Category: blaze media

Wouldn’t it be a bitter irony if Republicans lost the midterms — maybe even in conservative red states — because Democrats outmaneuvered them on the dangers of the AI data-center boom? The left now warns voters about land seizures, rising electric bills, water shortages, and Big Tech’s unchecked power. Meanwhile, Republicans stay quiet as Trump himself champions the very agenda voters increasingly fear.

During the Biden years, Republicans attacked Big Tech censorship, digital surveillance, Agenda 2030 land-grabs, and the artificial online culture reshaping young Americans. Every one of those concerns now intersects with the data-center explosion — energy demands, land use, power monopolies, and the rise of generative AI — but the political right barely whispers about it.

Republicans can channel AI toward focused, beneficial uses and away from a dystopian model that erodes civic life. Voters already want that shift.

Democrats don’t make that mistake. They see a potent electoral weapon.

Georgia hadn’t elected a Democrat statewide since 2006. Yet Democrat Peter Hubbard defeated a Republican incumbent on the Public Service Commission by 26 points by hammering “sweetheart deals” GOP officials granted hyperscale data centers. Voters in the state face repeated rate hikes linked to the massive energy demands of Big Tech facilities.

“The number-one issue was affordability,” Hubbard told Wired. “But a very close second was data centers and the concern around them just sucking up the water, the electricity, the land — and not really paying any taxes.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. In 2022, Georgia’s Republican legislature passed a sales-tax exemption for data centers. In 2024, a bipartisan bill attempted to halt those tax breaks, but Gov. Brian Kemp (R) vetoed it. Voters noticed — and punished the GOP for it.

Georgia now surpasses northern Virginia in hyperscale growth. Atlanta’s data-center inventory rose 222% in two years, with more than 2,150 megawatts of new construction under way. It’s no mystery why Democrats flipped two PSC seats in blowouts.

Republicans lost because they defended crony capitalism that inflated energy bills, devoured land, and fed an AI industry conservatives once warned about. If Kamala Harris had pushed the data-center agenda as aggressively as Trump now does, Republicans would be in open revolt. But Trump’s support silences the conservative grassroots and leaves Democrats free to define the issue.

Virginia tells the same story. Democrat John McAuliff flipped a GOP seat by attacking Big Tech’s land-grab and the rising utility costs tied to data-center expansion. He blasted his opponent for profiting while family farms vanished under the footprint of hyperscale development. He became the first Democrat in 30 years to carry the district.

At the statewide level, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governor’s office by arguing that AI data centers must pay their “fair share” of soaring energy costs. She framed the issue as a fight to protect families from Big Tech’s strain on the grid.

New Jersey voters heard similar warnings as they faced a 22% electric rate increase. Democrat Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli by double digits after blaming part of the spike on hyperscale energy demand. She pledged to declare a state of emergency to halt increases and require data centers to fund grid upgrades.

This pattern repeats in reliably red states.

Indiana saw dozens of new hyperscale proposals, yet not a single Republican official pushed back. Ordinary citizens blocked one of Google’s planned rezonings near Indianapolis. Liberal groups — like Citizens Action Coalition — filled the leadership vacuum and demanded a moratorium on new data centers, calling it a fight against “big tech oligarchs that are calling all the shots at every single level of government.”

RELATED: Stop feeding Big Tech and start feeding Americans again

Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Republican leaders, meanwhile, worked to ban states from regulating AI at all. This summer they attempted to insert a sweeping prohibition into the budget reconciliation bill that would bar states from regulating data-center siting or AI content for 10 years. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) now seeks to attach the same language to the FY 2026 defense authorization act. President Trump backs the provision.

Instead of ceding the issue to the left, Republicans should correct course. They can channel AI toward focused, beneficial uses and away from a dystopian model that erodes civic life. Voters already want that shift. A new University of Maryland poll found residents believe — by a 2-1 margin — that AI will harm society more than it helps. More than 80% expressed deep concern about declining face-to-face interaction, the erosion of education and critical thinking, and job displacement fueled by AI.

Capital expenditures cannot sustain the current pace of expansion, and public patience with Big Tech’s demands is running out. The political party that recognizes these realities first will earn the credit. Right now, the party that once defended property rights, community values, and human-centered technology is getting lapped by the party that partnered with Big Tech oligarchs to censor Americans during COVID.

Republicans still have time to lead. But they won’t win a fight they refuse to join.

​Gop, Democrats, Midterms, 2026, Data centers, Ai, Big tech, Opinion & analysis, Artificial intelligence, Wired magazine, Virginia, Georgia, Brian kemp, Taxes, Tax exemption, Land grabs 

The rise of transgenderism among young girls was studied intensely and deemed a social contagion by Abigail Shrier in her incredible book “Irreversible Damage,” and BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey believes it’s a similar story for young men — though the catalyst is different.

“It’s not true today that most of the boys and men who identify as the opposite sex do so because they have gender dysphoria that they were born with or that they developed as a child. But today it is, I believe, mostly due to pornography,” she explains.

“It is due to a sexual fetish that they have developed over time, that there is now a very real algorithmic pipeline via Pornhub and other porn sites that push young men to seek more and more exciting dopamine hits,” she continues.

Stuckey recalls the editor of Reduxx magazine, Genevieve Gluck, finding a link between pornography and the rise of transgenderism, which Stuckey describes as the “fetish of wanting to be feminized as a man, wanting to be submissive as a man.”

“So it’s true that these men who want to go into girls’ locker rooms, who want to go into girls’ bathrooms, are not doing so because they really think that they were born in the wrong body, but because they’re perverts. Those are the exact opposite kind of men that you want infiltrating women’s spaces,” she continues.

“Of course, you don’t want any man doing that, but especially not a man who is a sexual deviant in every way and who actually gets off on humiliation — humiliation for themselves and humiliation for women and girls. This kind of sissification porn actually depicts women as objects and depicts women as just things to be degraded and humiliated,” she adds.

While transgenders and their enablers will claim it’s about feeling uncomfortable in their own skin and slap the label of “gender dysphoria” on these men, it has nothing to do with biological sex at all — and everything to do with sexual fetish.

One subset of hardcore fetish pornography is “furry porn,” which oddly appears to have been a favorite of both Trump’s would-be assassin and Charlie Kirk’s assassin.

“I do not think it’s a coincidence that both of these men who are suspected as the killers of these top, you know, conservative, one politician and one activist, were also allegedly addicted to this kind of pornography and obsessed with transgenderism,” Stuckey says.

Trump’s would-be assassin was allegedly using they/them pronouns online and had an account on Deviantart — where he seemed especially drawn to scantily clad images of muscular male-looking bodies with female heads.

“So right away, this should sound the alarms for you of something satanic,” Stuckey says.

“I think about Mark 5 when Jesus heals a man with a demon, and this person goes by the name of Legion, or the demons go by the name of Legion … and when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him, out of the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit,” she explains.

When Jesus spoke to the unclean spirit, he asked him, “What is your name?” And the spirit replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

“Even though he is one in this body, goes by a multiple pronoun, goes by we. Now, I’m not saying that this Legion is necessarily possessing all of these people who go by they/them. I am saying unapologetically that it is demonic,” Stuckey says.

“That you cannot be a they, that you cannot be a them, that you cannot be a we. Subverting reality is demonic. Denying biological truth is demonic. Satan loves it. Why?” Stuckey asks, answering, “Because he is the father of lies.”

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.

​Video phone, Video, Upload, Free, Camera phone, Sharing, Youtube.com, Allie beth stuckey, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Fetish culture, Pornography evil, Demonic, Transgender, Lgbtqia agenda, Furries, Trump assassin, Charlie kirk assassin, Relatable with allie beth stuckey 

A federal judge sided Thursday with the attorney general in Washington, D.C., who sued against the National Guard deployment ordered by President Donald Trump.

The president ordered a deployment of troops into D.C. to quell the violent crime rampant in the area, but many on the left have accused him of militarizing the streets in order to intimidate his political opponents.

‘This unprecedented federal overreach is not normal, or legal. It is long past time to let the National Guard go home — to their everyday lives, their regular jobs, their families, and their children.’

