds.

Turek is in agreement, citing a biblical story.

“Jesus and the apostles called Satan a murderer, a liar, accuser, and slanderer who seeks to steal, kill, and destroy,” Turek tells Stuckey. “We had a murder a year ago. What have we had since then? Lies, accusations, and slander seeking to steal, kill, and destroy.”

“It’s textbook demonic,” he says. “And people say they don’t believe in the demonic.”

“The demons don’t go after ineffective movements. They go after effective people and effective movements,” he continues, adding, “And Charlie was enormously effective.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Allie beth stuckey, Spiritual warfare, Frank turek, Erika kirk, Charlie kirk, Christianity, Demonic, Blazetv show 

A Florida woman allegedly said her baby died when she fell asleep next to her son. However, police said the infant’s autopsy — along with a piece of the mother’s jewelry — tipped them off to something far more sinister.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said in a statement that deputies responded to a residence in Lakeland after receiving a report that a baby boy was unresponsive around 11:58 p.m. Sept. 6.

‘I think I killed our son.’

Police said the 3-month-old was rushed to Orlando Health Medical where he was pronounced deceased shortly after.

According to the affidavit, the infant had an abrasion and bruising on his head.

The sheriff’s office said:

An autopsy revealed that the baby had subdural hemorrhaging around the skull. Medical Examiner Dr. Stephen Nelson identified three separate impact injuries to the baby’s head. The impact injuries were located on the top of the forehead. Dr. Nelson also identified a 1.7 cm by 1 cm L-shaped injury to the baby’s forehead, which he stated appeared to be consistent with being caused by a square-like object.

Detectives interviewed the infant’s mother, 42-year-old Jessica Vlasac.

“Vlasac told deputies that she had accidentally fallen asleep with the baby in the bed and that she did not remember anything else, and that when she woke up, she found the baby lying face down on the bed, not moving and cold to the touch,” the police statement read.

According to the statement, “After the autopsy, detectives interviewed Vlasac again and observed her wearing a large, diamond-like stone ring on her ring finger that was consistent with the large, square-like shape mentioned in the autopsy.”

RELATED: Mother ‘very invested’ in Lindsay Clancy case accused of killing 2-year-old son, had chilling plans for husband: Prosecutors

Detectives executed a search warrant and obtained Vlasac’s devices and her ring.

Police said, “During the search, Vlasac spontaneously asked if the ring was what killed the victim.”

The statement read, “In a follow-up examination, Dr. Nelson examined the ring that had been confiscated from Vlasac and advised that the victim’s injuries were consistent with being struck by the ring, as a part of the impact injuries.”

The sheriff’s office stated that “there was no evidence of co-sleeping causing the death.”

The PCSO added that text messages retrieved from the night of the incident showed Vlasac bought alcoholic shots earlier that day, sent messages stating she killed the infant, and later asked the child’s father to delete the text history, WTVT-TV reported.

According to detectives, the baby’s father told them that Vlasac is someone who becomes “violent” when she consumes alcohol.

Police said the father told detectives that Vlasac sent him multiple messages saying that she had killed the infant, including one that read: “I think I killed our son.”

The statement said, “The father stated that Vlasac called him a few days later and seemed unusually normal when discussing the death.”

Police arrested Vlasac on Sept. 10 and booked her into the Polk County Jail, according to records from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.

Vlasac, of Lakeland, was charged with aggravated child abuse resulting in the death.

The first-degree felony charge carries a maximum prison sentence of 30 years if convicted, according to WTSP-TV.

Police said the investigation is ongoing.

Vlasac remains at the Polk County Jail without bond.

Law&Crime reported that Vlasac has a pretrial detention hearing Thursday and an arraignment hearing Oct. 13.

Records from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office show Vlasac also was arrested on Aug. 2 in a separate incident. She was charged with battery on a law enforcement officer, resisting an officer with violence, and resisting an officer without violence.

Jail records show Vlasac was released Aug. 19 in connection with that arrest.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Florida, Mom arrested, True crime, Dead baby, Crime 

A former Florida elementary school teacher was arrested after he allegedly showed pornography to students and touched them inappropriately.

Cesar Oriol Cardoso taught at the Sunset Park Elementary School until the Miami-Dade Schools Police Department arrested him.

‘Talk to your little ones, your children to help them to discern what is right and what is wrong in person ― and to talk and speak up.’

Police said Cardoso would show girls “inappropriate images or videos” after pulling them from physical education or other classes.

Some of the child sex-abuse material included photos of nude women and one image of a young boy with a woman. Other students reported seeing images that appeared to be of Cardoso himself.

The 53-year-old also allegedly touched or slapped several girls on the thighs or buttocks while making inappropriate comments.

In one instance he held his hand over his crotch and asked a girl if she wanted to “squish it,” according to the arrest report. Cardoso also allegedly tried to express his wish to kiss two of the girls.

Detectives on Friday interviewed Cardoso, but he invoked his right to remain silent.

Cardoso was charged with three felonies, including offenses against students by authority figures, showing obscene material to a minor, and lewd and lascivious conduct on a child under the age of 16 years.

“Behavior of this nature will not be tolerated under any circumstances,” a statement from a spokesperson for the Miami-Dade County Public Schools read.

Cardoso was removed from the school the next business day after school officials heard about the charges, the spokesperson added.

RELATED: ‘He ran into the wrong person’: Video captured brawl between man and martial arts teacher

Cardoso was held at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center without bond as of Monday, according to WPLG-TV.

“I think it’s atrocious. I think we need to do a better job and have people better vetted,” said Adrian Marin, a parent of a child at the school. “Talk to your little ones, your children to help them to discern what is right and what is wrong in person ― and to talk and speak up.”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Child sex abuse, Florida, Teacher arrested, Crime 

Democratic New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani says a plan by the Trump administration to restrict welfare for immigrants is “cruel and unlawful.”

President Donald Trump is seeking to change the public charge rule to allow the administration to deny visa and green card applications to immigrants receiving welfare benefits.

