Category: blaze media

You would think that growing up under an abusive, personality-disordered mother would immunize a writer like me from shock at women’s bad behavior. That’s what I always thought at least.

Then I witnessed the extraordinary outpouring of female sympathy for Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who killed her three children in 2023.

Some Clancy girls now claim Lindsay’s poor husband, Patrick, actually killed the kids and framed her. How do they know this? Astrology of course.

Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, is now on trial for murder. Her children were Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, eight months old.

There is no dispute about who killed them. Clancy’s defense admits she strangled all three children with exercise bands in the basement of the family’s home while her husband, Patrick, was out picking up medicine and takeout. The question for the jury is whether she was criminally responsible when she did it.

Her lawyers say she wasn’t. They argue that Clancy suffered from postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder and that psychiatric medications worsened her condition. Prosecutors say she deliberately arranged to get her husband out of the house and knew exactly what she was doing.

Clancy girls

I don’t know what the jury will decide. What I do know is what thousands of women have decided already.

Across social media, a group of women I’ll call “Clancy girls” have turned Lindsay Clancy into an object of identification and affection. They see her as a poor, unsupported, overwhelmed mother who begged for help and was failed by everyone.

Does this shock you? I hope it does. It is real, and it is deadly serious.

We have a dire, immediate, society-wide problem of women identifying with evil, sympathizing with evil, and financially supporting evil.

It should be socially unthinkable for anyone, let alone thousands of women, to openly weep for a woman who killed her three children by strangling them with exercise bands. Even 20 years ago, this moral derangement would have made a woman a pariah if she dared to speak it out loud.

Not anymore. In fact, the Clancy girls are going out of their way to exonerate this modern Medea.

‘Wonderful mom’

Take the Musgrove Family Fund. It has raised almost a million dollars for Clancy’s parents, Mike and Paula Musgrove, who have relocated from Connecticut to Massachusetts and incurred substantial expenses while remaining close to their daughter throughout the criminal proceedings. The organizers are careful to say that donating does not require taking Lindsay’s side: “Nothing about this fund asks anyone to share their view of Lindsay or the criminal case.”

Yet judging from the comments, many of the female donors are more than happy to offer Lindsay absolution:

Strong support and hugs for Lindsay and her supportive parents. My sister was also an RN when she went through PPD+PPS. It was so hard to watch her go through it.

We stand beside and behind you Lindsay and family. I struggled with PPD and PPA and many times it felt like I was asking for help, reaching up only to grab air. I am sending lots of love and virtual hugs.

I know it feels like it now, but you’re not alone Lindsay. Your emotion and love for your babies is felt through the screen. From one mom who’s been through psychosis to another — I just want to wrap my arms around you and shower you with love and support. You ARE a wonderful mom. It wasn’t you that day. It may have been your body, but it certainly wasn’t your mind or thoughts. — from a Kentucky mom

Love and “virtual hugs” for this “wonderful mom.” Personal emotional identification with a woman who committed a crime so depraved it forms one of the darkest psychological archetypes in Western mythology.

In the stars

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe Lindsay Clancy had a psychotic break. I don’t believe she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. I don’t believe that “too many psychiatric drugs” caused her to hallucinate and lose her mind. It’s hard to see how that’s possible when the evidence shows Clancy didn’t even take the recommended dosage of the drugs, or took them for a few days and stopped after that.

I believe Clancy shows the signs of narcissistic personality disorder and that she’s lying about having hallucinations to cover up the fact that she wanted her children dead because they interfered with the lifestyle and attention she believed she was entitled to. I think she killed them because their existence on earth meant that everything couldn’t be about Lindsay all the time.

It gets worse. Some Clancy girls now claim Lindsay’s poor husband, Patrick, actually killed the kids and framed her. How do they know this? Astrology of course.

Whatever the truth may be, it doesn’t ameliorate the shocking, reflexive sympathy countless women are displaying. Instead of being stunned by a diabolical, almost unthinkable murder, women across social media (and in hair salons, according to reports from my friends overhearing chitchat) see the mother who killed her children as the real victim.

This is moral depravity at a scale nigh unbelievable.

RELATED: ‘Carrie’ and the monster who raised me

Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images

The patriarchy did it

No one would make these excuses for a male family annihilator, which is what Lindsay Clancy is. Almost no one popped up to defend Chris Watts. No one wanted to “start a conversation about the pressure fathers are under” to deflect from the fact that he murdered his family.

No one makes mental health excuses for men who exterminate their children. It’s only women who get this sympathy.

Why?

Since the 1960s, Americans have been under a delusional spell called “feminism.” This magical spell managed to convince an entire country that women in the richest country in the world were unbearably oppressed. All of a sudden, all traditions were overturned. Motherhood became a burden. Children became a ball and chain forced on women by patriarchal men.

Feminism took over everyone’s mind, left, right, and center. Men and women. It has long been accepted as fact that women were always and ever subjugated by men. That having children was a prison sentence imposed on women. That being married and raising a family deprived women of making their mark in the world.

Feminism is a lie, and it is a tool of the narcissistic, resentful mind. It has pitted women against men and against their own children. It has convinced millions of women in the freest and most wealthy country in world history that they are “unsupported” and “exploited.”

Shock and despair

It would be hysterically funny if the consequences weren’t so egregious.

But they are. Lindsay Clancy stands a decent chance of being let off under the insanity plea because we refuse to acknowledge a fundamental aspect of human nature that everyone knew until the mid-20th century: Women have the capacity to do evil.

I put my abusive, narcissistic, psychopathic mother out of my life permanently 10 years ago. That’s long enough to be over the initial shock and despair of discovering that the one person I was supposed to be able to trust tried to destroy me. It doesn’t keep me awake nights any longer.

But I’m sleepless this week after discovering a new horror: If my mother had succeeded in killing me, my sister, or my brother, our names would be forgotten. Our mother would be seen as a tragic victim, a single mother “failed” by everyone.

At least she’d get hugs.

​Crime, Lindsay clancy, Filicide, Culture, Postpartum depression, First person, Motherhood, Feminism, Intervention 

The battle for censorship online has been raging on social media for more than a decade.

Netizens have clamored for unfettered free speech, while their detractors say that some things are better left not said. Somewhere in the middle, though, exists a new app that is going viral for one line: “Jesus is watching you!”

‘Half of the songs nowadays have no clean version.’

A post seen by more than 1 million people on X alluded to a Big Brother-style app that monitors the listening habits of music lovers. However, one chat with the app’s founder is likely to put that idea to bed.

The app is called Verso, and while on its face it is indeed an app designed to help censor music, the application’s stated intent is to fill in the gap of parental control settings on streaming services by acting as an intentional filter between the service and the listener.

Citing that around 92% of today’s top streaming songs are explicit, Verso says it wants to put parents and families in control of what they hear.

Co-founder Jonathan Bernal told Blaze News directly that he left his former job with the Google Gemini AI team because he wanted to use his skills to develop technology that supports the family unit, unlike most tech out there.

“Kids hear everything,” Verso says in its video. Bernal backs that up.

“Half a billion families are listening to music, and half of the songs nowadays have no clean version,” he said. “Parents are constantly reaching for the mute or skip button.”

In order ensure a listening experience in which parents don’t have to worry about blasting out adult content, the app syncs with music streaming services and filters out profanity or certain themes entirely. The system is akin to a time when content moderation on television could be trusted.

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To avoid a one-size-fits-all application, Bernal said it was important for the app to be able to make any song instantly “customizable.”

“You can make it family-friendly; you can make any song align with your values,” Bernal said.

This comes through the settings, where users can filter out sexual innuendo, profanity, sacrilegious messages, or anything they consider to be unpalatable. All of those options can be applied globally, but the fun part comes in the individual settings.

Any song specifically can be changed, and users are free to customize how the music gets censored. Bernal noted how many videos have gone viral of parents on TikTok using duck sounds for when their kids are in the car.

RELATED: Wi-Fi. Microwaves. Electromagnetism. It’s all connected — and so is the damage.

Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Getty Images

For clarification, the entrepreneur said yes, the viral image of the app asking users to repent is real.

Bernal said he is a Christian man and hopes to continue the app’s success so he can help promote the family unit.

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​Censorship, Streaming, Tech 

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle evidently weren’t cut out for the land of the free. After braving a few years of luxury in Los Angeles, they’re now planning to pull up stakes and retreat to Britain.

Royal flush

After British taxpayers were squeezed for roughly $3 million to refurbish the couple’s 18th-century home on the grounds of Windsor Castle estate, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced in January 2020 their decision to “carve out a progressive new role within this institution” and “step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family.”

