Category: blaze media

A star running back for the Green Bay Packers has been arrested on five charges that include a felony surrounding domestic abuse allegations.

Hobart-Lawrence police in Wisconsin responded to a disturbance complaint on Saturday morning involving Packers running back and three-time Pro Bowl player Josh Jacobs.

‘We ask for fairness and restraint.’

Police arrived after 8:30 a.m. to investigate the domestic issue, according to NBC26, which resulted in Jacobs’ arrest and subsequent booking into the Brown County Jail. Jacobs’ charges include battery, disorderly conduct, and criminal damage to property, all of which fall under the category of “domestic abuse.”

Other charges include intimidation of a victim and the more disturbing felony charge of “strangulation and suffocation.”

According to the NFL, which cited jail records, Jacobs was charged with one felony and four misdemeanor counts of assault with a bond set at $1,350.

Jail records reviewed by Blaze News made no mention of any charges and said Jacobs had been issued a “mandatory court appearrance [sic]” but “no bond.”

RELATED: NFL players defend NY Giants QB Jaxson Dart after he introduces Trump: ‘Fake Trump hate’

John Fisher/Getty Images

Jacobs’ attorneys, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, released a statement saying, “Josh vehemently denies the allegations, and this matter is in the early stages of investigation with important evidence that has not yet been made public.”

The attorneys added, “We ask for fairness and restraint while the judicial process takes its course.”

The Packers told NFL reporter Tom Pelissero that they are “aware of the matter involving Josh Jacobs.”

“As it is an ongoing legal situation, we will withhold further comment,” the Packers’ statement concluded.

On Wednesday, the Packers canceled their scheduled player media availability after their open practice. Coach Matt LaFleur will still hold his scheduled press conference, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

The team will still have a chance to make players available to the press though. NFL teams must make head coaches and players available at least once for every three days of official team activities during training camp.

RELATED: Judge scolds accuser of ex-Patriots player who said he smacked and choked her, then offered her $100K

Todd Rosenberg/Getty Images

Jacobs has had an outstanding career so far. He surpassed 1,000 rushing yards in four of his first seven seasons, with 929 rushing yards in 2025.

He led the league in rushing yards in 2022 with 1,653 yards and was named first-team All-Pro that same season.

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​Fearless, Green bay packers, Nfl, Football, Crime, Domestic abuse, Sports, Josh jacobs 

If you think car prices are already out of control, brace yourself. The next spike is coming, and it has nothing to do with supply-chain excuses, dealer markups, or government mandates.

In fact, it has nothing to do with the car industry at all.

Automakers have limited options here. They can delay production, strip out features, or pass the cost directly to buyers.

It is being driven by Big Tech’s race to dominate artificial intelligence, and no matter who wins, the American car buyer will pay the price.

Bidding war

Behind the scenes, a quiet bidding war is underway for one of the most critical components in modern vehicles: memory chips. These are not exotic, cutting-edge parts reserved for luxury cars. They are the backbone of everything from your backup camera to center screens to your safety systems. And right now, they are getting sucked up by massive AI data centers at a pace the auto industry simply cannot match.

Companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are spending billions building out AI infrastructure. These operations require enormous volumes of high-performance memory, the same category of chips used throughout today’s vehicles. The difference is they are willing to pay more, lock in longer contracts, and move faster than any automaker.

Chip manufacturers, including Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, are shifting production toward AI demand because that is where the profits are strongest. That leaves fewer chips available for automakers, and the ones that are available are getting more expensive by the day.

Winter is coming

Automakers are already feeling it. Executives at Ford Motor Company have acknowledged rising costs tied to memory chips, even as they try to reassure investors that supply remains stable for now. But that stability is fragile, and industry analysts are warning that shortages could begin to impact production as soon as late 2026.

Some companies are more exposed than others. EV-focused brands like Tesla and Rivian face added risk because their vehicles rely even more heavily on advanced computing systems. Traditional automakers like General Motors and Ford Motor Company may have slightly more flexibility, but they are still tied to the same supply chain realities.

What does that mean for you?

It means the car you want may cost more, take longer to arrive, or come with fewer features than expected. We’ve seen this before.

RELATED: Why the Pentagon just called Detroit’s Big 3 automakers

Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Computers on wheels

Modern vehicles are essentially computers on wheels. A typical car today uses large amounts of memory to manage safety systems, navigation, infotainment, and driver-assistance technology. In higher-end or electric models, that number climbs even further. Remove or limit those chips, and something has to give. Which means fewer features.

Automakers have limited options here. They can delay production, strip out features, or pass the cost directly to buyers. If history is any guide, they will do some combination of all three.

We saw it during the last chip shortage, due to COVID-related supply-chain disruption. Vehicles were shipped without features that customers had already paid for, with vague promises they might be added later. In many cases, those features never came back.

Now imagine that scenario again, only this time driven by a long-term shift in how chips are allocated globally. In other words, no end in sight.

Back to basics?

Some automakers are trying to get ahead of the problem. Toyota Motor Corporation and Honda Motor Company are working more closely with semiconductor suppliers to secure long-term agreements. It is a smart strategy, but it also highlights a bigger issue: The auto industry is no longer in control of its own destiny when it comes to critical technology.

It is competing with Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley has deeper pockets.

There is also a lesson here that automakers would rather not admit. For years, they pushed more screens, more software, and more complexity into vehicles, selling it as innovation. But that strategy came with a cost, and now that cost is showing up in the form of supply vulnerability.

Many drivers today are asking for less tech and just the basics. But with added technology that collects your data, car brands are going to be forced to cut corners somewhere. And we know they will give up features and still collect data and track your every move. All of this takes chips that are getting more expensive.

The more technology you pack into a car, the more exposed you are when those components become scarce.

New approach

For consumers, this may force a shift in thinking. Simpler vehicles could become more attractive, not just because they are easier to use, but because they are less dependent on volatile supply chains. At the same time, the used car market could see renewed demand as buyers look for alternatives to increasingly expensive new models. This happened during the last chip shortage where used cars ballooned in price. That makes it a good time to sell and a bad time to buy.

The push for AI is not slowing down. If anything, it is accelerating. That means the competition for memory chips is only going to intensify, and the auto industry will continue to be caught in the middle.

So the next time you see a higher price tag on a new vehicle, do not assume it is just inflation or dealer markup. There’s a good chance it’s tied to a data center somewhere, running thousands of servers, training the next generation of AI models.

There may be a big opportunity here: a growing market for affordable cars not encumbered with expensive, invasive, and bug-prone tech. But first, car makers will have to ditch the endless tech arms race and listen to their customers.

​Ai, Ai data centers, Artificial intelligence, Big tech, Car prices, Lifestyle, Silicon valley, Supply chain, Align cars 

An Israeli national linked to a Chinese fraudster’s illegal biolab in Nevada managed to skate on a felony charge this month after the Justice Department mysteriously moved to dismiss the criminal complaint against him.

Police raided a house in northeast Las Vegas on Jan. 31 managed by 55-year-old Ori Salomon, an Israeli national currently in the U.S. on an E-2 visa, and owned by Jia Bei Zhu, a Chinese national convicted of fraud earlier this month and linked to the secret biolab discovered in Reedley, California, in late 2022.

Inside Zhu’s Vegas property on Sugar Springs Drive, law enforcement agents found a “possible biological laboratory” complete with a “bio-safety hood, a bio-safety sticker, a centrifuge, multiple refrigerators, red-brown unknown liquids in gallon-sized containers, and refrigerated vials with unknown liquids,” according to Christopher Delzotto, FBI special agent in charge at the bureau’s Las Vegas office.

‘The Government has concluded that the interests of justice require dismissal of the complaint.’

That same day, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department also executed a search warrant at the residence where Salomon lives and allegedly found a French passport bearing the name “Ori Salomon,” an Israeli passport with the name “Ori Solomon,” and a black semi-automatic pistol.

While Salomon — accused of being a primary “agent and conspirator” with Zhu, who contacted him 467 times in the weeks leading up to the raid — was arrested on a state charge of disposing and discharging hazardous waste, the discovery of a firearm at his residence evidently piqued the interest of federal law enforcement.

After all, Salomon is prohibited from owning or possessing a firearm as a non-immigrant visa holder.

According to the original criminal complaint, Salomon made a recorded call to his daughter while in jail where he discussed the presence of additional firearms at his residence.

RELATED: Hasan Piker tests the line between dissent and enemy aid

Las Vegas Metro Police Department footage screenshots

A federal search warrant was executed at Salomon’s residence on Feb. 2, during which law enforcement reportedly seized multiple guns, including a Springfield Armory XD-9 9mm handgun; a Savage Mark II .22 caliber rifle; an IWI US Tavor-x95 5.56 rifle; a Glock 19 9mm handgun; and a Springfield Armory SA-XD ACP .45 caliber handgun.

Salomon’s adult daughter confirmed that the firearms in the house belonged to her father, the complaint claimed.

Salomon was charged with one count of being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm.