‘We’re shaking in our boots over this supposedly terrible outcome.’

Mamdani and New York Attorney General Letitia James are suing to block the plan.

“The new public charge rule seeks to push immigrant families away from the programs that have kept people fed and healthy for decades,” read a statement from the mayor Monday.

“New Yorkers will be afraid to see a doctor or ask for help they are legally entitled to,” he added. “That fear will not stop at the families that the federal government is targeting. Families who remain fully eligible for benefits will feel a chilling effect, and all New Yorkers will pay for it.”

Seattle, Chicago, and San Francisco are among the cities that are joining the lawsuit.

Mamdani went on to accuse the administration of intentionally dividing New Yorkers with the new policy, which would loosen the definition of a “public charge” in order to restrict far more immigrants from getting welfare.

“The new public charge rule not only sweeps aside more than a century of established law, it is intentionally vague as a means of creating uncertainty and fear to isolate immigrant New Yorkers,” he said at a press conference.

“Make no mistake, this is an undisguised effort to strip New Yorkers of the services they rely on, the public benefits they are entitled to,” he added.

Mamdani’s lawsuit included a coalition of cities and counties while James’ lawsuit included about 20 states. Both were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

RELATED: Illegal alien child abuser caught in US after being deported, Border Patrol tells Blaze News

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which is named as a defendant in both lawsuits, ridiculed the arguments made by the plaintiffs.

“Let’s get this straight, sanctuary states are terrified they will lose federal funds because hundreds of thousands of illegals and noncitizens might remove themselves from American welfare programs,” said the spokesperson to Courthouse News.

“We’re shaking in our boots over this supposedly terrible outcome,” the spokesperson added.

Unless the legal challenge is successful, the new rule change will go into effect on Friday.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Trump administration, Welfare, Immigration, Politics, Letitia james, Zohran mamdani 

When did facts or verifiable evidence get replaced by consensus within a specific community that continually repeats collectively held ideas or feelings? And is this trend why, everywhere we look, demonstrable truth is becoming subservient to imagination? Do we now live in a world where truth-seeking is taking a back seat to groupthink?

As far back as the 1980s, when regular folks were confronted with mics and asked for their man-on-the-street opinions on everything from when life begins to tactical strategy for war, I remember thinking, “This practice is going to be a problem.”

What happens to the fabric of society if what one personally believes attains precedence over what is proven to be true?

Why?

Because for the past 40 years or so, subjective constructs have been elevated to the status of fact and given far more credibility than verifiable truth. As if fallible human feelings determine what is true — they do not.

Granted, opinions are relative; we all have them, and in America, we can still freely express our point of view. This is also true of individual preferences and judgments, which remain relative. But more and more, people treat fictional beliefs and unsubstantiated claims as factual simply because large, loud, and strongly opinionated groups adopt and agree upon them.

Thus culture has become a delusional world where definitions can be altered to protect belief and political identity determines what is considered true or false.

This penchant for self-determined reality makes healthy debate almost impossible because what’s considered correct becomes tainted by distinctions shaped by a consensus around feelings rather than by credible substantiation.

The perversion of truth is increasingly evident in definitions of male and female, as well as in criteria defining human life.

Contemporary progressives seem most culpable for elevating subjectivism, self-perceived identity, and personal opinion above facts. Partisans on the left are so committed to redefining everything that moral or political debate has devolved into a one-way assault of accusations, denial, and the exaltation of fantastical beliefs.

One skill set missing from the relativists’ playbook is logic.

Viewed logically, calling something “my truth” concedes that whatever you believe or promote is personal rather than universally established as a certainty. The fallacy of “my truth” becomes most heated around topics like the dignity of life in the womb, biological sex, and who should ultimately bear personal responsibility when an “oppressed” woman commits a criminal act.

RELATED: Did Lindsay Clancy lose her mind — or her free will?

David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

That is where we have witnessed the tendency to promote personal opinion over what is morally, biologically, historically, legally, and philosophically accepted.

This is especially true when pro-life and pro-choice opinions clash. One side aligns with 95% of 5,502 biologists who agreed that human life begins at fertilization. Despite biological assurance, however, one side insists that a woman’s choice supersedes truth.

The looming danger is that if moral relativism continues to gain credibility, right and wrong vanish and opinion rules. The bad news is that opinions change, which means that on a collective whim, every life at whatever stage could become justifiably disposable.

What happens to the fabric of society if what one personally believes attains precedence over what is proven to be true?

What we have seen lately is that morally relativistic people are so steeped in the certainty that their opinions are correct that they applaud themselves for exposing those they view as evil, which seems not only an estimable goal but also a justification for violence.

Societal relativism has reached a boiling point and has put innocent individuals in the literal crosshairs of vigilantes responding to sentiments widely accepted as true.

According to this moral barometer, a conservative influencer can be assassinated publicly, and some who feel morally convicted by his views on biblical matters, politics, and traditional male and female roles think it’s fitting to cheer his death.

And these are the people who fancy themselves kindness warriors?

RELATED: Campus free speech is alive — barely

Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Among progressives, this pattern has evolved to the point that a devoted husband and father like Charlie Kirk is derided, while a woman who admitted to strangling her three children is defended and supported by female activists who have convinced themselves that children are disposable and women are an oppressed class.

Because of political differences, these same women feel justified in demonizing Kirk’s grieving widow merely because she holds the same conservative convictions as her dead husband.

These people have convinced themselves that, based on personal opinion alone, Patrick Clancy should be strung up, drawn, and quartered and that one black, male juror, who they have collectively concluded is also guilty by reason of maleness, deserves condemnation.

As if feelings and thoughts were evidence, some online defenders have made extraordinary accusations against Patrick Clancy, not on demonstrable proof but solely on a fairy tale they have concocted in their own toxic minds.

So the kind of psychosis that accompanies the delusional reality our culture is currently steeped in — especially in political debate — has now been deemed the authority to determine who is considered insane by the insane?

