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Congress is considering competing bills to “save college sports” after last year’s landmark name, image, and likeness settlement. The debate often begins with athlete compensation. It should begin with the financial structure that compensation is about to disrupt.

Football and men’s basketball do not merely pay for themselves at major universities. They subsidize nearly everything else.

Football and men’s basketball laid the golden eggs, and nearly everyone else lived on them. That arrangement may be ending.

Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act reports show the scale of those surpluses. In 2025, the last year before the settlement took effect, Michigan reported more than $120 million in combined surplus from football and men’s basketball. Tennessee exceeded $116 million. Notre Dame topped $102 million.

Those schools are not outliers. At least 12 of the Big Ten’s 18 members cleared more than $50 million from the two sports. At least eight of the SEC’s 16 members did the same. Half of the ACC schools reporting usable figures generated more than $17 million.

The pattern extends beyond the largest programs. Football and men’s basketball produced more than $20 million at Boise State and about $6 million at San Diego State.

Even those figures may understate the subsidy. EADA reporting is inconsistent and often opaque. Some universities hide profits and losses across entire athletic departments. Others report revenue from profitable sports while obscuring deficits elsewhere. Yet wherever the figures are complete, the same structure appears.

Football and men’s basketball generate cash. Nearly every other sport consumes it.

At the 12 Big Ten schools with complete women’s sports data, the average deficit approached $20 million. Nine SEC women’s programs reported deficits above $27 million. The seven ACC schools with complete figures averaged shortfalls greater than $11 million.

Success on the field rarely changes the arithmetic. Nebraska and Wisconsin built elite volleyball programs, yet each lost well over $1 million in 2025. Purdue volleyball and women’s basketball were rare Big Ten programs to report profits above $4 million. Duke volleyball posted only a small surplus in the ACC. South Carolina’s national champion women’s basketball program ran a deficit exceeding $5 million.

RELATED: Texas AG Ken Paxton threatens Big 12 over possible Texas Tech boycott

Antranik Tavitian/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Men’s nonrevenue sports also lose money, though generally less. At the Big Ten schools with complete reports, those programs averaged roughly $10 million in losses. The SEC average was about $11 million. Wisconsin men’s hockey lost $1.3 million; the national champion women’s team lost nearly $3 million.

The disparity is not an argument against women’s or Olympic sports. It explains how those sports have survived at their current scale.

Ticket sales, television contracts, and donations tied to football and men’s basketball have long financed teams that cannot cover their own costs. The surplus from the two commercial sports has sustained the breadth of the modern athletic department.

The NIL settlement is redirecting that surplus.

Schools may now share revenue directly with athletes under a cap, while collectives and boosters can make additional uncapped payments. Early evidence suggests that most capped money is flowing to the athletes who generate it.

Texas Tech spent 74% of its cap on football and 17.5% on men’s basketball. North Carolina State spent more than 85% on those two sports. North Carolina spent nearly 98%.

The logic is obvious. Schools competing for quarterbacks, pass rushers, and starting guards will direct money toward the players who determine wins, television audiences, and donor enthusiasm. Every dollar paid to those athletes is a dollar no longer available to subsidize programs that run permanent deficits.

The uncapped side payments create a second pressure. Donors who once gave to athletic departments — where their money could support the entire portfolio of teams — may instead direct funds to outside collectives focused on recruiting and retaining football and basketball players.

The same revenue engines are therefore being tapped twice: once through direct school payments and again through donor-backed NIL deals.

RELATED: Women’s sports finally got a reality check

Oliver Contreras/AFP/Getty Images

President Trump’s executive order on college athletics recognizes the danger. It warns that the new financial pressures could jeopardize women’s and Olympic sports and seeks greater discipline in the post-settlement system.

Whether the order or any pending bill can preserve the old model remains an open question. Congress cannot legislate away basic economics.

Athletes in revenue sports now have a stronger claim on the money they generate. Schools still want to maintain dozens of teams that do not generate enough revenue to sustain themselves. The same dollars cannot fully satisfy both demands.

For decades, college athletics concealed this trade-off behind the language of one unified department. The financial reports tell a simpler story: Football and men’s basketball laid the golden eggs, and nearly everyone else lived on them.

That arrangement may be ending. Congress should understand what it is trying to save before promising that every program can survive unchanged.

​Big ten, College sports, Sec, Womens sports, Revenue sharing, College football, Texas tech, Michigan, Opinion & analysis 

In normal times, the odds are close to zero that you or I would read anything by the kind of person who writes papers with titles such as “Edge Inversions in (Pₖ)-closed Groups.” These are not normal times, and mathematician Kirwin Hampshire now finds himself in an extraordinarily abnormal position.

In a harrowing Substack confession, Hampshire does not merely say that artificial intelligence is coming for his job. He says it is coming for his life — so forcefully that he already feels himself entering a kind of death throes.

Technology continues raising the spiritual stakes.

Not physical death, not yet. He says he is not suicidal. But he has been “screaming internally for days.”

Hampshire begins his apocalyptic declaration flatly: “I am going insane.” Frontier AI models, he says, have solved enough long-standing mathematical problems and conjectures that the meaning of his life’s work has begun to collapse.

“I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments,” he writes.

“It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare.”

Hyperbole? Perhaps. But Hampshire’s colleagues offer him a consolation that is almost worse than despair: Even if large language models advance mathematics more effectively than human beings ever could, mathematicians can continue doing what they have always done.

They can continue, in other words, without consequence.

They would become exhibits in a Museum of Human Accomplishments — animatronic figures carrying on a lifelike pantomime while the real movers of the world operate elsewhere.

The language, and the bone-rattling recognition behind it, will sound familiar to readers of Michel Houellebecq. His characters often inhabit a Europe that has already expired, leaving them little to do but submit to a brief terminal subservience and hope death arrives quickly.

Americans tend to dismiss such people as pessimists. But Houellebecq has spent more than 25 years showing that merciless positivity can become a fatal conceit.

The deeper catastrophe is not that millions of people think too negatively. It is that spiritual relationship and spiritual experience have steadily receded from their lives. The sea of the soulful is withdrawing from beaches where secular logic and ideology have stranded them.

In “Platform,” the protagonist cannot continue after losing, amid the degradations of sex tourism, his last access to love. In “Serotonin,” another man fights a futile pharmaceutical battle against depression until the drugs reduce him to almost nothing.

Houellebecq’s desperate refrain is easy to miss: Do you not see the apocalypse of a civilization dying from heartsickness and soulsickness — an illness it then exports around the world?

RELATED: Will America need a Caesar?

Chudakov2/Getty Images

Technological pessimists answer that machines can never replace other human beings in affairs of the heart and soul. Yet some of the most exuberant technological optimists inadvertently expose the hollowness of the pessimists’ own account of what makes a human life not merely worth living, but justifiable.

The hyper-optimists place above human relationship an encounter with the divine — or something that resembles it.

What are ordinary feelings, cares, and sorrows, they ask, when just around the corner lies the prospect of transcendent communion with a godlike superintelligence capable of carrying human consciousness across the universe?