However, on May 11, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Nevada — helmed by Israeli-born U.S. Attorney Sigal Chattah — filed a motion to dismiss the complaint without prejudice.

Prosecutors neglected to detail in the motion why they wanted to dismiss the complaint other than noting, “After a careful review of the evidence and additional information provided by defendant, the Government has concluded that the interests of justice require dismissal of the complaint at this time.”

The Justice Department and Salomon’s attorney did not respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Elayna Youchah, who released Salomon in February on a personal recognizance bond, ultimately agreed to dismiss the federal complaint. However, Salomon is still scheduled to appear in court on June 4 in connection with the hazardous waste charge.

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​Biolab, China, Criminal complaint, Firearms, Fraud, Israel, Israeli, Jia bei zhu, Search warrant, Sigal chattah, Las vegas, Nevada, Justice department, Politics 

A Georgia teacher has been accused of committing child sex crimes against six teenagers, according to multiple reports.

Maris Nichols — a 25-year-old biology teacher at Alexander High School in Douglas County — was arrested May 8.

‘The alleged behavior is unacceptable and violates the professional standards all employees are required to uphold.’

WSB-TV reported that Nichols was charged last week with multiple counts of child molestation, improper sexual contact by an employee, grooming of a minor for sexual offense, and one count of tampering with evidence.

A judge set Nichols’ bond at $74,000.

The judge ordered Nichols to remain under house arrest except for medical appointments, religious services, and legal consultations. The Times-Georgian reported that Nichols also must wear an ankle monitor, undergo a mental evaluation, avoid contact with minors not related to her, and stay away from the school.

The Times-Georgian obtained arrest warrants saying Nichols had sex with a student in a closet next to her classroom between 3:30 p.m. and 4 p.m. on April 23.

According to court documents obtained by WAGA-TV, Nichols also had sex with the same student inside a Hummer off campus in Douglasville.

Investigators added that Nichols allegedly sent nude photos and videos of herself to multiple students, including videos of herself masturbating with a sex toy during live video chats with at least two teens under 16, WAGA reported.

The arrest warrant said Nichols had sex with another student in the back seat of his truck at a golf club.

Nichols also sent explicit messages to two male students that detailed sexual acts she wanted performed on her, according to the arrest warrant.

The warrant added that a female student received videos containing nudity from the teacher, who also urged the student to watch the “Fifty Shades of Grey” movies before asking to discuss the salacious films.

The New York Post reported that Nichols instructed one of the teens to whom she sent sexual messages to delete their communications.

RELATED: Female elementary teacher, 25, turned in by husband for alleged sexual misconduct against underage student: Court docs

In a letter sent to parents that Fox News obtained, the Douglas County School System noted that it’s “deeply troubled” by the accusations.

The school system launched an internal investigation “upon learning of the alleged misconduct” and has cooperated with state and local law enforcement in their investigations.

“The alleged behavior is unacceptable and violates the professional standards all employees are required to uphold,” the letter stated, adding that it can’t provide additional information regarding the allegations.

School officials did not reveal if any disciplinary action had been taken against Nichols or if she had been terminated. But she was not listed Wednesday among the staff on the high school’s website.

During Nichols’ bond hearing earlier this month, her attorney Christy Draper said the case was an “unfortunate situation.”

“She is a solid member of this community. She’s never even had a speeding ticket before,” Draper said, according to the Times-Georgian. “This is not your typical person that you see in these kinds of situations.”

“The truth is eventually going to come out,” Draper added. “It’s going to show that this alleged victim is more the perpetrator of this situation. This is a lot more technical and a lot more complex than what meets the eye.”

However, a prosecuting attorney called the defense attorney’s allegations “egregious,” the Times-Georgian reported.

Draper gave a statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that read:

As this matter is currently under active investigation, we will not provide a detailed comment at this time. We are fully committed to getting to the bottom of these allegations and ensuring that every relevant fact is brought forward.

The arrest warrant did not specify the ages of the alleged victims but did note they all were teenagers.

Nichols was hired as a teacher at Alexander High School in May 2023.

WAGA reported that Nichols also has been a “player personnel director” for the high school football program.

The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to Blaze News‘ request for comment.

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​Teacher arrested, Teacher sex scandal, Child sex crimes, Georgia, Maris nichols, Crime 

Newly released Department of War documents shed light on possible aerial capabilities of UFOs.

On Friday morning, the Pentagon announced a document dump of more Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena files, revealing the findings of a current U.S. intelligence official.

‘The object then split into two and changed direction.’

The official said that in 2025, he was part of a team sent to investigate unusual noises and sightings of “orb-like” objects near a sensitive U.S. military facility.

“Our mission was to investigate loud thuds heard in the mountains on the test range, which coincided with … sightings reported over the previous several nights,” the government official wrote.

While flying at low altitude in a helicopter, the intelligence officer discovered “a large cave entrance with no visible end in sight,” but saw no safe landing spot.

Realizing they were low on fuel, the pilots took him to a prearranged rendezvous point and dropped off one unknown official before heading to a tanker for refueling. Before long, their Joint Operations Center had detected hits on radar, in the same area sightings were made on previous nights.

Using infrared goggles, ground teams soon reported seeing a UAP and described it as “super hot,” low to the ground, and moving at high speed.

“The object then split into two and changed direction,” the officer said of the ground team’s description, but this wouldn’t be the only time the unidentified object seemingly performed the unbelievable maneuver.

RELATED: Vast image ‘reminiscent of the grim reaper’ appears over Los Angeles

Luis Gutierrez/Norte Photo/Getty Images

The officer and the two pilots soon arrived and scanned the area with night-vision goggles, infrared, and the naked eye. The ground team then informed them that the foreign object had risen from the ground and moved within 10 feet of the helicopter before dropping below it and speeding off.

“The pilots observed it through NVGs and saw it split into two as a smaller object emerged before it accelerated out of sight,” the officer recalled.

The helicopter allegedly pursued the object, but was unable to match its speed. The officer was later told that several fighter jets in the area were asked to help identify the UAP.

The “close UAP encounters” allegedly lasted over an hour and took place when the helicopter was asked to search a nearby mountain.

RELATED: Why Big Tech’s biggest just signed on to build the Pentagon’s AI army

Luke Sharrett/Getty Images

The report’s summary said the incident occurred sometime in 2025 and referred to the official encountering unidentified “glowing orbs” both at close range and at a distance.

It further described the object as accelerating away in two different directions. Numerous “higher-altitude” orbs were described as the objects that came close to the helicopter.

Photos are featured along with the report, including ones that allegedly show the object after splitting in two. However, the bulk of the photos are dated as being captured in 1999.

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​Return, Ufo, Uap, Pentagon, Department of war, Tech 

Pope Leo XIII issued a papal encyclical in 1891 titled “Rerum Novarum,” which the Vatican notes “became the document inspiring Christian activity in the social sphere and the point of reference for this activity.”

In that groundbreaking document about the just ordering of society, Leo XIII applied Catholic doctrines to the modern conditions that manifested as a result of the Industrial Revolution.

Besides rejecting socialism as a means of remedying social ills and setting the stage for localism, the late pope expounded on the Church’s doctrine on work, private property, the rights of workers, the obligations of the rich, the dignity of the poor, and other timely terms and issues.

‘It can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal.’

The current pope, Leo XIV, has set out in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” to do for his era what his predecessor did 135 years ago.

The Roman pontiff has, accordingly, scrutinized “the great trends of our time, particularly technological advances,” through the lens of the Church’s Scripture- and tradition-based social doctrine — that living “legacy of wisdom, where we find principles for thought, criteria for discernment and judgment, and concrete guidelines for action.”

While the pope covers a great deal of ground in his encyclical, five remarks stand out as especially provocative and/or memorable.

1. The two cities

At the outset, Pope Leo XIV raises the questions of where man is going and toward which goal does he wish to orient himself.

Leo XIV notes that in the era of AI, mankind is faced with a choice — not whether or not to embrace technology, which he does not regard as a force intrinsically antagonistic to humanity — but of whether to “construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

RELATED: It’s not easy being pope — Leo’s big new tech encyclical proves it

Alessandra Benedetti – Corbis/Corbis/Getty Images

The American pope suggested that the choice will inevitably dictate how the transformative technology of the age is employed, given that this technology takes on the “characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.”

Following in the footsteps of Nimrod and choosing the first option would mean giving way to an ancient temptation and pursuing “a single language, a single technology, a single direction”; building a society “on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency”; and working toward a “future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means.”

The second option would similarly mean dominating the heavens but rather patiently cultivating a “space in which humanity rediscovers its solid foundations and its final end” — a place “less visible and less spectacular” that is founded on the common good and has for its bedrock a firm relationship with the Almighty.

Building for the common good necessitates resisting the “Babel syndrome” that animates transhumanism and other vainglorious efforts to correct what God has created and instead “accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected,” said the pope.