If carried to its logical conclusion, a relativistic mind meld can lead to mob rule, which is now depicted as “democracy,” a political system in which the potential exists to have an innocent individual dragged to the guillotine merely because the crowd believed he or she deserved it.

We see this now when evidentiary truth is automatically dismissed as coming from the wrong source. Yet the truth remains true even if no one believes it; reality cannot be reinvented to suit our fallible human proclivities.

As Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally,” a more than 70-year-old observation that supports the contemporary idea that the clash between human self-deception and moral reality is nothing new.

​Biological sex, Charlie kirk, Children, Conservative influencer, Lindsay clancy, Moral relativism, Patrick clancy, Personal responsibility, Prolife, Psychosis, Authority, Objective truth, Mob rule, Verifiable evidence, Gender ideology, Opinion & analysis 

Federal immigration agents identified an “active scout” working near the U.S.-Mexico border and quickly apprehended him, U.S. Customs and Border Protection tells Blaze News.

Photographs provided to Blaze News show the man in camouflage clothing surrounded by federal agents whose identities were obscured.

‘This successful interdiction highlights the seamless integration of our air assets, surveillance technology, and specialized ground agents.’

The scout was located on Sept. 4 near the town of Ajo by “pre-positioned Border Patrol reconnaissance personnel” and an “MQ-9 aircraft crew from the National Air Security Operations Center in Sierra Vista,” according to CBP.

H60 Black Hawk helicopter crews responded to the scout site and transported five tactical agents who used a fast-rope technique to take the man into custody without incident.

Another photo shows what appears to be a large solar panel on top of boulders in the desert.

“This successful interdiction highlights the seamless integration of our air assets, surveillance technology, and specialized ground agents,” read a statement from acting Chief Patrol Agent Henry N. Laxdal.

“By combining these capabilities, we can quickly locate and arrest individuals attempting to facilitate illegal activity in our most remote desert areas, keeping our communities safe,” Laxdal added.

UCB said the man was processed by the U.S. Border Patrol at the Tucson Sector.

RELATED: Federal agents find fentanyl, meth, and heroin in minivan at US-Mexico border, CBP says

U.S. Customs and Border Protection

The U.S. military has begun using high-energy lasers to destroy drones sent into the U.S. by Mexican cartels, according to a previous report from CBP.

Ajo is an unincorporated community of about 3,000 residents. It’s located about 42 miles away from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Border patrol, Customs and border protection, Mexican cartels, Immigration, Politics 

It’s National Truck Driver Appreciation Week, when the American Trucking Associations holds its annual hot dog and hamburger lunches for the same drivers it spends the rest of the year screwing through its lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C.

This year, however, drivers might enjoy the free food, cheap swag, and various other perks — if they happen to be in the yard for them — with just a little less cynicism. That’s because the industry’s annual PR stunt happens to coincide with something considerably more valuable: the kind of tangible political “appreciation” that actually produces real change.

Most Americans would probably be astonished by how easy it has been to summon a trucking company into existence.

On Monday, August 31, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech in Sterling Heights, Michigan, in support of Republican congressional candidate Mike Rogers ahead of the midterm elections.

Though Vance started with praise for Rogers and other members of the party, he quickly pivoted to problems in the trucking industry and the administration’s efforts to address them, while also highlighting the hard work and sacrifice of American truckers and the displacement they have faced in recent years.

“For too long … the Biden administration allowed American workers and American drivers to be endangered and have their jobs stolen by foreign fraudsters,” Vance said.

“Today is about restoring the basic principle that if you want to drive a big truck on America’s roads, you ought to be able to speak English, you ought to be a legal resident of the United States of America, and you ought to have basic qualifications because trucking is too important to let it go to foreign fraudsters.”

Flooded with foreign labor

Vance, like anyone else paying attention, can see that the trucking industry has been flooded with foreign labor, helping keep the freight costs of Fortune 500 America low while externalizing the real costs onto everyone else.

The Trump administration’s crackdown has illuminated the scope of the problem. A 2025 analysis prepared for J.B. Hunt by transportation economist Noël Perry estimated that the administration’s English-language requirements, immigration enforcement, and restrictions on non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses could ultimately remove as many as 614,000 drivers from the industry — nearly 16% of the nation’s heavy-truck driver population.

Speaking more freely to Overdrive, Perry said the number could go as high as 800,000 — a figure more in line with estimates I’ve heard coming from administration insiders.

The obvious losers in all of this have been legitimate American trucking companies. An already brutal freight market has been made even harder by competition from unscrupulous operators willing to cut corners by skirting the licensing, training, labor, and safety standards responsible carriers have to meet.

And the problem is compounded by Mexican trucking companies engaging in illegal cabotage — hauling domestic loads between American destinations using Mexican trucks and drivers.

More than 20 trucking-related companies sought bankruptcy protection during one 30-day period this spring alone, and another 21 transportation and supply-chain businesses filed for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 between late July and August 25.

The administration’s crackdown is finally beginning to tighten the freight market and push rates back up. But in a classic case of you win some, you lose some, diesel prices have now hit record highs.

License to kill?

Vance’s speech also coincided with an announcement from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy of a “whole-of-government” attack on another part of the problem: deficient CDL schools churning out poorly trained and sometimes completely unqualified drivers onto American highways.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, a division of DOT, issued immediate shutdown notices to 110 truck-driving schools and put another 160 on notice that they could be removed from operation.

The stakes are much higher than faulty paperwork. According to DOT, non-domiciled drivers who would no longer qualify for licenses under the administration’s new rules were involved in at least 17 fatal crashes that killed 30 people in 2025 alone. Yes, 30 innocent Americans died thanks to drivers who can’t read road signs, don’t know the rules of the road, and have no business getting behind the wheel of what is essentially an 80,000-pound missile. On the other hand, somebody saved a bundle on labor costs.

