Category: blaze media

Jimmy Kimmel announced that he will be replaced this summer with a rotating roster of hosts that includes one histrionic hater of President Donald Trump.

Kimmel said Rosie O’Donnell will be one of the hosts to take over the show as he takes a traditional two-month break for the summer.

‘It’s been heartbreaking to see what’s happening politically and hard for me personally as well.’

“We have assembled a potent group of hosts to fill in for me, beginning with Tiffany Haddish, Colman Domingo, Ike Barinholtz, Anthony Anderson, Jelly Roll,” said Kimmel on Thursday.

“And as a special treat for our commander in chief, I asked one of his all-time favorites, Rosie O’Donnell, to be here to keep the hits coming,” he added.

O’Donnell and Trump have attacked each other verbally since before he became president, and his insults against her have been used by opponents to accuse him of misogyny.

One of his most famous jabs came during the first debate for the presidential Republican primary in 2015, when he interrupted moderator Megyn Kelly.

“You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals,” said Kelly.

“Only Rosie O’Donnell!” said Trump to loud applause and laughter.

“For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnell,” Kelly responded when the laughter subsided.

In March, O’Donnell said she was leaving America for Ireland with her youngest child, Clay, and would return when all citizens have equal rights. She has said that the 12-year-old identifies as nonbinary.

“I was never someone who thought I would move to another country. That’s what I decided would be the best for myself and my 12-year-old child. And here we are,” she said.

RELATED: Trump team calls out ‘depravity’ of Jimmy Kimmel’s response to lethal ICE shooting

“It’s been heartbreaking to see what’s happening politically and hard for me personally as well. The personal is political,” she added. “When it is safe for all citizens to have equal rights there in America, that’s when we will consider coming back.”

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​Jimmy kimmel, President donald trump, Rosie o’donnell, Politics 

Economist Alan Greenspan has died at age 100, according to his wife.

Greenspan chaired the U.S. Federal Reserve for four terms under four different presidents, beginning in the Reagan administration in 1987 and ending in 2006 under the George W. Bush administration.

‘The more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct after inevitable, often unanticipated disturbances.’

Many credited his economic policies for the prosperity of the 1980s and ’90s, but others blame him for the global financial crisis of 2008.

He was married to veteran NBC journalist Andrea Mitchell since 1997. Mitchell said he died Monday from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Former President Ronald Reagan called him “an economist’s economist, one of the most widely respected men” in the field when he appointed Greenspan as Fed chairman.

After the financial crisis which Greenspan described as a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami,” he admitted that he made a mistake in his assumptions about human nature.

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he said during a 2008 congressional hearing.

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” he added.

His admission has become the basis for critics of the free market capitalist theory of economics.

RELATED: The Economist gets crushed over sympathetic portrayal of dead Iranian leader

He is also credited with coining the phrase “irrational exuberance” to explain investor behavior that leads to a market bubble.

“Whether by intention or by happenstance, many, if not most, governments in recent decades have been relying more and more on the forces of the marketplace and reducing their intervention in market outcomes,” Greenspan said in a 2005 speech.

“We appear to be revisiting Adam Smith’s notion that the more flexible an economy, the greater its ability to self-correct after inevitable, often unanticipated disturbances,” he concluded.

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​Alan greenspan, Andrea mitchell, Economic policies, Ronald reagan, Global financial crisis, Politics, George w. bush 

The day that honors the end of slavery was celebrated unanimously across most sports leagues, with some notable exceptions.

One was the Detroit Lions, who confused fans with their decision not to post any materials in support of Juneteenth.

‘It must have been an accident.’

Given that Juneteenth was first recognized as a holiday in 2021 by President Joe Biden, it is not unusual for the day to be overlooked by the common sports fan. For most pro sports teams though, every possible iteration of race or cultural politics typically gets marked down on the calendar.

This was why football fans were confused when the Lions opted not to post anything for Juneteenth, with one Lions supporter assuming “it must have been an accident.”

“Just go look at the Lions profile picture,” the fan noted; the Lions’ X photo features transgender and gay pride colors.

There was no mention of the new holiday from the National Hockey League either, Fox News reported.

The league is only a week removed from the last game of the Stanley Cup Finals, so it is possible employees are on hiatus. However, the NHL has been deeply involved in diversity efforts for years — especially since the Black Lives Matter era — making this a strange move for the league as well.

RELATED: SF Giants commentator compares gays to black people as ‘oppressed’ minority following Christian protest

Diamond Images/Getty Images

Some players in the league previously complained the NHL wasn’t doing enough to support diversity, even after the hiring of a woman named Kim Davis to serve as the executive vice president of social impact, growth initiatives, and legislative affairs.

With a goal to bring diversity to the league and its C-suite, Davis described hockey as a “tribe” that needs to “feel more welcoming.”

This eventually led to the NHL Player Inclusion Coalition, which has since wreaked havoc on the league with its initiatives.

Blaze News previously reported on the league-wide controversies surrounding Pride jerseys, Pride tape, and player backlash.

RELATED: Juneteenth only makes sense if natural law is real

Carmen Mandato/Getty Images

Still, NFL fans seemed split on the latest issue online, either dragging the Lions organization for not supporting Juneteenth or being puzzled as to why they support other progressive celebrations if they are able to avoid this one.

“I just find it wild that they can support LGBTQ but not black people especially since most of their team is Black,” an X user wrote.

Another reaction from the story had one fan saying they had grown to hate the “weird idea of social media telling teams what to do.”

With the Lions as the lone standout in the NFL, they join the Texas Rangers of the MLB who similarly are the only team in their league not to celebrate gay pride with a dedicated night.

The Lions and the NHLPA, which runs the Player Inclusion Coalition along with the NHL, did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

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​Fearless, News, Nfl, Nhl, Mlb, Detroit lions, Sports 

The Los Angeles Fire Department has been battling a blaze at a Boyle Heights cold-storage facility for nearly a week that began when the solar panels on the warehouse’s rooftop caught fire.

Former mayoral challenger Spencer Pratt criticized Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for cutting the LAFD’s budget and noted that the warehouse had previously been the site of a solar panel fire in 2024.

‘Interior storage rack systems remain in place and are supporting portions of the collapsed roof, creating complex and unstable conditions that require a cautious and methodical approach.’

“This same warehouse had a solar panel fire 2 years ago,” Pratt wrote in a social media post. He claimed that Bass “slashed the LAFD budget and now they can’t stop it, and it’s spewing out heavy metals into the lungs of Boyle Heights folks for a week straight.”

“Nice job, Karen!” he added.

Officials have reported that air monitoring results show no toxic chemicals or hazards beyond those expected in normal fire smoke.

Pratt further criticized the city’s leadership for having to “bring in resources from TEXAS to manage a single structure fire” after LAFD Chief Jaime Moore stated that the city was bringing in water cannons from Texas.

RELATED: ‘Reckless negligence’: Spencer Pratt announces he’s ‘teaming up’ with Karen Bass’ brother who sued his sister over Palisades fire

Etienne LAURENT/AFP/Getty Images

The fire prompted California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Bass to issue emergency declarations on Saturday.

Newsom’s office stated that the fire has “produced significant smoke and particulate matter that may affect air quality in surrounding neighborhoods.”

“The City and County have opened spaces for families seeking relief from the smoke, and we will continue working around the clock and doing everything possible to put this fire out completely,” Bass stated.

Operations at several schools in the area were temporarily relocated due to ongoing air quality concerns, the Los Angeles Times reported.

RELATED: ‘It’s war’: Spencer Pratt says he’ll keep working to save Los Angeles — and claims to have damaging evidence

Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

The LAFD provided an update on Sunday stating that fire crews had made “significant progress,” but noted that the “building’s construction continues to present operational challenges.”

“Interior storage rack systems remain in place and are supporting portions of the collapsed roof, creating complex and unstable conditions that require a cautious and methodical approach,” the LAFD wrote.

“Smoke conditions have improved significantly and are expected to continue improving as firefighters make progress extinguishing the fire. Although smoke conditions are trending in a positive direction, intermittent increases in smoke may occur as crews open walls and other concealed spaces to locate and extinguish hidden fire,” it continued.

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​News, California, Los angeles, Spencer pratt, Karen bass, Gavin newsom, Fire, Politics 

Elon Musk’s unprecedented rise to a trillion-dollar net worth has sparked outrage from leftists, who believe it is unfair that one person should possess that much wealth. But BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere sees Musk’s accomplishment very differently.

“I look at that as an incredible achievement. I look at that as something that is amazing. He’s done a lot of amazing things. He’s an incredible person,” Stu says.

“He’s out there just generating wealth like no one has ever seen,” he continues, pointing out that the “left is pissed off about it” and leftists think it’s “terrible.”