2. Falling victim to achievement

Leo XIV observed that within the ascendant technocratic paradigm previously denounced by Pope Francis, there is a “tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control, and profit alone shape personal, social, and economic decisions.”

‘Speed and efficiency should never be the supreme motivating force for the irreversible decisions.’

This contagious way of looking at the world — which threatens to reduce “creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency” — has spread in concert with “the expansion of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology,” said the pope.

Pope Leo XIV warns that unless technological progress advances with corresponding ethical and social progress, “the result may be an increase in means without a growth in humanity: ‘having more’ without ‘being more.'”

3. More dehumanization on the battlefield

Sensitive to the increasing ease of war-making, “tragically marginal” efforts to prevent conflicts, and the “perpetuation of conflict as a source of power and income,” the pope discussed the need to rein in and regulate the use of AI where the battlefield is concerned.

Leo XIV noted that moral judgments of a lethal or irreversible nature cannot be reduced to calculation and should not be entrusted to artificial systems.

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

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images

Leaving the work of killing and ruination to machines neither makes war more morally acceptable nor removes the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict, said the pope; rather “it can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal, lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defense into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data.”

‘Decisions now seem to be driven almost exclusively by economic calculations, justified through media distortions.’

Where AI and automated systems are involved, the pope advocates for:

holding those who design, train, authorize, and employ the technology used in strikes accountable;ensuring that “speed and efficiency should never be the supreme motivating force for the irreversible decisions made in the context of war”;requiring technology that facilitates attacks to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants and factor in the impact on defenseless populations;requiring weapons systems to retrace and reconstruct their decision-making processes “so that accountability and blame are not collapsed into ‘the machine'”;keeping decisions to use lethal force under human control; andavoiding an international AI arms race.

Leo XIV notes, “While AI can enhance the defense and protection of civilians, it can also lower the threshold for the use of force, shield people from responsibility, and foster a culture in which the enemy is reduced to a statistic and the victim to ‘collateral damage.'”

4. The new colonialism

After noting that the “Church renews her firm condemnation of all forms of slavery, trafficking, and the commodification of persons,” Leo XIV discussed a novel form of colonialism incubated in the digital economy that “appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information.”

The pope railed against the mining, aggregation, and analysis of individuals’ data — especially information about their health and genetics — noting that such information affords the powers that be “structural leverage over the future, for they can shape needs and markets. They can also decide, before others, to whom medicines, investments, and protections will be allocated.”

The remedy, according to the pope: restore “to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom, and for whose benefit.”

5. A false realism

The pope rails in his encyclical against realpolitik — politics based on doing what is regarded as expedient rather than what is understood as morally or ethically right — particularly as it relates to war.

Leo XIV, certain that “we live at a time of significant spiritual and cultural blindness,” characterized realpolitik as a “truly irresponsible” form of false realism that “sows in consciences and in society an attitude of resignation to the inevitability of war and dismisses peace and dialogue as utopian or irrational positions that ignore the risks at stake.”

While stressing that “peace is neither a naïve hope nor merely the absence of war” and is “always possible as the fruit of justice and charity,” the pope recognized that the prevailing climate of pragmatism and nihilism has nevertheless set the stage for “new wars that are perhaps even more dangerous than those of the past, since they tend to disregard all ethical limits.”

“Decisions now seem to be driven almost exclusively by economic calculations, justified through media distortions, manufactured enthusiasm, and ‘dreams’ that inevitably shatter, generating frustration and further violence,” wrote the pope. “When people come to believe that nothing is genuinely true and that principles are hollow words, then the fuse in their hearts is lit for new eruptions of intolerance and aggression.”

Just as he rejects this “false realism,” the pope rejects the encompassing “culture of power,” highlighting an alternative: the “civilization of love.”

“Christians see the darkness and acknowledge it for what it is, yet they do not merely gaze upon it passively, for they know the light and understand that the darkness has not overcome it and cannot defeat it (cf. Jn 1:5),” wrote the pope. “For this reason, even when suffering seems to have the last word, Christians serve the good and are sustained by a theological hope that gives reality both meaning and direction.”

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​Artificial intelligence, Industrial revolution, Leo xiv, Politics, Pope, Transhumanism, Technology, War, Data, Big tech, Tech 

This situation has happened to me twice in recent months. I meet a guy around my age (50s, 60s). We talk and find we have things in common. I’m excited to possibly make a new friend.

In both cases, there was no political discussion. I didn’t say anything about politics. And they didn’t either, which was a welcome relief.

These guys should be playing golf and awaiting grandchildren, not defending trans activism or walking in Pride parades.

In both situations, the subject of children eventually came up. I don’t have any. They both did.

That’s when things got tricky. One of them announced he had a gay daughter. And the other informed me that he had a trans son.

Supporting the supporters

In both cases, I nodded my head when they told me this, as if their children’s sexuality were a normal thing to bring up, which it is, in my progressive coastal city.

I also saw, in both cases, that these fathers were genuinely supportive of their gay or trans kid. Of course they were. It’s their kids!

I nodded along with them, showing that I was supportive of their kids, too, and that I supported them for supporting their kids.

At the same time, I know from experience that these situations are often more complicated than they appear. Like, are their kids actually gay or trans? Or are they just thinking about it? Or talking about it? Or experimenting with it?

Whenever I hear a parent say his high school or college-age kid is gay or trans, I think to myself: Let’s see what the kid tells you in a year or two.

The truth is that it has become almost mandatory for even the most well-adjusted young people to question their sexual preference and gender identity.

They’ve been receiving this messaging for decades now. Their schools, their teachers, and the entire society have told them: “Being gay is great. Being trans is awesome. Why not consider becoming one of those yourself? You might like it. You might discover it’s your true nature.”

But is that accurate? Most people turn out to be heterosexual. So why are our schools and educators so eager to get young people going off in all these different directions?

Why are these people involved in any aspect of a young person’s sexuality?

Forced participation

Another thing I notice: Nobody talks about the toll these situations take on the parents. Having a trans or gay child can be quite a lot to deal with.

It forces parents to concede — at least implicitly — that all this sexual identity talk is a good idea. In effect, it turns them into progressive Democrats.

Also, it’s a lot of stress. Older people didn’t have to navigate sexual identity when they were young. They don’t have any experience with these situations. Most of them just got married and had kids. And some of them didn’t.

But there wasn’t an entire culture war built up around what choices people made. You were free to do whatever. This was America.

RELATED: The return of Drag Queen Story Hour?

Irfan Khan/Getty Images

Gay until graduation

All of this reminds me of a close friend whose only child (a son) came out to her as gay while he was in high school.

Naturally, she supported him. Though at one point she privately said to me, with a sigh, “I guess I’ll never hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet.”

But then, two years later, the son decided he wasn’t gay after all. So all that anguish was in vain.

But then, another year later, the son started dating a trans person!

All of this was quite confusing and difficult for my friend. But of course, she couldn’t say anything or even commiserate with her friends, lest she be labeled a bigot.

Let’s just (not) be friends

It seems unlikely that I’ll ever hang out with either of these two guys I met. They have too much on their plates. And because of their children, they now have a stake in the sexual identity debates.

And this during a time when they were supposed to be letting go of their children. These were supposed to be their “empty nest” years.

They did their duty. They raised good kids. In both of these cases, the parents had put them through college.

These guys should be playing golf and awaiting grandchildren, not defending trans activism or walking in Pride parades.

But fathers love their children. So naturally, they want to help. They’ll do anything they can for their kids.

Grumpier old men

It used to be that older men were expected to become grouchy and conservative in their old age. But even that natural evolution has been subverted.

Now their lives are affected by LGBTQ politics almost as much as their children’s — which, I suspect, is exactly how the LGBTQ crowds like it. Anything that disrupts traditional families is all right by them.

​Culture, Gay children, Lgbt, Lifestyle, Parenthood, Traditional families, Blake’s progress 

A male who broke into a Memphis home early Tuesday morning came face-to-face with the armed homeowner, who was more than ready for him.

Memphis police told WMC-TV that officers responded just after 1 a.m. to a shots-fired call at a home on Eldridge Avenue in the North Memphis area.

‘This is my home. I mean, I should be able to enjoy it without people comin’ through the window on me.’

When officers arrived, they learned the homeowner caught an intruder breaking into the residence — and the homeowner was holding the suspect at gunpoint, the station said.

Police added to WMC that the suspect was lying face-down on the bedroom floor. The station’s video report below about the incident says the homeowner fired two shots.

RELATED: ‘I didn’t have any hesitation’: Gun-toting homeowner says he spotted intruder in his house and ‘just let it fire’

Officers commanded the homeowner to put the gun down, the station said, adding that they then checked the suspect — Simeon Pratcher, 33 — and found he was not wounded.

Pratcher told police he came through the window because he thought no one was home, WMC reported, after which he was taken into custody without incident.

Pratcher is facing charges of aggravated burglary and possession of burglary tools, the station said. Jail records indicate he remained behind bars Wednesday morning, and no bond amount is listed. His next hearing is Wednesday morning.