Say their names

This summer has been just as deadly. In July, 21-year-old University of Massachusetts Lowell soccer player Tobias “Toby” Forsythe was killed on Interstate 71 in Ohio when a tractor-trailer driven by 42-year-old Bekhzod Asrarov slammed into the back of his car.

Asrarov, an Uzbek national who entered the United States through the diversity visa lottery in 2024, held an Ohio CDL but needed Google Translate to communicate with first responders at the scene. According to court records and law-enforcement sources, he also tried to destroy or conceal his dashcam and other electronic devices after the crash.

Ah yes, another highly skilled, conscientious immigrant doing his part to help alleviate America’s fake trucker “shortage.”

And the deaths continued during the very week of Duffy’s announcement.

In the early hours of September 4, in Mesquite, Texas, 33-year-old Lisa Maldonado was killed in a crash involving a truck driven by Khasan Begbaev, who was working for a subcontractor hauling for Knight-Swift, one of America’s largest trucking companies. Begbaev has been charged with manslaughter. Police say he was reversing down a freeway entrance ramp before the crash.

On September 3, 50-year-old Brenda Watson was killed in a head-on collision in Ohio after a semi driven by Manjit Singh pulled out to pass another vehicle and struck Watson’s car. Transportation Secretary Duffy subsequently said Singh was being held on an active Homeland Security detainer and that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was investigating both his carrier and the training school where he received his CDL.

Two days earlier, police in Moab, Utah, stopped 30-year-old Chamkaur Singh (no relation) after clocking him driving a semi-truck 20 miles per hour over the speed limit. When officers ran his name, they discovered a nationwide warrant for vehicular manslaughter stemming from a California semi crash that killed four people. California authorities had reportedly been searching for him for two months.

Amazon’s shame

Also on September 1, a horrific crash took place in Tennessee involving a tractor-trailer pulling an Amazon trailer. The truck crossed the median on Interstate 40, crashed into several vehicles, and burst into flames. Its driver, 35-year-old Farahov Fhsvaisov, was killed and three other people were hospitalized.

The cause remains under investigation, and little has been publicly reported about Fhsvaisov beyond his registered Brooklyn address — an essentially meaningless bureaucratic detail. As for Fhsvaisov’s actual citizenship and licensing status, that is precisely the kind of information Kathy Hochul’s New York is now suing to keep out of the Trump administration’s hands.

And it’s not just New York. More than 20 states and the District of Columbia have joined the challenge to federal demands for access to commercial-driver information held in state databases. The states cite privacy concerns and argue that the federal government lacks the authority to obtain the information; the administration says access is necessary to uncover fraud and illegally obtained commercial licenses.

Amazon’s apparent involvement in the Fhsvaisov crash can’t help but recall long-standing questions about the company’s enormous network of outside trucking contractors. A 2022 Wall Street Journal investigation found that frequent Amazon contractors were more than twice as likely as comparable carriers to receive poor unsafe-driving scores; a later CBS News analysis found Amazon contractors had unsafe-driving violation rates at least 89% higher than other carriers in every month of the six-year period it examined.

Highway to hell

Yet while Secretary Duffy and other elements of the Trump administration are trying to restore sanity to the trucking industry, truckers are being attacked not only by the forces bringing insourced labor to compete with them, but by many on the left who want to preserve that system.

Truckers are also being threatened by the clumsiness of some of Duffy’s reforms as well as elements in the Republican Party that want to replace truckers not only with insourced labor but eventually with robots.

Let’s start with licensing.

In March, the FMCSA issued a new rule limiting who can be issued what is called a “non-domiciled” CDL.

Non-domiciled CDLs began as a narrow exception for drivers who could not obtain a recognized commercial license where they lived, including certain foreign drivers. Under the Obama administration, the old “nonresident CDL” was renamed the “non-domiciled CDL.”

The category became far more consequential over time. In 2019, during Trump’s first term, the FMCSA issued guidance — later endorsed by the American Trucking Associations — allowing foreign nationals with federal work permits to obtain non-domiciled CDLs.

Then came the Biden immigration surge. As the administration extended work authorization to huge numbers of migrants, it also vastly expanded the pool of foreign workers who could take advantage of the non-domiciled CDL system. Investigations into the system through 2025 found that roughly 200,000 drivers had been issued these licenses illegally and would see them revoked, or at least would not be renewed on expiry.

The Trump administration has now effectively closed the broader EAD pathway, limiting non-domiciled CDLs to a much narrower group of foreign workers with specific employment-based visas.

‘Public’ menace

The new rule is now being challenged in federal court. The lawsuit was filed by Public Citizen, the progressive advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, on behalf of two immigrant truck drivers, AFSCME, and the American Federation of Teachers. It argues that the FMCSA does not have the legal authority to remove such a large class of legally authorized immigrants from CDL eligibility.

For their part, the unions claim to be advocating on behalf of immigrant members who could lose their jobs under the rule. That puts two major American labor unions in the strange position of fighting a reform that could remove a huge pool of foreign labor from competition with American drivers.

How organized labor wound up fighting to preserve cheap foreign competition is a question for another piece. Curious readers might begin by looking into the sprawling network of nonprofits and foundations funding Public Citizen; several of them are also major backers of more permissive immigration policies.

RELATED: The deadly trucker crisis — and why mass migration is to blame

Justin Hamel/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Dalilah’s Law

There is, however, a straightforward way for supporters of the crackdown to fight back: Put the reforms into federal law.

Dalilah’s Law is named after a California girl who suffered catastrophic injuries after the car her mother was driving was rear-ended by a commercial truck. If passed, the law would tighten CDL standards, reinforce English-proficiency requirements, restrict eligibility for non-domiciled licenses, and crack down on deficient driver-training schools.

It would also address the outsourcing of freight brokerages and dispatch services overseas, a little-discussed but important part of the problem. If a load broker in Serbia or Pakistan fails to perform necessary due diligence in vetting a carrier, holding that broker accountable from the United States can be extraordinarily difficult. Dalilah’s Law would bring more of this activity within reach of American regulators.

