Category: blaze media

California Highway Patrol officers responded around 12:20 p.m. on Tuesday to a multiple-vehicle crash near Lodi that left two young Americans dead. The man believed to be responsible for the carnage — an illegal alien from India — reportedly fled the scene on foot.

The suspect, 24-year-old Manvir Singh, was quickly tracked down and arrested by San Joaquin County sheriff’s deputies and taken to the county jail, where he remains in custody as of early Thursday.

‘This criminal illegal alien from India should never have been behind the wheel of a semi-truck and allowed to kill.’

The deceased, ages 20 and 16, were sitting in a Kia Forte and slowing to a stop behind a Nissan Frontier and a Toyota Camry in the far right lane of northbound Highway 99 when a heavy-duty truck driven by the suspect and carrying a fully loaded semi-trailer smashed into them, reported Freight Waves.

According to CHP, the 80,000-pound truck hammered the rear of the Kia and launched it into the Camry, killing two Americans and sending five others to hospital, two of whom suffered critical injuries.

Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy revealed that Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom’s California — where an estimated 35% of the commercial drivers are Sikh, an Indian religious group — issued Singh a commercial driver’s license in March 2025.

RELATED: Fraudulent trucking carriers just ran out of road with new registration system, DOT says

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Duffy noted further that Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration investigators “are looking into how this illegal got his CDL and will investigate the trucking company who employed this driver.”

Amritsar Trans Inc., the intrastate freight company that reportedly operates the truck, is registered in Manteca, California; owns or leases five vehicles; has nine drivers; is unrated by the FMCSA; and is apparently run by Baljeet Singh.

Freight Waves highlighted that the company was cited for six violations across 11 inspections in the two-year window that ended April 24, 2026. One of the violations was for speeding 15 or more miles per hour over the posted limit, and another was for falsifying duty status to conceal having driven over hours.

Manvir Singh has been charged with felony vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, felony hit-and-run resulting in death or injury, and obstructing or resisting arrest. The Indian, whose bail has been set at $185,000, is set to appear in court Thursday afternoon.

The Department of Homeland Security told Fox News that Manvir Singh illegally entered the country through Arizona in 2023 and was subsequently released into the U.S. by the Biden administration.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lodged a detainer request in hopes that California authorities will ultimately transfer the illegal alien into federal custody.

“This criminal illegal alien from India should never have been behind the wheel of a semi-truck and allowed to kill two innocent people in a multi-vehicle crash in California,” DHS acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement. “He is now charged with vehicular manslaughter, hit and run resulting in death or injury, and resisting a police officer.”

“This is yet another example of why illegal aliens should not be operating trucks on American highways,” added Bis.

Transportation Secretary Duffy emphasized that “Dalilah’s law would have revoked this illegal trucker’s license. Congress must pass Dalilah’s Law NOW.”

H.R. 5688, Dalilah’s Law, would ban states from issuing commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens and limit issuance to U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and holders of specific work visas. The legislation would also require the revocation of any existing ineligible CDLs.

The legislation takes its name from Dalilah Coleman, a little girl grievously injured in a car accident that was caused by an illegal alien from India who reportedly obtained a commercial driver’s license from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Department of Motor Vehicles.

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​California highway patrol, Hit and run, Illegal alien, Department of homeland security, Indian, Truck driver, Truckers, Immigration, Transportation, California, Gavin newsom, Accident, Killer, Politics 

We’re learning a lesson that should be unmistakably clear as the world watches instability ripple outward from the Middle East: Geography still matters.

The war with Iran and the ever-present threat of disruptions at the Strait of Hormuz are exposing how fragile global energy supply chains have become. When choke points half a world away can rattle prices at the pump throughout the nation, it is time to rethink how and where America produces its energy.

Alaska offers our nation something rare: stability, security, and strength without choke points.

That rethink points north to Alaska.

Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz. When tensions rise, insurance rates surge, shipping slows, and prices spike. Families feel it immediately, particularly young families already struggling with affordability. These price shocks do not stem from resource scarcity; they stem from dependence on unstable routes and hostile actors.

Alaska has no Strait of Hormuz

What Alaska has is something the rest of the nation desperately needs right now: secure access to energy, open ocean shipping lanes, and proximity to Asian markets without relying on canals, narrow passages, or adversarial regimes. From the Gulf of Alaska, resources can move freely across the Pacific without transiting choke points that can be threatened, closed, or weaponized.

This geographic reality significantly cuts travel days and costs; it embodies freedom of access. It is geography that is Alaska’s destiny — and America’s — if we act on it.

For years, Alaska has been sidelined in national energy conversations, despite holding nearly all the critical minerals the United States depends on and vast reserves of oil and natural gas. Here at home, Alaskans pay some of the highest fuel prices in the nation, in part because we lack refining capacity and sufficient infrastructure to fully use what we already have.

A failure, not a shortage

When conflicts like the Iran war inject chaos into global markets, Alaska should be part of the solution. Responsible development of Alaskan oil, gas, and minerals strengthens national security, lowers costs for American families, and reduces reliance on adversaries who do not share our values or our interests.

Alaska should be treated as a critical asset, not an afterthought. That means advancing energy projects, encouraging refining capacity, and opening pathways for responsible exports. It also means making sure the benefits of development flow first to Alaskans — through jobs, lower costs, and long-term economic stability — rather than being locked away by red tape or federal neglect.

RELATED: The Iran war is causing another shortage — and it will directly affect every American

Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

The cost of service

The lesson of today’s uncertainty is not that America should retreat from the world, but that we should stand on firmer ground at home.

Wars are not measured by headlines, speculation, or the arguments that swirl in the middle of the conflict. They are measured at the end. If this conflict concludes with Iran defeated, its ability to threaten the world diminished, and our troops coming home safely, then Americans should unite in gratitude and pride.

Alaska understands the cost of service. We have one of the highest rates of veterans per capita in the nation. Our communities know sacrifice, duty, and resilience. If our sons and daughters in uniform succeed and return home victorious, we should celebrate their service and the removal of a dangerous foe from the world stage.

Alaska offers our nation something rare: stability, security, and strength without choke points. There is no Strait of Hormuz here, only opportunity. It is time we seize it. The time is right for Alaska and for the whole nation.

​Alaska, Middle east, Strait of hormuz, Supply chains, Gas prices, Global markets, Iran war, Opinion & analysis 

It doesn’t take a genius to manipulate the population. It just takes some mid-level AI chatbots with a mean streak.

That thought haunted Glenn Reynolds, the author of the new book “Seductive AI.” The tome doesn’t look to a near future in which artificial intelligence has a profound impact on our lives and culture.

‘The media actually had shame back then. You could browbeat them into correcting [mistakes].’

He sees its disruptive potential in the here and now.

Digital Don Juan

“There’s no reason why AI couldn’t be designed to manipulate human beings,” says Reynolds, known for his decades-old Instapundit.com website. “Raw brain power isn’t the best way to do it.”

Yes, the book explores the literal seductive power of an AI-powered device, whether an app, software program, or, eventually, a life-size sexbot coming to a Best Buy near you.

It also shares how manipulative AI can already be and some possible guardrails to prevent it from harming us.