And one article published by the Guardian is a perfect example of the left’s attitude towards Musk’s wealth.

“Is it bad that Elon Musk has a trillion dollars? Yes, and here’s why,” the headline reads.

“There’s really innovative thoughts here,” Stu jokes, “like ‘fiscal fairness’ is one of the reasons. So that’s really thoughtful. Second is — I thought this was interesting — ‘wastefulness.’”

Stu points out that the author, Ingrid Robeyns, lives in the U.K.

“I’d say it’s a free country, but she’s in the U.K., where they’re arresting people with opposite opinions,” he says.

“There’s a lot of interesting choices being made by that wonderful nation and the people in it. And we don’t get to control it because it’s their country, not ours, first of all. But secondly, because we’re not them. Like you control your own life. I wish people could get a little bit more sense on that one,” he continues.

Robeyns explained in her article that Musk’s wealth creates “harms.”

“Extreme wealth concentration undermines democracies,” Stu reads.

“He’s made more millionaires than pretty much anybody else,” he says, explaining that Musk has taken employees from the “lowest levels of the food chain” at his company and turned them into millionaires.

“She then says, by the way, ‘it comes with massive greenhouse gas emissions and environmental harm,’” he adds.

“I guarantee you that Tesla has done more with the electric cars to protect the environment than Ingrid does after any meal she’s ever had,” co-host Dave Landau chimes in.

“And there are emissions that she provides. … If you’re in the same room, you’ll know about them,” Stu adds, laughing.

Want more from Stu and Dave?

To enjoy more of Stu and Dave’s lethal blend of wit, humor, and insightful commentary subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​The guardian, Stu burguiere, Uk, Stu and dave do america, Elon musk 

A major tech company has announced that it is coming to Texas with a new partnership with an energy giant in the Lone Star State.

On Monday, Chevron announced that it is partnering with Microsoft to develop a new data center campus, known as “Project Kilby,” in Texas.

The project will scale to an estimated capacity of 2.67 gigawatts of capacity over time.

The two companies signed a 20-year power purchase agreement in anticipation of the planned, “co-located” power plant and data center.

Reuters reported that the facility is set to be built in Pecos, Texas, west of Midland.

RELATED: The AI gold rush could become an incumbent graveyard

BENOIT DOPPAGNE/BELGA MAG/AFP/Getty Images

“AI is reshaping the global economy, and abundant, affordable, reliable energy is essential to fueling that transformation,” said Jeff Gustavson, Chevron president of New Energies, in a Monday press release. “Chevron is uniquely positioned to deliver power to customers with certainty, speed, and at a competitive cost, leveraging Permian natural gas and our proven execution capabilities. This project links Chevron’s traditional strengths to emerging demand, creating differentiated value for our shareholders and the communities where we operate.”

This agreement, the press release notes, is an important milestone leading up to the final investment decision, which is expected to be made at the end of this year. The “first power delivery is anticipated in 2028.” The project will scale to an estimated capacity of 2.67 gigawatts of capacity over time.

The joint infrastructure appears to be designed, at least in theory, to avoid burdening residential neighbors with higher electricity rates, one of many oft-repeated objections to new data centers being built.

The press release claims that “Kilby is designed to deliver reliable, dispatchable electricity directly to Microsoft while aiming to mitigate impacts on the regional grid that consumers rely on,” presumably by, at least in part, circumventing the main power grid in the state.

While proponents of the deal point to economic growth potential for the state and efforts to mitigate negative environmental impacts, critics say there may be some serious drawbacks to the plan.

For example, a Mother Jones article from last month noted that Microsoft may intend to take advantage of significant tax incentives that could cost the state heavily.

Greg LeRoy, the executive director of Good Jobs First, pointed out that Microsoft does not mention tax abatements in its pledge. “If they don’t say, ‘We will refuse tax abatements,’ then they’ve got their fingers crossed behind their back,” LeRoy told Mother Jones.

Oil & Gas Watch warned that the project may have significant environmental impacts, including a yearly output of over 13.8 million tons of greenhouse gases, a comparable annual output to that of nearly 3 million gas-powered vehicles.

This agreement comes less than two weeks after Governor Greg Abbott (R) directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to “take immediate steps to protect residential ratepayers from the costs of data center expansion.”

In the letter, Abbott directed the PUC to “take action to require data centers to pay for all of their electric infrastructure costs to ensure that no residential ratepayer is burdened by those costs.” Abbott added that these directives are building upon Senate Bill 6 and directed the PUC and ERCOT to submit a report by July 17 and to take action to reduce residential ratepayer transmission costs by July 31.

Project Kilby will primarily use natural gas power and plans to “use non-potable, brackish groundwater sources for power plant operations.”

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​Ai technology, Chevron, Data center, Microsoft, Texas, Greg abbott, Politics 

When a trio of masked teens tried to rob a man aboard a Chicago bus Saturday night, the 54-year-old fought back, police told CWB Chicago.

Chicago police told the outlet the man was riding a northbound Ashland bus near 57th Street around 11:22 p.m. when the three males approached him and demanded his property while aboard the bus.

‘This will continue to happen all over the city. Can’t stand at the bus stop. Can’t ride the CTA bus. Can’t ride the train.’

Investigators told CWB Chicago the trio began taking items from the man, including a chain necklace that was later recovered from one of the suspects.

A witness told WGN-TV in the station’s video report that the suspects were “talking about shooting him, blowing his brains out.”

But the man soon decided he wasn’t going to give up his stuff without a fight.

Police told the outlet the man reached into his bag, pulled out a “sharp object,” and fought with the robbers.

The suspects battered the victim before fleeing the bus, and CWB Chicago reported that officers initially were dispatched after a bus panic alarm generated a “person with a knife” call.

But as the investigation unfolded, police learned the three ski mask-wearing teenagers targeted the passenger who fought back, the outlet said.

CWB Chicago said police recovered a knife at the scene.

More from the outlet:

Then came the plot twist: While officers were sorting out what happened on the bus, 911 operators received another call from the 5600 block of South Justine Street from a caller reporting that his 13-year-old little brother had been stabbed in the hand.

When officers arrived, they quickly connected the dots. According to a police report, the wounded 13-year-old, his older brother, and another individual at the Justine location turned out to be the robbers. Police also recovered the victim’s chain necklace at the scene.

RELATED: Plucky elderly man who uses a walker fights back in brutal fashion when much younger male unleashes attack on him with wrench

Police told CWB Chicago that Chicago Fire Department personnel treated the victim, who suffered a cut on his hand, and then took him to St. Bernard Hospital; he was listed in good condition.

Two of the alleged robbers suffered what police said were minor injuries, and paramedics also treated them the outlet said, adding that the three suspects were arrested and charges were pending as of Sunday morning.

A number of commenters reacting to the station’s video report about the incident were up in arms:

“The mayor will give the 3 criminals the key [to] the city for such bravery,” one commenter wrote sarcastically.”Every law-abiding citizen should invest in a [Firearm Owners Identification Card], firearm training, and the [Concealed Carry License],” another commenter said. “Stay ready for the Devil.””A 54-year-old man taking on three young punks and only having a laceration on his hand … bravo!!!” another commenter wrote. “And glad they caught and arrested the three thugs; just too bad they will be released, if they aren’t already, due to [Illinois Democrat Gov. JB] Pritzker’s absurd Safe-T Act.””In a future plea deal, charges of assault with bodily harm and aggravated robbery will be reduced to fare evasion — probably,” another commenter predicted.”This will continue to happen all over the city,” another commenter lamented. “Can’t stand at the bus stop. Can’t ride the CTA bus. Can’t ride the train.”

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​Arrests, Chicago, Crime thwarted, Fighting back, Injuries, Knife, Police, Robbery, Self-defense, Crime 

The Los Angeles School District superintendent resigned on Sunday, just four months after federal agents raided his home and office.

On Feb. 25, the FBI executed search warrants at Alberto Carvalho’s office and his San Pedro home. Carvalho was placed on paid administrative leave a couple of days later.

‘Because I believe our schools must remain focused on students and learning without distraction, I am resigning as Superintendent of LAUSD effective today, June 21, 2026.’

The reason for the raids has not been publicly revealed. However, some reports indicate they may have been connected to an investigation into a company that received $3 million from the district to develop an educational chatbot for students. The company went bankrupt, and the chatbot was never fully delivered.

Carvalho, who became superintendent in 2022, has not been charged with any crimes. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Carvalho sent a resignation letter on Sunday to the Los Angeles Unified School District and Board of Education members, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Carvalho’s letter did not address why he was stepping down from his position. However, he seemed to refer to the investigation as a “distraction.”

RELATED: FBI raids home and office of Los Angeles school superintendent, outspoken critic of ICE raids

Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

“It has been a great honor to serve you,” Carvalho wrote.