The video report also notes that the homeowner experienced a break-in just days earlier, during which his home was ransacked and items worth thousands of dollars were stolen.

“This is my home,” the victim told WMC in the video report. “I mean, I should be able to enjoy it without people comin’ through the window on me.”

After the previous break-in, two people were arrested, the station said.

“I’m not runnin’,” the defiant homeowner told WMC.

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​Home invasion, Memphis, Tennessee, Homeowner shoots at intruder, Arrest, Jailed, Guns, Gun rights, Self-defense, Crime, Second amendment 

In a recent interview, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pushed back against claims that taxing billionaires more would meaningfully improve life for working Americans, arguing that even dramatically increasing his tax burden would do little to solve inflation or lower costs for families.

“People sometimes say that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. That’s not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes … if people want me to pay more billions, then let’s have that debate, but don’t pretend that that’s going to solve the problem,” Bezos said.

“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you. You can’t connect those two things. Not logically,” he added.

BlazeTV host Pat Gray couldn’t agree with Bezos more, pointing out that he also “bleeds terribly” during tax season — but the government largely just wastes his money.

“And so, what happens is you could double that, or you could triple it, or you could quadruple it. It’s still going to the government, and they’re still wasting it on crap,” he adds.

But Bezos wasn’t done, taking on high rent costs as well.

“I recently saw somebody blame it on Airbnb. OK, Airbnb is not the cause of expensive rent … it’s already been outlawed in New York City and rents are still very high. So we know Airbnb isn’t causing high rents,” he said.

“What’s really causing high rent is government intervention. We subsidize demand with things like tax policy, which is fine, but at the same time, we constrain supply. We constrain supply with things like zoning and permitting. Why does it take so long to get something permitted to build?” he continued.

“If you want rents to come down, econ 101, really simple,” he said, explaining that you can’t subsidize demand and constrain supply.

“If you do, prices are going to skyrocket. But this is not anybody’s fault other than government policy. And this is fixable. Again, this is a skills issue,” he added.

“We should put together an economic commission. Featuring Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, you probably want to avoid Bill Gates,” Gray comments.

“But you know, get these guys together who know how to be successful and understand economics and help us craft a makes-sense tax policy in this country where you’re not just pounding people who are successful,” he adds.

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​Airbnb, Bill gates, Billionaire, Elon musk, Inflation, Jeff bezos, Pat gray, Pat gray unleashed, Tax policy 

Establishment Republicans are not the only ones who have suffered stunning electoral upsets lately.

After more than two decades in Congress, Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) lost the Democratic primary runoff on Tuesday to Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas), a man not only 40 years Green’s junior but who just took his seat in Congress a few months ago.

‘The President of the United States is a racist, a bigot, a misogynist, as well as an invidious prevaricator.’

Texas Republicans can take credit for forcing a contest between two sitting Democratic congressmen. After the Texas congressional district map was redrawn, the 9th district suddenly became much redder, compelling Green to seek the 18th district seat currently occupied by Menefee.

Neither Menefee nor Green managed to crest the 50% of the vote needed to win the Democratic primary outright on March 3. Menefee eked out a slight edge over Green that night, 46% to 44%.

By contrast, the primary runoff on Tuesday was a blowout in which Menefee trounced Green nearly 70% to 30%. The outcome was so unexpected that NBC News chief data analyst Steve Kornacki called it “jarring.”

Menefee was gracious in victory, stating, “Congressman Green, brother, I want to give you your flowers. I want to thank you for your service to people across Houston and Harris County.”

Green claimed the loss would mark the move “to another chapter in life,” adding, “I plan to continue to have a career associated with service.”

RELATED: Rep. Al Green forced into runoff with candidate half his age after failing to get 50% of Democratic primary vote

Rep. Christian Menefee and other Democrats; Nathan Posner/Anadolu/Getty Images

The extent to which Green has “served” his constituents in Texas since he was first elected in 2004 is a matter of debate. Even the Houston Chronicle acknowledged that Green is not necessarily as well known for “shepherding high-profile legislation” as he is for building “influence through seniority and committee assignments.”

At the national level, Green, a former president of the Houston chapter of the NAACP, is probably best known for his race-based activism and anti-Trump animus.

“The President of the United States is a racist, a bigot, a misogynist, as well as an invidious prevaricator,” he railed in July 2019. “To say that Donald John Trump is unfit for the Office of the President of the United States is an understatement.”

Since Trump began his first term in office in 2017, Green has introduced or co-sponsored articles of impeachment against him at least four times. Green has also been forcefully removed from each of Trump’s last two State of the Union addresses, most recently back in February, when he carried a sign that read, “Black people aren’t apes!”

Trump is not the only racist Republican in Green’s eyes. Green has also leveled accusations of racism against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Tennessee Rep. Diana Harshbarger, and all the Texas state lawmakers, including Gov. Greg Abbott, who helped redraw the congressional map.

The 18th District of Texas is deep blue, and Menefee is expected to coast through the general election in November against Ronald Whitfield, who secured the Republican nomination in March after earning just 4,500 total votes.

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​Al green, Democratic primary, Establishment republicans, Texas republicans, Politics 

As the Trump administration and congressional Republicans work to lower Americans’ cost of living this year, they should be guided by a simple principle: All affordability is local.

Democrats and too many establishment Republicans still think they create jobs, economic growth, and opportunity. Whenever high prices pinch consumers, lawmakers huddle up with K Street lobbyists to see what big business, big tech, and big banks want … and give it to them.

Yet they scratch their heads as corporate profits surge while working families’ monthly bills only climb higher.

Corporate consolidation makes life easier for lawyers, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and politicians. But it makes life much more expensive for everyone else.

We’ve seen this pattern again and again. Obamacare. Federal student loans. Subsidized mortgages. The Build Back Better inflation bomb. These policies doled out billions to insiders and middlemen but left everyday Americans holding the bag.

Instead of writing more checks this time, congressional Republicans should focus on rewriting the rules that are contributing to our affordability crisis. Federal regulations — mostly imposed by deep-state bureaucrats, not elected legislators — cost the U.S. economy more than $2 trillion per year. That’s five times the size of last year’s Working Families Tax Cuts legislation.

Reforming these regulations would lower prices, spur job-creating investment, and produce the broadly shared prosperity Republicans promised on the campaign trail.

Their first priority should be to reform the federal permitting process, an issue the White House and Congress have been working on together. However, despite real progress to improve efficiency and remove unnecessary red tape, the response has yet to match the urgency of the moment.

The permitting process has become a punchline — it’s wasteful, corrupt, and self-defeating. Federal agencies are blocking massive, urgent infrastructure investments in energy, mining, defense, transportation, AI computing, and manufacturing. Sometimes it seems like the U.S. economy’s greatest rival is not China, but our own government.

Our energy needs alone warrant wholesale regulatory reform. The United States today has neither the energy production nor transmission capacity we need to keep up with AI-driven electricity demand. New rules should be streamlined, transparent, and, most of all, fair. Our economic competitiveness and national security depend on these investments. A more prosperous, more secure future is not going to build itself.

The second priority, related to the first, is housing. President Trump has already signed executive orders to reform regulations that are holding back new home construction. Congress needs to follow his lead. The inability of working families to afford homes today has metastasized into more than an economic drag — it’s becoming a social crisis.

Current housing regulations seem intentionally designed to drive up home prices. This is great for well-off Boomers who see their homes primarily as 401(k)s with finished basements. But it’s catastrophic for young couples hoping to get married and start families.

By some estimates, the U.S. housing shortage is already more than 4 million units. Federal regulations should not stand in the way of new home building — nor should Washington subsidize state and local governments’ regulatory obstruction.

RELATED: A ‘Soviet’ housing fix from Congress

Michal Fludra/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Federal rules drive up costs in every sector of our economy. Health care, education, business, and occupational licensure all present golden opportunities to reform-minded policy entrepreneurs in the House and Senate.

And while they’re fixing regulations in those industries, Congress should also key in on the industry that ties them all together: banking. Right now, federal banking regulations are tilted in favor of the big banks, unfairly hamstringing some community banks and forcing many others to merge or close.

Industries dominated by huge corporations always seem robust. But as we saw during the financial crisis — and as we see every time an artificial bubble bursts — healthy, consumer-friendly markets are diverse and decentralized.

While outright bank failures have remained relatively limited in recent years, community banks are steadily disappearing through mergers, consolidations, and voluntary closures. In 1990, there were around 12,000 community banks scattered across the U.S. Today, only around 4,000 remain.

According to the FDIC, the number of community banks continues to decline each quarter, with 44 of them either closing or being absorbed by larger institutions in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone. That trend matters because community banks are not interchangeable with Wall Street giants.

Corporate consolidation makes life easier for lawyers, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and politicians. But it makes life much more expensive for everyone else.

Too many federal regulations treat all banks the same, putting compliance burdens on small lenders that only megabanks can afford.