Pop culture already warned us about AI’s seductive power. Think 2013’s “Her,” starring Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely man who falls for a bot voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Or even “The Big Bang Theory,” when the awkward Raj (Kunal Nayyar) falls in love with his Siri device.

“Seductive AI in the crudest sense … is looking more realistic as time passes,” Reynolds says. “You’ve seen these stories. … Women marrying their AI boyfriends. There’s just enough of that out there. You can’t dismiss it as ridiculous.”

The case of the 14-year-old Florida boy who took his own life after sharing suicidal thoughts with an AI bot named after “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen is hard to forget.

Blind faith

And it could soon get worse.

“One of my recurring themes in the book … year after year, the machines get better and people stay about the same,” he says, a scary thought given the technological progress we have already seen. “People’s ability to see through this stuff is a flat line.”

Humanity’s wobbly mental health status makes “Seductive AI” fears more profound.

“There’s a large number of people who are losing contact with objective reality. It’s encouraged by social media and a lot of machine affirmation. … The various AI chatbots will basically tell you how smart you are,” he says.

Even some terrible ideas, when fed into an AI bot, will spit back encouraging banter.

“All these platforms … not just the AI ones, foster engagement by pushing various emotions — fear, hatred, sometimes love,” he says.

RELATED: 6 movies that warned us about AI

Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images

The bot stops here

“Seductive AI” offers some possible guardrails, like suggesting that AI firms have a fiduciary duty to the person impacted by their expertise. That could allow people to sue if the bot’s behavior is in breach of that contract.

“The company producing the entity should be held liable for any breaches, exactly as if they had been made by a human employee acting for the company itself,” he writes in the book.

Reynolds says mainstream media outlets have done their part to promote the upside of AI, like fawning press over the rise of self-driving cars.

“Every single story you read in the automotive press was positive,” he says, downplaying the potential for fatal accident. “AI stuff was all super positive for a while. … Now that seems to have faded.”

The Blogfather

Reynolds previously wrote “The Social Media Upheaval” (2019) and “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths” (2007).

He’s best known in conservative circles for Instapundit.com, an old-school site with constantly updated links to the latest news and commentary. He was part of the early blogging wave that challenged mainstream media, with some stunning successes. In fact, he was so influential on other DIY pundits that he earned the nickname the Blogfather.

“The media actually had shame back then,” he says. “You could browbeat them into correcting [mistakes].” Take Dan Rather’s National Guard story, in which the CBS anchor claimed President George W. Bush shirked his duties based on manufactured evidence. The story might have stood unchallenged if not for several citizen journalists like the team behind Powerlineblog.com.

A simpler time

And he has his “beefs” with the current right-leaning media landscape. He recalls a simpler time in the digital arena.

“The period of 2004 to 2008 was kind of a golden age of independent media, before the walled gardens of Facebook and other platforms took over,” he says. It helped that journalists took criticism more seriously at the time.

The early blogging days also saw friendlier ties between left- and right-leaning bloggers. Now, that sense of brotherhood is gone, he says.

“It’s hard to have a civil discussion about anything now,” he says. “It’s a very unhealthy environment.”

As for his latest project, he admits the alluring nature of this technology boils down to something elemental.

“Yes, AI is extremely useful,” he says. “That’s another way of being seductive.”

​Artificial intelligence, Glenn reynolds, Culture, Lifestyle, Chatbots, Sexbots, Books, Interview, Independent media 

A former manager of a McDonald’s restaurant allegedly posted a video of herself “contaminating” french fries on social media and now faces prison time.

Kaylie Santos, 22, of Southbridge, Massachusetts, was arrested for the video that went viral on Facebook that showed two workers participating in the alleged contamination.

The video apparently showed Santos shoving the fries into her mouth before placing them in the fries carton.

Santos was apparently targeting her ex-girlfriend, who went through the drive-through of the restaurant on April 8, according to investigators. The video apparently showed Santos shoving the fries into her mouth before placing them in the fries carton.

“She wants french fries today, right?” Santos is heard saying, according to police.

Investigators also were able to obtain surveillance video from the store showing that she spit into the carton of fries.

When they interviewed the alleged victim, she said that she had ordered two sodas but that Santos gave her a bag of fries too. She didn’t think anything of it and ate the fries.

She also claimed that Santos had been harassing her and the customer’s new partner.

Santos faces one count of giving a person food “containing a foreign substance, which was intended or might reasonably be expected to cause injury.”

Investigators said they tracked down the victim by searching the license plate on the video from the drive-through.

WBZ-TV reported that the video on Facebook garnered tens of thousands of views.

RELATED: Grade school janitor contaminated children’s food with his bodily fluids and posted on social media, New Jersey police say

The owners of the restaurant said they were cooperating with police and that they had obtained a no-trespass notice against the former manager.

“The actions of these individuals are unacceptable and do not reflect our organization’s food safety standards or values,” they said. “The well-being and safety of our Southbridge community remains our top priority, and we are taking swift, appropriate actions.”

Entry-level McDonald’s managers make about $48,000, while general managers can make up to $90,000 in that part of the country.

A poll of Americans found that McDonald’s french fries blew away the competition for most popular fries among fast food restaurants.

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​Contaminated food, French fries, Mcdonalds, Viral video, Crime 

The U.S. House of Representatives will soon vote on a housing bill that supposedly addresses the nation’s very real affordability crisis and, even more important, lets politicians claim they are doing something about it.

The Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act in March by an 89-10 vote. Democrats backed it almost unanimously, and all but one of the no votes came from Republicans, even though President Donald Trump pushed hard for the bill.

States have the right to be stupid or smart. The federal government has no constitutional authority to make that choice for them.

One provision separates the Senate and House versions, and it matters a great deal.

The Senate bill would require investors who own more than 350 single-family rental properties to sell the excess after seven years. It exempts large institutional investors that build or buy new single-family homes for the rental market, but even they would have to sell those properties to individual homeowners after seven years.

The House bill drops that provision. That may be its best feature.

The Senate’s ownership cap is not only arbitrary and unfair; it is economically backward. Driving investors out of the market would raise prices, not lower them. It would shrink the pool of potential investors, reduce incentives to build and maintain housing, and leave buyers competing for a smaller supply of homes.

Those effects would push housing prices higher.

The only Democrat to vote against the Senate bill, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, blasted the seven-year forced-sale provision on the floor, calling it “bananas” and “a very bizarre thing” to restrict ownership by businesses other than hedge funds. The bill “demonize[s] people who want to build rental housing,” Schatz said.

He was right. The Senate version would do serious damage to housing supply. As Schatz put it, “This is positively Soviet.”

The two versions reflect sharply opposing views not only of housing, but of markets and government power in general. The real question is whether housing unaffordability reflects a “market failure” requiring federal and state correction, or whether markets work best when government limits itself to preventing force and fraud.

RELATED: When your ‘rich’ neighbor can’t afford furniture

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Today’s housing crisis is not a market failure. It is the product of government interference.

As I explain in my new Heartland Institute policy study, “Housing Affordability: America’s Short-Term Crisis and Long-Term Problem,” the immediate affordability crunch began with the rapid rise in federal spending starting in January 2021. The Federal Reserve accommodated that spending by expanding the money supply, helping ignite inflation across the economy.