“Over the past four years, together, we have made historic progress — gains that belong to our students, our educators, staff, and our communities.”

“Placing students first has always guided my work,” he continued. “Because I believe our schools must remain focused on students and learning without distraction, I am resigning as Superintendent of LAUSD effective today, June 21, 2026.”

RELATED: Thousands of students drop out of Los Angeles schools over ‘climate of fear’ from deportations, superintendent says

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

An LAUSD spokesperson told WTVJ that the district’s Board of Education “acknowledges receipt of the letter of resignation from Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho, effective June 21, 2026.”

“The Board remains steadfast in its commitment to ensuring stability, continuity, and continued progress through strong leadership. Our focus remains unchanged: providing every student with a high-quality education, supporting our dedicated workforce, and maintaining the trust of the communities we serve,” the statement read.

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​News, California, Los angeles, Alberto carvalho, Politics 

Last month, I wrote here that the AI bubble was about to pop and that when the subsidies ran out, the bill would land on the customer. The whole thing rested on one ugly fact: The companies selling AI were losing money on nearly every power user and pretending otherwise.

I figured we had a year or two before the cracks really showed. Maybe three. But the receipts started landing within weeks. What I got wrong wasn’t the diagnosis, but who would blink first. I figured the pain would start at the bottom, with small shops priced out when their renewals came due. Instead, it started at the very top, with the richest companies on earth — including several of the same outfits building and selling the stuff.

The message was: Get on board or get left behind.

The implications are massive. Let’s review.

Uber torched its entire AI budget in four months

Uber’s CTO, Praveen Neppalli Naga, told the Information in April that the company had already burned through its full 2026 AI coding budget. Four months in. Gone.

The culprit was Anthropic’s Claude Code. Uber rolled it out to its engineers in December 2025, and usage roughly doubled by February as adoption climbed from a third of the organization to better than four-fifths. By April, Naga was, in his words, back to the drawing board, because the budget he planned for the year had vanished in a third of it. Per-engineer costs were reportedly running anywhere from $500 to $2,000 a month.

On the “Rapid Response” podcast, Uber president Andrew Macdonald admitted he can’t connect all that token spend to anything customers can actually see. Asked whether the AI was producing more useful features, he said flatly, “That link is not there yet” and that the spending gets harder to justify when AI isn’t free.

Uber dropped roughly $3.4 billion on R&D in 2025, with AI a big chunk of that. Now the company has slapped a cap on it. Employees get $1,500 worth of tokens per coding tool each month, and the company is still trying to figure out what, exactly, it bought.

Microsoft revoked its own people’s Claude Code licenses

Microsoft is canceling internal Claude Code licenses across its Experiences + Devices division, the group behind Windows, Teams, Outlook, and Surface. The cutoff is June 30, 2026, which happens to be the last day of Microsoft’s fiscal year.

The pilot launched in December 2025. Engineers liked Claude Code so much that they started ditching Microsoft’s own GitHub Copilot CLI for it. Six months later, the company is pulling the plug and herding everyone back to Copilot. Token billing turned what looked like a flat seat license into a runaway tab, and Microsoft’s finance people reached the same conclusion Uber’s did.

Remember, this is Microsoft. They put money into Anthropic. And they still couldn’t justify keeping the lights on for their own engineers to use the tool.

Meta flipped from ‘tokenmaxxing’ to ‘tokenminimizing’

“Tokenmaxxing” was Silicon Valley’s newest bit of corporate slang, and it means exactly what it sounds like: Burn tokens to hit a target, climb a board, prove you’re “innovative.” Output optional.

For two years, Meta pushed staff to use AI for everything. Internal leaderboards tracked who burned the most tokens, handing out titles like “Token Legend.” The message was: Get on board or get left behind.

Now the memo reads differently. In June, Meta told roughly 6,000 employees the company clamping down on AI costs by capping token usage and building an internal dashboard to track who’s spending what. The Information called it “tokenminimizing,” and the company admitted internal AI use alone is on track to cost billions this year.

Here’s the context that makes it sting. Meta raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to between $125 billion and $145 billion, nearly all of it AI infrastructure. It also announced about 8,000 layoffs in April, roughly 10% of the company, with cuts beginning May 20.

RELATED: Shadowy companies are selling access to your smart TV — and its data

JDawnInk/Getty Images

So: Meta is spending more on AI than ever, fired thousands of people to help pay for it, and now can’t afford for the survivors to actually use the thing. Got it.

Amazon shut down its AI leaderboard

Amazon ran an internal leaderboard called KiroRank that scored employees on AI usage. The idea was to gamify adoption and reward the heaviest users.

It worked a little too well. Staff started “tokenmaxxing,” assigning AI agents pointless busywork just to climb the board. Some reportedly used AI for tasks they could have knocked out faster by hand, burning compute to chase a number. First reported by the Financial Times, Amazon killed KiroRank at the end of May. Senior VP Dave Treadwell’s message to the troops: “Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.”

That’s the whole problem in one sentence. Amazon wanted adoption. What it got was theater. Employees gamed a metric that had nothing to do with whether any real work got done.

The tokenmaxxing hangover

The sticker shock is showing up everywhere. TechCrunch reported in early June that a Priceline employee watched a routine Cursor renewal come back four to five times more expensive. One financial operations director described companies blowing through their entire 2026 token budget by April and quietly panicking.

Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn put a headstone on it in late May: “Tokenmaxxing is dead.” Companies raced to burn tokens and reward people for it, then discovered that adoption metrics aren’t business outcomes.

For two years, the answer to “should we use AI” was always yes, and the only argument was how fast. The question has quietly changed to “what did we get for it,” and a lot of companies don’t like the answer.

What this actually means

In May, I argued that AI companies were running loss-leading subscriptions, burning investor cash to buy the market, and hiding the real cost behind a subsidized price. You weren’t paying for the product. You were getting a subsidized demo, with the price hike scheduled for after you got hooked.

What I didn’t see coming was how fast the subsidizers would start cutting themselves off.

The companies with the deepest pockets are first in line to ration it, and several of them are the very ones building and selling it. They looked at the invoice and realized they can’t afford their own product. Uber’s CTO said the budget was blown away. Meta is building dashboards to meter its engineers. Microsoft, an Anthropic backer, is canceling licenses. Amazon found out its own people were manufacturing fake demand.

These aren’t scrappy startups running out of runway. They’re the richest companies on earth, with effectively bottomless access to capital, and they all hit the same wall at roughly the same time.

It’s not just them, either. On June 14, the Economist ran a piece called “Companies are scrambling to curtail soaring AI costs,” and the best line came from an executive at a big U.S. tech company who called the coming squeeze “an absolute nightmare.” His point: A large company runs hundreds of software programs, and once each one ships its own AI agents, the bills stack up fast. Ramp, the corporate-card provider that can see its clients’ actual spending, figures AI bills have jumped 13-fold in a year. Its heaviest 1% of users now average around $7,450 per person per month, against $11 for the typical customer. Even Sam Altman has called mounting customer costs a serious problem, which is a strange thing to hear from the man selling the tokens.

At current prices, AI costs more than it returns, and even the companies selling it can’t make the internal math work.

The lesson

AI has real uses, and I lean on it every day. But economics don’t care how you feel, and you can’t meme your way around a compute bill that climbs every month a power user gets better at burning tokens. That’s not hypothetical. It’s the whole reason the firms selling AI are the first ones rationing it.

If you run a business and you have bet the whole thing on API calls to somebody else’s model, look hard at that dependency. When the companies building these models can’t afford to let their own staff use them freely, what do you think happens when your renewal lands?

There are alternatives, and they’re getting absurdly cheap. The Economist notes that a mid-tier model like Anthropic’s Sonnet can run about 1/20 of what its flagship Opus costs. Kimi, an open-weight model from the Chinese startup Moonshot AI, runs about 1/20 of that. Stack those up, and a lot of routine work runs at a rounding error next to frontier pricing. “Send the easy jobs somewhere cheaper” is a real strategy now, not a compromise. You don’t have to stay locked into a vendor that is quietly rationing its own product.

The bubble isn’t bursting with a headline. It’s bursting with a memo. A budget revision. A canceled license. A quiet decision to ration the tool you were told would change everything.

And the people who sold you the revolution? They’re the same ones pulling the plug.

​Tech 

For American leftists, Father’s Day — like Columbus Day — constitutes an annual opportunity to publicly unload their baggage, air petty resentments, and express their depravities in creative ways. This Sunday was no different over at the New York Times.

Days after a liberal rag north of the border ran an article calling for the abolition of Father’s Day, America’s supposed newspaper of record endeavored to make Father’s Day about a reality-averse woman.