‘I can’t see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back.’

They dawdled around Canada for a time, then moved to the United States in 2020 to purportedly pursue a “more peaceful,” private life free of royal duties.

In February 2021, Buckingham Palace announced that Queen Elizabeth had informed the duke and duchess that:

in stepping away from the work of the Royal Family it is not possible to continue with the responsibilities and duties that come with a life of public service. The honorary military appointments and Royal patronages held by the Duke and Duchess will therefore be returned to Her Majesty, before being redistributed among working members of the Royal Family.

Liberated from the responsibilities and honors bequeathed to the prince by his forefathers, the duo has spent recent years chasing the limelight.

The DEI duchess — who upon settling in California suggested on multiple occasions that Britain is racist and that she and Prince Harry left because of supposed bigotry in the House of Windsor — has not, however, enjoyed the kind of media success for which she apparently pined.

RELATED: INGRATE BRITAIN: ‘Good Place’ star Jameela Jamil calls fellow Brits ‘evil,’ likens them to Marvel villain

Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

Netflix announced in July 2021 that Markle’s animated feminist series “Pearl” was going into production. The project was flushed the following summer.

‘F**king grifters.’

While the couple’s 2024 Netflix docuseries “Polo” — dubbed an “unintentional comedy” by the Guardian — actually made it to air, it was a total flop.

Earlier this year, Netflix divested from Markle’s lifestyle brand As Ever and decided not to renew her cooking show “With Love, Meghan.”

The couple had a lucrative deal with Spotify valued at roughly $20 million, but that collapsed in 2023 after the duke and duchess failed to produce more than one series and a holiday special. At the time, a Spotify executive branded them “f**king grifters.”

The couple’s latest flop, a documentary called “Cookie Queens” that they executive-produced, had made less than $600,000 as of Aug. 18, according to reported box-office figures.

Retreat

The couple has decided to move back to Britain sometime this month, according to an exclusive report from the Telegraph.

King Charles was reportedly informed of the couple’s decision on Sunday.

Their children, 7-year-old Prince Archie and 5-year-old Princess Lilibet, have been enrolled to start school in the U.K., a part of the world that Prince Harry once complained “has been created by white people for white people.”

The Telegraph noted that the couple plans to keep their homes in Montecito, California, and Portugal, and that Markle will run her lifestyle brand from the United Kingdom.

When asked about what motivated the return, a source close to the couple told CNN only that they enjoyed their family visit to Britain in July.

On the question of security for the duke and duchess, a Home Office spokesman told the Guardian, “The U.K. government’s protective security system is rigorous and proportionate,” adding that “it is our longstanding policy not to provide detailed information on those arrangements, as doing so could compromise their integrity and affect individuals’ security.”

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said, “We wish them well in the move that they’re making.”

The royals’ decision to return comes one year after Prince Harry stated that despite missing his homeland, “I can’t see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the U.K. at this point.”

Blaze News did not immediately receive comment from Buckingham Palace or the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

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​Meghan markle, Prince harry, Duke of sussex, Royal family, House of windsor, Britain, Netflix, Politics 

A Wisconsin man allegedly stabbed his father in the neck after asking him for a hug, then chased him when he tried to flee, police said.

The Racine Police Department said in a statement that officers responded to a report of a stabbing at a residence around 1 a.m. on Aug. 12.

‘As they went to hug, Joseph quickly presented a knife and stabbed [the victim] in the neck.’

Citing the arrest affidavit, Law&Crime reported that officers found a man with a stab wound who was “covered in blood and holding pressure on his neck.”

The man told police that his son, Joseph Michael Niemiec, stabbed him and then fled.

The father claimed to officers that he heard a noise coming from the back door, which he believed could be an intruder, but realized it was his son.

According to the arrest affidavit, Niemiec asked his father if they could talk because he was having a “rough go at life” and had attempted suicide several times and didn’t know what to do.

Police said Niemiec stepped away to use the bathroom, and when he came back, he asked his dad for a hug.

“As they went to hug, Joseph quickly presented a knife and stabbed [the victim] in the neck,” the affidavit said, according to Law&Crime.

The father said he “felt a punch to his throat and immediately placed his hand over it as he stumbled backwards.”

Law&Crime reported, “Niemiec allegedly came at his dad a second time, but the victim disarmed him and pushed him away. The victim ran away with his son in pursuit, cops said.”

According to the outlet, the father ran to a neighbor’s house, where he called 911.

Meanwhile, his son allegedly fled in a Chevrolet Malibu.

RELATED: Fatally stabbed elderly man found with his heart cut out; victim’s daughter charged with murder

Approximately 10 hours after the alleged stabbing, troopers with the Nebraska State Patrol spotted the Chevrolet Malibu on Interstate 80, roughly 650 miles from the crime scene.

Niemiec was arrested and hit with a charge of attempted first-degree intentional homicide, WITI-TV reported.

Jail records show that Niemiec was booked into the Hall County Jail, where he was being held pending extradition proceedings.

WITI added that the extradition hearing is scheduled for Sept. 15 in Nebraska.

Niemiec appears to be smirking in his mug shot.

The Racine Police Department said the father was treated at Froedtert Hospital and is expected to make a full recovery.

Tracy Kiesler, a neighbor, told WITI: “Oh my gosh, this is right down the road. What the heck is going on? So close to home, it makes you wonder what was going on that someone would do that.”

Kiesler added that the suspect only being 18 years old is “sad and scary.”

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​Nebraska, Wisconsin, Stabbing, Crime 

There is something almost touching about the astonishment with which American universities are discovering that racial discrimination is illegal.

The Justice Department announced Monday that it is investigating the College of William & Mary over scholarships and student benefits that allegedly discriminate according to race. The Civil Rights Division says it is examining whether those programs violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination by recipients of federal funding.

Universities spent years teaching America that racial discrimination could cure racial discrimination. They may now receive an expensive lesson in return.

One might have supposed that this was not a particularly difficult statute for universities to understand. These are, after all, institutions populated by people who pride themselves on detecting racism in places where ordinary mortals see friendship and community.

And yet when discrimination appears in their own programs, their racial acuity suddenly fails them. Universities have spent years building programs around concepts such as “whiteness,” “decolonizing,” privilege, and equity. The problem is not that administrators forgot the Civil Rights Act. It is that many convinced themselves they had discovered a morally superior exception to its basic rule.

The old civil-rights principle was admirably simple: Do not discriminate on the basis of race.

The newer DEI principle often works differently: Unequal treatment may be justified if it is meant to correct an earlier inequality.

The distinction is the whole game.

Under the older understanding, the injustice consisted in treating an individual differently because of his race. If a university told an applicant, “You cannot have this opportunity because you are black,” we knew what to call it. If it told another applicant, “You cannot have this opportunity because you are white,” we also knew what to call it.

The genius of DEI was to make the second sentence sound morally different from the first.

This required an impressive amount of academic labor. Entire vocabularies were constructed to explain why unequal treatment could become virtuous when practiced by the right institutions, against the right groups, for the right reasons. We learned about privilege, power, positionality, systemic racism, dominant identities, marginalized identities, intersectionality, and the rest of the lexicon.

RELATED: Trump’s Justice Department is shining a light on woke universities — finally

Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

The result was an ethical system of remarkable convenience. It condemned racial discrimination while supplying a vocabulary for practicing it.

The trick was accomplished by shifting the unit of moral judgment from the individual to the group.

Once people are sorted into historical categories of oppressor and oppressed, equal treatment begins to look suspicious. If Group A has enjoyed advantages and Group B has suffered disadvantages, treating individual members of A and B according to the same rules can be recast as perpetuating injustice. “Equity” then becomes a justification for unequal treatment today in the name of unequal treatment yesterday.

There is only one troublesome detail: The person standing before you today is an individual human being, not an installment payment on a historical debt.

A white 18-year-old applying for a scholarship did not write the Jim Crow laws. An Asian student applying to medical school did not build the transcontinental railroad with exploited labor. A black student is not the personal embodiment of several centuries of American suffering.

The civil rights tradition understood this. That is why the law speaks in the language of persons rather than assigning inherited moral credits and debits to racial castes.

The DEI worldview has spent years trying to reverse that achievement.

And now comes the awkward part.

The law is still there.

The Civil Rights Act does not contain an asterisk reading, “Discrimination permitted when performed in the service of social justice.” Title VI does not say recipients of federal money may discriminate according to race provided that a diversity consultant has explained why it is virtuous.