Housing prices rose sharply and crossed into statistical unaffordability in May 2021. They then surged further as inflation spread throughout the economy. The Federal Reserve later raised interest rates to contain the damage, which only made housing less affordable as mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen since the early 1980s.

At the same time, the country was already suffering from years of weak housing-stock growth after the 2008 financial crisis, another disaster created by the federal government and the Fed. Add a rapidly rising population driven by mass immigration, along with Millennials and then Gen Z entering prime homebuying years, and a long-running squeeze turns into a full-scale crisis.

That is the mess Congress and Trump now want to address.

Their answer is to tweak some federal regulations in the hope of encouraging more construction. That may help at the margins. It will not do much to expand supply, and it will do nothing to address the inflation that turned a difficult market into a crisis.

As I write in the policy study, “The solution to the inflation-inflicted affordability problem is significant cuts in federal spending,” though such cuts appear to have little political support.

The long-term solution is straightforward: Build more houses.

Here again, government is the main obstacle. Zoning restrictions, taxes, overregulation, rent control, urban-growth boundaries, land rationing, impact fees, excessive building-code requirements, and countless other local barriers have choked construction and sales.

Those policies mostly come from states and localities. The federal government, however, encourages them through housing and urban-development spending.

RELATED: Trump needs to denounce the Dignity Act

Alex WROBLEWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Both versions of the current bill try to reduce some of that federal encouragement of excessive state and local regulation. That is the right direction because under the Constitution, housing regulation belongs to the states.

States have the right to be stupid or smart. The federal government has no constitutional authority to make that choice for them. Congress and presidents have usurped that authority for decades and should relinquish it entirely.

The proper remedy is simple: The federal government should confine itself to the powers the Constitution actually grants. That would mean no federal spending on housing at all.

Such a change would end Washington’s manipulation of the housing market, a game that always favors major players and hurts ordinary people. It would also reduce federal spending and ease inflationary pressure.

Both versions of the bill include a provision blocking the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency through 2030. That is a good provision, though House fiscal conservatives wanted a permanent ban. They were right.

In practical economic terms, the solution to the housing crisis is simple: Build more homes and stop inflating the currency. Politically, however, that solution remains unlikely.

To Congress and the president, the bill’s most important function is political. It will do little to calm public anxiety about housing affordability, but it will let politicians say they acted. In Washington, that usually matters more, and costs much less, than doing something useful.

​Soviet, Congress, Senate, Democrats, Affordability, Constitution, Trump, Road to housing act, Opinion & analysis, Housing crisis 

The artificial intelligence boom has become one of the biggest engines of the American economy. It has also triggered a growing backlash against the data centers that make the boom possible. Tech moguls have rushed to build giant warehouses packed with the computing power needed to run AI systems, but they have done almost nothing to explain to ordinary Americans why those facilities deserve so much land, water, electricity, and political favoritism.

That failure should have created an obvious opening for libertarians. Governments shower data-center projects with subsidies, wield eminent domain to seize land, and help politically connected corporations reshape local communities in the name of technological progress. A coherent libertarian response would attack the merger of state power and corporate power.

The first great use of AI will not be liberation. It will be surveillance and control.

Instead, many libertarians have chosen to cheer the expansion without asking what the technology will be used for or whom it will serve. Their quasi-religious loyalty to capital has pushed them into another foolish position and exposed the danger of turning an economic theory into a full worldview.

The tech elite insist that AI will revolutionize the world, but they have done almost nothing to tell average people how their own lives will improve. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs spin wild stories about superhuman intelligence and the automation of tens of millions of jobs. That does not sound like a sales pitch. It sounds like the setup for a science-fiction dystopia. The one concrete justification they offer is strategic: AI will supposedly define the future of warfare, and America must stay ahead of China.

That argument would carry more weight if the same people pushing AI were not also so committed to building the kind of technology most likely to be used against Americans. They are not preparing some noble shield for the republic. They are building tools that can make the United States look a lot more like the techno-authoritarian China they claim to fear.

Data centers consume staggering amounts of electricity, sometimes drawing as much power as a moderate-sized city. They also use enormous volumes of water, create nonstop noise, and disfigure the landscape. Developers have found ways to soften some of those costs by building new power infrastructure and improving cooling efficiency, but none of the problems have been solved. In the meantime, local communities absorb the burden.

The economic case is weak as well. Data centers create construction jobs while they are being built, but once construction ends, they employ surprisingly few people. Governments usually justify subsidies by promising long-term economic activity and job growth. In the case of data centers, corporations collect the incentives while communities get very little in return.

A sane political movement would notice that. Many libertarians have not. Instead of challenging subsidies and land seizures, they have fought to champion the projects. Nick Gillespie of Reason recently posted a chart showing that almond farms use far more water than AI data centers. Almonds are notoriously inefficient in water use, and agriculture probably does consume more water overall.

But the comparison gives away the problem. People eat food. AI, at least so far, mostly offers job displacement and surveillance.

RELATED: Your enemies aren’t mentally ill. They apparently just want to kill you.

Blaze Media Illustration

Libertarianism grew, in part, out of the Austrian school of economics, which is useful for understanding markets. It was never meant to serve as a complete theory of human life. Like Marxists, however, many libertarians have turned an economic framework into a totalizing ideology. Free markets, contract law, and voluntary exchange become an all-encompassing lens through which everything must be judged. Once that happens, it becomes difficult to see anything that does not show up in GDP.

The real question is not how much of a resource gets spent, but for what purpose. Most people would not give up a hand to save a cockroach. Most would give up their lives to save a child. On paper, preserving the cockroach may look like the more efficient transaction. Only a lunatic would fail to understand why no sane person would ever choose it over the child.

Economics helps explain financial exchange, but in its hunger for abstraction, it often strips away the human element that drives actual decisions. Treat almonds and AI as interchangeable “economic activity,” and you erase the context that gives moral meaning to both. That is the error every ideology makes. Grand unified theories comfort the rational mind because they promise predictive clarity. Then they collide with actual human beings living in actual places.

Kevin O’Leary recently went on Tucker Carlson’s podcast to praise the record-setting data center he wants to build in Utah. Carlson pressed him repeatedly to name a job AI would create for ordinary Americans. O’Leary could not identify a single one. He fell back on vague assurances that new technologies always create jobs somewhere in the future. The one benefit he seemed sure about was that AI might help America defend Taiwan in a future war with China. That is a revealing answer to citizens asking how this technology will help their own country.

RELATED: The liberal guide to committing national suicide

Blaze Media Illustration

Many libertarians now seem to support data centers out of sheer loyalty to capital itself. Economic activity becomes an end in itself. Progress, no matter the cost, is presumed to produce more liberty. That is delusional. The first great use of AI will not be liberation. It will be surveillance and control. The same corporate and political class that backed vaccine mandates, digital surveillance, censorship, and biometric passes during COVID is now demanding trust on AI. Nothing in its conduct suggests a change of heart.

Our tech oligarchs lined up with Democrats, outsourced American jobs, embraced censorship, and showed enormous appetite for monitoring the population. They are not trustworthy allies.

The backlash against data centers may lack intellectual polish, but the instinct is sound. The elites driving AI are not on our side, and Americans have no reason to sacrifice their communities, resources, and liberty on behalf of people who plainly intend to use this technology against them.