‘The cultural elite[‘s] contempt for dads runs so deep.’

In an essay published on Sunday titled “To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated,” trans-identifying woman Zach Ellams discussed both her imagined fatherhood and her daughter’s absorption of the corresponding lunacy.

Ellams notes at the outset that while she has been “living as a trans man” since she was 18, she had to “learn how to be a trans dad” after she and her lesbian “wife” had a child.

This learning process apparently consisted of Ellams simultaneously developing confidence in the lie while indoctrinating her daughter — a little girl whom Ellams calls Elliot and who has apparently wondered about her mother’s new facial hair; stated she too wanted to grow a beard and tried to convince other children it was possible; told teachers about her mother’s breast-removal surgery; and asked her mother about her phantom breasts — “How long did you have breasts for, Dad?”

Whether Ellams or her lesbian partner gave birth to the girl is unclear.

RELATED: Actress Elliot Page mocked ruthlessly after trying to define ‘healthy masculinity’

Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images

The essay concludes with Ellams noting, “I thought I was teaching Elliot how to be happy and secure. Yet all along she had being doing that for me.”

Critics blasted the Times over its decision to mark Father’s Day with an essay about a dysphoric mother.

Investigative reporter Matt Taibbi called the essay an “all-timer,” noting he didn’t “know where to put it on the funny-vs-horrifying axis.”

Alex Berenson, a former reporter for the Times, congratulated his former paper for “perfectly catching how the cultural elite view men and fatherhood this Father’s Day — yes, to the Times, being a dad is something you do to feel better about having your tits cut off. Cannot make it up.”

“The cultural elite[‘s] contempt for dads runs so deep we don’t even get to speak for ourselves,” Berenson also said.

“The New York Times celebrated Father’s Day by saluting the real heroes: left-wing gender goblins who think mentally ill women mutilating themselves, mainlining hormone injections, and playing daddy dress-up are the true embodiment of fatherhood,” wrote Sean Davis, CEO of the Federalist.

“‘Liberal women let men have even one single thing challenge’: impossible,” quipped conservative commentator Michael Knowles.

The X account for Prager University simply asked, “What are we doing here?”

Ellams’ essay was published just days after the surgically mutilated lesbian actress formerly known as Ellen Page attempted to define “healthy masculinity,” suggesting what’s ultimately needed is more weeping and banana consumption.

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​New york times, Propaganda, Leftism, Trans, Father, Alex berenson, Sean davis, Women, Men, Politics 

Tyranny rarely arrives wearing a villain’s mask. More often, Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck argues, it comes wrapped in the language of compassion.

“The most dangerous sentence in all of human history is not, ‘I hate you.’ It’s, ‘This is for your own good.’ Cruelty announces itself, and you can guard against it. But tyranny that believes it’s being kind never stops because it never feels guilty,” Glenn explains.

“When somebody justifies power, a policy, or an exception by telling you it’s to protect the vulnerable, that is not the time to relax. They’re not protecting the vulnerable. They may think they are, but they’re not,” he continues.

And Glenn has several news stories to back up his belief.

“Britain, that full report on the sex scandal that has been going on with the, dare I say it, with the Muslim immigrants, the number now is at a quarter of a million girls were raped,” he begins.

“The officials shielded, you know, one favored group from criticism at all cost. And the cost was the children. And the instinct that did this was not hatred for the children or the British people. It was a warped idea of protection. Protect the favored group,” he explains.

“Story two … the UK wants to scan all content on every phone in the country. Not kids’ phones, every phone. Your photos, your messages, everything you do on the presumption that it might find something helpful to protect the children,” he continues.

“Protect the child becomes scan every adult. That’s the slope. That’s the play,” he adds.

The third story Glenn uses as an example is the FTC’s lawsuit against the world’s leading transgender medicine organization, where they allege that it “cooked its own clinical guidelines to juice insurance coverage for procedures on minors.”

“Now, I want you to set aside wherever you land on the underlying issue. Look only at the structure here. The institution you’re told trust because it’s credentialed authority where the doctors were protecting your child,” he says.

“They bent the science toward the billing department. Same pattern, different lab code,” he continues, before revealing the one question those who value their freedom need to ask when it’s being challenged.

“Ask the one question that has protected free people for 300 years,” he says, asking, “Who watches the protector?”

Want more from Glenn Beck?

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​Free speech, Tyranny, Muslim immigrants, The glenn beck program, Government, Glenn beck 

Liberal politician Keir Starmer announced his resignation on Monday — just hours after President Donald Trump let the cat out of the bag and faulted the British prime minister for failing “badly on two very important subjects — IMMIGRATION AND ENERGY.”

Critics celebrated his downfall, fellow travelers romanticized his time in office, and Starmer’s putative replacement, Andy Burnham, called for an “orderly and responsible” transition.

‘I couldn’t have predicted how quickly he would reveal himself as the most incompetent Prime Minister this country has ever had.’

Starmer, a deeply unpopular leader whose job disapproval rating has hovered around 76%, characterized his nearly two years in office as a success, stating, “We changed our party, ripping out the poison of anti-Semitism, restoring trust on the economy, defense, and national security, and becoming a party that once again stood proudly with, not against, our national flag.”

After suggesting that he had taken steps to “change Britain for the better” — “to build a fairer country with dignity and respect, where everyone is seen, everyone is valued” — and reiterating London’s support for Ukraine, Starmer noted that his party has made clear he is not the individual “best placed to lead us into the next general election.”

“I accept that answer with good grace,” said Starmer, the U.K.’s sixth prime minister since July 2016. “Every decision I’ve taken has been about putting the country I love first. That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour Party. I have spoken to His Majesty the King this morning to inform him of my decision. I will ask the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party to set out a timetable with nominations opening on the 9th of July.”

A Labour leadership election would ensure that Starmer is replaced before the British Parliament returns in September. Starmer said he would remain in office until he is replaced.

RELATED: ‘Beyond evil’: Nightmarish report reveals full scale of mass Islamic rapes of ‘250,000’ white British girls

Labor politician Andy Burnham. Gary Roberts/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images.

The Labour Party has been roiled in recent months by a civil war.

Ninety-six of Starmer’s 402 Labour members of parliament demanded the prime minister’s resignation last month after the party suffered significant losses — a net-loss of 1,229 seats out of a total of roughly 5,000 — in local elections, while Reform UK saw tremendous gains.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood reportedly urged Starmer in early May to establish a timetable for his departure.

The infighting did not go unnoticed by opponents in parliament.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, for instance, stated late last year that “the PM has shown he is in office but not in power.”

‘Digital ID was to be foisted upon people regardless of their wishes.’

Starmer’s ultimate decision to throw in the towel — just days after he and his party were blasted in the 219-page “Rape Gang Inquiry Report” — was welcomed by Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe, who stated, “He has been a truly disgraceful Prime Minister. I do not believe him to be a good man or a patriot. He has deliberately and rapidly accelerated the destruction of our Britain, of our home. History will not remember him kindly, nor should it.”

“I sat in Parliament, looking him in the eye, listening to him attempting to justify his decision to block a national inquiry into the mass rape of young British girls,” continued Lowe. “I will never forgive him. For that, and so much else.”

Labour politicians voted against a national inquiry into grooming gangs in January 2025. Starmer’s spokesman stated at the time, “We will be guided by the victims and what we’ve heard from the victims is that they don’t want to see another national inquiry.”

RELATED: African suspected of trying to cut white Briton’s head off identified — while police fret about online critics

Isabel Infantes/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage wrote, “The Prime Minister is finished. I have to give Starmer some credit: even I couldn’t have predicted how quickly he would reveal himself as the most incompetent Prime Minister this country has ever had the misfortune of having.”

Farage, who has demanded a prompt general election “at the soonest possible date,” countered Starmer’s success narrative with a list of some of the Labour government’s apparent misdeeds over the past two years:

The party started by trying to steal from pensioners, while simultaneously refusing to take action against welfare cheats. Rachel Reeves raided your pay packet to throw money towards public sector fat cats. Promises to “smash the gangs” were hollow, as illegal migration through the Channel hit record highs. Digital ID was to be foisted upon people regardless of their wishes. Hardened criminals were released from prisons back onto your streets. The Chagos Islands were nearly handed over at a cost to the taxpayer, and farmers were hit by a death tax.

The Free Speech Union also welcomed Starmer’s exit, noting, “He has led the most authoritarian government in more than a generation, unleashing an unprecedented assault on free speech. Indeed, he seems determined to make social media censorship his legacy.”

The FSU, like Farage, pointed out, however, that the Labour Party’s likely replacement may be just as bad as, if not worse than, Starmer.

Starmer’s most likely successor is Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor who handily won a special election on Thursday, thereby securing a seat in parliament and a viable pathway to the head of the Labour Party.