Christian saints and ordinary believers have long insisted that personal relationships, however precious, cannot by themselves cure the heartsick and soulsick experience of separation from God.

Hampshire’s anguish therefore requires terms that narrow his audience beyond both secular techno-optimists and secular techno-pessimists.

He accuses his colleagues of evading what is truly at stake: “Something about mathematical discovery … is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.”

Against that experience, Hampshire senses something close to satanic oppression.

“I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself,” he writes. “Am I alone in this paranoia? If we loosed a powerful demon in the machine, what would that look like? Would it consume lots of power, and gleefully imitate us, and tell us anything we wanted to hear? Would it fuel our delusions, and generate unspeakable images and give us (for a price of course) anything we desired? If a mathematician made a deal with the devil, what do you think they would ask for?”

The hyper-optimist might answer that ours has always been a plane of sorrows and that technology may soon grant us an exit.

The Christian offers a harder answer: However much satisfaction we take in exercising our gifts, those gifts will do us little good if they serve a master other than Christ.

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

Moor Studio/Getty Images

In that sense, the humanist may be the one living on borrowed time.

Hampshire’s pain should give us pause. Yet he places great weight on mathematics’ “Talmudic” quality — a “lively discourse of philosophical and religious richness spanning thousands of years” — while seeming unwilling, at least for now, to move from spiritual terror toward more explicitly salvific ground.

Technology, meanwhile, continues raising the spiritual stakes.

Secular pessimists and optimists alike may find it bizarre to conclude that those most devoted to God should be our most trustworthy guides in wielding tools that would inspire the envy of Zeus and Mephistopheles.

But a world sliding into a love apocalypse worse than anything our machines may do is running out of other answers.

​Ai, Christians, Demons, Mathematical discovery, Mathematical problems, Mathematicians, Mathematics, Saints, Spiritual crisis, Technological optimists, Opinion & analysis 

Wisconsin Democratic candidate for governor Francesca Hong campaigned in Milwaukee alongside two of the most controversial left-wing figures possible: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and political commentator Hasan Piker.

The pair appeared at a rally at South Milwaukee High School to endorse Hong, who is a Democratic Socialists of America member with a long history of anti-Israel activism.

When Piker was introduced, he told the people of Milwaukee that “Wisconsin is the heart of the historic American socialist movement.”

“He’s right partly about history, maybe more right than he knows,” Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck says, pointing out that Piker received a standing ovation.

“And then you have the woman standing next to him. She’s the one who described the murder of 3,000 Americans as ‘some people did something.’ Oh, OK. Well, yeah, they flew planes into buildings,” he adds.

When a reporter asked Hong whether campaigning with Piker and Omar was a risk, she said, “What would be a risk is to not build the broadest coalition possible.”

“Coalition is the oldest word in the story, and Wisconsin really invented it,” Glenn says, noting that in 1910, Emil Seidel was elected mayor of Milwaukee.

“He was mayor, the first socialist mayor to run in a major American city. Same city that sent the first socialist to Congress that same year. And they kept electing socialist mayors on and off for the next 50 years,” he explains, adding that these socialists were known as “sewer socialists” because they campaigned on sewers, garbage collection, water, milk inspection, paving, and municipal housekeeping.

However, they wanted more than sewers. Like Piker, who in that gymnasium “didn’t talk about sewers.”

And neither did Hong.

“She said yes to state-run grocery stores. Yes to cracking down on tech. Yes to freeing Palestine. Yes to a statue of Scott Walker built for the express purpose of letting people tear it down. That’s all more than sewers,” Glenn says.

And just a week ago, the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America went on Fox and called for the abolition of the Senate, the replacement of the presidency and Supreme Court, the abolition of ICE, open borders, the defunding of the Pentagon, open prisons, and putting large corporations under public ownership.

“Nobody had to leak that. Nobody hacked anything. She said it out loud on a Sunday show. And the plumber on your porch is still talking about your groceries bill. That is the way socialists work,” Glenn explains.

“If somebody is just talking about the sewers, that probably is a good thing. But you must then see who’s standing around them,” he continues.

“They’re in their own party, and they’re talking about it openly. They’re proud of it,” he adds.

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​Democratic candidate, Democratic socialists of america, Francesca hong, Glenn beck, Hasan piker, Ilhan omar, Milwaukee, Open borders, Wisconsin, Blazetv show 

The future of commerce is not some complex algorithm; it’s essentially the same as it has been since the 1980s.

That’s the gambit of a hugely successful new company putting up numbers that rival tech’s biggest.

Its latest valuation is a monstrous $20 billion, which is already a huge leap from its October 2025 numbers. The company has nearly doubled its valuation in those 10 months, up from $11.5 billion which secured an investment of $225 million.

That $11.5 billion valuation came less than a year after the company raised $265 million in January 2025 off of a $4.97 billion valuation.

This all means that the commerce app has quadrupled its value in about 18 months, something very rarely seen in its sector.

And that has the industry buzzing.

‘We only exist to the extent that we provide our customers a lot of value.’

Meet Whatnot. It’s based on an incredibly simple idea. Picture a cable channel with a 1-800 number, but it’s a livestream on your smartphone or computer.

That simple difference is what sets the livestream auction app apart from that staple of late-20th-century television, the home shopping channel. The buy-from-home TV programs exploded into popularity with the introduction of the Home Shopping Network back in 1982.

Whatnot has sellers present their items just as they did on TV back in the day, urging viewers of the livestream to buy before the time runs out.

As the Next Web puts it: “The urgency of a live sale, the countdown, the banter, the scarcity, does work that a static product page never could.”

RELATED: Dumpster-diving women claim they make $5,000 per month off discarded Louis Vuitton wallets and Michael Kors bags

Whatnot co-founder and CEO Grant LaFontaine. Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Fast Company

The Next Web reported that the company handled about $8 billion worth of livestream sales over the past year in North America and Europe alone, which helps justify its massive valuation to backers, markets, and industry insiders.

Looking at the backers, perhaps it should have been obvious Whatnot would enjoy a big upward trend: Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Google’s CapitalG are all involved.

Those investment firms are strongly associated with the venture capital scene, and indeed the only other companies making the same kinds of leaps in valuation as Whatnot are in the tech space. Companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, Nvidia, Tesla, and ByteDance are some of the comparable valuations in recent history, some of which far exceed a 4x jump.

The spike is largely driven by Whatnot’s rampant consumer base, which logs an insane amount of time on the app.

RELATED: BRONCO BUSTED: I caught Ford sneaking my data — and uncovered an even bigger threat

Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for ReedPop

Co-founder and CEO Grant LaFontaine wrote in 2024 that buyers spent more than 80 minutes per day on the app that year.

Grant previously worked in product roles at YouTube and Facebook and co-founded Kit, a merchandising company that was acquired by Patreon in 2024.

LaFontaine said in May that success comes down to being willing to put in hard work while also being willing to be wrong.

“We only exist to the extent that we provide our customers a lot of value,” he told Fast Company.