​Control, Data centers, Elites, Free markets, Kevin oleary, Libertarians, Opinion & analysis, Progress, Surveillance, Tucker carlson, Water usage, Austrian school of economics, Libertarian, Employment, Artificial intelligence, Nick gillespie, Reason, Economics 

James Talarico and Graham Platner are two of the most controversial Democrats running for office this year, but one new ridiculous Democrat star is now joining their ranks — and her name is Shelby Campbell.

Campbell, who is running for Congress in Michigan, is using a different campaigning method.

That is, she’s posting videos of herself twerking on social media.

“She’s 32 years old. She is apparently a law student. She’s a single mom. Gosh, who would have thought the woman twerking on social media would be a single mom? And she has four mug shots on her campaign website,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales explains.

“This is the absolute state of the Democrat Party,” she adds, before playing a TikTok video Campbell posted.

“It’s our time: the wine-mom gang,” Campbell says in the video while dancing around in a big T-shirt and disheveled hair.

“White ladies, I’m glad that we are becoming the enemy to the white man as well. I’m proud of you. Now, let’s get it, girls,” she adds.

But that’s not the worst of it.

“Let me present to you: Shelby Campbell mocking people who pray for child gunshot victims,” Gonzales comments, before playing another clip.

“Sky Daddy, please, please save the children from being shot with guns. Not by reforming the laws, but just by praying to you. Please, Sky Daddy. Dumb. Idiotic,” Campbell says in the video, again looking disheveled.

“At a certain point … we just need to come to terms with the fact that this is their best and brightest,” Gonzales says.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

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​Blaze media, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Congress, Democrat, Michigan, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Social media, Twerking, Sara gonzales, Voting 

An analysis of the states that have redrawn congressional districts for partisan advantage found that Republicans are winning the battle.

CBS News elections analyst Anthony Salvanto looked at the midterm elections map with Crystal Ball managing editor Kyle Kondik on Tuesday.

‘My best guess … is a Republican gain of seven seats, but there’s a range on that. It could be a little lower, it could be a lot higher than that.’

Texas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri have redistricted in favor of Republicans and garnered the party between 10 and 16 extra seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Democrats have only been able to gain seats in California and Utah, for a possible gain between four and six seats, according to the analysis.

Overall, Republicans could have as many as 12 extra seats, while Democrats could only whittle down the advantage to four for the Republicans if everything went their way.

In addition, there are three states where efforts are pending and Republicans could pick up more seats. Those are Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

“The argument sort of goes back and forth. Is it maybe nine seats? Is it maybe six seats when this all nets out?” Salvanto said.

According to their analysis, there are only about 16 actual toss-up seats to be determined, and Republicans have an estimated 211 to 208 seat advantage. Whichever party gets to 218 seats will determine control of the House.

“Obviously we got to have the election first to determine what the actual effect of the redistricting was,” Kondik responded. “My best guess … is a Republican gain of seven seats, but there’s a range on that. It could be a little lower, it could be a lot higher than that.”

Salvanto pointed out one possible weakness for Republicans were Hispanics in Texas districts who had moved to the Republican Party in 2024 but may not show up in as significant numbers for the midterms.

RELATED: Utah Supreme Court justice abruptly RESIGNS after accusation involving redistricting attorney

“Just because you change a map to benefit yourself, it’s not necessarily gonna do that,” Kondik added.

“I would specifically look at the Republican redraws because 2026 is gonna stress test those maps in a way that they won’t necessarily be tested for Democrats because this is probably gonna be a Democratic-leaning year.”

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​Control of house, Midterm elections, Redistricting, Republicans, Politics 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has identified 12 possible future outcomes of artificial intelligence — ranging from a perfect utopia to complete human extinction.

BlazeTV host Pat Gray enjoys some of them, while others are deeply unsettling.

“The libertarian utopia: AI brings prosperity and AI-driven automation replaces most human jobs. The AI is vastly more intelligent but does not interfere with humans, leaving them to co-exist in separate zones,” Gray reads.

“The egalitarian utopia,” he continues reading, “AI and robotics lead to extreme abundance. Ownership becomes obsolete because robots produce everything needed, and resources are essentially free.”

“That’s like a ‘Star Trek’ outcome,” he adds.

The next is the “benevolent dictator possibility.”

“A super intelligent AI runs the world, making decisions that are 0% corrupt and perfectly fair,” Gray says, noting that the “first three are pretty decent options.”

However, after those three, the AI starts to get a little more controlling.

“The gatekeeper: A single all-powerful AI controls all technology and prevents humans from developing any other dangerous technologies, ensuring safety at the cost of freedom,” Gray explains, before moving on to the “protector god.”

This AI is “developed specifically to defend humanity, acting as an omnipotent guardian against existential threats.”

One concerning option is the “zookeeper option,” which keeps humans in “a protected, comfortable state similar to a nature reserve.”

Even scarier is the “1984 surveillance state possibility.”

This AI would “create an inescapable totalitarian surveillance state where every action is monitored and dissent is impossible.”

“We’re almost there now,” Gray says, before moving on to the “cyborg enhancement path,” which involves humans integrating “AI directly into their bodies and minds.”

The “self-preservation replacement scenario” follows, where “AI is developed, but its goals diverge from humanity’s, leading to the eradication of humans.”

“Not out of malice, but because humans are in the way of its goals,” Gray says. “Man, I could see that happening.”

Then there is the “apocalyptic future,” which features a “poorly designed super intelligent AI” breaking free and “destroying civilization,” and “the boredom scenario,” where “AI does everything so well that humans lose their sense of purpose.”

The final scenario is the “oops scenario,” where “humans try to create a controlled AI but fail, creating something they cannot understand or control, leading to unpredictable, potentially catastrophic results.”

“So,” Gray says, “there’s a few.”

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​Blaze media, Blaze news, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Blaze podcast network, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Blazetv host, Pat gray unleashed, Surveillance state, The blaze, Artificial intelligence, Mit, Human extinction 

A former pastor known for leading a gay conversion therapy ministry was caught trying to meet what he thought was an underage boy for sex, according to Florida police.

Alan Chambers, 54, allegedly sent lewd messages including sexual photographs to an undercover police officer he believed to be a 14-year-old child.

He apologized to the gay community for ‘years of undue suffering and judgment at the hands of the organization and the church as a whole.’

Prosecutors say Chambers sent the sexually explicit messages via Telegram and Snapchat between February and May while trying to arrange a meetup with the fake underage child.

Chambers allegedly talked about “forbidden love” and sent a photograph that showed a “white [male’s] torso laying in bed where the end of their penis was visible.”

The detective pretending to be a boy said that on April 10, Chambers asked him to take an Uber and meet with him. He also allegedly deleted many of the messages out of fear of getting in trouble.

Chambers made headlines in 2013 when he turned against conversion therapy after admitting that he was attracted to men despite being married to a woman. He also shut down the conversion ministry and said he was going to work to build bridges between Christians and gay people.

He apologized to the gay community for “years of undue suffering and judgment at the hands of the organization and the church as a whole” and said his new ministry would have “peace to be at the forefront of anything we do in the future.”