A radical leftist who welcomes mass migration, Burnham is also an Islamophile who:

opposed the U.K.’s counter-extremism program as “toxic” for supposedly discriminating against Muslims, whom he said feel “unfairly targeted”;rushed to downplay the religious nature of the May 2017 Islamic terror attack at the Manchester Arena that left 22 people dead and 1,017 injured, noting that “the person who did it in no more represents the Muslim community than the person who killed Jo Cox represents the white Christian community”; andsupported the adoption of a definition of “Islamophobia” that claims it is “rooted in racism.”

Other candidates are, according to conservative politician David Frost, variations on a theme:

All the likely candidates, just like Starmer, are creatures of the same political class. All have devoted their lives to Labour politics and none appears to have any meaningful non-political hinterland or wider interests beyond pop music and football. They all support Burnham-style state‑led regionalism, they all see the state as capable of resolving all society’s ills, and they are all in their different ways steeped in corporatism and the trade unions. All are pro-EU and want to reverse Brexit. And of course all are hostile to “populism.”

Burnham thanked Starmer on Monday for his “leadership and dedication during such a challenging period” and emphasized the need for the transition process to be “conducted in an orderly and responsible way.”

“People want to see progress on economic growth, cost of living, public services, housing and opportunities for the next generation,” wrote Burnham. “Political change should never distract from the responsibility to improve people’s lives.”

Liberals at home and abroad did their apparent best to paint Starmer’s short stint in office in rosy colors.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, for instance, said Starmer “can be proud of the contribution he has made to the country he loves.”

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, claimed that “it can take many leaders years to grow into the statesman [Starmer] became in just two years,” adding that Starmer had helped make European and Ukrainian security stronger.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan claimed that Starmer “is a man of great integrity” who has “made a huge contribution to the Labour party and our country.”

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​Andy burnham, Britain, Donald trump, Immigration, Keir starmer, Leftism, London, Nigel farage, Rape gang, Uk, Politics, Labour party 

I don’t know what I clicked on that caused this, but lately most of the suggested videos on my YouTube sidebar are of morose and lonely young men saying things like:

Nobody wants to be in a relationship.

I’m 31, and I’ve never had a girlfriend.

It’s an easy formula. Speak in low tones. Sigh with profound weariness. Encourage men to feel sorry for themselves.

Everything about life sucks and is horrible.

I’m not sad. I’m empty.

I look at women, and I’m exhausted.

I prefer to live alone. In silence.

The pains of being pure at heart

The sad-looking narrators of these videos are usually sitting in a dark room, or at a desk, or sometimes in their crappy car. There are no visible decorations, no posters on the wall. Maybe there’s a row of Russian novels in the back or the collected works of Nietzsche.

The young men are usually sitting far enough from the camera to make them look fragile, weak, broken, and alone.

Each man tells his tale of woe. He’s given up on dating. He doesn’t enjoy talking to girls.

He feels disenfranchised, unwanted. Society is against him. The whole world is holding him down.

The women’s perspective

If you click on enough of these videos, you will eventually end up on the women’s side of the debate, faced with a cascade of videos from equally disillusioned young women saying things like:

Are men hiding?

Why are guys refusing to date?

It’s fun to hate on men.

Since when do dudes not want to smash?

The death of boyfriend culture.

If you start clicking on those videos, you might end up with some mix of the two, which reveals that the feeling of doom is everywhere:

Something isn’t right with people anymore.

No wonder everyone is gay now.

She’s 29, and she’s so lost in life.

No thank you, ladies. I’m good.

Dating fatigue is setting in. Women are giving up.

Night at the psy-opera

My first thought was that all these videos look suspiciously similar. Is this some sort of psyop? Is some nefarious organization trying to undermine heterosexual attraction? Or destroy any hope for Gen Z’s marital happiness?

Meanwhile, I find myself stupefied by the infinite parade of Millennial and Gen Z guys and gals, depressed, lonely, talking into their phones in their empty rooms.

How many people are really like this? Probably a lot. And that’s not good news for anybody.

RELATED: Evie magazine’s critics are wrong. Allow me to mansplain why.

Evie Magazine/Sigrid Estrada/Getty Images

Hetero-what?

It brings to mind the famous article “The Trouble with Wanting Men” from the New York Times, which declared, “Women are so fed up with dating men that the phenomenon even has a name: heterofatalism.”

(Since it’s the New York Times, nobody asked what the men think.)

Apparently, “heterofatalism” means that anyone who still feels trapped in heterosexual hell should kill themselves. Or at least feel very ashamed.

The writer of the piece, Jean Garnett, resents her own heterosexuality. Despite how objectively worthless men are, she still feels compelled to try to attract them. She craves that feeling of being longed for and desired.

She wants things to be like when she was younger. When men couldn’t resist her. When men couldn’t keep their hands off her.

Though from the sound of Ms. Garnett, I’m sure she would have something to say about any unwanted touching.

What women want

I have watched many of these videos. Men have their various complaints about women: Their girlboss attitude, their unrealistic standards, their doodle tattoos.

And women think men have lost their manliness. They seem withdrawn, passive, and preoccupied with their own troubles.

Women want men to approach them, charm them, buy them a drink.

But contemporary men are hiding in their basements, terrified of being #MeToo’d or rejected or ending up on social media as the butt of a small-penis joke.

Money talks

If these videos aren’t some secret plot to make young people miserable, they are at least a way to make money on the internet.

These men, sitting in their cars, staring forlornly into the gray skies outside, are gathering large followings.

It’s an easy formula. Speak in low tones. Sigh with profound weariness. Encourage men to feel sorry for themselves.

There is at least some psychological relief in that. If it’s happening to everyone, it’s not really your fault. It’s society’s fault. It’s the times. It’s woke politics.

Support the youth!

I do feel great sympathy for these young people coming up. It’s tough to be young and first venturing out into the world — especially at this particular moment in time, when everything about society seems structured to create conflict.

But I suspect they will find some form of happiness. It just isn’t going to be easy. And it might come in forms that are unfamiliar.

Either way, we should understand the challenges Gen Z seems destined to face. They are the ones with nothing to lose. Which means they’re the ones who will fight the coming battles.

We should remember that and help and support them in any way we can.

​Culture, Dating, Generation z, Heterofatalism, Lifestyle, Men and woman, Youtube, Zoomers, Blake’s progress 

When my documentary “15 Days” came out, I expected pushback. The film showed how American schools stayed closed long past the point at which honest people could defend the closures.

What I got was stranger. People asked me what to do.

Strangers in airports, parents at screenings, people who had never sat through a school board meeting in their lives — they wanted a plan. They wanted to know their part.

My second film, “Uncancellable,” is my answer.

The film is about Maud Maron. If you do not live in Manhattan, you may not know the name. You should.

Maud is a mother of four who has spent the last six years being told to sit down and shut up by every institution she belonged to. She has not sat down. She has not shut up. She keeps losing seats and titles, and somehow she keeps winning the argument.

Maud Maron is not a celebrity. She is a mother with a list of opinions and a refusal to swallow them to keep the room comfortable. The cure for the country is more of her, not fewer.

The argument is whether Americans are still allowed to think for themselves in public.

Maud was a public defender at the Legal Aid Society for more than 20 years. She started an advocacy group called PLACE NYC that defends screened schools and gifted programs in a city quietly dismantling both. She was elected to her community education council in District 2.

Then came the summer of 2020. Every progressive workplace in America held the same struggle session.

On a Zoom school board meeting that summer, a white board member sat with his friend’s black baby on his lap while making the case for keeping merit-based admissions at New York’s specialized high schools. Activists called him a racist. Letters circulated. Signatures were demanded.

Maud shrugged it off. She would not engage in identity politics, and she would not step down from her school board seat. For that, the lawyers at the Legal Aid Society called her a racist too. She was pushed out of her job.

She did not go quietly. She sued them.

In 2024, Maud introduced Resolution 248, which asked the council to examine the question of boys competing in girls’ sports and to put girls themselves in the room where the decision was being made. The council passed it. Activists followed her around. Council members who privately agreed with her said nothing in public.

RELATED: NYC moms file federal lawsuit against leftist education officials who allegedly punish those with dissenting views

Noam Galai/Getty Images

In 2025, the resolution was rescinded. Maud lost her school board seat in the next election. The activists declared victory.

Here is what they missed: Maud kept talking.

She is slowly winning in the culture the fight she lost in the room. A growing number of parents now say in public what almost nobody would say in 2020. That is partly because of Maud and people like her, who took the first hits so the rest of us would not have to.

In the film, Maud describes people coming up to her and saying she has the courage to say what they cannot. She turns the question around.

Why can’t they?

