Category: blaze media

America is sleepwalking into disaster. The rush to renewables, pitched by many progressives as patriotism in action, is in fact tying America to its greatest rival.

The story is sold in sunny ads about cheaper power bills and endless solar arrays glistening on rooftops. The truth is much darker. Behind those panels, behind the inverters that hum quietly in basements and back yards, stands the Chinese Communist Party.

For Beijing, solar was never about saving the planet. It was about power. Billions in subsidies turned factories into arsenals, entire cities redesigned to churn out polysilicon wafers and panels at a scale the West could never rival. Today, the result is plain. Four out of five solar panels in the world are built in China. Even when an American installer stamps “Made in the USA” on a box, the guts are usually Chinese. The supply chain runs through Xinjiang, through state-backed giants, through companies that move at the command of the CCP.

Beijing learned from the Huawei fight: infrastructure, not handhelds, is where real leverage lies.

The panels alone are only part of the story. The real danger lies in the hardware that makes them run. Inverters convert solar energy into usable power, but they also connect to the internet. That connection is sold as a feature: easy monitoring, remote diagnostics, seamless integration with smart homes.

Yet in practice, it is a back door. Investigators have uncovered hidden cellular radios, unexplained communication gear, and unexplored code in some Chinese-made units. If you were designing a system to surveil and, in the worst case, sabotage America’s grid, this is what you would build. Not just panels on rooftops, but an invisible nervous system running through the veins of American infrastructure. A lattice of cheap hardware, each piece quietly phoning home, each update carrying the potential to flip from clean energy to controlled chaos.

Washington already knows the risk. Huawei was banned from U.S. telecom networks years ago. Its name became shorthand for Beijing’s ambition to burrow into the very organs that keep the West alive. But banning Huawei in phones and towers didn’t end the threat. In this ever-evolving game, you smash one head and another 17 appear. What once came packaged as 5G now arrives in solar panels, in batteries, in electric vehicle supply chains. Beijing learned from the Huawei fight: infrastructure, not handhelds, is where real leverage lies.

RELATED: China’s soft-power trap in your back yard: How the CCP uses sister cities to undermine America

Photo by Nurphoto/Getty Images

This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has watched how China operates. Today, energy is not simply commerce but geostrategy. Control the inputs, and you control the future. Just as OPEC once dictated terms to the West by controlling oil, Beijing now holds the choke points of renewables. It has mastered the art of dependency, shifting the world’s reliance from barrels of crude to solar wafers, lithium, and rare-earth elements.

America’s lawmakers cheer each new solar farm, each new promise of “energy independence,” but the irony is bitter. Panels in Texas and Arizona may harvest American sunlight, but the lifeblood of those systems runs through China. The dream of independence has been traded for dependency of another kind: one not anchored in Middle Eastern oil fields but manufactured in Chinese factories and mined from Chinese-controlled terrain.

The consequences are sobering. Imagine a geopolitical crisis over Taiwan. Imagine rising tensions in the South China Sea boiling over. At that moment, America’s electric backbone, already fragile, could become a pressure point. Beijing wouldn’t need to launch a cyberattack. It would simply stop shipping the parts that keep panels running. Maintenance schedules would collapse. Replacement units would vanish. Thousands of megawatts of installed capacity would falter.

A stoppage wouldn’t just dim lights in California or freeze grids in Connecticut. It would ripple through hospitals, data centers, water treatment plants. Whole cities could grind to a halt. America would find itself in a 21st-century hostage crisis. No bullets fired, no bombs dropped; just the cold squeeze of withheld shipments.

Moreover, a compromised inverter, one that responds to servers overseas, is a potential weapon. American intelligence agencies have repeatedly warned about Chinese code found in critical infrastructure. A solar farm riddled with networked devices is no exception. What looks like a harmless box converting sunlight into usable current could, in the wrong hands, act as a switch. Imagine thousands of them going dark or, even worse, surging all at once.

The lesson is clear but unheeded. Energy sovereignty is not a slogan. It cannot be faked with subsidies while leaving the supply chain overseas. Real sovereignty requires mines, refineries, factories, and the political will to endure their messiness. It requires breaking the habit of outsourcing everything dangerous, everything dirty, to China and then pretending the ledger is clean.