Last year, the Justice Department expressly warned recipients of federal funding that antidiscrimination laws apply regardless of whether discriminatory practices are packaged under the label of DEI. Now William & Mary is discovering what that warning means.

Nor is William & Mary alone. The Justice Department has been examining race-conscious practices across higher education. My own university, Arizona State, is under investigation. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions should already have alerted universities that the legal ground beneath racial preferences had shifted dramatically.

But something deeper than law is involved here. Universities are supposed to teach students how to reason. So let us try an elementary syllogism.

Racial discrimination is wrong. Denying someone a benefit because of his race is racial discrimination. Therefore, denying someone a benefit because of his race is wrong.

You don’t need a doctorate in critical theory to follow the argument. Indeed, a doctorate in critical theory may be an impediment.

RELATED: Warning: This college course may be bad for your brain

Andi Purnomo/Getty Images

The great moral achievement of the civil rights movement was not to rearrange the racial hierarchy so different people could enjoy their turn at discrimination. It was to attack the hierarchy itself. The principle was equality before the law — not equality before the law except when our preferred theory of historical oppression recommends otherwise.

There is a useful lesson here for universities accustomed to believing that noble intentions confer immunity from ordinary moral rules.

They do not.

You may call discrimination “equity.” You may put it in a strategic plan. You may hire a vice president to administer it. You may surround it with the soothing language of “belonging” and “inclusion.” You may even persuade yourself that treating students differently according to ancestry is the latest advance in American civil rights.

But eventually somebody will ask the embarrassingly primitive question: Did you treat this person differently because of his race?

If the answer is yes, all the fashionable vocabulary in the world cannot make the question go away.

Universities spent years teaching America that racial discrimination could cure racial discrimination. They may now receive an expensive lesson in return.

The Civil Rights Act never learned DEI.

And the next shoe may be even more expensive: lawsuits from students who say they were denied scholarships, admissions advantages, or other benefits because of race. Once universities concede that race determined access to an opportunity, the legal question becomes much harder to explain away with the language of equity.

​American universities, Critical theory, Federal funding, Justice department, Racial discrimination, Social justice, Racial preferences, Dei, Civil rights act, Arizona state university, Opinion & analysis 

I don’t recall when I applied to become a checker at a grocery store. In fact, I’m fairly certain I am a writer by trade and have never worked in a grocery store, honorable work though it may be.

And yet it seems most stores I wander into to make a purchase have enlisted me to check out my groceries.

Well, I QUIT this unsought job I’ve been shanghaied into.

The self-checkout machine has been around longer than you might think.

I had that thought once again recently, standing beneath the cold fluorescent lights of a large American retailer, attempting to make my purchase — avocados, paper towels, toothpaste, and a package of hamburger — from a machine that clearly regarded me as a criminal. It beeped red and sounded an alert as if a thief were attempting to steal the Mona Lisa. After what seemed like an eternity, a bored, obese woman with four-inch nails ambled over to look me up and down and punch numbers into the screen.

No, I thought. Your look of annoyance notwithstanding, no — I’m not a grocery store checker, and I have no clue how your machine works.

Last year, the day before Thanksgiving, I found myself in an unsurprisingly packed grocery store with only one lane open. I guessed the implication was that everyone with full carts needed to scan them themselves. I watched the cattle plod their way to automated slaughter. How long can we continue this way and remain Americans?

The machines never work. There’s a never-ending requirement for some person to come unlock them (because you didn’t scan the Coke correctly). Half the time, they don’t even provide bags to put your food in. Never mind if you make the mistake of trying to buy fruits or vegetables; you have to scroll through screens to find what you want to buy. Guess what: those organic apples? I’m scanning them as regular old Galas. Oh, is that not right? Maybe you should have someone working here then.

When did we decide that companies could just jettison their workforce and have their customers fill in the slack? Are we going to start waiting and bussing our own tables? Well, there’s actually an entire genre of “restaurants” doing just that. Maybe we can save money by performing our own surgeries? Actually, let’s not give them any ideas.

The rot runs deep

The self-checkout machine has been around longer than you might think. One of the earliest recognizable systems appeared in a Kroger outside Atlanta in 1986. The idea was simple enough. Barcode technology had already transformed the supermarket. If a machine could read the barcode, why did an employee have to hold the box of Cheerios over the scanner?

For retailers, the appeal was obvious. Of course, they never asked customers how they felt about this.

Grocery stores are enormous businesses built on small margins. Labor is expensive, and checkout labor is particularly irritating from a management perspective because demand comes in waves. A store might need a small army of cashiers at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon and only a handful two hours later. Hire enough people for the rush, and you are paying workers to stand around during slow periods. Staff for the slow periods, and customers abandon carts when the lines stretch halfway down the cereal aisle.

RELATED: A huge pagan statue just went up in Texas. Is this the Western civilization we should be cheering?

Darko Mlinarevic/Getty Images

Here’s the thing: That’s a faceless corporation’s problem. I want to avoid becoming a team member at Kroger just to buy my groceries. A normal checkout lane required a human being. Eight lanes required eight human beings. Human beings are expensive and troublesome creatures. They need wages. They take lunch. They get sick. They quit. Some even expect health insurance. So, as with almost every bit of technology in our lives, it made our lives worse by outsourcing it to ourselves. All those low-level jobs, I’m guessing, were very important to those employees sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed.

The human element

There was another function, harder to place on a corporate spreadsheet.

The cashier was a person.

For most people, that hardly mattered. The interaction might consist of nothing more than “How are you?” and “Have a good one.” But those tiny exchanges accumulated into something that once characterized ordinary American life. The butcher knew what cut you liked. The bartender remembered your drink. The hardware-store clerk knew which screw you needed. The grocery cashier asked about your kids.

Commerce involved people because life involved people.

The self-checkout machine represents a different vision. It is efficient, anonymous, and frictionless when everything works. The ideal transaction requires no conversation at all. Enter the store, locate the product, scan it, tap the screen, and leave. God forbid you have to talk to another human being. For years now, chains have known that error rates are high, shoplifting is up, and popularity is in the tank. Apparently, companies are considering scaling them back. Schadenfreude, I say. But will they ever go away? Or will the America we love disappear first?

Consider this, then, my two weeks’ notice. I refuse to scan my own products any more. From now on, even if it means I have to harass a manager to open a lane, I’m deciding to check out of doing unpaid labor. I choose the humans over the machines.

​Tech, Lifestyle 

I wanted a reckoning. I did not want Jason Arday dead.

Three days before he was found dead at his London home last week, I published a column entertaining what I admitted was a mischievous theory: Maybe the disgraced Cambridge professor was not merely a fraud but a world-class trickster who understood liberal institutions well enough to play their racial and ideological anxieties for all they were worth.

Maybe the cruelty was not that somebody finally checked. Maybe the cruelty was that almost nobody checked sooner.

I hoped someday he would confess. I even had the title of the book I wanted him to write: “I Thought You’d Believe Me.”

I wanted that book. I did not want an obituary.

Graeme Wood, writing this week in the Atlantic, makes a persuasive case that my trickster theory was a tad too generous. Arday apparently did not respond to exposure with the wink of a con man finally caught. He insisted he was not a liar. Wood reaches for Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” and its livsløgn — the “life-lie,” a sustaining self-delusion that eventually becomes impossible to let go.

Maybe that’s closer to what happened. We’ll likely never know.

What we do know is that Arday lied. A lot. His public biography accumulated claims about academic appointments, fundraising, extraordinary athletic feats, and racist attacks that proved false, dubious, or impossible to verify. His scholarship contained extensive passages alleged to have been lifted from the work of less prominent academics. Cambridge ultimately opened investigations into his academic work and qualifications and, after his resignation, agreed to an independent inquiry into his appointment.

Enough of these lies!

That includes the lie now being told about the people who exposed them.

The fraud Ibram X. Kendi titled his response “The Media Lynched Jason Arday.” He says journalists have blood on their hands and treats Cambridge’s decision to investigate Arday as an abandonment of a prominent black scholar under racial attack. Wrong.

A lynching is not a metaphor for journalism you dislike. Reporting true and newsworthy facts does not become murder because the subject later dies.

What, exactly, should reporters have refused to investigate? The dissertation? The nonexistent appointments? The millions supposedly raised for charity? The 30 marathons in 35 days? The stories of racist attacks? The memoir?

RELATED: 5-star reviews for a fabulist memoir

Denise Baker/Getty Images

Precisely which question was forbidden?