“If you want to build a customer-centered culture,” the CEO added, “you have to actually follow through on building one and inject it everywhere you possibly can in the organization.”

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​App, Whatnot, Valuation, Shopping, Big tech 

A child sex sting operation in a Minnesota suburb of Minneapolis led to the arrest of two dozen men who allegedly sought to pay for sex with children.

Even more alarmingly, the Blaine Police Department said Friday in a Facebook post that nearly 400 people responded to the online advertisement they had set up in the operation.

‘These operations are a critical tool used by law enforcement agencies nationwide to stop crimes against children.’

Police said the two-day operation was intended to protect minors from “exploitation” and targeted those seeking to “engage in illegal activity involving underage youth.”

The 24 arrested allegedly “offered to pay for illegal sexual conduct with a person they believed to be a juvenile.”

They were booked into the Anoka County Jail on suspicion of prostitution.

Police said at least one person arrested was already a registered sex offender and others were repeat offenders.

“Everyone arrested will appear in court, where release conditions will be determined,” police said.

A total of 368 people responded to the advertisement in the online sting.

“These operations are a critical tool used by law enforcement agencies nationwide to stop crimes against children and deter violent or harmful behavior directed at youth,” police said.

RELATED: Middle school assistant principal allegedly tried to pay for sex with 13-year-old — but it was a sting operation

Blaine Police were aided in the operation by nine law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

Blaine is a city of about 70,000 residents.

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​Minneapolis, Child sex sting operation, Online predators, Crime 

Climate change policy might be due for a change itself.

Seventeen state financial officers have signed on to a letter urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to scrap Biden-era climate-related disclosure rules. The rules would require publicly traded companies to undertake costly environmental reviews to report their greenhouse gas emissions and other climate change metrics.

‘Americans want the SEC focused on protecting markets and investors, not turning our capital markets into a vehicle for climate activism.’

Responsible for managing billions of public dollars, the signatories argue that climate disclosure standards are an “unlawful expansion of the administrative state” poised to hamper private sector economic growth. Those standards are also referred to as the “Final Rules.”

“As stewards of public pension and treasury assets, we are acutely sensitive to costs borne by the companies in which public funds invest — costs ultimately passed to shareholders, including the beneficiaries we serve,” the signatories wrote. “The Commission’s own economic analysis estimates that rescinding the Final Rules could generate annualized savings of approximately $4.9 billion, and a total cost savings on the order of $7.9 billion.”

The SEC adopted the climate disclosure rules in March 2024. Opponents launched numerous legal challenges which were consolidated in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The agency itself stayed the rules in April 2024 awaiting legal resolution, but President Donald Trump’s election resulted in the stay becoming permanent. The SEC under Acting Chairman Mark Uyeda declined to defend the rule in March 2025.

Though never enforced, the rules remain on the books.

RELATED: Texas slams breaks on data center projects as Abbott orders sweeping industry audit

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The rules wouldn’t just be expensive to implement. They might also be illegal to enforce.

“The Trump SEC is right to rescind the climate disclosure rule and refocus the agency on its fundamental responsibility of protecting investors and maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets,” Utah Treasurer Marlo Oaks told Blaze News. “For years, the ESG movement sought to use the SEC to advance a climate agenda through disclosure mandates that went beyond material financial information and imposed unnecessary costs on businesses and investors. Rescinding this rule returns the SEC to its proper role as a neutral financial regulator focused on protecting investors and facilitating markets.”

Environmental, social, and governance standards are investment criteria used to assess a private company’s adherence to climate mandates and emissions regulations.

The SEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If successful, the rescission would be the latest in a long string of regulatory rollbacks during Trump’s second term. The Environmental Protection Agency under Lee Zeldin nixed the Obama-era endangerment finding in February.

As the law of the land since 2009, the ruling categorized carbon emissions as pollutants under the Clean Air Act and subjected them to federal regulation.

“The financial officers are right to support the Trump Administration’s efforts to rescind the Biden-era climate disclosure rules,” American Energy Institute CEO Jason Isaac told Blaze News. “Washington bureaucrats shouldn’t be weaponizing financial regulations to pressure companies into advancing far-left ESG policies that Congress never approved.”

“Americans want the SEC focused on protecting markets and investors, not turning our capital markets into a vehicle for climate activism,” Isaac added.

The letter was submitted ahead of the August 3 comment deadline regarding the rule’s potential rescission.

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​Donald trump, Environmental protection agency, Joe biden, Lee zeldin, Securities and exchange commission, Politics 

Fauci thought we would forget; now he’s desperately trying to rewrite history.

The infectious disease “expert” has shifted his story on gain-of-function research and the lab leak theory — but longtime Democrat Bill Maher isn’t letting him off the hook.

“He was caught in actual lies,” Maher said. “He was telling people — and the big issue to me is the origin of this, which is very important. How did it start? And he was telling people up front when it first began, ‘It was from the wet markets. That’s a conspiracy theory if you say it escaped from the lab.’”

Maher pointed out that the release of Fauci’s diary by Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has proven that he “knew better,” and he blames not only Fauci but the extremely partisan split on how to handle the pandemic.

“If we weren’t so partisan, we could just say gain-of-function research,” he said. “Obama told him not to do it. I would always have said don’t do it. But it’s a viable debate. It’s a reasonable debate. Should we soup up something that’s bad, this bacteria, to study it?”

“We could have had that debate in a rational way,” he continued. “We didn’t want to do that because why? Because we make everything about race.”

Maher recalled that during the pandemic, no one was allowed to say it “escaped from the lab because that was the racist point of view” and would mean “the entire Asian continent would have been somehow complicit in this because it escaped.”

“It was ridiculous, but that is where they went,” he added.

“Welcome to reality. Seriously, welcome to some common sense,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray comments on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”

“He’s starting to see the Democrat Party for what it is,” he adds.

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​Anthony fauci, Bill maher, Conspiracy theory, Democrat party, Lab leak theory, Pandemic, Race, Wet markets, Pat gray, Rand paul, Blazetv show 

A Democratic congressional candidate in Hawaii was caught on a viral video confronting beachgoers before being knocked unconscious by an MMA-trained man after allegedly threatening to put a woman in the hospital.

The Maui Police Department stated that the confrontation took place at Keawakapu Beach in South Kihei when a 61-year-old man asked 40-year-old Kirill Basin to lower the volume of his music, Hawaii News Now reported.

‘Watch your f**king mouth.’

“Basin allegedly threatened the man by implying he had a firearm and would shoot the victim’s wife,” according to Hawaii News Now.

Basin is seen on video yelling, “I told him if he wants to go to the hospital, come here!”

Someone is heard saying, “It’s over,” to which Basin temporarily agrees.

However, seconds later Basin screams: “Hey, f**k you! F**k you!”

A man urges Basin to stop, but the Democratic candidate replies: “What are you gonna do?”

Basin then seems to threaten a woman, apparently saying he would “put [her] in the ground.”

A woman calls Basin a “child,” to which he responds: “I’m a child. I’m 40 f**king years old.”