These regulations squeeze resources out of the local financial institutions that growing communities rely on. Especially in the AI era, the real-world human economy will depend more than ever on personal relationships, community solidarity, and interpersonal trust. Right now, Washington disadvantages those things and the community banks defined by them.

The American people are ready to make our economy affordable again — as soon as Washington lets them. Streamlining federal rules will allow Americans to build, drill, mine, invest and lend, and compute and compete as never before.

Lawmakers must remember that a more affordable economy is a more local, more cooperative, and more human economy. Regulatory reform — from national infrastructure to community banking — is an investment in America’s most powerful and undervalued resource: our people.

Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at The American Mind.

​Big banks, Big business, Big tech, Corporate profits, Cost of living, Democrats, Obamacare, Trump administration, Opinion & analysis, Inflation, Affordability, Housing 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton enjoyed more than one victory on Tuesday night.

In addition to defeating incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP Senate primary runoff election by over 380,000 votes, Paxton saw his endorsee, Texas state Sen. Mayes Middleton, win the Texas attorney general Republican primary runoff.

With over 97% of the expected votes in, Middleton — a proud supporter of the America First agenda — had secured 55.2% of the vote. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a former deputy to Paxton who who turned coat and pushed for Paxton’s resignation, trailed behind by 10.4 percentage points.

‘Republican obstructionists have to be done away with.’

Roy noted just before 10 p.m. that he had called Middleton to congratulate him. The victor thanked the fourth-term congressman online, writing, “Looking forward to working with you to keep Texas Red and see you pass the SAVE Act.”

Middleton — an oilman, seventh-generation Texan, and father of four who was endorsed by numerous conservative groups including the Texas Family Project, Moms for America Action, and the True Texas Project — pledged in his campaign to “lead the charge to secure our border, protect Texas kids, ensure fairness in girls’ and women’s sports, protect Texas taxpayers and consumers, ensure strict election integrity, and root out waste, fraud, and abuse from our government.”

RELATED: Trump-endorsed Paxton DEMOLISHES Cornyn in GOP Senate primary runoff

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

He also said that he would work to eradicate Sharia law in the state and abolish the H-1B visa program.

During the campaign, Roy and some of his backers characterized Middleton as inexperienced. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Middleton’s former primary opponent, Aaron Reitz, were among those who countered this framing.

Patrick repeatedly stressed that “Mayes Middleton is one of the most conservative members in Texas Senate history — a proven, unapologetic MAGA conservative who fights and wins,” who will “work hand-in-hand with the Governor, the Legislature, the Department of Justice, and President Trump to make the Texas Attorney General’s office the strongest in the nation.”

“Some criticize Mayes by saying he lacks the legal experience to lead. But that argument doesn’t hold up,” Reitz noted in an op-ed. “For nearly twenty years, Mayes has practiced law as a civil attorney, focusing on oil and gas transactions and litigation, while at the same time serving in state government.”

Middleton criticized Roy in turn for previously turning on President Donald Trump, characterizing the lawmaker as a backstabber who “betrayed MAGA.”

Roy — who enjoyed the backing of elements of the GOP establishment including Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) — stressed that he is aligned with Trump and has a stellar conservative voting record. However, some evidently have not forgotten that he opposed efforts to challenge the 2020 election results in Congress; accused Trump of “clearly impeachable conduct” after the Jan. 6, 2021, protests; and backed Trump 2024 presidential primary challenger Gov. Ron DeSantis.

After winning the presidential election in 2024, Trump suggested that Texas Republicans should primary Roy, accusing Roy of “getting in the way, as usual,” and noting that “Republican obstructionists have to be done away with.”

Middleton will now face off with Texas state Sen. Nathan Johnson, a litigator and composer, endorsed by the Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus and multiple gun-grab groups, who contributed scores to the anime series “Dragon Ball Z.”

Johnson has pledged to lead “the fight against the MAGA machine’s assault on our individual rights, against the looting of our tax dollars, and against federal overreach.”

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​Attorney general, Chip roy, Donald trump, Election, Maga, Mayes middleton, Texas, Politics 

Poping ain’t easy. After the turbulence of the Benedict and Francis papacies, during which the Vatican largely wrestled with internal challenges, the unique and contested authority of the bishop of Rome finds all of Christianity at an uncanny crossroads.

Just since Leo’s ascension, AI has developed to a point that — for many millions of people worldwide — intuitively underscores the failure of modernity’s greatest power structures to justify humanity’s continued existence and our continued individual existence as human beings. Science, economics, ideology, art, philosophy, ethics — none of these grand pillars of modern life can any longer give a defense of humanity adequate to bring silence and stillness, or even a “strategic pause,” to the juggernaut.

Already, of course, there are instant criticisms.

Desperate for something to cling to in the storm, many find themselves thirsting for exactly what modernity seemed to tell them to abandon: a guiding spiritual authority over their personal and social lives, one they are sure they can trust as a matter of life and death. With so many of the cults and sects born in the modern age fizzling out or mid-collapse, the obvious place to turn is the nemesis of the self-determining modern person: so-called “organized religion,” which for most in the West, especially America, still means the Christian church.

The depth of cognitive discomfort and embarrassment required of so many to return to the one place they had been convinced most to walk away from is so intense that the pressure on would-be spiritual authorities is reaching historic proportions. How to speak in a way neither too harsh nor too gentle? How to communicate effectively in an era of communication overload and parasocial relationships at scale? How to take needful risks of rhetoric and persuasion without provoking a devastating backlash, without being totally misunderstood, without becoming just another huckster cleverly hooking people with yet another sensationalistic, over-optimistic or over-pessimistic scenario?

Pope Leo, among many others of lesser public exposure, confronts all these questions and more. And in one document (so far), “Magnifica Humanitas,” he is expected to somehow answer them all or at least point the way to an answer as grand and comprehensive as the cyber ultimatum — justify yourself or say goodbye — being thrown down at the trembling feet of the human race.

Great expectations

This is obviously way too much weight to be piled atop one letter from one person — even this 50-page letter (an encyclical, addressed to the bishops of the Church in communion with Rome) and this person, the first American pope and the first with a degree in mathematics. It could have been guessed that Leo himself is cognizant of the good and not-so-good reasons for these towering expectations, and in this respect his much-hyped encyclical does not disappoint. It is a masterful exercise in managing constraints to preserve freedom of movement for a few carefully chosen steps. Leo had to show that his approach to the question of technology flowed with not only his predecessors but the Church as a whole, reaching back to its ancient origins. He had to speak in terms Christians generically could at least understand and find in the text some basis for sympathy and respect. He had to affirm his office’s claim to spiritual authority, and the Catholic Church’s and its tradition, without much further alienating any significant audiences, but while paying special homage to the constituencies he believes are key to mounting a successful bid for spiritual authority of any kind over AI-age technology. And he had to extend an olive branch of sorts to at least some of the most powerful of the AI technologists — a treacherously political task, given the increasingly naked opposition he faces from the Thiel/Palantir wing of tech and the increasingly naked worshipfulness toward AIs shown by tech’s effective altruist wing.

All this he managed to do, focusing his remarks on the core Christian understanding that humanity is alone the image of God on Earth, made capable by Christ of attaining to the very heights of sacredness intended for us by the Father. This purpose, this being, however deeply marred by the Fall, preserves for us individually and together a magnificent grandeur that nothing made by our own mortal hands can possibly surpass. Only by using our tools to degrade ourselves to radical new lows can those tools establish over us an overawing mastery that appears in our disfigured and diminished state to be godlike — to be, in fact, the real deity, the only deity.

RELATED: AI ‘doomers’ suffer from their own weird god delusion

ArtMarie/Getty Images

To avoid this fate worse than death, Leo brings the reader to the Catholic social teaching tradition. In sum, that teaching describes our inalienable sacredness in terms of a universal and particular human dignity that must be protected and cultivated among all, even and especially the most wretched, through the affirmative protection of full access to life’s ancient fundaments (work, rest, shelter, movement, family, etc.) and newer social staples (intellectual property, software, hardware, etc.). Rather than a set of principles, Leo shows the teaching as an embodied and active social practice, one that harbors and manifests the human grandeur bestowed by God as a common good that we, and the Church, are duty-bound to sow into.

Lovers and haters

Already, of course, there are instant criticisms. The feed has begun to fill up with many clever and incisive critical commentaries of “Magnifica Humanitas.” It is asserted that Leo’s cozying up to Anthropic is both cynical and naive. It is claimed that the pope spends so much time on social organization that he fails to dig into the fundamental questions about how a person is supposed to locate his own personal significance or identity apart from the community or the cyber collective. Some accuse Leo of simping for the political left by defending illegal “migration.” Others take issue with his insistence on a clear phenomenological and ontological distinction between the capabilities of humans and the capabilities of AIs. The list goes on and on.