Thousands gathered in Trafalgar Square on Monday to mourn Arday. The grief was real. So was the anger at the press and at Nathan Cofnas, the academic whose investigation of Arday’s work helped start the avalanche. Cofnas has controversial views about race. So what? If he found copied work, the relevant question is whether the work was copied. His politics cannot restore originality to somebody else’s prose.

This is how the evasion works: Stop talking about the evidence and start talking about the man who found it.

Now comes the possibility of “Arday’s Law.” A petition circulating in Britain actually proposes legislation limiting how many articles may be published about one individual within a given period, on the theory that excessive coverage causes mental anguish. It had garnered more than 3,500 verified signatures as of Wednesday.

The answer to too much journalism, apparently, is a government quota on journalism.

I sometimes fear Britain is lost. Thank God for the First Amendment!

This idea did not appear from nowhere. We have spent years teaching people that speech itself can constitute harm and that institutions therefore have a duty to build ever-safer spaces around anyone who might be harmed by it.

But no space is ever safe enough.

Once speech becomes violence, censorship becomes “care.” Eventually, as we’ve seen, the safe-space logic escapes the campus. A reporter asks too many questions. Too many newspapers publish the answers. Somebody suffers. Therefore, the state must decide when everybody has said enough. No thanks.

RELATED: No, the founders did not ‘tell you so’

Guy Smallman/Getty Images

That is not “liberalism.” Liberalism properly understood demands something harder: accepting that free speech can be intrusive, offensive, unfair, and occasionally cruel while recognizing that giving government power to decide when enough has been said is much worse.

If we want to talk about who failed Jason Arday, look first at the institutions that elevated him.

Graeme Wood’s harshest argument is also his most compelling. Arday was placed in a position for which the evidence increasingly suggests he was nowhere near prepared, while colleagues and institutions such as Cambridge, the BBC, and Simon and Schuster amplified an extraordinary biography instead of bothering to check it. Eventually somebody was going to notice.

Maybe the cruelty was not that somebody finally checked. Maybe the cruelty was that almost nobody checked sooner.

After I learned that Arday had been found dead, I wrote one of my writers: Hubris met Nemesis. And the outcome was invariably the same.

That does not mean Arday got what he deserved. Quite the opposite. Nemesis in tragedy is not proportional justice. It is catastrophe. Recognition comes too late, the machinery is already moving, and the ending is worse than anyone wanted.

Arday’s family and friends deserve compassion. His kids especially. They lost someone they loved.

But compassion does not require one more lie.

Death does not authenticate a false claim. It does not make plagiarism original. And if Arday took his own life, suicide does not retroactively turn reporters into murderers.

The tragedy is terrible enough. Don’t lie about that, too.

​Antiracism, Free speech, Ibram x kendi, Jason arday, Opinion & analysis, Racism, Plagiarism, Media, Truth, Cambridge university, Fraud 

Two years ago, high school freshman Colt Gray shot up Apalachee High School in Georgia, killing two teachers and two students and wounding nine others. School resource officers quickly ended the rampage, and Gray was taken into custody before the death toll climbed higher. His father, Colin Gray, who bought him the gun, was later convicted of manslaughter and second-degree murder.

Colin Gray’s prosecution drew much of the attention because it was a rare case of a parent being held criminally responsible for a child’s violence. But Colt Gray’s own punishment deserves attention too: life imprisonment without parole.

Healing is harder when justice is denied.

Gray’s age, troubled home life, and prior experience of being bullied could have been invoked as reasons for leniency. Instead, the judge concluded that his crime and his motives justified the harshest sentence available for a juvenile offender.

That’s significant because justice is not merely a tool for rehabilitation or deterrence. It also concerns what is owed to victims and to the community after an irreparable wrong.

Gray murdered four innocent people without anything resembling a justification. I would have no moral objection to the death penalty in a case like this. Because he committed the murders as a minor, however, life without parole is the most severe punishment available.

Even that cannot restore what was taken. As the older brother of one victim put it: “The defendant’s family will still get to see their son, talk to him, and know he is breathing. … My mother (and) my father don’t get that privilege. The only way to visit Christian now is by standing over his grave.”

Aristotle defined justice in terms of giving each person what he is properly owed. Whatever one makes of that formulation, it captures something modern criminal-justice debates often neglect: Punishment is not only about what might improve the offender. It is also about recognizing the gravity of the offense.

A sentence cannot bring the dead back. But a legal system that treats grave crimes with proportionate seriousness tells victims, families, and the broader community that what happened to them was not trivial and will not be waved away.

RELATED: ‘Why do we have an FBI?’ Georgia school shooter was on FBI’s radar months before attack

Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

Justice should also force us to confront the nature of the crime. As I wrote at the time, Gray displayed warning signs before he ever brought a gun to school. The lesson is not that every troubled teenager should be treated as a future murderer. It is that threats, fixation on mass killers, access to weapons, and other concrete warning signs should be taken seriously before tragedy makes hindsight easy.

The strongest objection to a sentence like this is that even terrible offenders, especially young ones, may be capable of change. That is a serious argument. But mercy and rehabilitation do not erase agency, nor do they undo the harm already done.

In Gray’s case, the record described an obsession with school shooters and a desire for notoriety. He was obsessed with school shooters. His home life may have been chaotic and his parents may have failed him badly. None of that means he lacked the capacity to understand that murdering classmates and teachers was wrong.

Judge Nicholas Primm made the point directly, saying the shooting “wasn’t done out of fear or anger” but “for the infamy of it.” As such, he doesn’t deserve another chance at living a “normal life.”

Gray may someday understand the evil of what he did. He may repent. He may even become, within prison, a radically different person. But none of those possibilities can make four murdered people less dead or obligate society to restore to him the freedom he deliberately took from others. Explanations are not the same as excuses.

This is where some accounts of restorative justice become inadequate. Restoration may have a place in criminal justice, especially where offenders can make meaningful amends. Murder imposes a limit on that logic because the central harm cannot be repaired.

RELATED: Jordan Salinas: Another ‘good guy with a gun’ ruins the gun control lobby’s narrative

Jason Armond/Getty Images; Facebook/JordanSalinas

The same caution applies beyond this case. It is a mistake to assume that every young violent offender is beyond redemption. It is equally mistaken to assume that redemption, if it occurs, necessarily entitles an offender to release. Recidivism among released prisoners is a real problem, though rates vary substantially by offense, age, and time horizon. The point is not that mercy is impossible. It is that mercy must be ordered to justice, not substituted for it.

By holding offenders accountable, courts can give victims and their families something no therapy program can supply on its own: a public judgment that the crime was real, grave, and deserving of punishment.

Assuming Gray’s punishment sticks, the Apalachee High School community will still have a long road ahead. Students and faculty can honor those they lost, support one another, and take warning signs more seriously in the future. None of that requires pretending punishment itself is healing. But healing is harder when justice is denied.

In this case, justice prevailed.

​Death penalty, School shooting, Criminal justice, Colt gray, Apalachee high school shooting, Mental health, Justice, Nicholas pimm, Restorative justice, Opinion & analysis 

For more than a year, Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) has survived one revelation after another.

Questions about his marriage. Questions about his military record. Questions about the stories he told about being wounded in Iraq. Allegations involving the abuse and blackmail of women. Questions surrounding his businesses and finances. A House Ethics Committee investigation.

Was the story Cory Mills told about Cory Mills true?

Through all of it, the Florida congressman remained defiant.

Stories were dismissed as attacks while reporters were accused of spreading falsehoods. When Blaze News began asking questions about his marriage and religious history, Mills became combative and raised the prospect of litigation. When we later assembled 10 of the most significant contradictions in his public record, his spokeswoman offered a two-word response: “All gossip.”

On Tuesday night, the voters of Florida’s 7th Congressional District rendered a different verdict.

Mills lost the Republican primary to former television anchor Ryan Elijah, who took roughly 47% of the vote to Mills’ 34%. A two-term Republican congressman who once appeared to have a promising future in the party will now leave Congress in humiliating fashion.

The result cannot be credited to any single news organization or investigation. Mills faced scrutiny from law enforcement, congressional investigators, political opponents, local and national journalists, and ultimately members of his own party.

But long before his political support collapsed, Blaze News had begun asking a simple question: Was the story Cory Mills told about Cory Mills true?

What followed became one of the most extensive investigations Blaze News has ever undertaken.