The video, with millions of views online, shows Basin allegedly threatening to put the woman “in the hospital” and then calling her a “bitch.”

A man is seen confronting Basin moments later.

The man, Kama Homan, told Hawaii News Now, “I’m like, maybe I should intervene, and then as I got closer and closer, he was just getting more irate and violent and then saying stuff.”

Homan claimed Basin threatened him by saying, “I’m going to hurt you.”

Video shows the two men getting into a physical altercation and Basin swinging a chair at Homan, who then quickly countered by punching Basin.

“He put his hands on me, and as soon as he tried to shove me, I hit him with a left and a right, and that’s when he stumbled and fell over the chairs,” Homan explained.

Basin appears to lose consciousness after falling backward following the punch.

Homan is seen telling Basin to “wake up.”

“Watch your f**king mouth, haole boy,” Homan tells Basin. Merriam-Webster defines haole as a person “who is not descended from the aboriginal Polynesian inhabitants of Hawaii.”

Homan said he used his mixed martial arts training to knock out Basin.

“Just block it and go for the KO. Just protect myself, which is why I had my hand up and then I adjusted to block the chair,” Homan told Hawaii News Now.

Fox News reported, “Once Basin regained consciousness, he told someone he was ‘going to jail’ before walking away.”

Moments later, Basin reportedly charged toward Homan while shouting obscenities.

The situation escalated when Basin pulled out a knife and threatened multiple people before tossing the weapon into the ocean, according to the Maui Police Department.

Homan said, “He ended up pulling the knife out on me after the altercation, and that was obviously a game changer when I knew he was off.”

Homan claimed that the weapon was a 5-inch switchblade, which he found and turned over to police.

Basin’s attorney, Brandon Segal, argued, “There’s no evidence in any of these videos that have been circulated tremendously that he ever had a knife in his possession. He never had a firearm in his possession.”

Basin was arrested on Saturday and charged with two counts of first-degree terroristic threatening. Basin’s bail was set at $1 million, according to county officials.

Segal called the bail amount “outrageous.”

“These are just allegations,” Segal asserted. “My client has a presumption of innocence.”

The judge ordered Basin to have no contact with Homan and four other people involved in the incident, according to Fox News.

Basin is scheduled to appear in court for a preliminary hearing on Thursday.

RELATED: Former MMA fighter beats battery charges after court said he acted in self-defense during Florida bar fight caught on viral video

The mission statement on the “Kirill for Congress” website states: “Fighting. With Aloha.” Basin moved to Maui during the COVID pandemic, according to a section on the site titled “Living here. Fighting here.”

Basin’s arrest arrived just days before the Democratic primary for the 2nd Congressional District of Hawaii, which is set to occur on Saturday.

Basin is running against three other Democrats, including incumbent Jill Tokuda.

The Honolulu Civil Beat noted that Tokuda’s challengers are “all relatively unknown candidates” and pointed out that “longshot” Basin was “arrested in May for pulling a gun on county workers in a government building.”

Tokuda told Hawaii News Now that her opponent carried out a “very violent act” and noted that it’s “not even his first one.”

As Blaze News previously reported, Basin entered a county building in Wailuku in late May and started “brandishing a firearm and engaged in a verbal altercation with county employees,” according to Maui PD.

Basin was arrested and charged with felony first-degree terroristic threatening.

Basin denied that he brandished a firearm or made any threats.

“According to Mr. Basin, the item being referenced was an unloaded pellet gun inside his backpack, with no pellet magazine in it,” Basin’s campaign told Blaze News at the time. “He states that it was never removed from the backpack, and that the individual making the accusation only saw it inside the bag.”

Just two days before that incident, Basin had to be forcibly removed from a South Maui town hall meeting after he engaged in “a verbal altercation with Council Member Tom Cook and staff members,” according to police.

Jared Agtunong, Cook’s executive assistant, obtained a temporary restraining order against Basin within two hours of the incident.

Agtunong said in his petition, “I did not answer Basin’s phone call, but he left a message telling me that I’m a piece of trash, said I should think of my family, and insisted I call him back.”

Agtunong added, “In additional texts sent on the same day, Basin wished me luck with prison, then at 9:00 p.m., Basin’s text said, ‘You’re f**ked.'”

In an Instagram post shared in June, Basin detailed his history while pleading for Joe Rogan to invite him to be a guest on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.

“Joe Rogan, I am Kirill Basin, a Ukrainian-born immigrant, NYU Law graduate, former public defender, civil liberties advocate, father, small business owner, and Democratic candidate for Congress in Hawaii’s Second Congressional District,” Basin wrote.

Basin boasted, “I’ve taken on the police — professionally — and won.”

Basin’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Blaze News.

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​Hawaii, Crime, Democratic party, Politics 

The controversial architect of the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic will have to turn over documents related to the shutdown, according to Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier.

Uthmeier said that Dr. Anthony Fauci is being investigated for possibly profiting personally from the pandemic lockdowns that damaged the U.S. economy and had other major deleterious consequences.

‘This is wrong and it could go towards a deceptive trade practice, fraud, public nuisance, you name it.’

Fauci was excoriated by many of his critics for pleading his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination numerous times while testifying before Congress last Wednesday.

“We issued a formal subpoena to Dr. Fauci under Florida state law seeking a breadth of documents ranging to what he knew, when he knew it, his doubts about the safety and efficacy of vaccines that he’s out there promoting,” Uthmeier said in an interview on Fox News Wednesday.

“And we’re really focused in on his self-dealing. Evidence has come to light he was trying to personally profit off of this,” he added. “This is outside of his government duties, his official role. He’s trying to pursue book deals, awards, getting connected with high rollers that might help him come into millions and millions of dollars.”

The attorney general said much of the evidence comes from the diary entries recently released by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

“This is wrong, and it could go towards a deceptive trade practice, fraud, public nuisance, you name it,” Uthmeier added. “I think there’s many aspects of Florida law that now are implicated.”

Fauci’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

RELATED: Former Fauci adviser INDICTED for allegedly hiding emails about the origins of COVID

“Government officials, they have a lot of immunities. They have protections when they’re doing their job, but when somebody like Dr. Fauci is lying and deceiving the American people, pushing out directives and mandates that he privately questions as unsafe, and he’s deriving a profit from it, that raises larger legal questions,” Uthmeier continued.

“We will get to the bottom of it. We will leave no stone unturned,” he promised.

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​Anthony fauci, James uthmeier, Subpoena, Covid, Florida, Politics 

Amir Hassan posted a gracious video on Wednesday accepting defeat in the Republican primary for Michigan’s 8th Congressional District.

The candidate got an enthusiastic endorsement from President Donald Trump but lost to fellow Republican Tom Smith, who had dropped out of the race and backed a third candidate.

Hassan is the first congressional candidate with a Trump endorsement to lose in this cycle.

Smith, a retired engineer, told Politico he will return to the campaign and work to defeat first-term incumbent Democrat Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet.