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb ruled that the president had exceeded his presidential authority but gave the administration 21 days to appeal the ruling.

Cobb said that Trump could not deploy troops for “non-military, crime-deterrence missions in the absence of a request from the city’s civil authorities.”

“Normalizing the use of military troops for domestic law enforcement sets a dangerous precedent, where the President can disregard states’ independence and deploy troops wherever and whenever he wants — with no check on his military power,” D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb said after the ruling.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller excoriated the ruling.

“Judicial despotism is one of the gravest hazards we face to the functioning and endurance of our Republic,” he wrote on social media. “No district judge can steal for himself the powers of the Commander-in-Chief.”

The president has sent National Guard members to other cities to combat crime and faced other challenges in court from his opponents and local government officials.

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said Schwalb’s lawsuit was “nothing more than another attempt — at the detriment of D.C. residents — to undermine the president’s highly successful operations to stop violent crime in D.C.”

RELATED: DC Dems are furious at Mayor Bowser for admitting Trump’s troops are lowering crime

“This unprecedented federal overreach is not normal, or legal. It is long past time to let the National Guard go home — to their everyday lives, their regular jobs, their families, and their children,” Schwalb added.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser admitted that the surge had helped decrease violent crime in the district, but she was widely criticized by other Democrats for saying it publicly.

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

​Trump dc surge, National guard surge, Federal judge vs trump, Troop surge, Politics 

With increased national focus on the trucking industry, federal and state authorities are stepping up efforts to crack down on illegal truck drivers to address concerns about road safety and national security.

A one-day operation last week in Texas led to the apprehension of 31 illegal alien truck drivers, according to Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s office.

‘When illegal immigrants break the law and illegally drive on our roads, they endanger the lives of countless Texans and Americans.’

The joint commercial vehicle enforcement operation on November 11 in Wheeler County along I-40 involved multiple law enforcement agencies, including the Texas Department of Public Safety, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the governor’s office reported on Wednesday.

Law enforcement officers inspected 105 vehicles as part of an effort to identify suspicious commercial driver’s licenses. DPS troopers referred 31 drivers to ICE after they were unable to verify their lawful presence in the U.S., despite presenting CDLs.

“It was determined that all 31 individuals were in the country illegally,” the governor’s office reported, noting that most of the licenses were issued by California, with none issued in Texas.

“Millions of Texans drive on our highways, roads, and streets every day,” Abbott stated. “When illegal immigrants break the law and illegally drive on our roads, they endanger the lives of countless Texans and Americans.”

RELATED: Trump DOT hammers Gov. Shapiro, threatens to pull millions after state hands CDL to ‘suspected terrorist’ illegal alien trucker

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

“This joint state and federal operation along one of the nation’s longest transcontinental highways removed illegal drivers and unsafe vehicles from Texas roads,” Abbott continued. “While liberal states like California issue licenses to illegal immigrants and risk the lives of Americans, Texas will work with our federal partners to maintain safe roads and apprehend illegal immigrants to protect our communities.”

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) has similarly launched efforts to remove illegal immigrant truckers from the roads.

RELATED: Oklahoma ICE sting busts 34 illegal alien truck drivers, others with rap sheets

Photo by George Rose/Getty Images

He provided an update in early November about Operation Guardian, which has also conducted enforcement along the I-40 corridor, noting that it has already resulted in the arrest of over 100 illegal alien truck drivers.

“For the second time in just the past month, the state of Oklahoma and ICE have banded together to bolster public safety along Oklahoma’s highways, identifying and apprehending illegal aliens who are in the country illegally and have been recklessly issued a commercial driver’s license by states like California, Illinois, and New Jersey,” said Marcos Charles, the executive associate director for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations. “Many of the illegal aliens arrested behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound tractor trailer can’t even read basic English, endangering everyone they encounter on the roads.”

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

​News, Texas, Greg abbott, Abbott, Kevin stitt, Stitt, Oklahoma, Immigration and customs enforcement, Ice, Texas department of public safety, Texas dps, Illegal immigration crisis, Illegal immigration, Immigration crisis, Immigration, American trucking industry, Trucking industry, Trucking, Commercial driver’s licenses, Cdls, Cdl, Commercial driver’s license, Politics 

An anonymous complaint against a small cross in the yard of some Christian homeowners has led to a community development district paying out nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

Wayne and Bonnie Anderson were notified on April 1, 2019, that their 1-foot white cross was in violation of yard decoration standards at The Villages.

‘In law, there has to be harm — what’s the harm? What’s behind all this? Something sinister, I guess.’

“I thought it was an April Fool’s Day joke,” Wayne Anderson said. “We call it a religious icon; they call it yard art — like the same with pink flamingos.”

He says that someone anonymously complained, and the Village Community Development District 8 began to fine him $25 for each day that he refused to take the cross down.

“The last I heard it was $44,000 for us,” he said.

“It’s not hurting anybody — there’s no harm,” Anderson added. “In law, there has to be harm — what’s the harm? What’s behind all this? Something sinister, I guess.”

The community district filed a lawsuit against the couple, and more than five years later, a judge ordered the district to settle with the couple. The district agreed to pay $173K in court costs and legal fees, as well as $70K for the Andersons.

And the cross gets to stay in the yard.

RELATED: California parents file lawsuit to stop curriculum that makes kids pray to Aztec gods

“Quarter of a million dollars nearly — over the little white cross,” Wayne Anderson said. “Can you believe that?”

WOFL-TV said the community district did not respond to requests for comment. The report noted that other crosses had popped up in the same neighborhood.

“This should never have happened, and it should never happen again,” Anderson added. “In the end, we get to display [it] as is our constitutional and God-given right.”

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

​Tiny cross complaint, Cross lawsuit, The villages lawsuit, Wayne anderson, Politics 

Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino told BlazeTV’s Glenn Beck that the company was trying to correct for lighting and comfort when it presented its redesign.

Masino was at the center of controversy in August when the old country store was blasted for changing its logo, branding, and interior design. Customers particularly took issue with the removal of the country man sitting on a chair next to a barrel, as well as the barrel itself, leaving just black “Cracker Barrel” text on a yellow background.

‘Were you surprised you weren’t fired?’

Beck sat down with Masino inside a Cracker Barrel, tucked away in a corner booth along with the company’s senior vice president of store operations, Doug Hisel. During the hour-long conversation that saw Masino almost shed tears at one point, the CEO expressed anxiety about agreeing to the interview due to feeling that her position throughout the ordeal had been misconstrued.

“I want to set the record straight,” she said. “I want people to know that this is the brand that they’ve always known and loved, and that our job is to take care of it and just set it up for the next 55 years.”

Beck cut the noise and directly asked, “Were you surprised you weren’t fired?”

“I feel like I’ve been fired by America,” Masino replied.

“That’s probably worse,” Beck noted.

The CEO explained that her intentions were only to help Americans love the brand, “the way I love this brand … the way everybody who works here.”

Pointing to the some 70,000 employees at Cracker Barrel, Masino said she knows the responsibility she has on her shoulders and that she must ensure her employees are taken care of, and in turn are able to put a roof over their head and food on their table.

“My job is to make sure that Cracker Barrel helps them do that,” she added.

RELATED: Cracker Barrel saves its old-timey decor — but will we settle for a Potemkin past?

Cracker Barrel CEO Finally Addresses ‘Woke’ Rebrand Controversy | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 275

Surrounded by classic Americana synonymous with the store, Beck asked the execs about the disconnect in terms of the rebranding; Masino rejected that there was ever a plan to remodel.

“Was [the rebrand] ever intended to get rid of all this?” Beck asked, kindly referring to the bleakly remodeled restaurants that were shown online.

“I think a lot of people think that Doug and me and other people sit around are like, ‘Let’s remodel Cracker Barrel.’ Nothing could be further from the truth,” Masino claimed.

The real reason for the recalibration, she cited, were customer experiences that described visits as being “real dark” and not being able to read the menu. She then recalled not one but two stories where she spotted customers using a stadium cushion while eating at the restaurant.