Our reporters interviewed former soldiers and military contractors who had served alongside Mills. We tracked down records. We spoke with former girlfriends, business associates, political figures, and people who had known Mills before he entered Congress. We confronted Mills directly with what we found and gave him repeated opportunities to explain himself.

Again and again, the answers produced more questions.

Here is what we reported.

The marriage certificate

The investigation began after a February 2025 domestic disturbance call involving Mills, which drew attention to a fact that surprised even some people around him: Mills was still legally married and going through a divorce.

That led Blaze News to a 2014 Virginia marriage record. We obtained and verified the certificate. It showed that Mills and Rana Al Saadi had been married by Mohammed Al-Hanooti, a radical Islamic cleric who had been identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas financing case and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot.

Mills confirmed the marriage to Blaze News in an interview. He denied converting to Islam and said he had not known about Al-Hanooti’s background. However, the questions did not end there. Five former associates subsequently told Blaze News that Mills had told them he converted to Islam. Mills continued to deny that account.

The story also opened another avenue of inquiry: Mills and Al Saadi had gone into the international arms business together after their marriage, eventually building the company PACEM into a substantial defense interest. That raised questions about Mills’ relationship with the company after he entered Congress and about his financial disclosures, matters already attracting scrutiny from congressional ethics investigators.

RELATED: GOP Rep. Cory Mills explains why he was married by a radical Islamic cleric

Getty Images

The soldiers who remembered a different Cory Mills

Mills had built much of his political identity around his military and defense contracting experience. He presented himself as a battle-tested veteran and private military operative. His campaign told voters that he had been “WOUNDED TWICE WHILE DEPLOYED.” He repeatedly described himself as having been “blown up twice” in Iraq.

Several former colleagues disputed important portions of Mills’ account, including descriptions of his military qualifications and what happened during two roadside-bomb incidents in Iraq.

That is how investigative journalism is supposed to work.

Scott Kempkins, who was actually wounded in one of the attacks Mills referred to, told Blaze News that Mills could not have been wounded in that explosion because Mills’ vehicle was already about 50 yards away. Chase Nash, who was riding in Mills’ vehicle, likewise told Blaze News: “Cory was not wounded.”

That distinction would become enormously important.

RELATED: Stolen valor? Veterans dispute Cory Mills’ record: ‘He fooled a lot of us’

Anadolu/Contributor/Getty Images

Mills blows up his own ‘wounded twice’ story

Eventually, Mills himself provided perhaps the most damaging evidence against one of his signature biographical claims. His 2022 campaign advertisement had declared in enormous letters that Mills was “WOUNDED TWICE WHILE DEPLOYED.”

Blaze News pressed him on both incidents.

Mills said that during the first explosion, he hit his head inside an armored vehicle. He described suffering a concussion and being evaluated before returning to work roughly three days later. When Blaze News asked whether he had actually suffered a traumatic brain injury, Mills said he had been examined and was told to monitor himself.

Then came the second explosion. Mills acknowledged that he wasn’t inside the vehicle that was struck.

Blaze News asked the obvious question: Was he wounded?

“No, I wasn’t wounded on that,” Mills answered.

It was an extraordinary admission because Mills wasn’t contradicting some hostile characterization invented by a political opponent. He seemed to contradict the words in his own campaign advertisement.

The allegations from Miss United States

Then the investigation took a much darker turn.

Lindsey Langston, then the reigning Miss United States and a Republican official in Florida, told Blaze News in July 2025 that she had been romantically involved with Mills. After the relationship ended, Langston accused Mills of threatening to distribute intimate videos of her to men she might date.

Her allegations resulted in an investigation by the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office, with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement also becoming involved. A Florida judge even eventually granted Langston a restraining order against Mills.

Langston also made allegations about Mills’ finances. She described people arriving at the home they shared with what she characterized as bags of cash and another incident involving money after a dinner.

RELATED: Miss United States accuses Rep. Cory Mills of sextortion, accepting ‘money bags’

Photos courtesy of Lake City Reporter

The political walls come down

With the 2026 midterms on the horizon, Mills appeared capable of surviving all of it. He was a Republican incumbent in a red district. He had built a national profile, and President Donald Trump endorsed him earlier this year. But political support began to disappear as the controversies accumulated.

Mills entered the primary under an active House Ethics Committee investigation, while prominent Florida Republicans, like Anna Paulina Luna, began abandoning him and backing his opponent. Trump, despite his earlier endorsement, conspicuously omitted Mills when he issued a new slate of Florida endorsements shortly before the Republican primary.

Then came Tuesday.

Our readers deserved better. So did Mills’ constituents.

Ryan Elijah defeated him decisively. It would be easy for a newsroom to take a victory lap after an election result like that. That would miss the point. Journalists do not get to remove members of Congress. Our job was never to defeat Cory Mills.

Our job was to find out whether what he told voters was true.

That required months of work that was often considerably less glamorous than the final headlines. Our reporters tracked down people who had worked with Mills decades earlier. We compared recollections against records. We went back to sources. And when evidence contradicted something we had been told, they kept digging.

A congressman who had constructed much of his political appeal around an extraordinary personal biography increasingly found that biography subjected to ordinary scrutiny.

Mills had every opportunity to answer. Sometimes his explanations became part of our stories. Sometimes he denied the allegations, and his representatives attacked the reporting. And sometimes, as with the claim that he had been wounded twice, his answers created problems larger than the original question.

That is how investigative journalism is supposed to work.

Not by beginning with a verdict and searching for evidence to support it, but by refusing to stop asking questions because the subject is powerful, popular, politically useful, or on your own side.

Cory Mills is not a Democrat being investigated by a conservative news organization. He is a Republican congressman, a Trump-backed candidate, a fixture of conservative television, and a politician whose public positions often aligned with those of Blaze News’ audience.

None of that made the questions less important. It made them more important.

Our readers deserved better. So did Mills’ constituents. He was a rising star who reached the heights of political fame, power, and wealth in an extraordinarily short period of time. Unfortunately, it seems he never could escape his demons.

On Tuesday, those constituents got the final word.

Cory Mills spent years building a remarkable story about himself. Blaze News spent more than a year checking it. What was uncovered was a man with a serial allergy to the truth.

In the end, the truth proved harder to outrun than any political opponent.

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​Cory mills, House ethics committee, Miss united states, Politics 

When organizers began preparing for a Jesus March in Chicago, they were shocked to find a large Muslim demonstration already taking place at the same location.

“We’ve got Muslims conquering Chicago as well now. They haven’t conquered the entire country, just most of it,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray comments. “So it’s good to see that they’re infiltrating Chicago as well.”

In a video posted to Instagram, Christian Sean Feucht revealed what he stumbled upon when he went to get ready for the Jesus March.

“Can’t make this up, guys, I am standing in the exact place where we are doing a Jesus March in one hour. And look who’s here. A massive march, a massive Muslim march where right now they’re singing over Chicago, ‘Muhammad is the only one. May Allah be lifted up,’” Feucht said.

“They’re declaring that all Jews and all Christians would be removed from this city,” he explained.

“Our cities in our nation are being fought for in the spirit. I don’t know if you need any more example than this right here. We didn’t make this happen,” he continued. “We literally just walked up to the exact place where we’re doing a Jesus March today in Chicago. There’s a massive Muslim march where they have been declaring over the city.

“And you know what? The church in America is asleep. I’ve been saying it over the last week. This is a perfect example. The church in America is asleep. We need to wake up,” he added.

“Makes me want to vomit,” executive producer Keith Malinak says on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”

“Yeah, we should wake up here,” Gray adds.

Want more from Pat Gray?

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

​Pat gray, Sean feucht, Jesus march, Islam, Chicago, Muslims, Jews, Christian, Blazetv show 

A viral video of a high school soccer player’s alleged attack on another player in South Dakota led to a police investigation.

The match between the Brookings High School Bobcats and Rapid City Central Cobblers spiraled into chaos after one player retaliated against another for a defensive play.

The viral video of the incident garnered over 18 million views on the X platform.

The game was being streamed online as the incident unfolded just before the end of the first half on Friday.

A Cobblers player shoves the Bobcats player out of bounds onto the ground and then kicks him in the back before raining punches down on the boy.

The recipient of the blows tries to shield his face as other players and adults run toward them to break up the beating.

A second later, another Bobcats player rushes in and starts punching as well.

The Cobblers player was issued a red card violation and ejected from the game. According to league rules, he will have to undergo sportsmanship training.

He might also face criminal charges.