“I look forward to working with Speaker [Mike] Johnson and the entire Republican team to expand our House majority and advance President Trump’s America First agenda to lower costs for working families and make America affordable again,” Smith said in a statement.

The political unknown raised very little money for the campaign, and in July he was forced to report his meager $1,850 donations in a handwritten note to the Federal Election Commission, claiming to have had issues signing into the online portal.

A Republican strategist who commented anonymously to Politico said that Trump’s pick had “clear flaws as a candidate” and opined that the GOP base rejected him because they were “reluctant to support a dude named Amir Hassan.”

Hassan is a Navy veteran and former law enforcement officer from Flint.

Rivet was mocked last year by the National Republican Congressional Committee when she sauntered into oncoming traffic in order to escape a tough question.

RELATED: Democratic Party has become so crazed, far-left AG Dana Nessel is avoiding convention over safety fears

“I fell short last night. I make no excuse. It was a tough race,” Hassan said in his video. “I always think of conservative values, and the biggest conservative value is we don’t make excuses.”

He went on to endorse the winner and called on the voters to flip the 8th District.

Politico reported that Hassan is the first congressional candidate with a Trump endorsement to lose in this cycle.

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​Michigan, Midterms, Republican party, Donald trump, Politics 

The Flock camera debate turns physical.

A candidate running for Tennessee’s 2nd Congressional District is now facing felony charges after authorities say he admitted to shooting down four automated license plate reader cameras — including at least one made by Flock Safety, the surveillance company at the center of a growing national privacy fight.

‘Gotta ban these dadgum things.’

Last week, Adam Lee Heimerman, 37, of Lenoir City, was arrested and charged with four counts of felony vandalism.

According to the Blount County Sheriff’s Office and Maryville Police Department, Heimerman admitted to investigators that he used a gun to shoot four automated license plate reader systems over the span of nine days in July.

According to a statement from police, the damaged cameras were first discovered on July 25 — three in Blount County and one in the City of Maryville — prompting a joint investigation by the two agencies.

Officials said evidence showed Heimerman accessed one of the systems from the “property of a house of worship” while a church service was under way.

RELATED: The truth about Flock cameras: ‘We are the sheep, and they are controlling us’

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The congressional hopeful is now being held at the Blount County Correctional Facility on bonds totaling $40,000, with a hearing scheduled for 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday in Blount County General Sessions Court.

Since his arrest, Heimerman has received a remarkable amount of support.

A GoFundMe started on Friday has raked in over $12,000 from more than 360 donors.

Rather than focus on the felony vandalism charges, the fundraiser casts Heimerman as a longtime Tennessean standing up for personal freedom, privacy, and government oversight, with the money earmarked for his defense attorneys.

RELATED: Flock off, Axon on

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images

Heimerman is running as an independent candidate for Tennessee’s 2nd Congressional District, facing off against Democratic candidate Michaela Barnett and Republican incumbent Tim Burchett.

Burchett, one of Congress’ loudest critics of Flock, has been blunt about his objections to the technology. He previously told reporters that lawmakers “gotta ban these dadgum things,” arguing that Americans should never have to choose between safety and liberty.

He recently introduced a bill that would bar federal agencies from buying or accessing automated surveillance systems and that would prevent state and local agencies from using federal funds to purchase them, citing Fourth Amendment concerns.

Under Burchett’s proposal, counties could still contract with Flock — they’d just have to pay for the privilege themselves.

Barnett, the Democratic candidate, has also spoken out against Flock cameras and other mass surveillance tools — although, as one outlet dryly noted, she has not proposed destroying them.

Asked by Military.com about Heimerman’s case, Barnett’s campaign stood by the underlying grievance but condemned the method. “The answer is not the unsafe discharge of a weapon in public spaces,” Barnett said.

Beyond Heimerman’s case, in neighboring Knox County, Mayor Glenn Jacobs — the former WWE wrestler known as Kane — put a hold on the local sheriff’s plan to install 270 Flock cameras, arguing the technology raises Fourth Amendment concerns.

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​Federal agencies, Felony charges, Fourth amendment, Government oversight, License plate reader, Tennessee, Us house, Vandalism, Mass surveillance, Tim burchett, Politics 

Governors Spencer Cox (R-Utah) and Kevin Stitt (R-Okla.) are giddy at the prospect of working with Democrats to import more migrants.

Cox pledged himself to the National Governors Association Task Force on Immigration Policy alongside longtime Trump critic Stitt, Wes Moore (D-Md.), and Matt Meyer (D-Del.) in a Bloomberg interview on Saturday. The four shared a bipartisan love-fest before slamming federal immigration policy and ICE.

‘States that did not face the invasion Texas confronted should not dictate terms that reopen the door.’

“We all care — Republicans and Democrats — about a secure border,” Cox said.

“We were together in February and having a conversation about immigration, and we were all shocked at the level of bipartisanship, cooperation, and agreement,” Cox said. “We were really stunned that everybody had kind of the same opinions on what needed to be done.”

Those “same opinions” seemed to revolve around the agribusiness, construction, and hospitality lobbies’ labor demands. It’s an approach that sees illegal immigration as a workforce resource rather than a crime.

“The reason I set this task force up is because I realized by talking to my colleagues that they’re having the same issues,” Stitt told Bloomberg’s Christina Ruffini. “They’re having the calls from their workforce community — whether it’s agriculture, whether it’s construction or hospitality — and they’re saying we’re overthinking this issue. Let’s actually have the governors issue workforce permits.”

The NGA’s approach mirrors a recent bill introduced by Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) that would allow states to control their own work visa policies and circumvent federal immigration enforcement.

RELATED: Pro-amnesty Utah Republican introduces last-ditch bill to import more migrants

Heather Diehl/Getty Images

“I’m wondering if you think the way ICE and DHS have been going about this process has been effective, by a show of hands,” Bloomberg asked the governors.

Neither Republican governor raised his hand.

When asked about his concerns with Trump’s approach, Cox pointed to “the violence and the deaths that we’ve seen” amid Minnesota enforcement actions, calling them “deeply problematic.”

Cox refused to vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020. He intended to withhold his vote again in 2024, but finally relented after Trump was nearly killed in Butler, Pennsylvania.

In 2022, Charlie Kirk called for Cox’s expulsion from the Republican Party after the governor supported keeping trans-identifying male athletes in women’s sports.

“We’re not using common sense right now,” Stitt continued.

“I’ll give you a perfect example. We had a person from Vietnam that’s been in Oklahoma City for 25 years, legally in the United States, with a green card, working at Hobby Lobby,” Stitt said.

“Twenty-five years ago, they got caught smoking marijuana. At that time, they self-deported, then came back legally. … They’ve been a great citizen chasing the American dream, but they’ve been picked up for deportation now.”

Stitt received Trump’s endorsement and fundraising aid in 2022, but endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 primaries. Trump later referred to him as a “RINO Governor” and requested intermediaries tell Stitt to “go f**k himself,” according to NOTUS.

Cox and Stitt may have found common ground with Democrat governors, but at least one Republican governor, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, disagrees with them on this issue.