“I love your food; I love it here, but your chairs are so uncomfortable,” she remembered one man telling her.

“That’s really where it all started,” Masino said. “How do we make the stores more comfortable?”

“How do we get the right balance of investment, of comfort, of nostalgia, of the tradition that everybody knows and loves here? But in a way, that’s easy for our teams to take care of,” she went on.

Masino said it was her expectation that customers would take issue with the presence of too many booths, but “it wasn’t that. It was the black and white and the decor.”

“So that’s why, when people got upset about it, we were like, ‘Oh gosh, that’s not the intention. We can revert them,'” she added.

RELATED: Cracker Barrel folds again, tells customers they ‘don’t need to worry’

Glenn Beck (L) interviews Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino (M) and Doug Hisel (R), senior vice president of store operations. Image courtesy Blaze TV / Glenn Beck

Beck was able to extract a lot of the boardroom reasoning behind the branding blunder from the CEO. Masino told him that the remodeled stores in question were all company-owned and have since been reverted back to their original design, save for four in Florida that are dealing with permitting laws; but the company is working on that.

During this line of questioning, Beck pointed out that he could feel Masino’s genuine nature and that she was “hurt deeply” and “personally” from the backlash the company received.

“You’re so human, and you’re fighting it. Why?” Beck asked.

“I don’t know,” Masino replied, appearing to tear up. At this point, Hisel jumped in to reassure Masino that she is a good person, doing her best.

The productive conversation concluded with a brief mention of Hisel and Masino reaffirming that “everybody is welcome at Cracker Barrel.”

“It’s America’s store,” Hisel said. “Come as you are. If you play checkers, we can do pancakes and country fried turkey. Come as you are.”

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

​News, Cracker barrel, Woke, Americana, Dei, Politics 

While most rappers and Hollywood celebrities have spoken out against President Donald Trump, one of them is bravely standing for his actions. And who it is is shocking, to say the least.

“I would like to thank President Trump for prioritizing this issue and for his leadership on the global stage in calling for urgent action to defend Christians in Nigeria, to combat extremism, and to bring a stop to violence against those who simply want to exercise their natural right to freedom of religion or belief,” rapper Nicki Minaj said.

Minaj also called the violence against Nigerian Christians not only a “growing problem in Nigeria,” but in “many other countries across the world” that “demands urgent action.”

“I want to be clear: Protecting Christians in Nigeria is not about taking sides or dividing people. It is about uniting humanity. Nigeria is a beautiful nation with deep faith traditions. … When one’s church, mosque, or place of worship is destroyed, everyone’s heart should break just a little bit,” she continued.

“And the foundation of the United Nations, with its core mandate to ensure peace and security, should shake,” she added.

“Has Nicki Minaj always been a Trump supporter?” BlazeTV host Pat Gray asks on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”

“God bless her,” executive producer Keith Malinak adds.

Want more from Pat Gray?

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

​Free, Upload, Video phone, Sharing, Video, Camera phone, Youtube.com, Pat gray unleashed, Pat gray, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Nicki minaj, Christian, Christianity, Christians in nigeria, Celebrity politics, Nicki minaj supports trump, President trump, President donald trump, Nigerian christians 

Abortions are described as a “uniquely human superpower” in a new kids’ book meant for children as young as 5 years old.

The book, titled “Abortion Is Everything,” was created by Amelia Bonow, an activist who is also responsible for the “Shout Your Abortion” campaign.

‘The book is marketed to children from 5 to 8, with the goal of explaining abortion in kid-friendly language. This isn’t just propaganda. It’s grooming.’

A post on the group’s social media page proudly marketed the book, according to the Live Action pro-life group.

“Parents, caregivers, and educators who work with children have long been searching for a tool to talk with kids about abortion, especially given the volume of political noise currently surrounding the issue,” reads a post on Instagram.

The book intends to describe how an abortion feels and why people have them.

“With accessible, inclusive language, ‘Abortion Is Everything’ frames abortion as the actualization of a uniquely human superpower: our capacity to imagine the future and make choices that lead us towards the life we envision,” the post reads. “Abortion is a tool that allows human beings to shape our destinies, and which has shaped the entire world around us.”

The Live Action group strongly condemned the effort in a post on social media.

“The founder of ‘Shout Your Abortion’ is now targeting kids. With a children’s book. Promoting abortion,” the post reads. “The book is marketed to children from 5 to 8, with the goal of explaining abortion in kid-friendly language. This isn’t just propaganda. It’s grooming.”

RELATED: Missouri man admits to kidnapping pregnant girlfriend at gunpoint to force her to have abortion

Photo by Chris Polk/E! Entertainment/NBC via Getty Images

“The abortion industry has long tried to indoctrinate children into their pro-abortion agenda,” the group continued on its website. “This book, presenting abortion as human empowerment, is just the latest example.”

The political fight over abortion has moved to the state level after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision establishing federal abortion rights in the historic 2022 Dobbs decision.

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

​Abortion kids book, Abortion debate, Dobbs decision, Pro-life movement, Politics 

A former teacher in Kentucky — who was accused of asking her underage lover to kill her husband — has learned her fate for sexually assaulting a jailed minor.

In April, 28-year-old Elena Bardin was arrested and initially charged with three counts of sexual abuse, solicitation of murder, and distribution of obscene material, according to a court records citation People magazine obtained. Following her arrest, Bardin was hit with three counts of unlawful transaction with a minor.

‘I know you say you’ll take care of him, but shouldn’t someone else do it so suspicion is miles away from you?’

Kentucky State Police said in an April statement that Bardin “solicited a male juvenile at the Adair Juvenile Detention Center to kill her husband.”

But a jury acquitted Bardin of the charge of soliciting the teen to murder her husband.

However, in September, Bardin was convicted of one count each of first-degree sexual abuse, unlawful transaction with a minor, and distribution of obscene material to a minor.

People said the defendant’s estranged husband, Michael Bardin, and the alleged victim both testified against Bardin for the prosecution.

Last week, a judge sentenced Bardin to four years in prison for first-degree sexual abuse, 10 years for unlawful transaction with a minor, and 12 months for the distribution of obscene material to a minor; the sentences are to be served concurrently. Bardin also was ordered to register as a sex offender for 20 years, according to Court TV.

During sentencing, Circuit Judge Samuel Spalding noted there were 193 pages of “letters, pictures, and everything else,” which he described as “juicy.”

“The letters you sent … they were juicy, they were things you’d see in a triple-X movie, and completely inappropriate, obviously, and I think you know that, for a young man that age,” Judge Spalding stated, according to WKRC-TV.

Spalding continued, “And for an educator, it was incumbent upon you to set a better example. I will say, though, the 193 pages of letters, pictures, everything else, it depicts a very intelligent and articulate young woman who was clearly articulating her thoughts and desires to this kid.”

RELATED: Ex-middle school teacher — guilty of 21 counts of sex crimes against daughter’s underage babysitter — learns her fate

Bardin — a reported mother of a 5-year-old girl — had been an English teacher at the Adair County Juvenile Detention Center, where the victim was detained.

The Kentucky State Police said, “Evidence also revealed that Ms. Bardin had subjected the juvenile to illegal sexual contact and provided him with sexually explicit images of herself.”

Citing testimony from Bardin’s supervisor at the juvenile detention center, the judge added that the former teacher had been warned to end the relationship and stay away from the teen. Judge Spalding reportedly stressed that the student had been moved to another section of the detention center.

“And, ma’am, not only did you not heed that advice and stop, it looks to me like you actually doubled down on the behavior after that, and that is concerning,” Spalding alleged.

Prosecutors accused Bardin of having a sexual relationship with the 17-year-old student who was detained at the juvenile facility.

The Kentucky State Police stated, “On March 27, 2025, the Adair Juvenile Detention Center conducted a routine search of juveniles’ living units where letters and explicit material were found in a male juvenile’s possession sent by an Adair County School teacher assigned to the facility.”

The Union-Bulletin reported, “According to prosecutors, in one of the letters confiscated by investigators, Bardin talks about oral sex and having sex in the boy’s cell.”