No good deed

While all this is going on, the FMCSA has undertaken a revamp of the federal system through which trucking companies register. In an interview with “60 Minutes” earlier this year, FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs described the industry as having a “front door” problem: It has been too easy for bad actors — including so-called chameleon carriers, unsafe trucking companies that shut down and simply reappear under new names — to enter or re-enter the market.

Most Americans would probably be astonished by how easy it has been to summon a trucking company into existence. Just pay the $300 federal operating-authority fee, provide insurance and paperwork, and list a U.S. business address.

On paper, that address has to check out, and within 12 months you’re supposed to undergo a safety audit, followed by monitoring for the rest of an 18-month probationary period. But that assumes an overwhelmed system actually gets to you.

To address this, our bureaucrats have decided to bureaucrat some more with a new system called Motus, which has produced the results typical of government: penalizing operators who attempt to obey the rules, while essentially giving a free pass to anyone determined to break the law.

In a detailed examination of the rollout, trucking-industry writer Danielle Chaffin documented legitimate carriers unable to operate because Motus incorrectly showed them as inactive or saddled them with erroneous insurance requirements. At the same time, she found carriers with out-of-service orders — including some with no insurance on file — still showing as active in the new system. As one carrier put it, Motus was “waving the bad actors through the gate and choking the honest ones out.”

It seems like decent American companies continue to get stuck in the pincer between the open border policies of the previous administration, and the seeming unwillingness of government agencies to go full Genghis Khan against the bad actors allowed into the industry.

Backing the bots

As if displacement and replacement by foreign labor weren’t bad enough, we are also looking down the barrel of driver replacement by automation — something the Trump administration is actively encouraging even while it takes steps to protect truckers from foreign labor.

On September 3, DOT released its “National Strategy for Automated Vehicles,” laying out the administration’s priorities for automated-vehicle technology through 2030. The document largely concerns the bureaucratic minutiae of regulating vehicles that may or may not accommodate a human driver at all. But it will also help guide how the government deals with autonomous trucks.

Congress is considering the BUILD America 250 Act, a major surface-transportation bill that includes a federal framework for autonomous commercial vehicles. Republicans are also behind legislation such as the AMERICA DRIVES Act, introduced by California Republican Rep. Vince Fong, provisions of which have been incorporated into the larger bill.

The legislation seeks to limit state-level regulatory authority over autonomous commercial vehicles, including state requirements that certain highly automated trucks have a human being aboard.

Supporters argue that a national framework is necessary to prevent a patchwork of state regulations from strangling an emerging American technology. But Republicans should understand why their messaging looks confused to America’s truckers and why Fong’s bill seems at odds with their usual commitment to federalism.

On one hand, the administration is finally addressing their replacement by foreign labor. On the other, Republicans are working to remove regulatory barriers for technology whose ultimate promise is to move freight without anyone sitting behind the wheel.

Stuck in the middle

Do we have any friends in government at all?

The left appears happy to defend policies that allow American trucking companies to replace domestic labor with cheaper foreign drivers. Republicans are finally addressing that problem, but they also appear remarkably credulous when dealing with autonomous-vehicle developers whose technology could eventually supplant truckers’ jobs altogether.

Vice President Vance said in his speech that “we care about America’s truckers because for generations they have represented something much greater … the very best of this country’s character, people who spend long hours away from their families.”

“In some ways, truckers are the modern cowboys.”

I would submit to Vice President Vance that the administration’s actions thus far have been welcome and helpful for America’s truckers, and they deserve to be commended. But the administration needs to do more. It should continue removing bad actors from the trucking industry, pass Dalilah’s Law, make sure its own bureaucracy doesn’t punish legitimate operators, and be more realistic about what emerging technologies mean for us and for our economy.

The modern cowboys would like to keep on trucking for as long as we can.

​American workers, Biden administration, Commercial drivers license, Foreign nationals, Midterm elections, Mike rogers, Open border policies, Jd vance, Sean duffy, On the road 

The left is determined to divide people into competing groups of oppressors and oppressed — and Christian apologist Frank Turek knows why.

“Marxism is all about the group, whereas Christianity is all about the individual. … That’s the focus of the war on reality right now,” Turek tells Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck.

“They want people to identify everybody by an identity group,” he explains. “‘What identity group are you in?’ And if you are part of that collective, you’re oppressed. And if you’re not, you’re automatically an oppressor.”

“We’re not judging people individually any more,” he says. “We’re judging people by what? Even non-behavioral identity groups that they’re in. ‘Oh, you’re white, Glenn. You’re a bad guy. Oh, you’re a man. You’re a heterosexual. You’re a citizen of the U.S. You’re a Christian, Glenn. You’re an oppressor.’”

“But if you have the opposite qualities, you’re automatically oppressed,” he adds.

“It’s the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” Glenn agrees. “You must destroy that God because that’s the personal God. That’s the first personal, and the only personal, God — the one true God.”

“And so all of this — this is why people hate Jews and why they’re trying to get Christians to say, ‘We don’t need to remember that Jesus was a Jew.’ Because if you can get … yourself away from the Old Testament, now you don’t have the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob any more,” he continues. “And all of that falls apart.”

“You must have that. That’s why there’s this war. Everything boils down to that: the God of the individual,” he adds.

Turek agrees, noting that “it’s also why Marxism dispenses with the individual.”

“They think the state is eternal,” he says.

“Whereas we Christians know the state isn’t eternal,” he continues. “It’s individuals that are eternal, and they’re going to be judged individually.”

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.

​Christianity, God, Jews, Marxism, State, War, Jesus, Frank turek, Glenn beck, Blazetv show 

Picture a family with three cars. Mom and Dad both drive to work. The kids need rides to school and practice. The cars cost money, gas, repairs, and insurance, but they start when you turn the key. That is the whole point.

Then a salesman shows up with an amazing deal. He has a solar-powered car and a wind-powered car. No gas needed. The fuel is free. Who wouldn’t want that? They buy both, figuring they will save money and finally dump a couple of the old cars.