“Governor Abbott will not support proposals that create new incentives for illegal entry or that treat those already here unlawfully as a ready labor pool. Texas jobs belong to Texans,” Abbott spokesperson Andrew Mehalaris told Blaze News. “States that did not face the invasion Texas confronted should not dictate terms that reopen the door.”

An agenda for the NGA Task Force on Immigration Policy has yet to be released.

Cox, Stitt, Moore, Meyer, and the NGA did not respond to requests for comment.

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​Kevin stitt, Oklahoma, Spencer cox, Utah, Immigration, Politics 

Residents of Massachusetts will have to live with more illegal aliens among them after the Democrat-controlled government passed the “strongest” protections against Immigration and Customs Enforcement yet.

Gov. Maura Healey (D-Mass.) signed the Protect Act on Wednesday in a ceremony at an economic development agency in the city of Chelsea.

‘ICE is so wrong in what it’s doing, and ICE needs to be stopped, here in Massachusetts and around this country, just stopped in its tracks.’

Healey claimed the law included the “strongest” protections for illegal aliens against ICE.

“I think we can agree that we need immigration reform in this country,” Healey said to reporters. “We can agree we need controls at the border. We can also agree that ICE is so wrong in what it’s doing, and ICE needs to be stopped, here in Massachusetts and around this country, just stopped in its tracks.”

The bill will restrict ICE agents from performing civil immigration arrests without a warrant at courthouses, schools, child care centers, and health care facilities.

Healey said the fear of ICE operations has led the immigrant community in Chelsea to stop going to doctor appointments and to take their kids out of school. Chelsea schools have reported a decline in attendance.

She also claimed that ICE agents at courthouses have kept witnesses and others from showing up to their hearings.

“This is what ICE is doing to our people and our neighborhoods,” Healey said. “All of this done by ICE agents, who are untrained, unqualified, and unfit to do their jobs.”

RELATED: Sheriff pushes back against edict from New York governor to END cooperation with ICE

The Trump administration has increased immigration enforcement this summer, leading to a record number of detentions for the month of July, according to records obtained by CBS News.

“The Protect Act is the strongest law in the country to protect people from ICE, and to protect public safety,” Healey concluded.

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​Department of homeland security, Immigration and customs enforcement, Illegal immigration, Politics, Maura healey 

The 37-year-old male accused of starting the devastating Old Trails Fire in Spokane, Washington — which has displaced more than 60,000 people since Saturday — was convicted of killing his father in Arizona, officials told KPNX-TV.

The station, citing records, said Aaron Farinacci was convicted over a decade ago of manslaughter and aggravated assault after killing his father.

‘It was citizens who were paying attention to their surroundings, being aware and willing to step up and say something, that led to the relatively quick apprehension of Mr. Farinacci.’

Farinacci was released from prison six years ago, KPNX said, and he was arrested Monday on a first-degree arson charge.

“Mr. Farinacci is a convicted felon out of the state of Arizona,” Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels said, according to the station. “Major crimes detectives in Spokane County were able to identify him. They developed probable cause and determined the origin of the fire was indeed exactly where the witnesses had seen Mr. Farinacci kneeling in the grass earlier that day.”

According to the sheriff, a witness said Farinacci was bending down near some grass and looked nervous — and then the witness said smoke was coming from the area soon after, KPNX reported.

The sheriff added to the station that Farinacci was carrying waterproof matches and butane when he was arrested.

Spokane County Jail records indicate that Farinacci remained behind bars Wednesday on a $1 million bond.

“As it happens in so many critical cases, it was citizens who were paying attention to their surroundings, being aware and willing to step up and say something, that led to the relatively quick apprehension of Mr. Farinacci,” Sheriff Nowels said, according to KREM-TV.

RELATED: Video: Thug throws Molotov cocktail at man in wheelchair, setting him on fire — right in front of police headquarters

Documents show that Farinacci pleaded guilty to shooting and killing his father in October 2010 amid a domestic dispute, KREM reported in a separate story.

Farinacci, 21 years old at the time, was in the dining room with his mother and adoptive father when he got into an argument with his father over doing the dishes, KREM said, citing records.

More from KREM:

The man then retreated into his parents’ bedroom, and his father followed, opening the bedroom door with a key. Documents show that Farinacci armed himself with a gun kept in the room and shot his father, striking him in the face, and then shot him again in the back as his father turned to leave.

Farinacci ran from the scene and then “shot himself in the chest with the same gun he used to shoot his father,” according to documents.

Farinacci told police that the shooting was an accident and that he felt he “deserved to be sentenced to prison as he took someone’s life.”

Farinacci was convicted of manslaughter and aggravated assault in 2012, KREM said, adding that records show he was released from prison in 2020 and discharged from probation in 2024 while living with a girlfriend in Washington state.

Farinacci, a Spokane resident, has no previous history of arson, KREM said.

The Old Trails Fire has become the most destructive fire in Spokane history, KREM added, forcing more than 60,000 people to evacuate and burning down at least 700 homes.

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​Arson charge, Spokane fire, Old trails fire, Washington state, Arizona, Manslaughter conviction, Son kills father, Aaron farinacci, Arrest, Crime 

The WNBA’s Atlanta Dream held a Barbie Night on Monday in celebration of star player Angel Reese getting her own doll, but Reese’s pregame comments are what stole the show.

With her mini-me sitting on the table in front of her, Reese made a bold claim for the ages that brought more unneeded politics into a league that could sorely use a break.

‘I didn’t have dolls that really look like me.’

Barbie basics

Reporters were lobbing softball questions to Reese before the game, with one journalist referring to the player as “Barbie” before asking how it feels to be the first Atlanta-based athlete to have a doll modeled after her.

“It feels amazing,” Reese replied. “To be at first always means a lot. Especially [since] there’s a lot of women that have come before me.”

Following up with another beach ball, the reporter asked, “What were some of the dolls you played with when you were little?”

Reese immediately turned to identity politics for her answer:

“Honestly, I didn’t have a lot of dolls because I didn’t have dolls that really look like me much,” the baller claimed. “And that’s why I kind of really wanted to make sure this was super intentional because, now that they have a doll that that looks like you and nails and hair, but also you can be a killer on the court as well. So that was something that was important for me when getting the doll.”

Reese’s baffling claim defies all known Barbie history, which launched its first black doll named Francie in 1966, billed as Barbie’s cousin. Christie followed in 1968, Barbie’s friend. Creator Mattel then went against its own storyline in 1980 when it released Black Barbie.

RELATED: WNBA coach counter-protests Sophie Cunningham with ‘trans kids’ shirt — Caitlin Clark responds

Doll partisans

Reese was born in 2002, the same year several major doll lines featured prominent black characters. This included Bratz doll Sasha and My Scene doll Madison. My Scene released a Jamaican line of dolls in 2003 as well.

In 2005, music group Destiny’s Child (which included Beyonce) had its own Barbie dolls.

These dolls are not cherry-picked; the examples are widespread.