Brookings Police Chief Michael Drake told KELO-TV that police were investigating the incident and would interview more than a hundred witnesses. They are also reviewing at numerous videos beyond the viral footage.

The viral video of the incident garnered over 18 million views on the X platform.

The Rapid City Area School District released a statement about the incident to Dakota News Now.

“Rapid City Area Schools is aware of an incident involving a player from Central High School’s soccer program and players from another South Dakota team during a soccer match,” read the statement.

“We expect all students to demonstrate respect, sportsmanship, and appropriate behavior at all times, both on and off the field,” the district added. “We do not condone behavior that does not meet these expectations. Appropriate actions will be taken in accordance with RCAS policies and procedures.”

RELATED: Viral video shows middle school officials barely react as 13-year-old is viciously beaten

The South Dakota High School Athletic Association also released a statement calling the incident “unacceptable” and said it was cooperating with school officials.

“In general, disciplinary actions beyond our general ejection policy are worked through more on the school side, and Rapid City Central is currently doing that within the framework of their own training rules and district policies,” the statement read. “They will keep us up to date on that work and we will support them in whatever is needed.”

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​Viral video, South dakota, High school, Soccer, Assault, Crime 

The family of a student in a viral video of a disturbing high school wrestling match with a transgender-identifying opponent has filed a lawsuit to end the policies at the school.

The alarming video showed the female student suddenly appear distressed during the match and yell to her mother for help.

‘Despite mandatory reporter laws, officials ignored the incident until it became a national news story weeks later. Even now, they refuse to take it seriously.’

She later said that the opponent had sexually assaulted her during the match.

According to the lawsuit, the student did not know she was competing with a transgender-identifying athlete during the Dec. 2025 match at Rogers High School in Puyallup, Washington.

Pierce County prosecutors declined to prosecute the student on the basis that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

The principal and athletic director of the school are facing separate charges because they failed to report the allegation for two months to law enforcement officials.

The school has claimed the two acted in accordance with the information known at the time and that the district launched an investigation immediately upon learning about the incident.

The mother said that the school did nothing about the allegation despite her presenting them with the video of the incident. They only responded, according to her, after the issue gained national attention.

“Despite mandatory reporter laws, officials ignored the incident until it became a national news story weeks later,” read the lawsuit. “Even now, they refuse to take it seriously — to deal with the assault, to reserve girls sports for girls, or even to give parents the necessary notice so they can keep their daughters safe.”

The family is being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom.

On Tuesday the family’s attorneys appeared in court asking for an injunction to stop the school from making females compete with biological males.

RELATED: LA Times hit with vicious online backlash for bizarre headline about trans-identifying athlete

“The most important thing is that parents have a right to know if their child is going to be put in an unsafe situation, like being on a wrestling mat with a male athlete,” said Hal Frampton of the ADF. “They deserve notice and the right to opt out of that situation.”

While some reports describe the alleged assault as “groping,” the lawsuit asserts that the victim’s vagina was digitally penetrated.

Attorneys for the district say the incident is being investigated, but they dispute that the student’s Title IX protections were violated.

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​Alliance defending freedom, Title ix, Sexual assault, Transgender-identifying athlete, Politics 

A Chinese national was arrested Wednesday in Massachusetts for orchestrating a bizarre scheme involving the alleged framing of another national for voter fraud.

33-year-old Yupeng Sun impersonated another Chinese person who had legal permanent status and tried to frame the victim for voting in the 2024 election, according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office press release.

He then submitted numerous anonymous tips to Homeland Security Investigations and US Citizenship and Immigration Services accusing the victim of illegally voting.

Sun also allegedly submitted two fraudulent immigration forms in the name of the victim and his wife, which led to their green cards being confiscated. They were also entered into removal proceedings.

Prosecutors said Sun impersonated the victim in order to register online to vote and then submitted an early voting ballot at Malden City Hall.

He then submitted numerous anonymous tips to Homeland Security Investigations and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services accusing the victim of illegally voting in the presidential election.

Sun went on to impersonate the couple in order to request the abandonment of their legal permanent status.

The couple discovered the scheme when they returned to the U.S. from an international trip in June 2024 and their green cards were confiscated during secondary inspection at the airport in Boston.

The DOJ said the Lexington Police Department and the Andover Police Department were instrumental in the investigation to unravel Sun’s alleged scheme.

Sun was charged with one count of fraudulent voter registration and one count of fraudulent voting.

RELATED: Convicted scammer and former aide to Minneapolis mayor arrested… AGAIN

United States Attorney General charging documents online

The charging documents indicated that the victims told police Sun was their tenant but had been evicted and retaliated by harassing them and ultimately trying to get them deported. Sun had been arrested for allegedly attacking the victims’ daughter, but the charges were dropped.

Sun admitted that he was “very, very” angry at both the victim and his daughter in an interview with police and appeared to confess to signing some of the documents.

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​Chinese national, Voter fraud, Immigration, Deportations, Politics 

Rosie O’Donnell had never been a guest on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” before she accepted an offer to host the show.

Replacing Jimmy Kimmel during his summer vacation, O’Donnell was brought on for a week with one simple goal: to upset President Trump.

‘I don’t know how she can live with herself.’

I see Nazis

Kimmel said himself O’Donnell was being used as a “special treat” for the president, perpetuating the unlikely notion that, of course, the president is a nightly viewer.

O’Donnell told Variety that while she and Kimmel had never spoken in person, while saying they have an “adversarial relationship,” she was happy to take the opportunity to stick it to Trump.

Particularly, O’Donnell took shots at Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison — due to his apparent closeness with the president — for the pending takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which would give him control of CBS and CNN.

“It would be like Fox taking over all news channels. Imagine if Fox was not one outlier and Fox was the mainstay? That’s what’s happening with Hollywood now and the Ellisons, and it’s tragic,” O’Donnell claimed.

“Look at what’s happened to CBS News and ’60 Minutes,’ which was the gold star of their entire network, and they blew it up,” O’Donnell declared.

Seemingly with no room for upward trajectory left on her insults, O’Donnell then alluded to the idea that CBS News editor Bari Weiss, who is Jewish, is siding with “Nazis.”

“This Bari Weiss person, I don’t know how she can live with herself. There are people who are sidling up to him and history will record all of their names, what they did, and who they stood next to,” O’Donnell continued.

She added, “If you’re in a room with 10 Nazis at a table and you’re the only one who’s not, there’s a pretty good chance you’re a Nazi.”

RELATED: ‘I wasn’t invited to those parties’: Kelsey Grammer mocks woke Hollywood hypocrisy

Spite night

Fellow television host Piers Morgan was one of the most vocal opponents of O’Donnell’s Nazi comparisons.

Morgan said a day later, “Calling Jewish people ‘Nazis’ is so disgusting.”

Morgan labeled the comments “such a pathetic line of attack that it makes me want [Bari Weiss] and David Ellison to succeed in shaking up TV News as all the hateful trolls like O’Donnell will them to fail.”

The spite-based (temporary) return to hosting comes after O’Donnell revealed on a recent podcast that she got a tattoo to remind herself of her daughter’s pronouns. O’Donnell said that her 13-year-old, who believes she is “nonbinary,” became annoyed with her mother’s inability to remember how to address her.

“They first told me that it was ‘they/them,’ I tried my best, but I kept saying ‘she,'” O’Donnell said.

“And so they wrote on a cardboard paper ‘they,’ and then they would hold it up above their head every time I said ‘she,'” O’Donnell laughed.

This led to a tattoo that says “they” on O’Donnell’s wrist, so that she will “never forget.”

RELATED: Rosie O’Donnell takes drastic measure to stop herself from ‘misgendering’ her ‘nonbinary’ teenager

Hoda Davaine/Getty Images/SXSW London

Irish goodbye

O’Donnell also revealed that while she thought her tattoo was a loving gesture, her daughter was completely numb to the idea.

“I thought she’d be very touched, and she didn’t give two s**ts. She could not care less.”

O’Donnell has lived in Ireland since Trump took office in 2025, where she has pursued citizenship on grounds of her ancestry. It is unclear whether or not it has been awarded. On the other hand, Trump threatened to revoke O’Donnell’s U.S. citizenship last summer.

As a talk show host, O’Donnell’s “The Rosie Show” had one season in 2011-2012, while “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” had six seasons from 1996 to 2002.

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​Donald trump, Jimmy kimmel, Piers morgan, Rosie o’donnell, Nazis, Entertainment, Bari weiss 

Republican Nancy Mace shocked the internet this week when she decided to debut her heavily tattooed arms for the first time — after keeping them under wraps for months.