RELATED: Memphis pastor charged with trafficking and sexual exploitation of a minor — after different pastor at same church convicted

Chambers was arrested on Tuesday during a traffic stop at Aloma Avenue and Strathy Lane.

The man was booked on charges of solicitation of a minor, transmission of harmful material to a minor, and unlawful use of a two-way communication device.

His bond was set at $15,000, and he was ordered to not have any communication with anyone under the age of 18 years old.

“Today our detectives stopped a predator before he had the chance to harm a child. … Parents, please monitor your children’s internet and social media activity — you are the first line of defense,” reads a statement from the Orange County Sheriff’s office.

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​Child sex sting, Solicitation of a minor, Undercover police officer, Politics, Lgbtq 

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos ripped into many of the policies on the left in a recent interview that was clipped widely on social media.

Bezos took aim at schemes to raise taxes on the wealthy and advocated lower taxes on Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder. He made the comments from the factory floor of his Blue Origin aerospace company during an interview on “Squawk Box” with CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin released Wednesday.

‘We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology!’

When pressed on the issue of taxes, Bezos said half of Americans shouldn’t pay federal income taxes at all. He cited the example of a theoretical nurse in Queens who earns $75,000 a year and pays about $12,000 in federal income taxes.

“People talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes? At all,” he said.

“Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes? That’s $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything. And by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3% of the taxes,” Bezos added.

“It’s only 3%. We can find 3%. It’s a small amount of money for the government,” he continued. “And the more I thought about it, to me it’s kind of absurd that we’re doing this. You know, we shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology! It really makes no sense!”

Bezos said it was fine to debate what the wealthy should pay in taxes but went on to accuse politicians of distracting voters by vilifying the wealthy. He added that politicians were ignoring the root problems causing inflation and other economic problems.

“If you’re really being honest about it, we don’t have a revenue problem in this country. We already have the most progressive tax system in the world,” Bezos said. “The top 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of all tax revenue, the bottom half pay only 3%, and I think it should be zero.”

“We actually have a spending problem,” he added and cited the $44,000 that is spent on every child in the New York City school system with worse outcomes than other cities.

“If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system,” Bezos joked, “packages would take six weeks to arrive, we would charge you a $100 delivery fee, and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item in it!”

Sorkin didn’t laugh.

“That’s a skills issue!” Bezos added. “It’s just competence.”

RELATED: Leftists lose their minds after Jeff Bezos announces new direction for WaPo in favor of freedom

Bezos also argued that the government could double the taxes he pays and it wouldn’t help the theoretical nurse in Queens because government spending is so out of control.

“You can’t connect those two things, not logically,” he said.

The entire segment on taxes with Bezos can be viewed on CNBC’s YouTube channel.

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​Federal income taxes, Government spending, Jeff bezos, New york city, Politics, Tax system 

Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck is sounding the alarm over what he sees as a cultural road map America could soon follow if conservatives fail to maintain the momentum of the Trump era.

“If we don’t get a Marco Rubio, or whoever is running and is the candidate, in line with what Donald Trump is doing right now — if we don’t get that, we’re going to be back here with a vengeance,” Beck warned.

“We’ll be right behind you,” he tells Peter McIlvenna.

McIlvenna, who grew up in Northern Ireland as well as in the Republic of Ireland in Dublin and Limerick, tells Glenn that he’s right — and that the cities there are “not Irish at all.”

“Ireland is an interesting test case, going from probably the most staunchly Christian Catholic country to now the most liberal country. What happened on the abortion laws was unbelievable. The rush to same-sex marriage so quick,” he explains.

“Part of that was the sex scandals that were in the Catholic Church were then used to destroy any remnant of Christianity within the country. Instead of saying ‘this is happening in parts of Church; we need to address it,’ the Church was decimated,” he continues.

The hypocrisy, McIlvenna points out, is when you point out that Islam has the same problems — or worse — the response is that it’s “a few bad apples.”

“It was a concerted attack on the Church, destroying the Church’s role as a guiding light for Irish society to now being dismissed and ridiculed and rejected,” he explains.

But it’s not just Ireland. The decline of Christianity and embrace of Islam are happening all over the United Kingdom.

“Islam presents itself as dominant and gives them an identity. And I think that’s the thing we are lacking as a nation. We don’t know our identity,” he says. “We have ripped out Christianity from the nation.”

Want more from Glenn Beck?

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​Abortion laws, America, Blaze media, Blaze media cofounder, Blaze news, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Blaze podcast network, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Candidate, Catholic church, Christianity, Conservatives, Decline of christianity, Donald trump, Dublin, Embrace of islam, Glenn beck, Hypocrisy, Ireland, Islam, Marco rubio, Northern ireland, Republic, Same sex marriage, Sex scandals, The blaze, The glenn beck program, Trump era, United kingdom 

Ukrainian military hardware appears to have once again endangered the people of a NATO member nation.

Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal announced on Tuesday that “a drone entering Estonian airspace was detected quickly and shot down over Southern Estonia by a NATO Air Policing fighter jet.”

‘These trajectories have to be as far from the NATO territory as possible.’

Michal thanked Estonia’s “NATO allies, the Romanian Air Force, and the fighter pilots who carried out this mission with professionalism and precision,” adding that “NATO is vigilant, prepared, and capable of acting rapidly when needed.”

Hanno Pevkur, the defense minister for the Baltic nation of 1.36 million souls, confirmed that a Romanian Air Force F-16 pilot participating in a training flight shot down the drone using a single missile. The remains of the drone crashed several hundred meters away from a residential building in the Central Estonian town of Põltsamaa.

A resident told state media that he saw two fighter jets soar overhead, then heard a loud bang.

“There was a loud blast, and I saw the drone falling from the sky,” said the witness. “As it was already close to the ground, I heard another blast.”

It’s presently unclear whether the drone was carrying any warheads.

Heorhii Tykhyi, a spokesperson for Ukraine, apologized to Estonia “for such unintended incidents,” reported DW.

RELATED: Killer drones have conquered the skies. Can we ever be safe again?

Sergei SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images

The Estonian Defense Forces claimed that the Ukrainian drone stole into Estonian airspace “under the conditions of heavy electronic warfare, including GPS spoofing and jamming, by Russia.”

Defense Minister Pevkur said in an interview with Estonian Public Broadcasting that Ukrainian officials — who do not have permission to use Estonian airspace — “have indeed apologized, but they have also reaffirmed that they are doing everything on their part to ensure that these drones do not enter NATO airspace.”

Pevkur expressed some frustration with Kyiv, telling the Associated Press, “We’ve said to the Ukrainians all the time that if you’re attacking Russian positions or Russian targets, then these trajectories have to be as far from the NATO territory as possible.”

The Estonian Internal Security Service has launched a criminal investigation into the aerial intrusion.

In recent months, numerous Ukrainian military drones have entered the airspace of friendly neighboring countries.

A pair of Ukrainian drones entered Estonian and Latvian airspace on March 25, for example. One of the drones struck Estonia’s Auvere power ⁠station and the other crash-landed. Officials suggested that the drones were supposed to be part of a Ukrainian attack on Russia.

Days later, two drones entered Finnish airspace, then crashed near the city of Kouvola. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo told his country’s state media that the drones appeared to be of Ukrainian origin.