“I hope you enjoyed that. I did,” Bardin reportedly wrote in a letter to the minor, according to the Union-Bulletin.

Another letter written by Bardin allegedly said, “I know you say you’ll take care of him, but shouldn’t someone else do it so suspicion is miles away from you? IDK, I’m going to miss you so (redacted) bad tonight. You look so handsome today, love. I love you.”

In April, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported that the Adair County school district listed Bardin — with her first name spelled “Elana” — as a teacher at the Adair Learning Academy, which is part of the Adair Youth Development Center.

The youth development center operates in conjunction with the regional juvenile detention center, the Herald-Leader said, citing the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice. Adair Superintendent Jason Faulkner told the paper that Bardin was an employee of the district and that she had been terminated.

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

​Murder for hire, Murder for hire plot, Teacher arrested, Teacher sex scandal, Teacher student sex scandal, Sexual assault, True crime, True crime news, Crime, Kentucky, Bad teacher 

Democrats appeared thrilled when they thought the Epstein files were finally going to take President Donald Trump out, but BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales points out that instead, it appears that the president has “been playing 4D chess all along.”

“They didn’t realize they were just going to fall into a trap of implicating themselves,” Gonzales says, before playing a clip of Democratic House Delegate Stacey Plaskett — who is from the Virgin Islands, where Epstein Island was — doing just that.

When the last batch of Epstein documents came out, the Washington Post even noticed that Plaskett and Epstein would text quite often.

“In fact, they were texting in the middle of congressional hearings, and he ended up coaching her on how to get dirt on President Trump during a hearing of Michael Cohen’s testimony,” Gonzales explains.

“The irony is not lost on me that they kept trying to get Trump with Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, it turns out, Jeffrey Epstein at every direction hates his f**king guts. Like, he hates Donald Trump. So, the idea that they were best buds … he clearly hates Donald Trump,” she continues.

Plaskett has since tried to defend herself, and it didn’t help her case.

“I got a text from Jeffrey Epstein, who at the time was my constituent, who was not public knowledge at that time that he was under federal investigation, and who was sharing information with me,” she said on the House floor.

However, in 2008, Epstein was serving a sentence for a prostitution case.

“We all knew in 2019 that Jeffrey Epstein was a bad guy,” Gonzales says, pointing out that Plaskett even admitted this to CNN, appearing unable to keep her story straight.

“I believed that Jeffrey Epstein had information, and I was going to get information to get at the truth. If individuals are not involved in illegal activity, extending his criminal enterprise or his financial enterprise or all of those things, I think that we need to look at what people are doing moving forward,” Plaskett said.

“Wait, let me just better understand that. What is that point? Because at the time, he was a known sex offender, and it had been detailed all the sexual abuse,” the CNN anchor replied.

“There are a lot of people who have done a lot of crimes, and as a prosecutor, you get information from people where you can,” Plaskett replied.

And House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) made sure to defend Plaskett when he was being grilled on her admission on CNN — but Gonzales points out it’s likely just because he also was “in bed” with Epstein.

One email reveals that Democrat fundraisers invited Epstein to an event to meet privately with Hakeem Jeffries, which meant his campaign was soliciting money from Epstein.

“Dear Jeffrey, we are thrilled to announce that we are working with Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, one of the rising stars in the New York Congressional delegation. Sometimes referred to as ‘Brooklyn’s Barack,’” the email read.

Another section of the email asked Epstein to reach out if he “would like to get an opportunity to get to know Hakeem better.”

“The fact that he was groveling for support, financial support, from a convicted child predator,” Gonzales scoffs. “Like, these are bad people.”

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.

​Sharing, Camera phone, Upload, Video phone, Free, Video, Youtube.com, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Sara gonzales, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Jeffrey epstein, The epstein files, Stacey plaskett, Hakeem jeffries, Epstein, Epstein emails, Democrats, President trump 

The horrific attack on a woman on a public train in Chicago has garnered angry responses from many — but the Democratic mayor was not one of them.

The 26-year-old victim is in critical condition after a man doused her with a liquid at about 9:30 on Monday night and then lit her on fire on the CTA Blue Line train. The man fled from the scene, and police later arrested 50-year-old Lawrence Reed as a suspect.

‘The issue is violent misdemeanor offenders & how to stop. Be part of the solution, Mayor.’

When asked to comment on whether the suspect should have been on the streets in the first place, Mayor Brandon Johnson initially called it an “isolated incident,” according to a Chicago Tribune reporter.

“This is an isolated incident, and I don’t see this as some sort of trend. And again, the level of accountability that has to happen in this moment, I trust that the federal level will do its part,” Johnson said.

“As awful and as horrific as this tragedy is, this is an isolated incident. As we continue to invest more in our public transportation system, we want people to feel safe,” he added, “and that’s why I’m doing my part to ensure that these investments are getting right to the people.”

Many on social media thought his response was not proportional to the depth of pain the innocent victim suffered.

“Downplaying this as an isolated incident is absolutely insane,” replied Carter Christensen, a communications strategist for ActBlue.

“Brandon Johnson’s minimization of a woman being randomly set on fire on Chicago’s public transportation system is absolutely appalling,” another user responded on social media.

“Loop Punchers hurting women too. The issue is violent misdemeanor offenders & how to stop. Be part of the solution, Mayor,” another response reads.

“Some dude in Chicago with 49 prior arrests lit a woman on fire in public. But somehow this dips**t can’t say he should have been in jail,” another response reads.

“Yes it’s an isolated incident but maybe if his f**king city doesn’t stop releasing these pieces of s**t then it can quickly go from isolated to infrequent until it becomes a common incident,” another added.

Reed has reportedly been arrested more than 70 times in Cook County alone and has at least 13 convictions.

RELATED: Man allegedly lit random woman on fire on Chicago train — suspect had numerous previous arrests

Johnson offered more serious comments at a press conference later where he expressed “shock and horror” at the attack.

“This is an absolute failure of our criminal justice as well as our mental health institutions. This individual was charged with dozens of felonies over the past three decades,” Johnson said. “He was clearly seriously mentally disturbed and was a danger to himself and to others. The system that we had failed to intervene. … We’re also praying for her family at this time. This is a horrific tragedy that should have never happened.”

Reed is facing federal terrorism charges over the incident. Police have since said they have evidence that he filled a bottle with gasoline at a gas station just 20 minutes before the attack.

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

​Woman set on fire, Chicago train crime, Chicago mayor brandon johnson, Backlash against johnson, Politics 

The Department of Transportation issued a warning on Thursday to Pennsylvania that it is at risk of losing tens of millions of dollars in federal funding, according to a department press release obtained by Blaze News.

The DOT sent a letter to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and state DOT Secretary Michael Carroll stating that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration uncovered “evidence of procedural and programming errors” in the state’s issuance of non-domiciled commercial learner’s permits and driver’s licenses.

‘Joe Biden allowed tens of millions of illegals to pour into our country through open borders, including a suspected terrorist who Pennsylvania then allowed to get behind the wheel of a semitruck.’

Pennsylvania issued CDLs with expiration dates beyond the foreign nationals’ lawful presence in the country, according to the DOT. Further, the state was accused of issuing licenses without requiring drivers to provide proof of lawful presence in the U.S. The department also stated that other non-domiciled CDLs were issued to lawful permanent residents who were eligible for regular CDLs.

Of 150 records reviewed by the FMCSA, two instances were found in which PennDOT issued non-domiciled CDLs with expiration dates that extended beyond the drivers’ lawful presence. The FMCSA uncovered four cases in which the department failed to provide evidence that it required drivers to present lawful residence documents. Lastly, the FMCSA identified two instances in which the department issued a non-domiciled CDL to individuals who were eligible for a regular CDL.

The DOT noted that 12,400 drivers hold an unexpired non-domiciled CLP or CDL issued by Pennsylvania.

The federal department demanded that Pennsylvania take “immediate corrective action” or risk the decertification of its CDL program and losing certain federal-aid highway funds. The corrective action includes an immediate pause on the issuance of all non-domiciled CLPs and CDLs, as well as an internal audit to identify procedural errors. Pennsylvania is also required to identify and void all unexpired non-domiciled CLPs and CDLs that were improperly issued.