This is the world China wanted: a globe wired to its factories, its materials, its technology. It’s time to break free. Because there’s no such thing as MAGA if America kneels to a nation that despises everything it stands for. A country that crushes faith and despises Western values cannot serve as the backbone of American renewal. To rely on China is to outsource sovereignty. Cut the cord, or watch greatness slip away forever.

​Tech, Culture 

President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard members in response to Washington, D.C.’s high crime rates continues to spark pushback from left-leaning critics. Another man is facing felony charges after he was accused of assaulting soldiers patrolling the area.

‘President Trump is cleaning it up.’

Scott J. Pichon, a 33-year-old Maryland lawyer, was arrested on Friday and charged with felony assault for allegedly spitting on two South Carolina National Guard members.

The soldiers were patrolling outside Union Station when Pichon allegedly attacked them while riding past on an electric scooter.

Amtrak Police Sergeant Robert Underwood said that he heard Pichon “make a noise like he was coughing up mucus.” He stated that he then observed Pichon spit “a mixture of saliva and mucus” on the troops.

One of the National Guard members was struck in the face and the other in the neck, according to a statement of facts.

Pichon was arrested and appeared in court on Tuesday. With no objection from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey released Pichon on his own recognizance.

RELATED: Deranged DC leftist faces consequences for allegedly hurling a Subway footlong at a federal officer

Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

This incident marks the second time in recent weeks that law enforcement arrested an individual for allegedly attacking federal officials stationed in D.C. as part of Trump’s effort to make the streets safer.

Sean Charles Dunn, a 37-year-old D.C. resident, was accused of throwing a Subway sandwich at a federal officer earlier this month. Dunn is also facing felony charges.

RELATED: Trump to patrol DC streets alongside law enforcement amid crime crackdown

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Since the surge on D.C. streets started, law enforcement has made 1,094 arrests and seized 155 illegal guns, U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro announced on Tuesday.

“Not a single carjacking in over a week. We continue to fight the fight to make sure that people in D.C. are safe,” she stated. “President Trump is cleaning it up.”

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​News, Washington d.c., Washinton dc, Dc, D.c., Jeanine pirro, Donald trump, Trump, Trump administration, Trump admin, Politics 

A white male who slapped a black male in the face and then got severely beaten in Cincinnati’s infamous mob attack late last month was charged with disorderly conduct, a fourth-degree misdemeanor.

The arraignment for Alex Tchervinski took place Tuesday, WLWT-TV reported.

‘He was not only brutally beaten and robbed during the assault; he’s now being prosecuted when he was attempting to defend himself and his friends.’

Tchervinski, 45, didn’t appear in Hamilton County Municipal Court, but his attorney Douglas Brannon entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.

Brannon said his client acted in self-defense, WLWT noted.

A cellphone video shows a white male and several black males squaring off before the mob attack begins. The video shows light physical contact between the white male and two black males, while others of both races appear to try to break things up. Then amid verbal sparring, the white male lightly slaps the face of a black male — and then the mob attack commences.

The above video and a second clip show the mob repeatedly stomping, kicking, and punching the white male while he’s lying in the street.

Tchervinski has been identified as one of the six victims in the mob attack.

WLWT said it remains unclear whether the slap led to Tchervinski’s misdemeanor charge.

“I am not aware of what basis they made the disorderly conduct charge,” Brannon said, according to the station. “It’s not been explained to me by any prosecutor or any filing made by the prosecutor. So I’m very interested to learn from them why they felt it necessary to bring this charge under these circumstances.”

Brannon also said Tchervinski was acting in self-defense and should not be charged, according to WLWT. “Alex himself sustained over 28 blows to his head, face area. He was brutally beaten in this instance. I think he is being victimized now for a second time. He was not only brutally beaten and robbed during the assault; he’s now being prosecuted when he was attempting to defend himself and his friends.”

RELATED: Cincinnati official who said mob attack victims ‘begged’ for beating doubles down; woman punched in face records tearful clip

However, leaders in the black community — including state Rep. Cecil Thomas (D-Cincinnati) — have been saying a disorderly conduct charge isn’t enough, the station reported.

“An assault is an assault. When you put your hands on someone and use force, you have assaulted that individual, and that was an assault,” Thomas told WLWT. “Disorderly conduct is a slap in my face.”

Both sides are agreeing on one thing, however — that city leaders aren’t being transparent, the station said.

Case in point: The city solicitor prosecuting Tchervinski’s case is trying to seal the citation, WLWT reported.