Earlier this month, two more Ukrainian drones strayed into NATO airspace, crashing ultimately on Latvian soil. Reuters reported that one of the drones exploded at an oil storage facility, damaging four tanks.

Drones aren’t the only unwanted surprises Ukraine had sent into NATO’s back yard.

A S-300 air defense missile landed in Poland on Nov. 15, 2022, rocking the village of Przewodów and killing two farm workers.

Ukrainian officials and numerous media outlets — including the Associated Press, CNN, CBS News, and Fox News — rushed to suggest that the explosion was the handiwork of the Russians, which would have been sufficient to trigger articles 4 and 5 of the NATO charter, potentially putting the U.S. into direct conflict with the nuclear power.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president whose term officially ended in May 2024, said in the wake of the deadly explosion, “Russian missiles hit Poland, the territory of our friendly country. People died.”

The Polish and American governments rejected the suggestion that Russia fired the missile, noting instead that it was likely a Ukrainian missile that had accidentally been lobbed into a NATO country.

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister at the time, called the claim that the explosion was caused by Ukraine a “conspiracy theory.”

Polish investigators, denied any relevant intelligence from Kyiv, later claimed that the missile was fired by Ukraine. The particular missile that landed in Przewodów has a maximum range of 56 miles, and Russian forces were nowhere near close enough to land the shot.

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​Drones, Electronic warfare, Estonia, Europe, Explosion, Missiles, Russia, Ukraine, War, Politics, Zelenskyy 

The U.S. Department of Justice says Cuban ex-dictator Raul Castro has been indicted on charges related to the shooting down of two planes in international waters.

Castro, 94, ruled over the communist government in the island nation until 2018 after his brother, revolutionary icon Fidel Castro, passed over control in 2008 over his health issues. Fidel Castro died in 2016 at the age of 90.

‘If you kill Americans, we will pursue you. No matter who you are. No matter what title you hold.’

In an indictment unsealed Wednesday, the U.S. government charged that the surviving Castro should be held criminally responsible for the deaths of American citizens.

On Feb. 24, 1996, the Cuban government fired upon and shot down two unarmed U.S. civilian aircraft, killing four Americans who were on a rescue mission, according to the indictment.

“For the first time in nearly 70 years, senior leadership of the Cuban regime has been charged in the United States for alleged acts of violence resulting in the deaths of American citizens,” reads a statement from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“President Trump and this Justice Department are committed to restoring a simple principle: if you kill Americans, we will pursue you. No matter who you are. No matter what title you hold.”

The four Americans were working with Hermanos al Rescate, or Brothers to the Rescue, a humanitarian operation that sought to aid Cubans trying to flee the communist regime.

The DOJ alleges that the organization was infiltrated by communist agents who provided information to the Cuban military in order to plan the attack on the planes.

The indictment alleges charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, two counts of destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder.

In addition to Castro, the indictment also names five other Cuban officials who are allegedly partly responsible for killing the Americans.

RELATED: ‘I can do anything I want with it’: Trump confirms he’s eying another country for the ‘taking’

The U.S. nationals killed in the operation were Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales.

“For 30 years these families have waited for answers — and this FBI never forgot,” FBI Director Kash Patel said. “We will continue working with our Justice Department partners to bring to justice those who attacked our civilians.”

The defendants face a maximum penalty of death or life imprisonment on the murder and conspiracy charges if convicted, the DOJ said.

In response to the indictment, current Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez claimed in Spanish: “On February 24, 1996, Cuba acted in legitimate self-defense within its jurisdictional waters, following repeated and dangerous violations of our airspace by notorious terrorists — a fact of which the U.S. administration at the time was alerted on more than a dozen occasions, yet it ignored the warnings and allowed those violations to continue.”

Whether Castro and the other defendants will be extradited to the United States to face the charges is unclear. Blanche said of Castro: “There was a warrant issued for his arrest. So we expect that he will show up here, by his own will or by another way.”

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​Communist regime, Raul castro, Communist cuba, Doj indictment, Politics 

BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock is sounding off on what he believes is one of the most revealing stories in modern sports: the Dallas Wings’ recent draft decision.

According to Whitlock, the WNBA team prioritized cultural narratives and personal relationships over talent, as the LGBTQ agenda appears to always outweigh merit these days.

“This should have been the biggest story in sports because it helps you understand just how fake and gay everything is in the sports world and who is actually controlling the sports world,” Whitlock explains.

“The Dallas Wings drafted Paige Buecker’s girlfriend, number one overall, over Olivia Miles,” he says.

“Azzi Fudd is Paige Buecker’s college girlfriend and current girlfriend,” he continues, pointing out the “organization’s run so unprofessionally” and is “dominated by the alphabet mafia and the LGBTQIA+.”

“This is the equivalent of them drafting Azzi Fudd to satisfy Paige Bueckers and this gay love affair between these two and their promotion of this alphabet mafia LGBTQ agenda. They’re so invested and deep off into that, that they would pass up a far superior player who could help them win a championship so they would stay on narrative,” he says.

“And the media isn’t allowed to discuss this,” he adds.

Whitlock believes Miles is the “far superior player,” and calls the draft pick “the equivalent of the Portland Trailblazers taking Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan.”

“If we weren’t all living in fear of the alphabet mafia, if fake and gay wasn’t dominating all of the sports world and all of America, you’d think that would be a story,” he adds.

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​Alphabet mafia, Azzi fudd, Blazetv host, Championship, Dallas wings, Fearless, Fearless with jason whitlock, Jason whitlock, Jason whitlock harmony, Lgbtq agenda, Lgbtqia, Media, Michael jordan, Olivia miles, Paige beckers, Paige beckers girlfriend, Portland trailblazers, Sam buoie, Sports world, Wnba team 

Former President Barack Obama’s latest appearance on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show had it all, from thinly veiled critiques aimed at the current presidency and the Republican Party to alien skepticism.

And BlazeTV host Pat Gray wasn’t impressed, pointing out that the applause throughout the interview sounded “fake.”

“I’ve never seen that in an interview with the president before,” he notes.

In the interview, Obama told Colbert that “the presidential center is nonpartisan” before immediately pivoting to concerns about Republicans and Donald Trump.

“The reason I want to mention that is because I’m worried about the Republican Party, not just the Democratic Party,” Obama told Colbert, while Gray listens and scoffs.

“When I was president, people would ask me, ‘Well, what change would you like to see in Washington?’” Obama told Colbert. “I’d say, ‘I’d love a loyal opposition. I’d love a Republican Party that was conservative in some ways, that didn’t agree with me on a whole bunch of stuff, but believed in rule of law.’”

“We’re going to have to do some work to return to this basic norm, and we probably now have to codify it,” he explained. “The White House shouldn’t be able to direct the attorney general to go around prosecuting whoever.”

“The idea is that the attorney general is the people’s lawyer, it’s not the president’s consigliere, right?” Obama asks.

Obama went on to explain that “we can’t overcome the politicization of the criminal justice system” to another round of “fake” applause.

Colbert then asked Obama about aliens, to which Obama replied that for the people “that still think that we’ve got little green men underground somewhere,” there’s no need to speculate because “the government is terrible at keeping secrets.”