Reese’s new doll is part of the Barbie Signature lineup that is now sold at $38 each on Mattel’s website. Other dolls in the same line include one modeled after singer Miley Cyrus, astronaut Ellen Ochoa, and Juneteenth activist Opal Lee.

NBA icon LeBron James even has a Barbie doll too.

RELATED: WNBA deletes ‘lighthearted’ video that would actually get players in other leagues banned for life

Paras Griffin/Getty Images

Celebrity thoughts

Reese’s statement is reminiscent of bold celebrity claims in recent years that likely sounded groundbreaking during inner monologues, only to be laughable when they were verbalized.

This includes actor Jennifer Lawrence’s 2022 idea that “nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie” before her “Hunger Games” films. This was debunked in seconds when viewers pointed to Sigourney Weaver in 1979’s “Alien” or the many subsequent “Resident Evil” and “Underworld” movies.

In 2024, action star Lucy Liu claimed that before her film “Charlie’s Angels,” the media “had never before had three women on a magazine cover.”

“They didn’t even know how to do it. It was such a strange thing for women to collaborate and be seen as colleagues and friends,” she added.

This claim ignored the history of the original “Charlie’s Angels,” who shared not only a 1976 cover of People magazine but also Time magazine that same year. Liu went on to make false statements about female television leads as well.

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​Wnba, Angel reese, Lebron james, Barbie, Miley cyrus, Lifestyle 

Pennsylvania Democrats have long enjoyed an incredible advantage: a massive lead in registered voters that gave the party a built-in edge heading into every election.

But according to BlazeTV hosts Nick Freitas and Christian Hines, that advantage is disappearing — and it’s all thanks to a boots-on-the-ground approach headed by the late, great Charlie Kirk.

“While the Senate fights over the SAVE Act and whether or not we can actually rely on our elections anymore, Pennsylvania, of all places, has handed Democrats a huge loss,” Freitas begins.

“Democrats used to have a major voter registration lead in pretty much every election. This week, that lead got cut significantly, and the number left standing should terrify anyone planning a Democratic campaign in 2028 in Pennsylvania,” he says.

And as Hines notes, “For as long as the records have existed, Pennsylvania has been an overwhelmingly Democrat state in terms of party registration.”

Even as recently as 2012, there were “over a million more registered Democrats in the state than Republicans.”

Now, he says, there’s “not even evidence, there’s hard numbers that show that that advantage has basically disappeared.”

And head of the Citizens Alliance of America Cliff Maloney had a lot to do with this change.

“For many years, I’ve kind of had this idea that door-knocking is the lost art on the right that the left has kind of mastered, right?” Maloney tells Freitas and Hines.

So, when Charlie Kirk and Turning Point reached out and asked Maloney if Citizens Alliance of America would focus on door-knocking in Pennsylvania, he jumped at the opportunity.

“Not registering voters, not doing GOTV, but solving the major problem, which was failing to compete when it came to vote-by-mail,” he explains.

“We knocked 510,000 doors, and Trump ended up getting 34.5% against Kamala Harris. This changed my life,” he says.

“When I went out and we were delivering the White House on that night, the Democrats had an active voter registration advantage of over 200,000 — 200,000. … The fact that that is down into the 20,000s is just absolutely wild to talk about which direction Pennsylvania’s going,” he adds.

“Things are getting done,” Freitas comments. “You proved it with respect to what you can do when people stop just complaining on X and actually get up, start knocking doors, start doing the things that actually move the needle within these races.”

Start watching Nick Freitas now at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK40 for $40 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Charlie kirk, Donald trump, Kamala harris, Vote by mail, White house, Registered voters, Democrats, Republicans, Pennsylvania, Nick freitas, Christian hines, Save act, Cliff maloney, Blazetv show 

BMW is assuring its drivers that the company is not pushing ads on them.

Drivers of 2020 BMWs and beyond may have a different take, because since the end of July, there has been a sponsored feature available to them without asking for it.

‘I hate this so much.’

Not an ad

To celebrate “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” the next flick in the seemingly unending franchise, BMW introduced “a special surprise” for its drivers: an ad.

That’s not how BMW sees it, though. Though the short video features a new BMW model, shows Spider-Man on the side of a nearby building, and tells viewers the movie is exclusively in theaters, BMW assures its customers that what they are seeing is not an advertisement.

The animation is “designed to provide customers with optional themed animations and messages linked to a range of global and local occasions,” BMW told Business Insider. “It is not a form of advertising.”

However, the “animation” doesn’t require the user to do any searching to find it. According to BMW’s own press release, simply starting the car brings up a “special banner” on the display, which can be clicked on to start the video.

“This is crossing the line,” one BMW driver said while showcasing the video.

RELATED: Is America still a ‘first world’ country? Not compared to Japan

At the drive-in

Not all BMW owners will have to suffer through their friendly neighborhood superhero’s appearance, though. Only those driving models capable of forced updates will see the video.

BMW says any of its cars equipped with BMW Operating System 7, 8, 8.5, 9, or BMW Operating System X will see the updates so long as they were produced after July 2020.

Moreover, BMW told website the Autopian that the in-vehicle animation is part of “a broader brand partnership with the film.”

“A few of our vehicles — including the BMW iX3 — were in the film, and a special edition iX3 was featured on the red carpet during last night’s premiere in Los Angeles,” the carmaker added.

Author Jason Torchinsky went on to say, “No one needs to have this shoved at them in their cars.”

“I hate this so much. Maybe beyond rationality,” he wrote.

RELATED: Actor Jon Bernthal calls pit bull fear ‘ridiculous’: ‘It’s just dog racism’

A 2020 BMW 3. Manfred Schmid/Getty Images

Bono bungle

The forced injection of media is reminiscent of the great U2/iTunes fiasco of 2014.

U2 frontman Bono (Paul David Hewson) apologized to iTunes users at the time after his album “Songs of Innocence” was forcibly downloaded onto their iPhones and iPods.

“Oops, I’m sorry about that,” Bono said, per the Guardian.

The singer barely offered any regret, chalking the move up to an attempt to parse through media “noise.”

“I had this beautiful idea, and we kind of got carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing. Drop of megalomania, touch of generosity, dash of self-promotion, and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years mightn’t be heard. There’s a lot of noise out there. I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.”

The “Songs of Innocence” album went on to become one of U2’s worst-selling albums.

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​Cars, U2, Bmw, Spider-man, Lifestyle 

As data centers continue to sprout up around the country, some leaders have begun reassessing and responding to many communities’ concerns about their impact.

On Monday, Governor Greg Abbott (R-Texas) announced a comprehensive data center audit as concerns grow around many of the projects.

‘Our top priority is to protect Texans’ safety and quality of life.’

Abbott directed the two relevant Texas agencies, the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, to conduct a full audit on all data center projects, pausing all projects until they successfully complete the process.

The audit itself demands that these data centers demonstrate their impact on local communities. The audit will specifically require answers regarding water and electricity usage, as well as solutions to reduce noise and light pollution, among other concerns.

“Our top priority is to protect Texans’ safety and quality of life,” said Abbott. “Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first.”