RELATED: ICE takes down alleged ‘wanted terrorist’ illegal alien trucker

Josh Shapiro. Photo by Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images

Failure to comply may lead to the DOT withholding $75,500,000 in funding for fiscal year 2027.

Thursday’s warning is part of the DOT’s greater effort to crack down on road safety and national security concerns related to the flood of illegal aliens that joined the trucking industry amid the Biden administration’s open-border crisis. The DOT has already withheld funds from California over similar violations.

RELATED: Newsom’s state ‘caught red-handed’ illegally issuing thousands of commercial driver’s licenses to foreign truckers: DOT

Akhror Bozorov. Image source: Department of Homeland Security

“Under President Trump, this department is taking every measure to ensure dangerous foreign drivers aren’t illegally operating 40-ton vehicles on American roads,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stated. “Joe Biden allowed tens of millions of illegals to pour into our country through open borders, including a suspected terrorist who Pennsylvania then allowed to get behind the wheel of a semitruck. I will continue to fight to get these dangerous drivers off our roads to protect American families and support our national security.”

Duffy’s statement presumably referred to Akhror Bozorov, a 31-year-old truck driver from Uzbekistan who was recently arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency stated that Bozorov was accused of belonging to a terrorist organization. He was issued a non-domiciled CDL with REAL ID by Pennsylvania.

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

​News, Pennsylvania, Department of transportation, Transportation department, Dot, Sean duffy, Cdls, Cdl, Commercial driver’s licenses, Commercial driver’s license, American trucking industry, Trucking industry, Illegal immigration crisis, Illegal immigration, Immigration crisis, Immigration, Politics 

A woman found with hateful political messages written on her body with gruesome injuries was not a victim of a heinous attack, but she plotted the hoax herself, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

Twenty-six-year-old Natalie Greene was found bound up with zip ties with numerous slashes and “Trump whore” written on her stomach on the night of July 23, according to a press release. The Rutgers student was working for Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey at the time.

They also obtained a photograph of the design for the body modification that Greene requested from the scarification artist. They matched the wounds photographed by an officer.

Greene allegedly told investigators that she and a friend were attacked by three armed men on a trail at the Egg Harbor Township Nature Reserve in New Jersey.

When police arrived, they found her yelling, “He has a gun! He has a gun!” and crying loudly.

She was also found with the message “Van Drew is a racist” written in marker on her body.

Greene was transported to a hospital for treatment, where officers took photographs that were included in the criminal complaint.

Investigators grew suspicious when Greene’s friend appeared agitated when asked to provide keys to the car they drove to the nature reserve, a Maserati sport utility vehicle. After gaining access to the car, they found black zip ties as well as duct tape inside.

RELATED: Dem who blamed Trump for ‘Hinduphobic’ messages has been arrested for alleged race hoax

Image source: U.S. Dept. of Justice press release screenshot composite

Police then obtained cellphone data from the pair and saw that Greene had driven to the studio of a “scarification artist” in Pennsylvania just before the reported assault.

After obtaining data from their phones, investigators saw that someone had googled “zip ties near me” from her friend’s phone as well. They were able to garner evidence that she purchased the zip ties on the day of the alleged attack at a Dollar General store.

Investigators said they obtained evidence from the scarification studio that showed Greene paid $500 for body modifications just hours before the alleged attack. The studio requires clients to provide identification and sign a consent form prior to services performed.

They also obtained a photograph of the design for the body modification that Greene requested from the scarification artist. They matched the wounds photographed by an officer.

Drew’s office released a statement about Greene to the New Jersey Globe.

“While Natalie is no longer associated with the congressman’s government office, our thoughts and prayers are with her and hope she’s getting the care she needs,” the statement read.

RELATED: Activists blame Trump for ‘kidnapping’ of mom for deportation — feds say it was a hoax

Image source: U.S. Dept. of Justice press release screenshot

Greene was charged with conspiracy to convey false statements and hoaxes and making false statements to federal law enforcement. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison as well as a fine of $250,000 and three years of supervised release.

She was released on a $200,000 unsecured bond after her arraignment on Wednesday.

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

​Natalie greene, Political hate crime hoax, Rep jeff van drew, Republican hoax, Politics 

Over 50,000 climate alarmists from across the globe climbed aboard fuel-guzzling planes, boats, and automobiles and traveled to Belém, Brazil, this month to attend the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

On the second-last day of anti-American diatribes and globalist pearl-clutching over the supposed crisis that Bill Gates recently admitted “will not lead to humanity’s demise,” the conference went up in smoke, at least partly.

‘The world is watching Belem.’

Footage circulating online shows a hectic scene: of flames erupting in the pavilion area of the Hangar Convention and Fair Center of the Amazon, where nations and various NGOs had set up their public-facing stands; of security guards blowing whistles and shooing panicked delegates and observers away; and of some individuals attempting to extinguish the growing inferno as it ate a hole in the roof.

One person in the office of the summit presidency confirmed that the blaze had been contained within about 30 minutes, the New York Times noted.

“Firefighters and security teams responded promptly and continue to monitor the site,” Cop30 organizers said in a statement obtained by Le Monde.

It’s presently unclear what started the fire. No injuries have been reported.

RELATED: Bill Gates does stunning about-face on climate ‘doomsday’ claims: ‘This view is wrong’

Photo by PABLO PORCIUNCULA/AFP via Getty Images

The fire proved to be the latest of several issues affecting the conference.

For instance, torrential rainfall at the outset of the conference flooded the entrances to the venue and left certain meeting areas soaked. There were reportedly also complaints of non-functional restrooms and oppressive heat.

In addition to complaining about “inadequate air-conditioning in venue areas” and the “poor condition of the delegation offices provided,” Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, whined in a Nov. 12 letter to Andre Correa do Lago, the president of COP30, that the conference’s security was substandard. According to Stiell, hundreds of protesters had damaged property and injured staffers.

COP30 was embroiled in scandal even before it began as the result of the local government’s decision to cut a four-lane highway through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest to ensure that COP30’s participants would enjoy easy motorized transit in and out of the hosting city.

Hours before the fire began, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged negotiators to reach an “ambitious compromise” on an anti-fossil-fuel agenda, stating, “The world is watching Belem.”

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

​Cop30, United nations, Climate, Climate alarmism, Climate change, Fossil fuels, Brazil, Third world, Bill gates, Belem, Cop 30, United nations climate change conference., Politics 

Netflix’s thriller “A House of Dynamite” very much wants to teach us something about the folly of waging war with civilization-ending weapons. The lesson it ends up imparting, however, has more to do with the state of contemporary storytelling.

The film revolves around a high-stakes crisis: an unexpected nuclear missile launched from an unspecified enemy and aimed directly at Big City USA. We get to see America’s defense apparatus deal with impending apocalypse in real time.

It seems the best Ms. Bigelow, Mr. Oppenheim, and the team at Netflix can offer up is a lukewarm ‘nukes are bad, mmkay?’

Triple threat

“Revolves” is the operative word here. The movie tells the same story three times from three different vantage points — each in its own 40-minute segment. From first detection to the final seconds before detonation, we watch a bevy of government elites on one interminable red-alert FaceTime, working out how to respond to the strike.

This is the aptly named screenwriter Noah Oppenheim’s second disaster outing for the streamer; he recently co-created miniseries “Zero Day,” which features Robert De Niro investigating a nationwide cyberattack.

That series unspooled a complicated and convoluted conspiracy in the vein of “24.” “A House of Dynamite” clearly aims for something more grounded, which would seem to make accomplished Kathryn Bigelow perfect for the job.

And for the film’s first half-hour she delivers, embedding the viewer with the military officers, government officials, and regular working stiffs for whom being the last line of America’s defense is just another day at the office … until suddenly it isn’t. The dawning horror of their situation is as gripping as anything in “The Hurt Locker” or “Zero Dark Thirty.”

Then it happens two more times.

On repeat

In Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” Duke Orsino laments a repetitive song growing stale: “Naught enters there of what validity and pitch soe’er, but falls into abatement and low price.”