Regular people do not need politicians picking their power plants for them.

Then reality shows up.

The solar car runs when the sun is out. The wind car runs when the wind is blowing. Dad still leaves at 7:30 on dark winter mornings. Mom still has to pick up a kid at five o’clock when the air is dead calm. Families go where they need to go, not when the weather cooperates.

So they keep all three reliable cars. Now they own five.

Five cars do not fit in the driveway. So they pour more concrete and build a bigger garage. Someone suggests big batteries to store power for the days when the sun and wind quit. That costs a fortune too.

The salesman talked a lot about free fuel. He never mentioned the two extra cars, the bigger garage, the batteries, or the fact that you still need the old cars anyway.

Welcome to America’s electricity policy.

Wind turbines and solar panels really do make electricity without buying fuel. That is the selling point. But electricity has to be there the instant you flip the switch.

Factories cannot sit idle until the wind picks up. Hospitals cannot ask patients to wait for better weather. Families expect the furnace, the refrigerator, and the lights to work every single time.

Because wind and solar depend on the weather, adding them does not allow us to retire the dependable plants.

Natural gas, nuclear, coal, and hydro still have to be on standby when renewables produce little or nothing. We pay for two systems and get one grid’s worth of reliable power.

RELATED: Why are we teaching kids scarcity in an age of abundance?

Al Drago/Getty Images

Then come the wires. Wind and solar sit far from where people live, so they need new transmission lines, substations, and grid upgrades. The Energy Department’s own draft transmission study points to one of the largest build-outs in our history.

Batteries help, but only for a few hours. Most grid batteries can only run for about four hours.

None of this means wind and solar are worthless, but it does mean we should count the whole bill honestly.

The real question is not how cheap the electricity is when the generator is running. It is what it costs to keep reliable power available whenever people need it.

That price includes generation, transmission, grid upgrades, storage, backup capacity, and enough always-on power for calm, cloudy days. It also includes where the hardware comes from. Most of the world’s solar panels are made in China, which is building coal plants to run those factories.

If wind and solar still look cheapest after every cost is counted, let them win on the merits. If nuclear, natural gas, coal, hydro, or something better delivers more value, that should win instead.

Regular people do not need politicians picking their power plants for them. They need honest prices, real competition, and electricity that shows up when the switch is flipped.

Free fuel sounds great. But before we buy the fourth and fifth cars, somebody ought to ask whether we are actually saving money or just paying for more cars, more concrete, and a bigger garage to get to the same places.

​America, Clean energy, Coal, Factories, Insurance, Natural gas, Nuclear, Power grid, Solar, Solar panels, Wind turbines, Politicians, Cole plants, China, Opinion & analysis 

Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, recently offered a reassuring vision of our technological future. Artificial intelligence, he predicted, will soon monitor police body cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dashboards. “Citizens will be on their best behavior,” he explained, “because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.”

One is tempted to ask whether “best behavior” includes declining to construct an electronic surveillance state. Presumably, the algorithm will decide.

The surveillance state does not make good citizens. It makes practiced actors.

Ellison envisions AI supervising police officers as well as ordinary citizens. If an officer does something wrong, the system will detect the problem and report it to the appropriate authorities. Drones may even replace police cars during high-speed pursuits. The drone will follow the suspect while artificial intelligence records the proceedings and analyzes everyone involved.

Ellison, who is an atheist, wants an all-knowing being that is perfectly good and will judge our behavior.

It is difficult not to admire the efficiency. We have finally devised a deity suitable for the modern secular mind: omnipresent, nearly omniscient, and conveniently owned by a corporation, with promises of suitable oversight.

For generations, atheists and secularists have assured us that civilized people can dispense with belief in a God who sees our actions, judges our conduct, and holds us accountable. The notion of divine judgment was dismissed as primitive, oppressive, and psychologically unhealthy.

Enlightened people, we were told, do not need the threat of an all-seeing eye to behave morally.

Now, having removed God from heaven, our technological elites propose installing His replacement on every lamppost.

The secular project promised liberation from divine surveillance. Its culmination may be a camera that never blinks, connected to a machine that never sleeps, operated by authorities who never admit error.

Of course, artificial intelligence is not God. It is not even intelligent in the full human sense. It has no conscience, understands no moral law, and possesses no wisdom. It processes information according to purposes and standards supplied by human beings.

RELATED: The 9/11 generation may be building AI’s 9/11 moment

BlackJack3D/Getty Images

This creates a slight difficulty: If AI is to report “bad behavior,” someone must first tell it what bad behavior is.

Who will do that?

The programmers? Oracle executives? Government agencies? More AI? The same institutions that cannot define a woman may soon be entrusted with defining acceptable behavior for every citizen.

AI can recognize a face, track a vehicle, and perhaps identify a raised voice. It cannot tell us why assault is wrong, why citizens possess rights, or why the government should be restrained in its treatment of them.

The atheist insists that the universe contains no transcendent moral order. Human beings are products of impersonal matter, motion, and chance. Yet he continues speaking of justice, dignity, equality, and human rights as if these were eternal truths rather than temporary preferences produced by an unusual arrangement of atoms.

Having denied a Lawgiver above the state, he inevitably looks to the state to serve as lawgiver.

The God of Scripture sees everything, but His omniscience is joined to perfect knowledge, righteousness, and justice. He knows not merely what we do but why we do it. He judges the heart as well as the outward act.

Most importantly, God is not accountable to a government contractor, a political party, or Oracle’s quarterly earnings report because God is the standard for what is good, righteous, and holy.

RELATED: When government breaks the law, can you even sue?

DNY59/iStock/Getty Images

AI surveillance offers omnipresence without wisdom, judgment without righteousness, and accountability without any objective account of the good. It cannot produce virtue. At most, it can produce outward conformity in people who know they are being watched.