Above and beyond all these objections, however, it would simply be absurd to think that any pope, making a respectable go at fulfilling even only his “first among equals” role ascribed before the schism to the bishop of Rome, would not issue a theological and anthropological “effort post” on the present technological situation that looks more or less like “Magnifica Humanitas.” While Leo’s repeated emphasis on the conciliar and synodal character of the Church could uncharitably be seen as mere theological window dressing for socialist-style social justice, Orthodox and high-church Protestant Christians, to take a few examples, could see at a higher level a papal recommitment to an embodied experience and understanding of spiritual authority that is both well grounded and well distributed, not concentrated at a single earthly point from which every drop of trustworthy guiding must radiate down.

Yet it is true that Leo chose his emphases for reasons not all Christians or Americans would prefer to privilege most, and in the spirit of developing some of the more useful themes left outside the encyclical, I would venture — as someone who covered all these issues over five years ago, complete with passages heavily citing the same Romano Guardini quoted in “Magnifica Humanitas,” in my book “Human Forever” — a few additional reflections.

Frontier observations

Firstly, Leo makes much use of a contrast between two forms of building — that of the Tower of Babel, which seeks to consummate human pride by tooling a total, united identity, and that of the walls of Jerusalem, which were patiently reassembled under the repentant leadership of Nehemiah. Some people, especially exceptional ones, will always seek to build for the whole of humanity by building at scale for a whole-of-humanity use case, and indeed this is not the only or the crucial modality. At the same time, the metaphor of rebuilding Jerusalem suggests a unity of the city of God and the city of man that many will experience as unattainable even on a more patient timeline. Historically, Christians in this position have ventured to society’s frontiers, “empty” spaces where the barest habitations can be prepared to protect and nourish the cleansing of the personal heart and the prayer for the salvation of the human race. And, historically, these habitations, which grew into monasteries, not infrequently became the seeds of villages and townships — the city of God the germ of the city of man. Ours is a moment perfect for the building of monasteries, into which many who feel incapable of living in the world will flow if they are not enclosed in a system of “assisted suicide” at scale.

Secondly, work, value, and society — these relational things at the center of Leo’s presentation of human worth — take on still higher stakes when energy, memory, and money increasingly converge, as they are now clearly doing. Obviously a tool that asserts a monopoly on the choice of tools — where “everything’s computer,” as Trump says, and AI is “the only thing we have,” as Thiel says — is not neutral. More interestingly, however, what choice of tools do we have to cultivate and sustain a socioeconomic life richly rooted in the full complement of salutary architectures? Today, any worthwhile answer to this question has to begin with Bitcoin — where the unity of energy, memory, and money is manifested in a tool that isn’t AI and that just about anyone can start using right now to enable friends, family, parishioners, and even monks to build and strengthen one another without relying on top-down, centralized control. Indeed, if Bitcoin is not used in this way, it is easy to see how it will be seized upon to undergird even stronger and more sweeping forms of top-down control.

Thirdly, Leo recognizes the limitations of any papal encyclical to address these matters. How to know who to trust in seeking and receiving authoritative spiritual wisdom is a matter increasingly hard to settle from a primarily or mainly intellectual approach, such as considering the persuasiveness of a person’s presentational management of concepts, terms, and ideas. So does the risk of hinging humanity’s prospects on intellectual persuasiveness become acute, driving the seeking and the receiving deeper into the direct experience over time of face-to-face relationships with persons not legible from the increasingly disembodied “aerospace” of the field of intellectual presentation. Subsidiarity as a “principle” precipitates ultimately into relational and personal practices — beginning with their grounding not just on bottom-up practices of fraternity, but, even more fundamentally, on the rock of one’s own personal and interior humbled attention toward the moment-to-moment effort at cleaning out the chamber of the heart enough to receive the Holy Spirit.

Finally, while harmony between us and our own tools is not a pipe dream, it is a difficult matter of balance and degree tested by the deepest honesty about what rationales lurk in the hidden recesses of our hearts. Free will must involve trade-offs, often stark while rarely utterly absolute. The gradations thereof pertain increasingly to accepting that all choices in favor of merely human means at the expense of divine means make debits of treasure that can and do compound. The joyful sadness of accepting the prospect of divine forgiveness for the infirmity involved — and the dedication of the will to keeping this weakness in mind, even as our more merely human means are used even or especially unto the human good — is increasingly essential to maintaining a relatively more harmoniously balanced relationship between human-made and divine-made (or begotten) means.

​Tech, Pope leo xiv, Artificial intelligence 

Arizona police raced to the home of a woman after she threatened to harm two children she had with her husband, only to find a gruesome scene.

Andrea Clarice Davis, 38, sent her husband a photograph of their child bleeding before she killed the two children and then killed herself, police said.

‘She was a good mom, so please don’t just, whatever happens, don’t portray her to be some — she did what she did, but she wasn’t a horrible person. She wasn’t.’

Glendale Police spokesperson Jose Santiago said the woman’s 39-year-old husband called police on Monday from Tailgaters Sports Bar & Grill just after midnight to report the shooting.

He said Davis had found him with another woman and fired a gun at both of them just outside the bar. The 36-year-old woman was shot in the back of the head as she tried to flee.

The husband told police that Davis had threatened to harm their two children, and police responded to their home near 49th Avenue and Paradise Lane, only 2 miles away from the bar in Phoenix.

He then received a photo from his wife showing one of the children bleeding and notified police.

Glendale and Phoenix officers arrived at the home about 2:30 a.m. and forced their way into the home because of the alarming texts Davis had sent to her husband.

When they gained entry, they found the bodies of the two children, 18-month-old Andolan and 10-year-old Austin, shot dead, and Davis dead after shooting herself.

Felicia Queen, a cousin of the father, told KTVK-TV that she was shocked by the incident.

“They were little, you know. They didn’t deserve it. They still had a whole life ahead of them. And it’s not fair. I can’t even imagine what my cousin’s going through right now,” Queen said.

Davis’ best friend told KTVK that she had lost her mind after finding out her husband had been having an inappropriate relationship with a co-worker.

RELATED: Woman confesses to heinous crime on social media and mocks victim: ‘I bet he ain’t laughing now’

The woman shot at the bar was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. The husband was not harmed in the shooting.

Santiago would not confirm whether Davis’ husband was in a relationship with the other woman. Both police departments said they had no prior interactions with the family.

“He is a very good dad,” Queen added. “And she was a good mom, so please don’t just, whatever happens, don’t portray her to be some — she did what she did, but she wasn’t a horrible person. She wasn’t.”

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​Alarming texts, Inappropriate relationship, Mom kills kids, Murder suicide, Crime 

Eleven months ago in these pages, I argued that task forces would not cut it. President Trump needed a truth and reconciliation commission.

I noted at the time that the Biden administration oversaw one of the most sweeping campaigns of federal abuse in modern American history. Nearly every major department played a role. A truth and reconciliation commission on political persecution would give Americans what they had long been denied: justice, reconciliation, and a full accounting of the truth.

Trump has created an opportunity to help real victims in a real way. Republicans should not kill it. They should make it work.

In November, Senate Republicans tried the opposite. Rather than compensate everyday victims of federal weaponization, they tried to pay themselves.

The scheme emerged from the Arctic Frost scandal. Senators quietly inserted legislative text into a funding bill to end the government shutdown. The provision would have created a $500,000 cause of action for individual senators for each instance in which investigators seized their data. Some senators could have become millionaires many times over.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) drove the effort and repeatedly went on television to defend it.

I argued then that the surveillance of senators was wrong. It should never have happened. But senators did not face what ordinary Americans endured.

Senators have large campaign accounts to hire top lawyers. They operate from official offices, protected by constitutional safeguards such as the Speech and Debate Clause. They did not lose their homes, jobs, savings, or businesses. But thousands of Americans did. Many still face legal bills, ruined livelihoods, and ongoing cases. They deserve restitution — not the politicians who failed them.

The Oversight Project, my organization, joined the fight. We called out Graham and made the legal, prudential, and political case for compensating the real victims of weaponization. The Senate’s self-dealing provision was eventually pulled, much to Graham’s chagrin.

But the victims remained ignored.

Trump created a better path

That began to change last week. President Trump stepped up in his own unique and unmistakable way.

In January, Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service over a political leak of his tax returns. Those returns, after years of left-wing fixation, revealed nothing especially interesting. Trump sought $10 billion in damages. He recently settled for a far lower amount: $1.776 billion.

RELATED: The anti-weaponization fund is not just for J6. It is for the rest of us too.

JDawnInk/Getty Images

But rather than pocket the money himself, Trump directed it toward the creation of an Anti-Weaponization Fund. The fund would be governed by five members empowered to issue monetary settlements to victims of government weaponization.

That act deserves applause. It also deserves protection.

Trump is redirecting money that could have gone to him toward Americans harmed by the government. Conservatives should encourage that kind of selflessness, especially from a president who suffered more than anyone from the weaponization he now seeks to address.

The fund must work

I instantly recognized the historic opportunity the fund presents. I have spent years defending victims of weaponization, investigating government abuse, and advocating restitution. The fund needs to work, and it needs to work well.