Or put another way, the tune, not realizing its simple beauty, sings itself straight into worthlessness.

And somehow, this manages to be only part of what makes “A House of Dynamite” so unappealing. Our main characters — including head of the White House Situation Room (Rebecca Ferguson), general in charge of the United States Northern Command (Tracy Letts), and the secretary of defense (Jared Harris) — offer no semblance of perspicacity, stopping frequently to take others’ feelings into account before making decisions, all while an ICBM races toward Chicago. From liftoff to impact in 16 minutes or less, or your order free.

Missile defensive

So thorough is this picture of incompetence that the Pentagon felt compelled to issue an internal memo preparing Missile Defense Agency staff to “address false assumptions” about defense capability.

One can hardly blame officials when, in the twilight of the film, we’re shown yet another big-screen Obama facsimile (played by British actor Idris Elba) putting his cadre of sweating advisers on hold to ring Michelle, looking for advice on whether his course of action should be to nuke the whole planet or do nothing. The connection drops — she is in Africa, after all, and her safari-chic philanthropy outfit doesn’t make the satellite signal any stronger. He puts the phone down and continues to look over his black book of options ranging “from rare to well done,” as his nuclear briefcase handler puts it.

And then the movie ends. The repetitive storylines have no resolution, and their participants face no consequences. The single ground missile the U.S. arsenal managed to muster up — between montages of sergeants falling to their knees at the thought of having to do their job — has missed its target.

Designated survivors — with the exception of one high-ranking official who finds suicide preferable — rush to their bunkers. The screen fades to black, over a melancholy overture. Is it any wonder that audiences felt cheated? After sitting through nearly two hours of dithering bureaucrats wasting time, their own time had been wasted by a director who clearly thinks endings are passé.

No ending for you

If you find yourself among the unsatisfied, Bigelow has some words for you. In an interview with Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, she justified her film’s lack of a payoff thusly:

I felt like the fact that the bomb didn’t go off was an opportunity to start a conversation. With an explosion at the end, it would have been kind of all wrapped up neat, and you could point your finger [and say] “it’s bad that happened.” But it would sort of absolve us, the human race, of responsibility. And in fact, no, we are responsible for having created these weapons and — in a perfect world — getting rid of them.

Holy Kamala word salad.

RELATED: Phones and drones expose the cracks in America’s defenses

Photo by dikushin via Getty Images

Bigelow-er

For much of her career, director Kathryn Bigelow has told real stories in interesting ways that — while not always being the full truth and nothing but the truth — were entertaining, well shot, and depicted Americans fulfilling their manifest destiny of being awesome.

That changed with Bigelow’s last film, 2017’s “Detroit,” a progressive, self-flagellating depiction of the 1967 Detroit race riots (final tally: 43 deaths, 1,189 injured) through the eyes of some mostly peaceful black teens and the devil-spawn deputy cop who torments them. “A House of Dynamite” continues this project of national critique.

But what, exactly, is the point? It seems the best Ms. Bigelow, Mr. Oppenheim, and the team at Netflix can offer up is a lukewarm “nukes are bad, mmkay?” This is a lecture on warfare with the subtlety of a John Lennon song, set in a world where the fragile men in charge must seek out the strong embrace of their nearest girlboss.

It’s no secret that 2025 carries a distinct “end times” energy — a year thick with existential threats. AI run amok, political fracture edging toward civil conflict, nuclear brinkmanship, even the occasional UFO headline — pick your poison. And it’s equally obvious that the internet, not the cinema, has become the primary arena where Americans now go to see those anxieties mirrored back at them.

“A House of Dynamite” is unlikely to reverse this trend. If this is the best Hollywood’s elite can come up with after gazing into the void, it’s time to move the movie industry to DEFCON 1.

​A house of dynamite, Entertainment, Culture, Netflix, Movies, Kathryn bigelow, Nuclear war, Review 

The Trump administration has unveiled a broad action plan for AI (America’s AI Action Plan). The general vibe is one of treating AI like a business, aiming to sell the AI stack worldwide and generate a lock-in for American technology. “Winning,” in this context, is primarily economic. The plan also includes the sorely needed idea of modernizing the electrical grid, a growing concern due to rising electricity demands from data centers. While any extra business is welcome in a heavily indebted nation, the section on the political objectivity of AI is both too brief and misunderstands the root cause of political bias in AI and its role in the culture war.

The plan uses the term “objective” and implies that a lack of objectivity is entirely the fault of the developer, for example:

Update Federal procurement guidelines to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model (LLM) developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.

The fear that AIs might tip the scales of the culture war away from traditional values and toward leftism is real. Try asking ChatGPT, Claude, or even DeepSeek about climate change, where COVID came from, or USAID.

Training data is heavily skewed toward being generated during the ‘woke tyranny’ era of the internet.

This desire for objectivity of AI may come from a good place, but it fundamentally misconstrues how AIs are built. AI in general and LLMs in particular are a combination of data and algorithms, which further break down into network architecture and training methods. Network architecture is frequently based on stacking transformer or attention layers, though it can be modified with concepts like “mixture of experts.” Training methods are varied and include pre-training, data cleaning, weight initialization, tokenization, and techniques for altering the learning rate. They also include post-training methods, where the base model is modified to conform to a metric other than the accuracy of predicting the next token.

Many have complained that post-training methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback introduce political bias into models at the cost of accuracy, causing them to avoid controversial topics or spout opinions approved by the companies — opinions usually farther to the left than those of the average user. “Jailbreaking” models to avoid such restrictions was once a common pastime, but it is becoming harder, as corporate safety measures, sometimes as complex as entirely new models, scan both the input to and output from the underlying base model.

As a result of this battle between RLHF and jailbreakers, an idea has emerged that these post-training methods and safety features are how liberal bias gets into the models. The belief is that if we simply removed these, the models would display their true objective nature. Unfortunately for both the Trump administration and the future of America, this is only partially correct. Developers can indeed make a model less objective and more biased in a leftward direction under the guise of safety. However, it is very hard to make models that are more objective.

The problem is data

According to Google AI Mode vs. Traditional Search & Other LLMs, the top domains cited in LLMs are: Reddit (40%), YouTube (26%), Wikipedia (23%), Google (23%), Yelp (21%), Facebook (20%), and Amazon (19%).

This seems to imply a lot of the outside-fact data in AIs comes from Reddit. Spending trillions of dollars to create an “eternal Redditor” isn’t going to cure cancer. At best, it might create a “cure cancer cheerleader” who hypes up every advance and forgets about it two weeks later. One can only do so much in the algorithm layer to counteract the frame of mind of the average Redditor. In this sense, the political slant of LLMs is less due to the biases of developers and corporations (although they do exist) and more due to the biases of the training data, which is heavily skewed toward being generated during the “woke tyranny” era of the internet.

In this way, the AI bias problem is not about removing bias to reveal a magic objective base layer. Rather, it is about creating a human-generated and curated set of true facts that can then be used by LLMs. Using legislation to remove the methods by which left-leaning developers push AIs into their political corner is a great idea, but it is far from sufficient. Getting humans to generate truthful data is extremely important.

The pipeline to create truthful data likely needs at least four steps.

1. Raw data generation of detailed tables and statistics (usually done by agencies or large enterprises).

2. Mathematically informed analysis of this data (usually done by scientists).

3. Distillation of scientific studies for educated non-experts (in theory done by journalists, but in practice rarely done at all).

4. Social distribution via either permanent (wiki) or temporary (X) channels.

This problem of truthful data plus commentary for AI training is a government, philanthropic, and business problem.

RELATED: Threads is now bigger than X, and that’s terrible for free speech

Photo by Lionel BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images

I can imagine an idealized scenario in which all these problems are solved by harmonious action in all three directions. The government can help the first portion by forcing agencies to be more transparent with their data, putting it into both human-readable and computer-friendly formats. That means more CSVs, plain text, and hyperlinks and fewer citations, PDFs, and fancy graphics with hard-to-find data. FBI crime statistics, immigration statistics, breakdowns of government spending, the outputs of government-conducted research, minute-by-minute election data, and GDP statistics are fundamentally pillars of truth and are almost always politically helpful to the broader right.