A man who refrains from stealing because theft is wrong possesses a measure of virtue. A man who refrains because six cameras and a drone are recording him possesses a measure of caution. The surveillance state does not make good citizens. It makes practiced actors.

Nor does recording everything solve the oldest political problem: Who watches the watchers? AI will report citizens to “the appropriate person,” Ellison tells us. This formulation is meant to be comforting, though history offers few reasons to assume that the person receiving unlimited information about the population will remain permanently appropriate.

The atheist rejected God because he did not want an authority above man. He is now constructing an artificial authority beneath man — but controlled by a small number of particularly powerful men. That is simply a transfer of divine attributes to institutions conspicuously lacking divine character.

We were told that when God disappeared, mankind would come of age. Instead, mankind immediately began shopping for cameras.

The choice is not between accountability and freedom from accountability. Every society will hold its members answerable to some standard. The real question is whether that standard rests upon a moral law higher than rulers or upon whatever rules the rulers program into their machines.

A God who judges governments as well as citizens is a barrier to tyranny. An AI system operated by the government is an instrument of it.

Our secular technologists have discovered that a society cannot survive unless people believe their actions are seen and judged. They have merely concluded that God’s principal defect was that He could not be purchased from Oracle.

​Ai, Anthropic, Athiests, Cameras, Christianity, Drones, God, Justice, Police, Religion, Scripture, Silicon valley, Surveillance state, Virtue, Opinion & analysis 

Democrats are raging at Joe Manchin, the former Democrat U.S. senator, after he endorsed Susan Collins, the incumbent Republican in the race for one of two Senate seats in Maine.

Manchin had represented West Virginia but was heavily criticized by Democrats for his moderate voting patterns. He left the Democratic Party in 2024 and became an independent.

‘Susan is always in there, always in the trenches.’

Rather than endorse the progressive candidate of his former party, Manchin told voters 73-year-old Collins needed to stay in the Senate.

“You lose the Susan Collinses of the Senate, you’re losing the soul of the Senate — basically, a person you can talk to, who wants to do the right thing all of the time,” he said on CNBC Monday.

“Now, everybody says, ‘Oh, she doesn’t do this, doesn’t speak up.’ Susan is always in there, always in the trenches,” he added.

Collins released a statement about his endorsement.

“Joe is a dear friend and trusted colleague with whom I have always worked closely to solve problems and deliver results for the people of Maine and America,” she said.

“From helping end government shutdowns and negotiating the Electoral Count Act to delivering COVID relief and historic investments in our nation’s infrastructure, we have shown what is possible when Republicans and Democrats work together to find common ground and get things done. I am honored to have his support,” she added.

Keeping Collins in the Senate is pivotal for Republicans’ hopes to maintain their control of at least one house of Congress.

RELATED: Graham Platner officially WITHDRAWS from pivotal Senate race

While Collins’ progressive challenger, Troy Jackson, is not a democratic socialist, he has been endorsed by the organization.

Manchin has previously said he could not support a socialist for office.

“How could you support some of the crazy stuff they’re for? Have you seen their platform?” Manchin said to CBS’ Margaret Brennan in an interview last month.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Joe manchin, Susal collins, Maine, Us senate, Politics 

Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky returned to the Senate on Monday after a long absence due to his health issues.

The former leader of the Senate had been absent from Congress for three months before the newest session began Monday.

The slim Republican majority in the Senate meant his vote was pivotal toward passing any legislation opposed by the Democrats in the minority.

McConnell said in a statement that his recovery had been “a long and often frustrating process,” according to Axios.

“Today, I’ll cast my first Senate vote since I took a bad fall back in June,” he added. “I’m really looking forward to being back on the Senate floor and seeing my colleagues.”

He added that his recovery had been stymied by the “lingering effects” of his bout with polio in childhood.

The slim Republican majority in the Senate meant his vote was pivotal toward passing any legislation opposed by the Democrats in the minority.

“I’m still not quite back to 100%, but I’ve assured Leader Thune that, as I continue with physical therapy on the advice of my doctors,” McConnell added, “I will do my best to be present for tough votes when our Conference needs me.”

Reporters posted at McConnell’s residence recorded video as the 84-year-old senator left his residence in a wheelchair on his way to the Senate.

In a brief statement at the Capitol, he said he was determined to vote on a farm bill and to punish Russia.

RELATED: Mitch McConnell’s replacement might be chosen in court first

McConnell is also expected to vote on the nomination of Matthew Byrne to be a district judge in Ohio.

“Elaine and I are very grateful for all the continued well wishes from our fellow Kentuckians, and I’m glad to get back to more of business as usual on their behalf this month,” he added.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Mitch mcconnell, Us senate, Congress, Politics 

Over the past decade, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) has continuously dodged allegations that she married her brother to help him obtain legal immigration status in the United States. Last week the controversy exploded anew as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Benny Johnson an investigation into the claim is under way.

On Sunday, another Trump administration official, border czar Tom Homan, confirmed the existence of an “ongoing criminal investigation” of Omar by the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations division.

‘We’re gonna take a look at it. If we think that there’s a crime, we’re gonna prosecute that crime.’

Homan’s admission came during a segment on Fox News’ “The Sunday Briefing.”

Homan told Fox News that “if someone committed immigration violation, if someone committed marriage fraud or anything like that, regardless if they’re a congressman or not, no one’s above the law.” When pressed he further, confirmed the existence of a current criminal investigation into Omar.

Homan and Mullin are not the only Trump administration officials to claim that investigations into Omar and the validity of her citizenship are under way. In May, Vice President JD Vance told a reporter, “We’re gonna take a look at it. If we think that there’s a crime, we’re gonna prosecute that crime. And that’s something the Department of Justice is looking at right now.”

For her part, Omar has consistently denied the allegations. In March, after an earlier claim of fraud by Vance, her chief of staff released a statement to Fox News: “This is a ridiculous lie and desperate attempt to distract from the pedophile protection party’s unpopular war of choice, increasing gas prices, and rapidly dropping polling numbers.”