“This idea of conspiracy theories, if there were aliens or alien spaceships or anything under the control of the United States government that we knew about, seen, photographs, what have you, I promise you, some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with one of the aliens and sent it to his girlfriend,” he said.

“Do you wish they were real?” Colbert asked Obama.

“I actually do,” he responded.

Executive producer Keith Malinak isn’t buying it, commenting, “Never denied it.”

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​Alien skepticism, Aliens, Attorney general, Blaze media, Blaze news, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Blaze podcast network, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Blazetv host, Conspiracy, Conspiracy theories, Criminal justice system, Democratic party, Denial, Donald trump, Fake applause, Former president barack obama, Keith malinak, Little green men, Nonpartisan, Pat gray, Republican party, Rule of law, Stephen colbert, The blaze, United states government, Pat gray unleashed 

Barney Frank, the powerful former Massachusetts congressman who left his imposing stamp on the nation’s financial system, has died at age 86, according to family.

Frank was the first member of Congress to be openly gay, and he used his platform to push the Democratic Party to the left on LGBTQ+ issues before the term “LGBTQ+” even existed.

‘Most Democrats agree with me,’ said Frank. ‘But they’ve been intimidated out of saying so.’

After the great global financial meltdown in 2008, Frank was the architect of new regulations on the banking industry to limit its financial risk and prevent future implosions. The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill bears his name as well as the name of former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.).

That bill also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was pushed by Elizabeth Warren before she ran for the U.S. Senate. The agency purports to protect consumers but has been criticized by Republicans for supporting liberal policies.

Frank was an icon in LGBTQ+ circles for coming out as gay in 1987 at a time when the homosexual community was being besieged by the AIDS epidemic. He said he regretted not coming out earlier.

In 2012, he also became the first sitting member of Congress to be in a same-sex marriage.

In his later years, he used his prominent influence to push the Democratic Party against extremist positions into more centrist policies. His final book, “The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy,” opposes the current Democratic “vote-repelling platform” that includes open borders, defunding the police, and the “rule of the pronoun police,” surprisingly.

“I know most Democrats agree with me,” Frank said in a recent interview via Zoom with the Atlantic. “But they’ve been intimidated out of saying so.”

The book is scheduled to be released in September.

Frank was an outspoken and cunning thorn in the side of his Republican political opponents.

Many Democratic figures are paying their respects to Frank after his passing.

“Barney Frank was an exceptional legislator, whose name is synonymous with the strongest consumer financial protections in history and whose advocacy helped forge a fairer future for all of our children,” said former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Working families in Massachusetts and beyond lost an iconic champion today.”

RELATED: Barney Frank, creator of Dodd-Frank Act, refutes Dems blaming Trump for bank collapses

“In the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Barney Frank was the gravelly-voiced, smart-as-a-whip congressman who fought hard to get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over the finish line,” wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

“His one-liners were wicked and wickedly funny. Barney delivered for working people, and the world is a poorer place without him,” she added.

Frank’s sister confirmed to CNN that he died.

“He was a wonderful brother. I was lucky to be his sister. I will miss him,” she said.

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​Barney frank, Democratic party, Global financial meltdown, Nancy pelosi, Politics, Lgbtq 

Consider a small military drone, electrically powered, commercially sourced, guided by GPS and a cellular link and the patience of whoever is holding the controller. The drone costs around $500. The missile sent to destroy it costs $2 million. This is, at the moment, the defining arithmetic of modern air defense, and the people responsible for solving it are very aware that they have not yet done so.

We have been in similar situations before. When the first aircraft appeared over battlefields in 1914, artillery was quickly tilted toward the sky. In World War II, barrage balloons forced attackers higher, degrading their accuracy, channeling them into envelopes where radar and gunfire could find them. Radar transformed air defense by making detection a network rather than a pair of eyes. Each new threat produced a new institution for managing it, and each institution carried within it a theory of the sky as a space to be controlled, parsed, and made legible.

This is a consumer-electronics model applied to weapons procurement.

The anti-drone systems of 2026 are the latest iteration of that project. What is different is the low cost of the weapons and the speed at which they adapt.

The defense is a layered architecture. You detect the target through some combination of radar, radio-frequency sensing, electro-optical and infrared cameras, and acoustic arrays. You classify it: Is this a delivery drone, a news crew, an adversary? You track it and assign a response. You fire, jam, send another drone to intercept it, or decide the risk is acceptable and let it pass. None of these steps is simple; the central difficulty is not any single step but the compression of them all into a duration less than that needed by the threat to cover the remaining distance. The military speaks of “shortening the sensor-to-shooter timeline.” Software is now as consequential as hardware, and the human operator is increasingly the bottleneck.

No single sensor works in all conditions. Radar handles range and darkness but struggles in urban clutter. RF sensing identifies control links but fails against autonomous systems. Cameras support discrimination between a civilian quadcopter and a weaponized one, but slow or hovering targets can confuse systems designed to filter out birds and weather. The FAA, in its work on civilian airports, noted persistent difficulty accurately detecting and identifying unmanned systems. Drones are hard to characterize cheaply and reliably in all conditions, and the failure modes differ by sensor type, which is why fusion of all these modalities is now the baseline.

A constellation of weaponry

Electronic warfare remains central, especially near populated areas. However, jamming must be embedded in a wider system. Cannon-based defenses are effective at close range, limited by altitude, ammunition consumption, and line of sight. Missiles extend the coverage envelope, but are not cost-effective against cheap targets. High-energy lasers are precise and cheap per shot, but their per-shot cost understates their required infrastructure. High-power microwaves may affect multiple drones simultaneously but can have collateral effects on friendly systems. No single type of defense is sufficient.

RELATED: Commencement speaker praises AI and globalism — graduates crush her with boos

Phelan M. Ebenhack/Getty Images

Interceptor drones are emerging as an important option. In Ukraine, by late April 2026, drone-on-drone intercepts were accounting for roughly 40% of kills against long-range Shahed-style UAVs, up from around 25% only months earlier. A semi-disposable flying interceptor meets the attacker on more favorable economic terms than a Patriot battery. Ukraine has arrived at this solution through necessity. NATO is watching closely.

The U.S. Army’s acquisition behavior clarifies the current moment. The Government Accountability Office has reported that the Army is not heavily developing some handheld and dismounted counter-drone systems because their effective lifespan is too short. Instead, it procures commercial systems on 24- to 36-month warranty cycles and replaces them with new technology when the warranty expires. This is a consumer-electronics model applied to weapons procurement. The state of the art is a position on a curve, replaced on a schedule.

Anti-drone systems are institutions for managing visibility and turning atmosphere and electromagnetic spectrum into administrable space. The problem they address is continuous classification: who is present in the sky, who is authorized to be there, what signal is being emitted, what level of risk is acceptable. The low-altitude airspace above a military base, a power plant, or a port has become a zone of perpetual interrogation. Every object in it must be accounted for.

The front line is everywhere

Older air defense was organized around a small number of aircraft. The counter-drone problem is about governing a dense environment filled with cheap, abundant objects of ambiguous provenance. Ukraine has formalized this approach: Industrial enterprises there now staff their own air-defense units, equipped with anti-drone gear, coordinated by the Air Force, integrated into the national defense architecture. Anti-drone war runs through factories, logistics networks, and civilian labor. Verified strike videos are fed into battlefield situational-awareness platforms, linked to points-based reward systems, and connected to procurement decisions. Combat becomes a chain of footage, metadata, validation, and supply.