It is a fair question. Every parent who has watched a school curriculum get rewritten without input has felt this. Every employee who has rewritten the same Slack message four times to avoid setting off a colleague looking to be offended has felt it.

We are afraid. That fear is the whole problem.

This is what I keep telling people who ask me what to do: You do not need a national platform. You need a local one.

The school board meets this month. The PTA needs a treasurer. The neighborhood listserv has a thread about a new library policy. Your sister-in-law is about to pull her child out of public school and is too embarrassed to say why. Your son’s teacher used a phrase at parent night that made you uncomfortable, and you said nothing.

Start there. Speak up at the kitchen table first. Then at the school. Most of the people in your life are probably waiting for somebody to go first. You can be that person.

People love to say one person cannot change a country. One person cannot. A million ones can. That is what a force multiplier is.

RELATED: Democrats vilify NYC parents, demand they abandon request for policy review of transvestites in girls’ sports

Photo courtesy of Palladium Pictures

It is also why every authoritarian system in history has worked so hard to make the first person who speaks pay the highest price. If you can scare the first one quiet, the second one never opens her mouth.

I come from the Soviet Union. I know how that works.

“15 Days” and “Uncancellable” may look like different films, but they ask the same question: Are you willing to be the first one to say the true thing?

Both are stories about free speech and ordinary people who refused to stay quiet when their professions and neighbors wanted silence. The cost of speaking up is real. The cost of staying silent is worse.

Some people will tell you the country is too far gone for one Tuesday-night school board meeting to matter. They are wrong, and they are mostly the people who do not want you to show up.

Show up anyway. Bring a friend.

Maud Maron is not a celebrity. She is a mother with a list of opinions and a refusal to swallow them to keep the room comfortable. The cure for the country is more of her, not fewer.

It starts with the small, unglamorous habit of saying what you actually think, in the room you are actually in, to the people who are there with you.

That is the force multiplier. That is the whole revolution.

​15 days, Covid, Lockdowns, Uncancellable, Legal aid society, School boards, Maud maron, Opinion & analysis 

James Talarico, a Democratic Texas state representative, former teacher, and Presbyterian seminarian, is the Democratic nominee facing Republican Ken Paxton in the competitive 2026 U.S. Senate race in Texas.

Talarico’s campaign is built heavily on his “Christian” faith, which he uses to justify abortion, the LGBTQ+ agenda, and other progressive causes, leading many conservatives to call him a heretic, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and a blasphemer.

BlazeTV’s Sara Gonzales is one of the loudest voices warning that Talarico would be a curse on the state of Texas. On this episode of “Come and Take It,” Sara unveils three disturbing facts about the Scripture-twisting seminarian’s church — St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.

1. ‘Christ-centered’ … but open to ‘all religions’: St. Andrew’s shocking statement of faith

On the FAQ page under the section “What does this church believe,” St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church’s website reads:

We are Presbyterian, yet our first allegiance is to Christ’s gospel of universal love. We are Christ centered, yet we respect and learn from all religions of love. We affirm the ancient symbols of our faith, yet we strive to speak a new language that includes all people and affirms the scientific discoveries of our day. We hope to teach children the stories of the Bible without sectarian dogma. We strive to be a close, nurturing community, yet we welcome all people into our midst. We wish to live in inner peace, yet hear God’s call to work for peace and for universal human rights. We take faith seriously, yet believe the journey should be fun. We celebrate life in many artistic forms.

“So, not a Christian church at all,” Sara says, calling it a “fun club.”

2. Proudly ‘out’ lesbian chaplain: The reverend on staff at Talarico’s church

One of the reverends on staff is a lesbian woman named Babs Miller. Her profile on the website reads, “I was finally ordained here in 2014, 24 years after I graduated from seminary, as an ‘out’ lesbian chaplain.”

“That’s how you know that this is not a real church, is when they have a pastor who’s like, ‘I’m living in sin, yeah. Come to our church. … I’m going to preach to you about God’s word while I’m not following it in my daily life and bragging about it,” Sara scoffs.

3. ‘Safe haven’ for porn? Sexually graphic books found in St. Andrew’s kids’ library

“At St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, at their church library — where children allegedly are allowed to just roam, hang out — are sexually explicit books,” Sara says.

According to the church’s website, the library features “over 1,300 books ranging from topics in history to social justice to Christianity and world religions.” This includes a banned book section, described as “a safe haven for stories from a variety of life experiences and viewpoints.”

“Much like the Bible, recorded histories of people’s lives are not pornography. Using that word for LGBTQ+ stories or other hard topics is a political tactic, not an honest description,” the website reads.

But Sara disputes this claim, noting that the library catalog features numerous pornographic books, including “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson, which contains graphic depictions of rape and incest, and “This Book Is Gay” by Juno Dawson — a book that’s been widely banned in public schools for its graphic depictions of the “ins and outs of gay sex.”

Other controversial titles include “Trans Kids, Our Kids: Stories and Resources from the Frontlines of the Movement for Transgender Youth,” “Called OUT: The Voices and Gifts of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Presbyterians,” “Becoming Nicole: The Inspiring Story of Transgender Actor-Activist Nicole Maines and Her Extraordinary Family,” and the graphic novel “Gender Queer” (one of the most banned books in the country for its sexually explicit illustrations).

“If this is in a church library — not just accessible to adults who are allegedly trying to practice Christianity, but also, like, able to be viewed by children, by minors — what won’t this church do?” Sara asks. “I mean, this is demonic, to say the least.”

To hear more, watch the full episode above.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Come and take it, Come and take it with sara gonzales, Austin texas, James talarico, Presbyterian church 

When I heard that a black female Howard University professor of “communication” had written a Substack piece supporting accused murderer Karmelo Anthony and attacking the victim’s family, I was not surprised.

I regularly research this genre of racialist academia, much of it grounded in grievance, paranoia, and moral inversion. So I reviewed my personal library of pseudo-academic studies for what I already knew I would find about the author.

Con men and grifters have more than their share of psychopaths. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior appears more frequently among academics than is comfortable.

Sure enough, there she was: Dr. Stacey Patton, a prolific spinner of race-driven commentary who monetizes narcissism and paranoia for a rarefied audience.

Patton is typical of blindered black academics who contribute to the myth of ubiquitous black oppression in American society, a myth that now boasts its own literature. Much of systematized black academia has long been characterized by racial paranoia and self-regarding grievance.

This creates a paradox on campus. Mental illness in higher education is rarely identified and treated. Instead, institutions often nurture and encourage various maladies, even celebrating “neurodiversity,” especially when it serves ideology. At the extreme, grievance-studies enclaves become magnets for the like-minded, creating self-sealing provincial communities where paranoia and narcissism harden into conspiracy theory.

Consider Patton.

She contributed to “Presumed Incompetent II,” a key text in the canon of “poor me” paranoia and grandiose narcissism. Her chapter is titled “Why I clap back against racist trolls who attack black women academics.” This is classic main-character narcissism. Yet in its biography of Patton, Howard University modifies the chapter title, perhaps to make it sound more academic: “How Right-Wing Media Outlets Are Fighting Real Diversity in Academe.”

For narcissistic academics like Patton, reality can be edited as part of the self-regarding method. If needed, they can simply make it up.

Patton is hardly alone. The racialist canon contains countless articles and books with titles such as “Racial Battle Fatigue in Higher Education,” “Racial Battle Fatigue,” “Racial Battle Fatigue in Faculty,” “Black Fatigue,” and “Toxic Ivory Towers.” Patton, a “communication” professor and self-described historian, is an active participant in this paranoid fantasy. She defends her racialism this way:

Can you imagine people saying that a cancer researcher focuses too much on cancer? Or how about a climate scientist is suspiciously obsessed with climate? How about somebody saying a theologian keeps bringing up god? They wouldn’t. But when Black scholars study race, suddenly our expertise is some kind of pathology.

RELATED: Howard University professor’s wild take: Austin Metcalf’s dad is the real villain

Claudio Caridi/iStock/Getty Images

Genuine scientists are questioned all the time, and they are held to strict standards of method. Patton is not. The chief difference is that she has no discernible expertise unless she claims “identity” itself as expertise. The entire genre of narcissistic racialism rests on confirmation bias, selection bias, erasure of the distinction between fact and fiction, Orwellian manipulation of language, made-up “composite stories,” postmodern relativity of truth, outright fables, and rescue hypotheses designed to protect racialism from disconfirmation.

Most troubling, these dysfunctions are rooted in codified paranoia — the core of the racialist myth.

In Patton’s Substack piece attacking the father of murder victim Austin Metcalf, she distinguishes herself as a purveyor of communal narcissism. The piece is nominally about Karmelo Anthony. In reality, it is another exculpatory exercise for bad behavior.