Mace revealed that she got the tattoos in order to experience “the pain that I need to feel.”

“When you say something like ‘I need to feel pain’ or ‘I deserve to feel pain,’ there are just warning-sign alarms going off all over the place for me,” BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere comments, disturbed.

“Yes, that’s something I expect to hear from a cashier at Hot Topic, not a congresswoman,” co-host Dave Landau agrees.

“Also, ‘pain I need to feel’ sounds like a Nine Inch Nails song or like a Clive Barker movie. It doesn’t sound like a reason you get tattoos. I have tattoos. They’re hidden. I mean, I suppose are emotional pain, due to who I got them for, which is also why they’re hidden,” he says.

Dave notes that it reminds him of an acquaintance he has who got an “end racism” tattoo on his lower back.

“He came over on his motorcycle, and this was maybe 2000. And he showed me, and half my friends there were black, half were white. And he showed us his ‘end racism’ tattoo. And if you ever want to see black people laugh harder … show them your almost-a-tramp-stamp ‘end racism’ lower back tattoo,” he says.

“That must have gone over really well,” Stu says.

“Oh yeah, he ended up getting it removed,” Dave adds.

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​Congresswoman, Nancy mace, Republican, Tattoos, Stu burguiere, Dave landau, Blazetv show 

A special education teacher at a California elementary school is being investigated after concerned members of the community sent the district disturbing social media posts attributed to her.

Kenisha Daily of Fresno said she was “starting a black militia” and wanted to go “rob some white people” in the posts on Instagram, according to video shared by KFSN-TV.

‘I viewed the post as entertainment and never meant to threaten, harm, or alarm anyone.’

“Starting today I’m starting a black militia, so if you’re black and you wanna shoot some guns, come find me! We gonna rob some white people,” she said in one video. She also posted video of herself handling a long gun as well as a handgun, KFSN reported.

The controversial videos appear to have been removed from her account.

The Madera Unified School District put Daily on administrative leave from teaching at Lincoln Elementary School, though as of Wednesday afternoon, she is still listed among the staff on the school’s website. A temporary restraining order has also been ordered against Daily, according to KFSN.

Law enforcement officials told KFSN that they are investigating the videos.

In a statement to KFSN, Daily apologized for posting the videos.

“I viewed the post as entertainment and never meant to threaten, harm, or alarm anyone,” she said in the statement.

“I am genuinely heartbroken that a careless post has caused people to question my character and the trust they have in me,” she added. “For anyone who has been impacted or made to feel uncomfortable, I am truly sorry.”

RELATED: VIDEO: Cop turns in her badge and gun after posting racist rant against black people online

KFSN noted that Daily had been featured in a few news stories, including one from 2024 in which she received free braces as a part of the “Smiles for Teachers” program.

“I realize that I am an avenue for my students to be able to integrate into the classrooms, into the community,” she said on a newscast at the time. “And so, I’m reflective of them. And I have to make sure that I’m reflecting the best parts of them.”

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​Social media, Anti-white racism, Teacher, California, Politics 

Sophie Cunningham responded with style, grace, and domination after fans in Canada booed her relentlessly during the Indiana Fever game against the Toronto Temper Tuesday.

The star guard has come under fire after she made a powerful statement in support of women’s sports and against biological males competing against females.

‘I think that’s what sports is all about. You’re going to get boos. You’re going to get cheers.’

That may have been the impetus for the Canadian fans booing passionately whenever Cunningham got the ball during the WNBA matchup. Several viewers posted videos of the booing on social media.

Cunningham hit all three of her three-point attempts and helped the Fever defeat the Tempo, 101 to 95.

After the game, she was gracious in a postgame press conference and complimented the fans in the arena.

“I want to shout out the Tempo crowd and the city. I think we’ve had so much fun. It’s my first time being in Canada. It’s a lot of our first times being in Canada,” Cunningham said unprompted.

“But the crowd was absolutely amazing, and, you know, I think that’s what sports is all about. You’re going to get boos. You’re going to get cheers,” she added. “But just the fact that they’re so passionate, they’re loud, and they’re putting on for the city, I think it’s amazing.”

In an on-court interview after the game, she also appeared to reference the controversy over transgender-identifying athletes.

“What a great environment for women’s basketball. It was a hell of a crowd. It was a lot of fun to play in front of,” she said.

When asked about her role among the “big three” scorers, she referenced girls playing sports again.

“I’m just here. I’m just here. Whatever the team needs of me, I’m going to do,” she insisted.

“Like I said, I’m just going to come, have some fun. Maybe inspire some young girls to come beat me one day!”

RELATED: Black WNBA player blames ‘white privilege’ after ejection for hitting Sophie Cunningham

Cunningham’s support for women athletes has led to some fans appearing at her games with signs thanking her for standing up against unfair competition.

This in turn has led to some angry responses from many, including the co-owner of the Seattle Storm, who cursed out two teenage girls at a game. She was later suspended and fined by the league.

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​Sophie cunningham, Wnba, Womens sports, Transgender athletes, Sports 

The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced that it is turning old federal land — including Cold War uranium sites, closed military facilities, and other public parcels — into part of the physical backbone of America’s artificial intelligence buildout, pairing new data centers with the power generation needed to run them. The projects could also create new domestic jobs.

Critics will focus on the benefits to big technology companies. The larger issue is harder to dismiss: Energy security is national security. The country that can build and power the next generation of AI infrastructure will hold an enormous economic and strategic advantage.

Whatever disagreements Americans have over individual energy sources, China is not waiting for us to resolve them.

That means the United States cannot afford an ideological energy policy. Whether the resource is natural gas, nuclear power, solar, battery storage, or the critical minerals needed to build advanced technologies, domestic supply should be treated as a strategic asset.

AI is already changing the scale of America’s power needs. Data centers alone could soon consume as much electricity as the entire country of Malaysia. Advanced manufacturing is returning to American soil and will require still more reliable power.

The military is modernizing with increasingly energy-intensive technology as well. As retired U.S. Air Force Lt. General David Deptula argued in the Washington Post, data itself has become a strategic military asset. The countries that lead the next generation of AI will need more than talented engineers and sophisticated algorithms. They will need the infrastructure to power the entire ecosystem.

China understands this. Beijing has spent years pursuing an aggressive all-of-the-above energy strategy. It continues to build coal plants while investing heavily in solar, nuclear power, hydropower, and battery storage. Whatever disagreements Americans have over individual energy sources, China is not waiting for us to resolve them.

The Energy Department’s plan is therefore a timely step. It creates opportunities to pair new power generation with the infrastructure that will consume it. But if America intends to win the AI race, policymakers across the political spectrum will have to go further and remove unnecessary obstacles to new energy supply.

Solar power, for example, has been the fastest-growing source of new U.S. electricity generation for five years running. In 2025, the United States added 43 gigawatts of new solar capacity, enough to power over 32 million homes. Where permitting and regulatory barriers needlessly delay viable projects, Washington should remove them.

RELATED: Water, watts, and workers: 3 persistent myths about AI and data centers

Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

The same urgency should apply to critical minerals. The United States has spent years allowing dependence on foreign supply chains to deepen even as minerals became indispensable to batteries, electronics, defense systems, and energy infrastructure. Domestic mining and processing cannot expand at the speed national security demands if projects spend years trapped in permitting and regulatory limbo.

This is not an argument for replacing traditional energy with newer technologies. It is an argument for abundance. Oil and gas remain essential. Nuclear power can provide large amounts of reliable electricity. Solar and storage can add capacity quickly in the right places. Critical minerals underpin all of them. The strategic question is not which source wins an ideological contest. It is whether America can produce enough energy, reliably and affordably, to meet the demands ahead.

China is already acting on that logic. The United States should do the same. The next phase of economic and military competition will be shaped not only by who invents the best technology, but by who can build the plants, mines, transmission, data centers, and generation needed to deploy it at scale.

The Energy Department’s announcement is a good start. Now we need to make abundance the policy: build more, permit faster, secure domestic supply chains, and stop treating energy sources as political footballs.

America will need all the reliable energy it can produce, however we can produce it. The country that powers the future will have a much better chance of leading it.

​Artificial intelligence, National security, Natural gas, Opinion & analysis, Solar, Data centers, China, Rare earth minerals, Electricity, Department of energy, Big tech 

Skepticism over whether the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) is qualified to keep his seat was greatly compounded on Tuesday by a troubling admission she made during a debate with Ralph Norman, the Republican congressman who is also running to represent South Carolina in the U.S. Senate.