In an ideal world, the distillation of raw data into causal models would be done by a team of highly paid scientists via a nonprofit or a government contract. This work is too complex to be left to the crowd, and its benefits are too distributed to be easily captured by the market.

The journalistic portion of combining papers into an elite consensus could be done similarly to today: with high-quality, subscription-based magazines. While such businesses can be profitable, for this content to integrate with AI, the AI companies themselves need to properly license the data and share revenue.

The last step seems to be mostly working today, as it would be done by influencers paid via ad revenue shares or similar engagement-based metrics. Creating permanent, rather than disappearing, data (à la Wikipedia) is a time-intensive and thankless task that will likely need paid editors in the future to keep the quality bar high.

Freedom doesn’t always boost truth

However, we do not live in an ideal world. The epistemic landscape has vastly improved since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. At the very least, truth-seeking accounts don’t have to deal with as much arbitrary censorship. Even other media have made token statements claiming they will censor less, even as some AI “safety” features are ramped up to a much higher setting than social media censorship ever was.

The challenge with X and other media is that tech companies generally favor technocratic solutions over direct payment for pro-social content. There seems to be a widespread belief in a marketplace of ideas: the idea that without censorship (or with only some person’s favorite censorship), truthful ideas will win over false ones. This likely contains an element of truth, but the peculiarities of each algorithm may favor only certain types of truthful content.

“X is the new media” is a commonly spoken refrain. Yet both anonymous and public accounts on X are implicitly burdened with tasks as varied and complex as gathering election data, creating long think pieces, and the consistent repetition of slogans reinforcing a key message. All for a chance of a few Elon bucks. They are doing this while competing with stolen-valor thirst traps from overseas accounts. Obviously, most are not that motivated and stick to pithy and simple content rather than intellectually grounded think pieces. The broader “right” is still needlessly ceding intellectual and data-creation ground to the left, despite occasional victories in defunding anti-civilizational NGOs and taking control of key platforms.

The other issue experienced by data creators across the political spectrum is the reliance on unpaid volunteers. As the economic belt inevitably tightens and productive people have less spare time, the supply of quality free data will worsen. It will also worsen as both platforms and users feel rightful indignation at their data being “stolen” by AI companies making huge profits, thus moving content into gatekept platforms like Discord. While X is unlikely to go back to the “left,” its quality can certainly fall farther.

Even Redditors and Wikipedia contributors provide fairly complex, if generally biased, data that powers the entire AI ecosystem. Also for free. A community of unpaid volunteers working to spread useful information sounds lovely in principle. However, in addition to the decay in quality, these kinds of “business models” are generally very easy to disrupt with minor infusions of outside money, if it just means paying a full-time person to post. If you are not paying to generate politically powerful content, someone else is always happy to.

The other dream of tech companies is to use AI to “re-create” the entirety of the pipeline. We have heard so much drivel about “solving cancer” and “solving science.” While speeding up human progress by automating simple tasks is certainly going to work and is already working, the dream of full replacement will remain a dream, largely because of “model collapse,” the situation where AIs degrade in quality when they are trained on data generated by themselves. Companies occasionally hype up “no data/zero-knowledge/synthetic data” training, but a big example from 10 years ago, “RL from random play,” which worked for chess and Go, went nowhere in games as complex as Starcraft.

So where does truth come from?

This brings us to the recent example of Grokipedia. Perusing it gives one a sense that we have taken a step in the right direction, with an improved ability to summarize key historical events and medical controversies. However, a number of articles are lifted directly from Wikipedia, which risks drawing the wrong lesson. Grokipedia can’t “replace” Wikipedia in the long term because Grok’s own summarization is dependent on it.

Like many of Elon Musk’s ventures, Grokipedia is two steps forward, one step back. The forward steps are a customer-facing Wikipedia that seems to be of higher quality and a good example of AI-generated long-form content that is not mere slop, achieved by automating the tedious, formulaic steps of summarization. The backward step is a lack of understanding of what the ecosystem looks like without Wikipedia. Many of Grokipedia’s articles are lifted directly from Wikipedia, suggesting that if Wikipedia disappears, it will be very hard to keep neutral articles properly updated.

Even the current version suffers from a “chicken and egg” source-of-truth problem. If no AI has the real facts about the COVID vaccine and categorically rejects data about its safety or lack thereof, then Grokipedia will not be accurate on this topic unless a fairly highly paid editor researches and writes the true story. As mentioned, model collapse is likely to result from feeding too much of Grokipedia to Grok itself (and other AIs), leading to degradation of quality and truthfulness. Relying on unpaid volunteers to suggest edits creates a very easy vector for paid NGOs to influence the encyclopedia.

The simple conclusion is that to be good training data for future AIs, the next source of truth must be written by people. If we want to scale this process and employ a number of trustworthy researchers, Grokipedia by itself is very unlikely to make money and will probably forever be a money-losing business. It would likely be both a better business and a better source of truth if, instead of being written by AI to be read by people, it was written by people to be read by AI.

Eventually, the domain of truth needs to be carefully managed, curated, and updated by a legitimate organization that, while not technically part of the government, would be endorsed by it. Perhaps a nonprofit NGO — except good and actually helping humanity. The idea of “the Foundation” or “Antiversity,” is not new, but our over-reliance on AI to do the heavy lifting is. Such an institution, or a series of them, would need to be bootstrapped by people willing to invest in our epistemic future for the very long term.

​Trump, Elon musk, Ai, Ai bubble, Tech 

Cracker Barrel has lost one of its board members responsible for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

After a marketing disaster involving a change to its iconic logo and unique in-store designs, the company quickly apologized and reverted back to its original look. It has since looked to regain consumer trust and is finally making moves in its boardroom.

‘Gilbert helped oversee the formation of our strategic plan.’

Now, an independent director and board member who shouldered at least some of the blame for the rebrand is stepping down.

Cracker Barrel announced Gilbert Dávila’s resignation on Thursday morning, following a shareholder vote on the company’s board of directors. Shareholders elected nine of the company’s 10 recommended director nominees, including CEO Julie Masino, who has taken the brunt of the public bashing for the marketing failure.

Cracker Barrel thanked Dávila for being a valued member of the board during his five years.

The company added, “Over that time, Gilbert helped oversee the formation of our strategic plan and led our Compensation Committee with skill and dedication. We are grateful for his many contributions.”

RELATED: Cracker Barrel desperately rewrites ‘inclusion’ and DEI web page after backlash

Just a couple weeks earlier, two of Cracker Barrel’s largest proxy advisory firms, Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, were reportedly pressuring shareholders to drop Dávila over his role in the marketing fiasco that tarnished the company’s public image.

“Dávila is highlighted in board materials as one of two marketing specialists among the independent directors. He is also a member of a standing board committee whose purview is to assess social and political risks to the company’s business,” ISS said, the New York Post reported.

At the same time, the group reportedly said that while removing CEO Masino would create too much chaos, her responsibility for the botched logo “is no less than Dávila’s.”

Both ISS and Glass Lewis agreed, however, that change was sorely needed at the company, adding that Dávila’s marketing expertise was “faulty.”

In a recent interview, Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck pressed Masino and company senior vice president of store operations Doug Hisel about DEI and other woke marketing strategies, demanding to know: “Had the company embraced DEI as a culture?”

“Don’t preach to me on that,” he added, speaking for many consumers tired of political messaging from major corporations.

“I’m here to eat your meal. Can we just not have that thrown in our face?”

RELATED: Exclusive interview TOMORROW: Cracker Barrel CEO answers Glenn Beck’s brutal question — ‘Why weren’t you fired?’

— (@)

Under Dávila’s watch, Cracker Barrel’s diversity-laden marketing initiatives had spiraled out of control, with the company webpage dedicated to values frequently changing.

In fact, Cracker Barrel’s “culture and belonging” page has shifted gears so many times that internet archivists saved dozens of changes over the last two years alone.