For that reason, I threw my hat in the ring to serve as one of its five members. But this column is not about my campaign for that position. It is about the Anti-Weaponization Fund and the bad-faith attacks now aimed at destroying it.

January 6, 2021, became the fulcrum for the left’s assault on civil rights, legal norms, and basic rule-of-law principles. Prosecutors, courts, media outlets, members of Congress, and left-wing activists turned their power against ideological, political, and religious enemies.

In their minds, January 6 gave them moral and political permission to go all the way. They used it to hurt thousands of Americans, including people who had nothing to do with the Capitol riot. Once they saw what their unleashed machinery could do, they lost all shame and restraint.

These victims were my friends, colleagues, and fellow patriots. Some had to sell their homes. Some lost jobs. Some saw their reputations destroyed. Many incurred crushing legal bills.

The so-called conservative legal movement and legacy conservative institutions were largely absent. Too many viewed the targets as a lower-class problem — or worse, as an opportunity to purge the Republican Party of the deplorable MAGA voters they detested.

Republicans funded the machine

The FBI sent agents to question parents at school board meetings. The government pressured social media companies to censor lawful speech on a massive scale. Senators had their phone records secretly subpoenaed. Churchgoers were surveilled. Americans who did nothing more than hold the wrong political opinion found themselves under the microscope of a weaponized federal government.

Republicans in power did worse than nothing. They confirmed Merrick Garland, an obvious case of a scorned partisan with revenge on his mind, as attorney general. As weaponization accelerated, Republicans funded it without restraint.

They also poured billions into the Department of Homeland Security, helping finance a vast network of left-wing nonprofits that moved illegal immigrants into and around the country while providing them with every service imaginable. USAID and other federal agencies served as Democratic patronage networks, funneling money to left-wing projects and make-work jobs.

House Republicans even launched a so-called Weaponization Committee. It barely scratched the surface of its $20 million budget and achieved little.

What did Republican leaders do well? Fundraise and appear on cable television to denounce the very abuses they kept funding.

RELATED: If Congress can’t oversee the FBI, who can?

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Now they want to kill restitution

Then, despite the private and public misgivings of much of the establishment, Trump won the presidency again. Much of his campaign rested on addressing the harms inflicted not only on him but on all the Americans targeted by the same regime. On his Agenda 47 promise list, he vowed to “end the weaponization of government against the American people.”

The politicians fell in line. They did not contest the promise then.

Now some Republicans have joined Democrats in threatening to destroy the Anti-Weaponization Fund. Some have even floated refusing to fund central elements of Trump’s presidency, including Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, if that is what it takes to stop the fund.

They are willing to reopen the border rather than let Trump compensate victims of federal abuse. That crosses a line no Republican should approach.

When the government harms people, the government should do what it can to make them whole. Critics may object to the form of the fund. I object to four years of destruction visited upon my friends and allies.

Trump has created an opportunity to help real victims in a real way.

Republicans should not kill it. They should make it work.

​Gop, Republicans, Lindsey graham, Irs, January 6, Fbi, Anti-weaponization fund, Opinion & analysis, Donald trump 

Hasan Piker has built a lucrative career denouncing the United States from inside the United States. That arrangement has always carried a certain comic hypocrisy. But his reported subpoena over a March trip to Cuba raises a question far more serious than one streamer’s revolutionary cosplay.

When does anti-American activism become aid to America’s enemies?

The academy may discover that Americans have grown tired of funding institutions that teach students to despise the nation that sustains them.

The latest controversy surrounding Piker is not merely another internet spectacle. It touches an old constitutional question: What limits apply when political activism moves from criticism of American policy into support for regimes hostile to the United States?

Investigators with the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control have reportedly subpoenaed Piker and CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin over their March trip to Cuba as part of the “Nuestra América Convoy.” The investigation concerns possible violations of U.S. sanctions law, including the financing, coordination, and delivery of goods to the Cuban regime.

The details remain incomplete, and a subpoena obviously is not a conviction. But the story matters because it exposes a broader issue universities, politicians, and media elites have avoided for years.

What counts as “aiding America’s enemies”?

Coordination is key

According to reports, investigators seek financial, logistical, and communications records related to the trip. The inquiry reportedly centers on whether activists coordinated with Cuban government entities or violated sanctions restrictions administered through OFAC.

Piker has framed the investigation as an attempt to silence criticism of the United States and Israel. He has defended the convoy as humanitarian relief. He has also praised communist Cuba while enjoying the freedoms and opportunities of the United States. He did not, apparently, spend much time asking Cuban-Americans why they fled the island.

Cuba is not merely a tropical backdrop for revolutionary aesthetics. It remains a communist dictatorship and a longstanding U.S. adversary. American sanctions against Cuba arose from decades of geopolitical conflict, expropriation of American property, intelligence operations, and alliance with hostile foreign powers.

That is why the law treats this area seriously.

In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court upheld restrictions on providing “material support” to designated foreign terrorist organizations, even when that support took the form of training or coordinated advocacy. The court reasoned that seemingly benign support can legitimize hostile organizations and free resources for more dangerous activities.

The key legal principle is coordination.

RELATED: Woke ‘Squad’ member appears to confess to undermining Trump embargo on Cuba

Jim Vondruska/Getty Images

Independent speech criticizing America remains constitutionally protected. Americans may denounce foreign policy, oppose wars, criticize sanctions, or defend unpopular causes. But direct coordination with hostile foreign entities belongs in a different category. Logistical support, fundraising, organized assistance, and coordinated propaganda can cross the line from protected dissent into unlawful support.

That distinction is vital. It also leads to a question much larger than Hasan Piker.

From scholarship to treason

For years, professors at publicly funded universities have argued that violence against the United States is morally justified because of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, or American support for Israel. Some have praised political violence abroad as “resistance.” Others have defended Hamas rhetoric as “decolonial struggle.” Still others have trained students to view America itself as an illegitimate regime founded on oppression.

At what point does this cease to be scholarship and become ideological assistance to America’s enemies?

The modern university loves to invoke “academic freedom” as though the phrase ends all debate. But academic freedom was never meant to shield every form of political agitation from public scrutiny. Nor does it require taxpayers to subsidize institutions that teach students to despise the constitutional order that protects them.

A professor at a public university holds a privileged position funded by taxpayers and entrusted with forming the minds of future citizens. That status does not erase his constitutional rights. But it does heighten the public’s interest in what universities reward, protect, and promote.

Can a tax-funded professor argue that Americans deserve violent retaliation? Can he encourage students to view foreign terrorist organizations as morally justified revolutionaries? Can he defend armed resistance against the United States as a legitimate response to “settler colonialism”?

Universities have spent decades pretending these questions do not exist. Many of the same institutions that warn endlessly about white supremacy tolerate faculty rhetoric that justifies violence against Americans, Israelis, and other supposed oppressors in the name of liberation.

They have built entire departments on ideological hostility to the American constitutional order. Students learn that the United States is fundamentally illegitimate, that Western Civilization is inherently oppressive, and that power — not truth or justice — determines morality. Under those assumptions, violence becomes easy to rationalize as liberation.

Campus activism has repeatedly celebrated anti-American movements abroad while denouncing America itself as uniquely evil. Faculty members increasingly blur the line between analysis and activism, between scholarship and revolutionary agitation, all from tax-funded offices under institutional protection.

RELATED: Democrats don’t have a fix for their extremism problem

Noushad Thekkayil/NurPhoto/Getty Images

The contradiction is striking. Universities often police ordinary constitutional patriotism while tolerating rhetoric sympathetic to regimes hostile to the United States. Professors may face investigation for questioning DEI orthodoxy or praising MAGA politics, while admiration for Marxist revolutionary movements often receives the protection of “academic freedom.”

The Hasan Piker subpoena exposes this double standard.

An overdue reckoning?

The issue is not whether Americans may criticize their government. Of course they may. The First Amendment protects dissent because free societies tolerate disagreement.

But the First Amendment does not require public institutions to pretend that all forms of anti-American agitation carry the same civic meaning. A democracy may distinguish between criticism of its policies and organized sympathy for hostile regimes. It may distinguish between unpopular speech and material coordination. It may distinguish between scholarship and indoctrination.

Universities should have drawn those lines long ago.

If professors encourage students to sympathize with anti-American violence, defend revolutionary movements hostile to the United States, or justify armed resistance against the constitutional order, taxpayers may reasonably ask whether public universities are subsidizing ideological warfare against the nation itself.

For years, universities dismissed these concerns as paranoia.

Now federal subpoenas may force the country to revisit them in public.

And the academy may discover that Americans have grown tired of funding institutions that teach students to despise the nation that sustains them.

​Hasan piker, First amendment, Cuba, Hamas, American universities, Western civilization, Academic freedom, Opinion & analysis 

Amazon Prime Video’s series “The Boys” has long depicted its primary villain, Homelander, as a mockery of President Donald Trump, before killing him off in the series finale.