Directed-energy systems remain, despite genuine recent progress, uneven in maturity, burdened by infrastructure requirements, and sensitive to uncontrollable atmospheric conditions. RAND, in its 2025 assessment of directed-energy systems in Ukraine, argued that such systems should not yet be a near-term investment priority. The GAO found that both the Army’s high-energy laser and high-power microwave programs remained in test rather than transitioned to stable programs of record. The leading edge lies in layered integration, rapid refresh cycles, and cost discipline.

What anti-drone technology protects, it also re-describes. The sky becomes a measurable grid of emitters, tracks, altitudes, probabilities, and response options. Defending a perimeter requires continuous visibility over low-altitude airspace. The fog of war is rewritten in code, confidence scores, and fire-authority rules embedded in software that no single operator fully oversees. Adaptation cycles are so fast that sensors, doctrines, and effectors are repeatedly outpaced. Anti-drone war is a struggle for control of a new and changing fog.

​Tech 

Blood has begun to boil in response to the damning revelations about the unprovoked butchery of 18-year-old Englishman Henry Nowak, his apparent post-stabbing traducement by Sikh suspect Vickrum Digwa, and his bloody death in Southampton police custody.

Tommy Robinson, an activist who has been highly vocal about the fallout of mass immigration and the failure of multiculturalism in England, said the evidence presented in Digwa’s murder trial is “f**king outrageous.”

‘Will the anti-racism movement even bat an eyelid?’

Former Trump adviser and Tesla CEO Elon Musk called Nowak’s alleged treatment by police “unconscionable.”

“This poor boy was running away from someone who stabbed him & stole his phone, but the police in the UK attacked him instead of his murderer!” Musk claimed.

Musk has vowed to “fund a wrongful death lawsuit against these disgusting excuses for law enforcement,” adding that “they damn well better have been fired.”

The Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, which oversees Southampton, noted in a release several days after Nowak’s slaying — a release that was recently scrubbed from the department’s website — that officers responded around 11:30 p.m. on Dec. 3, 2025, to reports of an altercation taking place in Portswood, a suburb of Southampton, England.

RELATED: UK bans American ‘far-right agitators’ ahead of Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom march

AAron Ontiveroz/Denver Post/Getty Images (L); Alex Pantling/RFU/The RFU Collection/Getty Images (R)

The constabulary stated that officers found Nowak with multiple stab wounds; that he was pronounced dead on the scene; and that Digwa and his mother, Kiran Kaur, were charged in connection with the Englishman’s death.

Of course, there was far more to the story.

Prosecutor Nicholas Lobbenberg provided the jury in Digwa’s trial with additional insights into Nowak’s demise, alleging, for example, that:

Nowak — on his way home from a night out with his soccer team during which he consumed less than the drink-drive limit — was happily singing to himself and sending Snapchat videos to friends when he encountered Digwa;Nowak captured footage on his phone of Digwa openly carrying around an 8-inch Sikh blade, in addition to the smaller kirpan blade he was also carrying around his neck;Nowak’s phone containing the damning footage — including a clip where the suspect states, “I am a bad man” — was ultimately found in Digwa’s pocket;Neighbors supposedly did not see the attack but heard Nowak declare that he had been stabbed and was dying;The victim, spouting blood, attempted to climb a fence to escape his attacker, only to have the Sikh alleged assailant “aggressively pursue him”;Digwa “didn’t seek help for the man he had injured with his sizeable knife, instead he accused him of being a racist and being drunk”;Digwa’s mother was captured on video taking the murder weapon back to the family home where it was “stashed among an arsenal of weapons at the home”;Analysis found DNA from the mother, hairs from Digwa, and blood from Nowak on the knife; andDigwa declined to comment in a police interview following the stabbing but provided a prepared statement claiming that “Henry Nowak had subjected him to a drunken, racist attack,” in response to which he “stabbed out twice with his kirpan.”

Jurors were shown police bodycam footage of Nowak’s arrest. The footage shows police first finding Nowak leaning against a wall, being propped up by the suspect’s father, the Daily Echo reported.

Nowak, who can be heard on the footage saying he “can’t breathe,” according to the Daily Echo, is handcuffed while on his side and bleeding out. After an officer informs the victim that he is under arrest on suspicion of assault, Nowak repeatedly states that he has been stabbed.

According to the Daily Echo, a male voice responds at one point: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Only after the pierced Briton collapsed did police reportedly start administering first aid. By the time a doctor was flown in by helicopter, the young man had perished.

“A student was stabbed with a ‘shashtar’ knife on a night out. As he lay bleeding to death, his attacker claimed he’d racially abused him, so the police handcuffed him. Henry Nowak choked to death, in a puddle of his own blood under arrest for ‘racism’, in Britain, in 2025,” wrote British politician Robert Jenrick, a Reform UK member of parliament.

“Will there be protests at his death? Will the anti-racism movement even bat an eyelid?” Jenrick continued. “I suspect not. They’ve totally lost the plot.”

The Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary did not respond to Blaze News’ request for comment, nor did the councilors and the member of parliament who oversee Portswood.

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The American trucking industry has been plagued by companies that rack up safety violations and penalties, then shut down and quickly reopen under a new identity to evade regulatory enforcement and hide poor safety records. Such companies have become known as chameleon carriers.

But the Department of Transportation is taking action to prevent chameleon-carrier fraud by rolling out a new, modernized registration system.

‘The lack of accountability is disturbing, and it’s killed American families on our roads.’

The DOT and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced on Tuesday the live launch of Motus, a system that “replaces a decades-old network of loosely connected applications rife with fraud, waste, and abuse.”

FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs called Motus “a major advancement.”

“This system improves efficiency for legitimate carriers while strengthening FMCSA’s ability to detect fraud, improve data quality, and identify unsafe operators,” Barrs stated.

The previous “fractured” registration system allowed bad actors to easily exploit loopholes and “game the system,” according to the DOT.

“This outdated registration system operates on a low-barrier, minimal-validation framework — making it alarmingly simple for fraudsters to register as motor carriers. All they needed was an email, name, and physical address,” the DOT stated.

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Bryon Houlgrave/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The department estimated that there are “several thousand suspicious registration numbers tied to fraudulent carriers.”

The DOT’s new unified registration system will rely on biometrics and data analytics to verify the identities of carrier applicants. Motus mandates identity verification protocols, such as government-issued identification and digital facial scans.

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“Dangerous foreign drivers and the shell companies who employ them have been taking advantage of this lax, decrepit federal registration system for years. The lack of accountability is disturbing, and it’s killed American families on our roads,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stated. “Thanks to President Trump, we are delivering a new registration system that will stop fraud dead in its tracks and strengthen oversight on shady carriers.”

“And for good, honest drivers who follow the rules — our new system will improve customer service, enhance reliability, and cut down on red tape,” Duffy continued. “Today marks another important milestone in our crusade to make America’s roads safer, and it reflects the Trump administration’s commitment to cracking down on fraud wherever it hides.”

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