RELATED: Fossil fuels fuel the AI boom: Microsoft and Chevron partner on massive Texas energy project

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

While these concerns have been repeatedly raised by citizens across the country, Abbott is also requiring data centers to provide information on ownership and controlling interests and, crucially, how they are paying for the construction and maintenance.

The audit will require data centers to show the extent to which they are “paying their own way” or relying on cushy tax breaks.

Texas has positioned itself as one of the best states for data center projects, due in large part to the tax incentives granted as an investment by the state. These incentives, however, are under increased scrutiny as data center projects have skyrocketed in the state.

Earlier this year, the Texas Tribune reported, citing the Texas comptroller’s office, that Texas stands to lose out on $3.2 billion in sales tax revenue over the next two years from this tax break alone.

The governor’s press release reports that 90% of new power requests, totaling a massive 474 gigawatts in capacity, came from new data center projects, yet doubt has been cast on these projects holding up their side of the bargain.

In a July 27 Texas Senate Committee on Finance hearing on data centers, Brad Reynolds, chief revenue estimator for the comptroller’s office, gave testimony that of 138 new data centers that have come in for certification but are not yet verified for the sales tax exemption, only 20 of them have been audited.

What’s more, according to Reynolds, six of the 20 were found to be noncompliant with the requirements for the tax exemption.

In June, Abbott set in motion a plan to reexamine the legal framework and incentives in place, specifically pledging to work with the legislature to “repeal” sales tax exemptions and other “outdated” incentives for data centers.

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​Data centers, Water usage, Greg abbott, Texas, Politics 

The Democratic Party is undergoing a hostile takeover by democratic socialists and similarly minded radicals who’ve made no secret of their contempt for the United States and desire to transform it into something wholly unrecognizable.

After electoral successes in Colorado and New York, the Democratic Socialists of America enjoyed another victory on Tuesday in Michigan with DSA-backed state Rep. Donavan McKinney handily beating Rep. Shri Thanedar and Islamic leftist Abdul El-Sayed defeating Haley Stevens, the candidate preferred by the Democratic establishment, for the U.S. Senate nomination.

‘What’s the point of tolerating that?’

Prior to this latest Democratic primary bloodbath, blue-collar hero and former host of “Dirty Jobs” Mike Rowe weighed in on the party’s embrace of “an ideology that has been proven, demonstrably, to be a really bad idea.”

In a lengthy post that prompted the usual suspects to melt down, Rowe noted that it was “alarming to see how quickly communism has been embraced by so many, but it’s even more alarming, to see how many have yet to condemn it, in favor of sheltering under a ‘big tent.'”

Establishment Democrats, impotent to stop their party’s takeover, have resorted in recent days to “big tent” talk as an apparent means of coping.

When asked, for instance, whether he was comfortable with El-Sayed, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said during a press conference on Tuesday, “Look, we are a big tent party, and being a big tent party is a strength, not a weakness.”

RELATED: Democratic socialist leader goes on Fox and admits every extreme thing they want to do

History/Universal Images Group/Getty Images (L); Spencer Platt/Getty Images (R)

Earlier this month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) similarly downplayed concerns over the DSA’s ascendancy, stating, “Progressives in San Francisco were the early versions of the DSA. I’ve seen this all my life. I think it’s incredibly healthy.” Newsom added that he’s for “addition … not for subtraction.”

“Not that anyone asked me, but … wow,” Rowe wrote. “The candidates that Newsom is referring to here are not subtle. They have clearly articulated precisely what they want, and exactly what they will try to accomplish if they gain power. No borders. No police. No prisons. No Senate. From each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities, and so forth. They are literally quoting Karl Marx, and they are literally on the record as desiring to completely dismantle our government and replace it with actual communism.”

Rather than embracing bona fide communists, Rowe recommended that Democrats make a “reasonable appeal to Independents, and those not on board with this administration” and “affirmatively distance themselves from an ideology that has caused more human suffering than any other scheme dreamt up by man.”

“If the DSA continues to grow in popularity, and the Democrats actually campaign on their behalf, I think it’ll be the largest political blunder in my lifetime,” added Rowe, a self-identified independent.

His post generated a great deal of conversation — and backlash — on social media, especially on Facebook, where the post had over 8,500 comments. Rowe then engaged in the dirty job of reading and responding to some of his critics.

In addition to leaning into his criticism of leftist lunacies, Rowe torpedoed the suggestion that some of the DSA candidates aren’t communists simply because they identify as socialists; highlighted instances where prominent Democrats quote directly from “The Communist Manifesto”; refuted false equivalencies and efforts to paint Republicans as Nazis; and underscored that it’s foolish to characterize age-old conservative principles as “Trumpian.”

At the risk of ruffling even more feathers, Rowe noted that if one of America’s two major parties “is affirmatively determined to transform our democratic republic into a communist state, then we’re no longer debating the various ways to make our country better; we’re debating the merits of destroying it. And really, what’s the point of tolerating that?”

DSA national co-chair Megan Romer proudly admitted in a recent interview that her organization seeks, among other things, to eliminate the Senate; replace the presidency and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary handpicked and overseen by Congress; abolish U.S. borders and grant amnesty to all illegal aliens presently residing in the country; defund the Pentagon; abolish prisons; and seize public control of most large corporations.

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​Communism, Democratic party, Democratic socialists, Mike rowe, Chuck schumer, Michigan, Shri thanedar, Abdul el-sayed, Politics 

Another nemesis of President Donald Trump has bitten the dust, politically speaking.

Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) has voted as a far-left radical since he was first elected to Congress in 2022. He has even introduced articles of impeachment against Sec. of War Pete Hegseth, former Attorney General Pam Bondi, and, of course, the president himself.

The district is a safe Democrat seat.

But Thanedar was always an awkward fit for Michigan’s 13th Congressional District. He was born in India, often speaks in broken English, and doesn’t really even seem to know the area. A year ago, Thanedar went viral for all the wrong reasons after he struggled to name a city in his district other than Detroit.

Earlier this year, Thanedar seemingly threatened Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott, warning him during a congressional hearing, “You better hope you get pardoned.” And like Tony Fauci, Thanedar has also been accused of harming beagles, though he has denied wrongdoing.

Despite the controversies, this year, Thanedar once again asked the people in his district for their vote. This time, they said no.

RELATED: It’s time to ban foreign-born lawmakers — Ilhan Omar and Shri Thanedar prove why

In the Democratic primary election on Tuesday, democratic socialist challenger Donavan McKinney quickly jumped out to a lead, and with 99% of votes counted, McKinney ultimately defeated Thanedar, 51.9% to 48.1%.

Thanedar conceded defeat before noon on Wednesday: “This morning, I called Rep. Donavan McKinney and congratulated him on his win. I offered him full cooperation and a smooth transition.”

The district is a safe Democrat seat, and McKinney is expected to coast to victory over Republican Taras “T.P.” Nykoriak in November.

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​Shri thanedar, Donald trump, Michigan, Anthony fauci, Politics