The show’s creator, Eric Kripke, specifically wanted to use Homelander’s death as a way of demonstrating how “strong men” are actually reduced to helpless cowards when “stripped of their power.”

And in his death scene, Homelander groveled and cried, making some disgusting offers in exchange for mercy.

“My understanding of this Homelander character is that he is actually … a very insecure, sort of neurotic guy who would not naturally find himself in a position of power. So, perhaps that ending is not exactly unexpected,” BlazeTV host John Doyle comments.

“But the point is, the reason that ending came about wasn’t so much because of the natural progression of the character so much as it was, again, the writer literally saying, ‘It’s very important for us to remind the audience that strong men are actually cowards and their power over you is freaking illegitimate,’” he says.

“They write the whole show to be nothing more than just this very thinly veiled contempt for patriots and normal Americans. It’s murder porn. It’s bloodlust porn. And that’s why, ultimately, it’s a portrayal of how they think we all just deserve to die,” he adds, calling the writer of the show a “completely deranged libtard” who’s “making propaganda.”

However, the propaganda backfired.

“And for the entire time, people were using that murder porn that the show was creating and using it to go against everything that the writer stood for and his terminal TDS,” Doyle comments.

While Homelander was considered evil by the left, the right has picked up patriotic memes of the superhero and begun sharing them across social media to describe themselves.

“Every time they try to create a piece of art or media that is depicting right-wing people in a negative light, even if it’s a caricature of how they perceive us to be, everybody always loves them,” Doyle says, using Rorschach from “Watchmen” as another example.

“Roschach is everybody’s favorite character,” he says.

“It brings me sort of immense joy to use your own work against you with a tiny, tiny fraction of the effort it took you to make it,” he continues.

“I am taking your livelihood and using it in a way that is against your will and without your consent,” he adds.

Want more from John Doyle?

To enjoy more of the truth about America and join the fight to restore a country that has been betrayed by its own leaders, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Amazon prime, Donald trump, Eric kripke, Homelander, John doyle, Rorschach, The blaze, The boys, The john doyle show, Watchmen 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s challenge to incumbent Sen. John Cornyn went unresolved in the heated Republican primary race on March 3, as neither candidate proved able to secure 50% of the total vote.

Though Cornyn confidently warned Paxton that “Judgment day is coming,” Paxton ultimately proved victorious in Tuesday’s runoff election, handily beating the four-term senator by double digits.

AP News and NBC News called the race for Paxton around 9 p.m. ET, at which time 49.1% of the vote was in and Paxton was leading Cornyn 62.5% to 37.5%.

‘Our Country needs Fighters.’

Cornyn’s campaign blew over $24 million on advertising, including the attack ads that unsuccessfully tried to turn Republican voters off Paxton, reported the Texas Tribune.

Tens of millions of dollars more were blown by various pro-Cornyn groups, including the super PAC Texans for a Conservative Majority, which squandered $32.9 million on total advertising. The group even dropped $9.5 million in runoff-only ad-spending to help the senator.

The Lone Star State’s AG, whose campaign spent only $4.8 million on advertising, stated in a runoff Election Day interview that “John Cornyn has never done anything significantly good for the state of Texas in 42 years.”

In his final argument against maintaining the status quo, Paxton faulted his opponent for “siding with Joe Biden on restricting Second Amendment rights, siding with Joe Biden on bringing Afghan refugees here without vetting them, going against Donald Trump on the border, going against Donald Trump’s re-election, going against Donald Trump’s first election, fighting for amnesty, open borders — that’s John Cornyn.”

RELATED: GOP congressman sort of reappears after going AWOL for months, missing over 100 votes

Richard Rodriguez/Getty Images

Toward the end of the race, Cornyn’s team framed the senator — who received donations from elements of the GOP old guard including former President George W. Bush and Rupert Murdoch — as a steady and proven conservative and Paxton as “morally bankrupt” and a “mortal threat to the America First agenda.”

President Donald Trump evidently did not share Cornyn’s vision for the future or his concerns about Paxton.

The president endorsed Paxton last week, touting him as “a true MAGA Warrior who has ALWAYS delivered for Texas, and will continue to do so in the United States Senate.”

While signaling goodwill to Cornyn by referring to him as a “good man,” Trump emphasized that Paxton is a fighter and that “Our Country needs Fighters, and also Loyalty to the Cause of Greatness.”

Trump wasted no time celebrating Paxton’s win on Tuesday, posting to social media an image of himself and the victor along with a reminder of his endorsement.

Paxton will now face Democrat state Rep. James Talarico — a part-time Presbyterian seminarian who has attempted to use Scripture to justify abortion, protested the public display of the Ten Commandments, concern-mongers about traditional Christian views, voted against sparing kids from sex-rejection mutilations, and claimed there are six sexes.

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​Donald trump, George w bush, James talarico, John cornyn, Ken paxton, Open borders, Runoff election, Rupert murdoch, Second amendment rights, Texas attorney general, Politics 

Video of a gay eighth-grade student’s expletive-filled graduation speech from Kentucky went viral after his uncle posted it online.

Daniel Mattingly called Stuart Academy in Louisville “f**king ridiculous” in the crude apex of the series of woke insults he tossed at school officials on Thursday.

‘This school is built on racism, sexism, and homophobia. I encourage everyone here today to stand up for yourself, even if it makes a scene.’

Mattingly claimed that officials turned down versions of his speech that were inappropriate for the event before launching into the insults.

“The theme that I was given for the speech was acceptance,” the eighth grader explained to WAVE-TV. “A majority of it was just explaining that I see that people are going through trauma and going through oppression today.”

He went on to claim that teachers at the school told him his speech wasn’t positive enough and was too controversial. On the day of the speech, he defied them and accused them of being homophobic and racist.

“Apparently this school doesn’t know better than to give an angry gay kid a microphone,” he said during the speech.

“No shade at all, but I came to this graduation planning to give a speech about my trauma influencing me as a person, and black, brown, and mixed youth are facing oppression nowadays and being forced to fear their own identities,” he added.

He went on to say that all of the school’s students are “oppressed” youth.

“This school is built on racism, sexism, and homophobia. I encourage everyone here today to stand up for yourself, even if it makes a scene,” he added. “This school is f**king ridiculous!”

He got a lot of applause from the students, and the woke speech got even more recognition after his uncle posted video online.

“All these teachers told me to speak from my heart for this speech, and I realized I shouldn’t chicken out, because I need to speak from my heart and tell these people what they need to be told,” Mattingly told WAVE.

RELATED: Parents protest after student who posted ‘up-skirt’ photos of female schoolmates is allowed to return to class

The student told WAVE he didn’t want to make the school look bad when he claimed that it was “built” on “racism, sexism, and homophobia.”

Video of his unedited speech was posted to social media.

Jefferson County Public Schools did not issue a statement about the school in their district.

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​Graduation speech, Public schools, Kentucky, Viral video, Politics 

A former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee announced a campaign running for Florida’s 20th Congressional District and was immediately accused of “dismantling” black “power.”

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) was redistricted out of her previous seat and opted to run in the 20th district, which is composed of about 50% black residents.

‘DWS is everything that’s wrong with the Democratic establishment.’

In a statement released Tuesday, nearly all the DNC members from Florida condemned the decision by Schultz.

“Our party cannot credibly denounce the dismantling of black political power by Republicans while treating one of Florida’s few remaining majority-black districts as a political opportunity for an incumbent seeking a safer seat,” the statement reads.

Schultz, who has been in Congress for more than two decades, would likely win an easy contest in the general election in the left-leaning district. However, other Democrats accused Schultz of using her power to make her campaign easier.

“Debbie Wasserman Schultz is carpetbagging to FL-20, a black opportunity district instead of running in her own,” said Elijah Manley, another Democratic candidate running for Florida’s 20th district.

“DWS is everything that’s wrong with the Democratic establishment. … I look forward to retiring her from public office permanently.”

Others like former 2 Live Crew rapper and black activist Luther Campbell, who is also running for the seat as a Democrat, warned Democrats that the black community is taking notice.

“To the Florida DNC members who stayed silent — we see you too. We’re taking receipts,” Campbell wrote on social media. “Congressional District 20 is not a political opportunity seat. Black representation matters. Lived experience matters. Make sure you’re on the right side of history.”

“This decision reinforces the same message Republicans have pushed for years: that black representation does not matter,” the Florida Democrats continued in their letter. “It does matter. Representation matters. Lived experience matters.”

RELATED: USC accused of racism after minority candidates don’t qualify for gubernatorial debate — so USC makes drastic decision

Schultz ran the Democratic Party from May 2011 until July 2016, just a few months before President Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. The late Harry Reid, a top Democratic leader, blamed Schultz for the devastating loss.

“We need a full time DNC chair and what they should do — they can take my model if they want — it’s not rocket science,” Reid said at the time. “It doesn’t take a lot of brain power to figure out what needs to be done.”

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​Black activist, Democratic national committee, Rep debbie wasserman schultz, Politics