The page had previously been labeled “culture and inclusion” and mentioned terms like “unconscious bias,” a form of inadvertent, subliminal racism allegedly exhibited by all.

Back in 2024, the page was called “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging” at Cracker Barrel. It celebrated “Diversity in Our Decor,” “Diversity in Our Leadership & Development,” and even spoke of achievements on the Human Rights Campaign “equality index.”

It additionally included mention of company programs like “Be Bold,” a mission to develop “black leaders”; the “LGBTQ+ Alliance,” which had the purpose of “strengthening Cracker Barrel’s relationship to the LGBTQ+ community”; and “HOLA,” a program to “promote Hispanic and Latino culture through hiring, developing, and retaining talent within Cracker Barrel.”

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

​News, Cracker barrel, Diversity, Dei, Americana, Executives, United states, Politics 

Florida Rep. Cory Mills (R) evaded another censure effort Wednesday night, but not without some heated criticism from a Republican colleague.

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina forced a censure vote on Mills Wednesday over “alleged stolen valor, arms deals he’s under investigation for and alleged abuses toward women.” Mace also went after Mills after a handful of Republicans blocked the censure of Democrat Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, who colluded with Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing.

‘The more we learn about this guy and his purported activities, the worse it is.’

Mace alleged that Plaskett’s censure failed because Mills cut a “backroom deal” to suppress his own censure. Similar allegations were made toward Mills back in September when he was the deciding vote to protect Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s censure for the insensitive comments she made following Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

“Another backroom deal so Cory Mills can’t get censored [sic] for Stolen Valor,” Mace said in a post on X. “I have the General who ‘recommended’ him for the Bronze Star on record saying he never wrote it, never read it and never personally signed it. This. Is. Washington.”

RELATED: ‘Backroom deal’: Nancy Mace to force a vote on Cory Mills after Republicans shield Epstein-texting Democrat

hoto by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

The two Republicans reportedly had a heated exchange on the House floor Wednesday night, with Mace calling Mills a “disgrace” and mouthing the words, “You’re a piece of s**t.”

Mace later addressed these outbursts in a post on X, saying the real scandal is Mills’ track record.

“While Rep. Cory Mills is worried about my ‘mean’ words on the Floor last night — I’m worried about our national security and what sort of arms deals he or his companies have with foreign countries. I’m worried about how court records show he abuses women and had to have a restraining order set against him for it. I’m worried about how stealing the stories of other soldiers constitutes STOLEN VALOR and spits in the faces of veterans who gave it all Hold your tongue and sit this one out Mr. Mills.”

The censure vote ultimately failed 310-103, with 204 Republicans and 106 Democrats defending Mills.

Only eight Republicans — Reps. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Kat Cammack of Florida, Joe Wilson of South Carolina, and Mace — voted to advance the censure measure.

Although the censure failed, Mace still called the effort a win.

RELATED: ‘Swamp protects itself’: Republicans shield Epstein-texting Democrat — allegedly to save Cory Mills’ hide

Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images

“Last night was a win with either outcome of the vote,” Mace said in a post on X. “Now the Left can’t do any more backroom deals with Mills or use Mills as a bargaining chip whenever a Republican moves to censure another. And his investigation has been formally referred to an Ethics Subcommittee.”

“However, I pray leadership will remove Mills from his committees until Ethics is done with Mills. The more we learn about this guy and his purported activities, the worse it is.”

Blaze News reached out to Mills’ office for comment.

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

​Nancy mace, Cory mills, Censure, Backroom deal, Ilhan omar, House republicans, House democrats, Stacey plaskett, Jeffrey epstein, Epstein files, Anna paulina luna, Lauren boebert, Marjorie taylor greene, Harriet hageman, Tim burchett, Kat cammack, Joe wilson, Politics 

Just weeks after the scandal in Celina ISD dropped where a coach was revealed to not only have had a past relationship with a high school student but was also videotaping middle school players in the locker room, another Texas football coach has been accused of abuse.

But he’s not the only one. A myriad of abusers have been exposed in Texas — all who have been tasked with guiding young students.

One woman, a teacher’s aide named Andrea Rodriquez, admitted to an “intimate relationship” with her student at Runge ISD in South Texas. A Mount Pleasant teacher named JaQuaven Rogers, a special education teacher’s aide at Wallace Middle School, has been accused of sex crimes against a student. And a Mesquite Academy teacher has been jailed for possessing child sex abuse material.

And all of this has been uncovered just this November.

Now, Robert Vela High School’s head football coach Ernie Alonzo is being sued by Robert Rocha, the father of an Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District student, after Alonzo ordered Rocha’s son to “perform strenuous physical exercises completely nude.”

According to Rocha, when his son “attempted to preserve any shred of dignity by covering himself with underwear,” Alonzo forced him to remain nude by threatening him.

The coach reportedly sought Rocha’s son out while he was in the shower and forced him out of the shower to perform the exercises for him. Following the act, “The coach secluded himself for unknown and suspicious reasons.”

The lawsuit also alleges that there were multiple victims who Alonzo targeted.

“I know I say this every time,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says on “Come and Take It.” “But I really, I feel like I must hammer home, if this ever was my son, I would be in jail for homicide.”

“Think about the arrogance an adult must have to commit such a crime, like such a gross violation … the arrogance to think this is not going to come out eventually, like a boy isn’t going to understand inherently that his coach pulling him out of the shower and forcing him to exercise in front of him naked and then suspiciously taking a few moments to himself is entirely messed up,” she continues.

And like the Celina ISD case, Alonzo was hired despite having a shady history at another school – McAllen ISD. He was given the job despite his inappropriate behavior because of his “deep ties to the powerful political machine in Edinburg” and “the patronage of a high-level athletics administrator, Oscar Salinas.”

“Just like so many of these cases, the schools are passing the trash to other schools. … They’re allowing these people who they know have a track record of being inappropriate.” Gonzales comments.

“They don’t care. They care about everything except the children. They care about their pay. They care about covering for their own. They care about football. They care about your taxpayer dollars lining their pocketbooks, building new football stadiums,” she continues.

While those involved in the lawsuit have admitted that what Alonzo did was wrong, they’re now claiming “governmental immunity” from being sued.

“You might as well claim governmental immunity for sleeping with your students,” Gonzales scoffs.

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.

​Upload, Sharing, Free, Camera phone, Video, Video phone, Youtube.com, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Sara gonzales, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Celina isd, Ernie alonzo, Robert vela high school, Child abuse, Sexual predators, Oscar salinas 

After more than a month’s delay due to the government shutdown, the government has released a new jobs report from September. The report defied expectations and proved President Trump is getting the economy back on track.

On Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the long-awaited jobs report. The numbers blew many estimates out of the water.

‘This strong report is more proof that President Trump’s pro-growth, America First agenda is already making great progress, and it will continue to deliver positive results for American families and businesses.’

According to data obtained from the BLS, the U.S. added 119,000 jobs in September, marking an increase compared to previous months. The estimate, according to Fox News, was 50,000 new jobs.

RELATED: Trump orders Labor Statistics chief to be fired over revisions in weak jobs report

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“The economy is booming under President Trump! His commitment to bringing jobs back to the United States and putting America First has turned this country around and set us on the right track!” Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters said on X.

Wages are also up 0.2% to $36.67 in September, BLS said. According to the data, hourly earnings have increased 3.8% over the last 12 months.

In a statement obtained by Blaze News, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “The September jobs report more than doubled market expectations — adding 119,000 new jobs to the American economy. In stark contrast to the disastrous Biden economy, almost all of these new jobs were in the private sector and went to American-born workers instead of illegal aliens. Wages for workers are continuing to rise, a reversal of the Biden years where private sector wages declined by about $3,000 because of the Democrats’ inflation crisis.”

“This strong report is more proof that President Trump’s pro-growth, America First agenda is already making great progress, and it will continue to deliver positive results for American families and businesses,” Leavitt added.

Citing the government shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has said that it will not release full data for October. Instead, it will release partial data with the November jobs report, according to ABC News.

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

​Politics, Jobs report, September jobs report, Economy, Karoline leavitt, Bls, Bureau of labor statistics, President trump, Maga