Darline Graham, a former commissioner with the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, was appointed last month by Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster to finish her brother’s term. Lindsey Graham died unexpectedly on July 11.

‘What are we doing here?’

Graham and Norman both advanced from the special GOP primary on Aug. 11 and are on the ballot in the primary runoff on Aug. 25.

Immediately after the candidates fielded some questions about the U.S.-Iran war and what to do about the apparent depletion of critical American munitions, debate moderator Greta Van Susteren asked Graham, “Are Taiwan and the South China Sea national security issues for the United States?”

The Pentagon noted in its 2026 National Defense Strategy document that communist China’s historic military buildup affects America’s interests because “the Indo-Pacific will soon make up more than half of the global economy.”

“The American people’s security, freedom, and prosperity are therefore directly linked to our ability to trade and engage from a position of strength in the Indo-Pacific,” said the NSS document. “Were China — or anyone else, for that matter — to dominate this broad and crucial region, it would be able to effectively veto Americans’ access to the world’s economic center of gravity, with enduring implications for our nation’s economic prospects, including our ability to reindustrialize.”

RELATED: Drain the swamp? Meet the refill

As for Taiwan, the island nation sought by Beijing is a “semiconductor manufacturing powerhouse” that ranks among America’s top-five merchandise trading partners.

After having Van Susteren repeat the question, Graham responded, “I’m just going to be honest here. I’m not, on national security — I’m not that informed on national security.”

Graham paused for a moment, then added, “But I do support the military,” then referenced her brother’s and father’s military service.

‘This is not something you inherit.’

“I’m not a polished politician up here. National security is not my thing, not my area of expertise,” continued South Carolina’s first female senator, “but I do support the military.”

Norman didn’t immediately make hay of Graham’s admission but instead answered the moderator’s original question, stating, “Taiwan is a definite ally, and we have a trading relationship with them that is beneficial to the United States, chips being one of them and others.”

RELATED: ‘Birthright senatorship’ betrays America First

Peter Zay/Anadolu/Getty Images

Norman further emphasized the need for America to deter China from taking over Taiwan, in part by sustaining Trump’s “peace through strength” approach abroad.

While Norman didn’t pounce on Graham’s admission, others on the right did en masse.

Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, noted, “I’m sorry, but respectfully, even accounting for her being new to the job, this is embarrassing and inexcusable. China’s threat toward Taiwan is a bit of a big deal, especially — it would seem — for a member of the U.S. Senate.”

BlazeTV host Steve Deace tweeted, “What are we doing here?”

“I did not think I had heard that right,” wrote South Carolina state Sen. Matt Leber (R). “This admittance should be the end of this race.”

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley tweeted, “Lindsey Graham was well informed on the United States’ national security. Darline Graham admits she’s not. This is not something you inherit. And it’s critical in the U.S. Senate.”

Graham faced far less ridicule over her suggestion during the debate that there were “50 million people in South Carolina.”

President Donald Trump has endorsed Graham and is scheduled to attend a rally with her in Myrtle Beach on Friday.

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​Donald trump, Darline graham, Steve deace, Ralph norman, South carolina, Senate, Taiwan, Foreign policy, National security, Lindsey graham, Politics 

When I first entered the public arena, the focus of my work was almost entirely on why the right needed to take power seriously. Conservatives had suffered a devastating string of political and cultural losses because they focused on argument and ideology while paying little attention to the way power actually worked. That criticism drew plenty of hostility from defenders of the status quo who did not appreciate some rookie pointing out why decades of conservative leadership had produced so little.

It turns out I was not alone. Popular voices including Matt Walsh and John Doyle now openly support conservatives taking and wielding power effectively. That disagreement has launched another round of public debate over the pursuit of power, but the argument is only a proxy for a larger battle over JD Vance, foreign policy, and the future of MAGA.

The arguments breaking out across the conservative commentariat are not separate fights. They are proxy battles over the same question.

Donald Trump represented a serious threat to the established political order. Initially dismissed as a brash reality television host, he quickly demonstrated that he was tapping into something deeper than celebrity and catchy insults. Trump was not a career politician. He did not enter politics with deep ideological commitments, and he did not know or care about the established rules.

He fused law and order, economic protectionism, foreign policy restraint, immigration enforcement, and culture-war issues in a way no Republican candidate had since Pat Buchanan. Trump saw an untapped political market and, like any good businessman, gave the customers what they wanted.

Many prominent establishment figures declared themselves “NeverTrump” and vowed to resist MAGA’s takeover of the conservative movement. That strategy failed. Trump became a political steamroller. Some NeverTrumpers migrated into the Democratic coalition or created opposition “conservative” outlets such as the Bulwark. Others decided to wait.

MAGA had the populist momentum, but the establishment still controlled institutions, personnel, and much of the donor class. The bet was that it could outlast MAGA and co-opt it, just as the Republican establishment had absorbed the Tea Party.

The next opportunity came with Ron DeSantis. Establishment conservatives hoped Trump’s legal troubles would make him vulnerable to a popular governor with a record of victories. DeSantis was supposed to offer Trumpism without Trump: populist energy packaged in a form more compatible with the old ideological agenda.

It did not work. Trump’s primary and general-election victories removed any illusion that a direct assault on him from inside the party could succeed.

If the establishment could not oust Trump, the remaining option was to derail his movement and prevent anyone from carrying MAGA into future elections. Despite Republican control of the House, Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, congressional Republicans have repeatedly clashed with the administration. The Senate has stalled key personnel and has not passed the SAVE Act. Republican politicians know they must praise Trump rhetorically, but many continue to resist important parts of his agenda.

RELATED: The right has a blind spot about young women

Blaze Media Illustration

Add a deeply unpopular war with no obvious end, and the result is an effective containment mechanism: MAGA divided, distracted, and exhausted.

That is why the fight over JD Vance matters so much. When Trump sent the vice president to negotiate a peace deal, critics who had spent years presenting themselves as Trump’s loyal allies suddenly questioned Vance’s ideology, associations, and viability as a successor. Like Trump, Vance is not wedded to neoconservative foreign policy. His role in the negotiations made clear that he is being prepared as a possible heir to the movement.

At the same time, some critics began presenting Marco Rubio as an alternative while attacking any attempt to withdraw from the conflict.

The fights over power, foreign policy, affordability, and the dangers of the New Right are therefore part of the same proxy war for control of the GOP. It is no accident that many establishment figures who favor expansive military commitments abroad also recoil from using political power aggressively at home.

We can always find money for war, but when the cost of living becomes unbearable, suddenly government action is communism. The overlap is not accidental. It reflects the old conservative settlement: Republicans may fight wars abroad and protect big business at home. They may talk endlessly about social issues, but they are not supposed to spend serious political capital addressing them.

That is why it may seem strange to watch figures such as James Lindsay, Joel Berry, and Ben Shapiro portray Matt Walsh as a socialist or JD Vance as a crypto-Nazi. The rhetoric makes more sense when viewed through coalitional politics. Whatever they think personally of Walsh or Vance, they recognize that both threaten an order that has existed for decades.

The conservative movement became comfortable as beautiful losers: controlled opposition rewarded with money, status, and institutional access while the country moved steadily left. Trump disrupted that arrangement. Vance threatens to continue disrupting it.

RELATED: It’s the economy, stupid — again

Blaze Media Illustration

If conservatism is ever to become a real political movement, it must escape the ideological shackles that keep it from acting. As Russell Kirk argued in “The Conservative Mind,” conservatism should not be about preserving an abstract ideology but a particular people and their way of life.

MAGA represented that shift. It was willing to pursue policies that improved the lives of Americans even when those policies fell outside neoconservative economic or foreign-policy orthodoxy. Achieving those goals requires the right to think seriously about power and how to wield it. Even reducing the size of government requires acquiring and applying state power.

The NeverTrump project now is to poison the well around Vance, prevent him from inheriting the movement, and return the GOP to establishment politics as usual.

That is the argument underneath the latest round of conservative infighting. The personalities change, the immediate controversy changes, and the slogans change, but the stakes remain constant. Someone will define what MAGA becomes after Trump, and the establishment has no intention of surrendering that decision.

The arguments breaking out across the conservative commentariat are not separate fights. They are proxy battles over the same question: Who gets to rule the Republican Party after Trump?

​Jd vance, Donald trump, Gop, Republican party, Marco rubio, Joel berry, Ben shapiro, Economy, Affordability crisis, Opinion & analysis