RELATED: DHS secretary: Ilhan Omar married her brother, and consequences are coming

The allegations have dogged Omar since she won her primary for the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2016. In August of that year, Scott Johnson reported at Power Line blog that a since-deleted post on Somalispot claimed that “Omar married her brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, implying that the latter marriage assisted his entry into the United States.”

Power Line’s Johnson further looked into marriage records and reached out to those involved. He received a response from attorney Jean Brandl, which was the first in a long line of Omar denials regarding the allegations, “There are people who do not want an East African, Muslim woman elected to office and who will follow Donald Trump’s playbook to prevent it.”

Brandl continued, “Ilhan Omar’s campaign sees your superfluous contentions as one more in a series of attempts to discredit her candidacy.”

RELATED: JD Vance reveals Ilhan Omar is under federal investigation — and it may be about her marriage

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

In 2020 after the allegations again surfaced, Omar unequivocally denied the allegations via a statement. She wrote, “A number of baseless rumors have been made recently about my personal life and family. I will say it again here: they are absolutely false and ridiculous.”

Omar went on to detail her side of the marriage timeline.

The Department of Homeland Security and Rep. Omar have not responded to Blaze News’ requests for comment.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Department of homeland security, Federal investigation, Ilhan omar, Immigration status, Jd vance, Markwayne mullin, Tom homan, Politics 

Gen Z was told casual sex was no big deal while being promised a future with a loving partner through dating apps.

Dr. Debra Soh says young people, especially young women, are now dealing with the consequences.

“I don’t think casual sex is good for either sex, but especially for women,” Soh tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey, explaining that it’s “slightly different” for men.

“Women do tend to become more attached after sex. Whereas for men, hormonally it’s different,” she says.

While women release bonding hormones during sexual activity, Soh tells Stuckey that men’s hormones “go back to baseline.”

“So they actually disengage after sex and lose interest in their partner,” she says.

This is why Soh believes it’s “very irresponsible” that so many “feminist influencers and podcasters tell their young fans that they should be promiscuous or that they should have sex on the first date.”

“They’re telling their young fans to engage in behavior that is ultimately going to be self-destructive. And I do think this is an example of intrasexual competition in that women compete with other women and men compete with other men for sexual partners,” she explains.

“So I find that really sad, because I see it, especially with Gen Z women. I say Millennials, probably, too, really bought into this idea that having sex on the first date is not a big deal. That casual sex, if men can do it, women should do it,” she adds.

But it’s not just casual sex that’s killing modern love.

“You can kind of see some of the obvious issues with being able to swipe left or right,” Stuckey says. “It’s superficial. It’s based on aesthetics. But one thing that you said that I hadn’t thought about is that having more options is … a historical anomaly.”

“So our ancestors before us did not have this roster of people within a 200-mile radius that they were judging based on a self-assessment and pictures,” she continues.

“The paradox of choice speaks to this,” Soh explains. “So there have been studies showing that … when people are given fewer options, they’re more likely to actually make a choice and to be satisfied with that choice.”

“So when you’re on a dating app, it feels as though there is an unlimited number of potential partners. And so people are constantly seeking the next best thing,” she continues.

“I think there are very many of us who are just not present in terms of the dating process. … That’s a side effect of being online and just how so much of romantic interest or courtship is based through online connections or lack thereof, I suppose, nowadays,” she adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Allie beth stuckey, Casual sex, Dating app, Dr debra soh, Hookup culture, Hormones, Modern dating, Women, Blazetv show 

Carnegie Mellon University has been forced to take action against a Nigerian-born professor after yet another anti-white post she made on social media went viral.

Linguistics professor Dr. Uju Anya posted a message about dancing over the deaths of white males before online sleuths started reposting other previous anti-white missives. She also mocked critics who threatened to report her to the university.

‘I meant every word I said in my tweets responding to white men. … May they all eat s**t.’

“Die first, white man, then ask yourself why I’m dancing,” she allegedly wrote on the X platform on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. The message was in response to a critic who had asked her why she only celebrated the deaths of white men.

Screenshots of the post quickly went viral, and Anya ridiculed her detractors, who included tech billionaire Elon Musk.

“Carnegie Mellon University knows exactly who they have. They poached me from my previous job, aggressively recruiting me with a massive salary and stellar benefits. So baby, run tell them they f**ked up, and see if they pick up your call,” she reportedly wrote.

“Keep crying, loser. My department chair just texted me saying they’re throwing all of your emails in the trash,” she reportedly added with three laughing emojis.

Then the university responded hours later.

“Dr. Uju Anya is currently on voluntary professional leave from the university and is not teaching courses on our campus this academic year. We are deeply concerned by recent hostile and threatening social media posts by Dr. Anya and are reviewing this matter closely,” read the statement from the university.

“To be clear: These posts incorrectly imply our university’s endorsement and are contrary to our community standards and values as well as our commitment to fostering a safe, respectful and welcoming campus community,” they added in a second post.

Anya’s X account also does not exist any more.

Anya first made headlines in 2022 after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, when the academic posted an insidious message wishing that the queen had suffered greatly.

“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying,” she wrote. “May her pain be excruciating.”

She deleted that post, which was against Twitter policies at the time. Anya also later claimed that the British government had “massacred and displaced” half of her family.

RELATED: Black elementary school teacher posted alleged anti-white threats on social media

Anya had also reportedly responded, “May he rot in piss,” to the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death.

In a post on Instagram, she reportedly claimed to have been “doxxed” after “fascist white supremacist MAGA trolls” incited threats against her on social media.

“I meant every word I said in my tweets responding to white men and all others insulting and maligning me. I do not retract or apologize. May they all eat s**t,” she apparently added.

In 2024 Anya said black men doubting an activist’s claims of assault were using “white supremacist tactics” to “dehumanize” her. That story collapsed after a police investigation that included surveillance video that contradicted the activist’s claims.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Social media, Racism, Anti white racism, University, Politics