She writes from the ideological hotbox known as Howard University, where the maladies of “poor me paranoia” and grandiose narcissism find a distinct genre of faux scholarship, especially among black female academics.

Howard has become a sort of academic “Love Boat,” the final destination for fading intellectual celebrities who could not survive in the world of rigorous scholarship and sharp criticism. It is the last stop for Nikole Hannah-Jones of the error-riddled 1619 Project; Ibram X. Kendi, scandal-plagued author of “How to Be an Antiracist” and failed director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of multiple empty autobiographical meditations on an unaccomplished life.

So no one should be surprised that a purveyor of paranoia plies her trade there. Howard offers a communal home for professionalized narcissism, and the symptoms are obvious to anyone willing to look.

One of those symptoms is “virtuous victimhood,” in which people story-tell themselves into victim status, blame others, then seek compensation or “reparations” for their declared victimhood. I have written extensively on this psychological phenomenon. It is the de facto resource-extraction strategy for the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement, which I explore in “DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education.”

Con men and grifters have more than their share of psychopaths. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior appears more frequently among academics than is comfortable.

The campus provides a kind of microbiology lab where mental illness can worsen, not encumbered by healthy introspection and certainly not by medical treatment. Here I refer specifically to the maladies of “poor me” paranoia and narcissistic personality disorder. Racialist oppression studies are grounded in both.

By “racialist,” I do not mean “racist” in the common sense, but rather in the neutral sense used by W.E.B. Du Bois. Racialists are consumed by race as the single explanatory factor and conduct their lives inside a race-driven fantasy. They view the world exclusively through the “lens” of race. When someone uses the term “racial lens” or “lens of race,” know that he is engaged in a resource-extraction con.

Patton monetizes her red-meat racialism on Substack, addressing a paid audience — a morally vacant fringe of black America, along with guilty white liberals — that is troubled, paranoid, easily duped, and easily led by grifters. The audience for this racialist niche literature is large enough for a quasi-academic to earn a good living. University of Pennsylvania professor John L. Jackson described this credulous audience in “Racial Paranoia.” Jackson, to his credit, survived Howard with his integrity intact.

RELATED: America is done buying bogus racial alibis

This does not mean racialists such as Patton lack passion, sincerity, intellect, or certitude. Of course they marshal facts, though often interspersed with claims that are doubtful at best and fabricated at worst. Evangelists for cults and extremist movements also exude passion, sincerity, charisma, and certainty. They weave fantasy and fact until the two become indistinguishable.

As I explain in “DEI Exposed”:

The technique appears to be to simply fabricate something, the more ambitiously egregious the better, to pass it off as fact, and then to circulate it with bluster, bluff, and zeal. It demonstrates the power of paranoid thought and action and repetition to achieve legitimacy as a ritualized “truth.”

Racialists are passionate about their faith-based ideology. Many are skilled persuaders. Some are talented tale-spinners. Others are crusaders with a burning sense of conviction.

That energy drives the racially aggrieved in academia — the vignettes, scenarios, composite stories, fables, and tales built around the assumption that whatever happens must be explained through the magical reality of paranoid ideology. The conclusion is predetermined.

As one passage from the academic literature puts it:

So long as the poor-me paranoid can maintain her strategy, she will retain a high self-esteem. She will be motivated to go to great extremes to maintain this — inventing the evidence, or concretizing ambiguous comments, expressing her beliefs in terms of absolute certainty, and, most of all, amplifying the enormity of the conspiracy against her, as would be warranted to persecute an immense talent.

Subclinical paranoia and narcissistic personality disorder provide the evaluative framework for this extremist slice of academia, whose growth accelerated after the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Unfortunately, a subset of black America, supported by “bad me paranoid” white liberals, buys into the infantilizing fantasy. In that fantasy, the faux persecuted are always absolved of responsibility, and a racialist enemy is always available to blame, no matter how tortured the explanation.

In 2026, however, we see signs of sobriety. Academia is growing less tolerant of dubious provincialism, and society is growing less tolerant of consequence-free violent behavior, even as Patton and her compatriots attempt to legitimize the murderous violence of Karmelo Anthony. Because of Patton and her ilk, we may see many more Karmelo Anthonys sacrificed before this tendency is reversed.

Stacey Patton and the racialist clique would do better to sound a warning than to cheer on racially justified violence that brings disastrous legal consequences and appropriate punishment. Patton’s next book is due in October and, of course, has a racialist theme: “Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children.” We shall see what she says.

I am not optimistic. The monetization of psychopathy is not easily remedied, especially when lavishly compensated careers depend on it.

​Opinion & analysis, Black lives matter, Karmelo anthony, Stacey patton, Howard university, Racialism, W.e.b. dubois, Racism, Ibram x. kendi, Diversity equity inclusion, Nikole hannah-jones, Ta-nehisi coates 

Every summer, we get to celebrate the first love of every girl: her father. Before she knows what love is, before she has language for it, a daughter is learning it from him. The way he looks at her. The way he stays. The way he shows up on the hard days and the ordinary ones.

Long before she sits in a pew and hears about a God who is steadfast and faithful, she has already been given a picture of what that looks like — or she hasn’t. The difference between those two things will follow her for the rest of her life.

That steady, faithful presence inspired something in me that his illness could not take from him.

Living standard

The role of fatherhood, particularly to daughters, is one of the weightiest callings a man has. A father is his daughter’s first introduction to unconditional love, her first model of strength and gentleness working together. The world provides little girls with countless stories about knights in shining armor and perfectly orchestrated Hollywood romance. It is easy for those fictional portraits to slowly become the standard by which real love gets measured.

But a dad has a more powerful opportunity than any fairytale can offer. He can step into his daughter’s life as the living standard, the real man who shows her what it means to be fully known and fully cherished.

When she is old enough to hear that God loves her as a Father, she will reach for the nearest frame of reference she has. For better or worse, that frame is you, Dad.

Dad’s darling

I often think about my own dad, Norm Haverkos, who spent more than 40 years living with multiple sclerosis. By the time I was in grade school, he couldn’t walk without falling. Eventually, he couldn’t walk at all.

What he could do, and chose to do, every single day was show up. Growing up, I followed my dad around just to be near him. My sister would tease me about it and call me “Dad’s darling.” I never denied it. I was his love, and he was mine.

Despite his illness, my father never made it an excuse to step back from his duties to his children. Confined to a wheelchair, he still found ways to be present: in our garage workshop as we refinished antiques on winter afternoons, in the stands at whatever event we were part of, in the confusing seasons when I simply needed him nearby.

He refused to let his limitations hold him back. He was a tender shepherd to our family, guiding us not in the typical way the world portrays strength, but in a way that demonstrated faithfulness. A shepherd doesn’t lead from the front because he’s the strongest. He leads because he refuses to leave. That was Norm Haverkos. He led us, carried us, and loved us, despite his fleeting mortality.

RELATED: Bruce Willis, dementia, and my father

Jim Spellman/WireImage/Getty Images

The grace to guide

That steady, faithful presence inspired something in me that his illness could not take from him. He helped me understand a God who does not abandon His children when life gets difficult. Like any father, my dad was not perfect, but he was present. And in his presence, I found my worth. Eventually, I found my way to the One whose love my father’s had been pointing toward all along.

The weight of the calling each father carries is heavy. But each dad can be equipped with the grace to carry it. You do not have to be a perfect man to be a faithful one. You do not have to have all the answers or feel whole. If you haven’t given it your best yet, there is mercy and forgiveness to start fresh, and start today.

Sacred calling

Norm Haverkos was not flawless — not physically, not always emotionally — and yet the mark he left on my life ultimately shaped tens of thousands of girls I would go on to serve. That is the math of faithful fatherhood. It multiplies in ways you will never fully see.

To every father reading this: Your daughter is watching. She is learning who God is by watching who you are. She is building her worldview on the foundation of your presence in her life. That is a sacred calling, and it is not too late to honor it.

Be the kind of man she can’t help but follow around. Be the kind of man who makes her a darling, not of her father only, but of her Father in heaven.

​First-person, Faith, Family, God, Christian living, Multiple sclerosis, Christianity, Daughter, Father’s day 

To some in our modern society, the holiday celebrated on the third Sunday in June may seem archaic. Father’s Day may even invite calls to downplay or mock the role fathers play in our culture.

But the holiday provides important lessons in honor, respect, sacrifice, and long-term responsibility — lessons our 21st-century world badly needs to recover.

Father’s Day gives us an opportunity not only to recognize the imperfections of our earthly fathers, but also to honor and bless them in whatever small ways we can.

Consider the parable of the prodigal son, as Jesus recounts it in Luke’s Gospel. The younger son asks his father for his share of the inheritance, effectively seeking to end his relationship with the man who gave him life. Upon receiving his portion, he journeys to a foreign land and promptly squanders it in debauchery.

Our world provides far more opportunities for temptation than existed in the time of Christ, and many of them now sit in the palms of our hands. Social media, online gambling, pornography, and endless distraction are instantly available with a few clicks. Little wonder Western society seems more individualized and more alienated than ever.

Fathers, when they embrace their proper role, can stand against those prevailing currents. With God’s help, fathers can model upright living for their children and give them an example to follow.

As the head of a business founded by my parents half a century ago, I cannot thank my father enough for the lessons he gave my brothers and me. The Christmas I turned 13, he gave me a pocket-sized Bible. His note inside included these words: “The solutions to any problem are in this great book. Try to read a chapter each day of your life, and you will be happy.”

My father did not merely surrender his own life to Christ’s will. In his own way, he taught me to do the same — to pursue a personal relationship with God and try to align my life with God’s word. The way my father loved my mother and lived his faith helped shape me into the man, husband, father, and business leader I am today.

A culture that devalues fathers threatens to leave future generations without the broader perspective and discipline they need to flourish — inside the family home and in daily life with neighbors, friends, and co-workers.

In his letter to the early church in Ephesus, the apostle Paul reminds children to “honor your father and mother so that you may live long in the land.” By their nature, honor, respect, and obedience require sacrifice, traits our popular culture rarely celebrates.

RELATED: Want to leave a legacy for your kids? Focus on living like this.

martin-dm/iStock/Getty Images

But I would not have done as well in my roles as a husband, father, and business leader without the discipline and values my father helped instill in me. Those life lessons extended far beyond the four walls of our family’s home and business.

Father’s Day gives us an opportunity not only to recognize the imperfections of our earthly fathers, but also to honor and bless them in whatever small ways we can. And for those of us who are fathers and grandfathers, it offers a chance to pass on the values our fathers — earthly and heavenly — have given us.

That may be the greatest inheritance we leave our children.

​Father’s day, Fatherhood, Family, Honor, Faith, Christianity, Opinion & analysis 

BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is celebrating a new chapter with the announcement that baby No. 4 is on the way — but alongside the exciting news, she has a message for Christian women who believe they need to live up to certain “myths” in order to fulfill their roles as women.

“One of the biggest myths in Christian womanhood,” she says is the “idea that one, biblical womanhood and so-called traditional womanhood or being a so-called tradwife are completely synonymous.”

The idea of a tradwife has been perpetuated endlessly on social media, where women portray themselves in long floral dresses and baking sourdough loaves.

“We’ve kind of conflated the trad-aesthetic — which is a social media trend for some people, I’m not saying it’s not genuine for many people — with being a biblical woman. And it’s not always the same thing,” Stuckey says.

Another myth of Christian womanhood is that your life does not begin as a woman until you get married and have children.

“My argument is not that those things cannot bring a level of fulfillment because they absolutely do. They’re good and wonderful blessings. The biggest earthly blessings I have in this life are my family, my husband, and my children,” she says.

“However, they are not the pinnacle of your fulfillment and satisfaction. Christ is, which means you can have that right now if you are a Christian, no matter what stage of life you’re in,” she says, pointing out that you can faithfully serve God from anywhere.

Another myth Stuckey sees infiltrating modern Christian women is what she calls “therapy culture,” which is essentially self-help language, self-affirmation messaging, inner-child therapy concepts, and therapeutic frameworks.

“Ultimately, I think all of these psychological ideas elevate the God of self rather than leading us to Christ and encouraging us towards self-denial,” she says.

While this modern therapy messaging encourages looking inward for happiness, Christianity says to look to Christ.

“Of course, that is true,” Stuckey says.

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, Children, Christianity, Family, Husband, Marriage, Relatable, The bible, Tradwife, Relatable with allie beth stuckey 

In September 2025, Toyota officially opened Woven City at the foot of Mount Fuji: a development of streets and residents, robots and cameras, inventors and ordinary people arranged on land formerly occupied by a car factory. The company calls it a “living laboratory.” What Toyota has built is not quite a city and not quite an experiment. The city is a model, staged in domestic architecture, demonstrating that the most important question in technology right now is not whether artificial intelligence can write a poem or pass an examination, but whether it can carry a parcel, assist a frail body, and navigate a loading dock without killing anyone.

This arrangement is an example of what Japan has begun calling “physical AI.” The term has spread quickly. Two years ago, it appeared mainly in specialist papers. Today it is found in strategy documents, industrial policy, parliamentary testimony, and semiconductor planning. The government has formally pledged, through its Basic Policy on Economic and Fiscal Management, to formulate a strategy for robots equipped with AI and advanced semiconductors. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry illustrates the concept with a warehouse robot that maps its environment, chooses routes dynamically, avoids obstacles, and coordinates with other machines in real time. The Japan Science and Technology Agency’s research arm organizes the field around three directions: stronger task execution, better adaptability to diverse environments, and coexistence with humans.

Making machines more like bodies may be more consequential than making them more like minds.

There is a history to the choice of the word “coexistence.” Japan has been making robots for decades, and it has been making stories about robots for even longer. The mechanical dolls of the Edo period, the karakuri ningyo, were clockwork figures that concealed their mechanisms inside appealing social surfaces: a doll that served tea, another that fired an arrow. Japan has long cultivated a public culture in which mechanism and social performance are not antagonists. That inheritance runs through Astro Boy and Waseda University’s decades of humanoid research, through every official document that describes robots as a component of public welfare. When METI describes image sensors as the human eye of physical AI, it is drawing on a vocabulary assembled over centuries. Japan keeps remaking a robotics culture, and today’s discussion of physical AI is the latest round of creation.

The urgency, however, is contemporary and specific. Japan is aging at a rapid rate. Caregivers are scarce. Logistics workers are scarce. Regions outside the major cities are emptying. METI launched its RING Project in 2025 to eliminate regional labor shortages through robot deployment. A 2024 revision of government guidelines on long-term care technologies was framed around reducing caregiver burden and supporting elderly self-reliance. The delivery robots now permitted on public roads, under a 2023 legal change, are presented as a practical response to a known shortage.

The technical challenges are not simple. Robot foundation models cannot train on the open internet the way large language models do. Bodies encounter a world that resists transcription. NEDO, the government’s technology-development agency, notes that what is overwhelmingly lacking is data collected in the physical field. The AIROA consortium, established in December 2024, exists largely to build the data infrastructure for generative AI foundation models to work in robots at scale.

RELATED: Shadowy companies are selling access to your smart TV — and its data

JDawnInk/Getty Images

The stack that makes physical AI possible includes multimodal perception, state estimation, planning, control, feedback, safety, edge computing, and digital twins. Kajima and Preferred Networks’ navigation system for construction sites combines cameras, lidar, and inertial measurement to build maps of an environment that never stays the same from one shift to the next. Mujin’s architecture employs a digital twin running in continuous feedback with a physical warehouse, updating state, re-optimizing motion, and coordinating execution in something close to real time. Getting intelligence into bodies and those bodies into the world is a data-engineering problem of considerable difficulty.

Japan’s Moonshot Goal 3 sets a target of AI robots that allow more than 90% of people to feel comfortable with them by 2030. The target acknowledges that physical AI is, among other things, a social legitimacy problem. Waseda’s AIREC project, developing a care robot for household, welfare, and medical settings, is pointed at the hardest version of this problem: safe bodily interaction with vulnerable humans. The researchers describe tactile sensing, dressing assistance, attention mechanisms, and predictive learning for physical contact. Journalists who have visited the lab tend to describe the same scene: a robot trying to put a shirt on an elderly person without hurting him. That image is instructive; physical AI is most sensitive in close human interaction.

The rhetoric of Japan’s push rests on a claim of human augmentation rather than replacement, technology that reduces burden while preserving self-reliance. Nevertheless, the demographic crisis that makes robots attractive also makes the economics of replacement compelling. One-third of Japanese companies were already using or actively considering AI-powered robots by 2026, while researchers and trade journalists noted the intensifying competition from the United States and China in more autonomous, AI-enabled systems. Japan can use the language of augmentation for now. Whether it can continue to do so through demographic free fall and international competition is a different question.

The Japan Science and Technology Agency has noted that physical AI may address limits inherent in purely software-based intelligence. The assumption is that intelligence without a body is a specific and limited kind of intelligence. Once a system has to carry something, or navigate a construction site, or change an elderly person’s clothing, the problem of being in the world arises. Perception becomes active. Error has weight. Meaning is inseparable from situation. The Japanese know this. What is new is that the country is now wagering its industrial future on the proposition that making machines more like bodies may be more consequential than making them more like minds. At the foot of Mount Fuji, a living laboratory works to settle the bet.

​Tech