“I can’t explain why the city brings a charge and wants to try and conceal it at the same time,” Brannon noted, according to the station. “I think this is something that needs to be aired to the public. The public needs to see what’s going on and how wrong this prosecution is.”

In addition, not all videos of the incident have been made public, WLWT reported.

“It’s mind-boggling for us to have to get drips of this as we go along. The city should be just as transparent as everybody else involved,” Thomas added to the station. “We need to move from this, and the only way we can is we need to allow the people to understand exactly what happened here, and then we begin a process of healing. We can’t do that with this drip faucet of information coming out.”

Prior to the charge against Tchervinski, seven others — all of them black — were charged in connection with the mob attack. Six of of the seven have been indicted on eight charges each: three counts of felonious assault, three counts of assault, and two counts of aggravated riot. Those six face nearly 30 years in jail if convicted on all charges.

A black male seen on a third cellphone video standing next to the face-slap victim appears to be the first individual to physically retaliate against the white male. As it happens, police are looking for another mob attack suspect, and the image cops released of this suspect appears to match the appearance of the male seen retaliating on video.

Chief Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Kip Guinan addressed the face slap, saying that it came after someone else was already beaten, not before, WXIX reported. Guinan also acknowledged that racial slurs are audible on some of the videos of the mob attack — however, he said the slurs were uttered “a minute and 47 seconds into the brutal beatdown,” the station reported.

“Were there words said? Yes. Were they inappropriate? Absolutely,” Guinan also noted, WXIX reported, before adding that “these poor people were being assaulted, stomped WWE-style, elbow-drops onto pavement. One woman was knocked out to the point her head hit the pavement. We could be here on a homicide.”

That woman — who has come to be known as Holly — is seen on cellphone video (1:34 mark) apparently trying to intervene on behalf of a beaten-up man, but instead another female punches her from behind — and seconds later, a male punches her in the face, knocking her flat on her back on the street.

RELATED: Mother of Cincinnati mob attack suspect defends ‘honor roll’ son, 34, charged with felonious assault, aggravated riot

Republican U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio shared on X grisly images of Holly’s face days after the mob attack.

“This is Holly,” Moreno wrote in his post. “She wanted to have a nice evening out with friends. Instead, she got this.”

The male accused of punching Holly has been identified as 38-year-old Patrick Rosemond. Prosecutors said that in addition to knocking out and nearly killing Holly, Rosemond “assaulted each and every single victim in brutal and vicious fashion,” WXIX-TV reported earlier this month.

RELATED: Male accused of punching woman in face, knocking her out during Cincinnati mob attack finally appears in court

Patrick Rosemond. Image source: Hamilton County (Ohio) Sheriff

Rosemond is seen on video dancing, high-fiving spectators, and taunting victims following the “violent attack,” the prosecution added, according to WXIX. The prosecution added that Rosemond also has prior convictions — including 10 misdemeanors and three felonies, the station said. His bond was set at $500,000.

One of the more vocal advocates for the arrested black suspects has been Pastor Damon Lynch, and he recently stated that Holly wouldn’t have gotten punched had the slap not occurred, WXIX noted in another recent story.

“We do not feel the violence was proportionate to the slap. We are not saying that,” Lynch stated, according to the station. “We’re saying if [the white man] had not slapped this black man in the face, Holly would not have gotten punched out, and the night would have ended.”

BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock has been commenting on the mob beatdown since it all unfolded late last month, and one of his recent video takes included Lynch altering the lyrics of a Jim Croce song for his own purposes as he spoke to a crowd at a church: “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit in the wind, you don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger, and you don’t slap a black man in the face.”

RELATED: 2 female suspects jailed over Cincinnati mob attack get big breaks from judge

Whitlock didn’t take kindly to Lynch’s words.

“Why is he racializing this? It’s disrespectful to slap anyone, regardless of color, in the face. Is he saying … if a black person slaps a black person in the face, it’s OK? If a black gang member shoots a black man in the face, it’s OK? If a black gang member accidentally shoots some young black child, it’s OK?” Whitlock stated. “But everybody knows that you don’t slap a black man in the face, I guess, unless you’re black. He’s in a church talking about common street thugs — and I’ll include the white guy in that, because he … seemed to be trying to fight with someone. … [The reverend is] justifying to the people in that audience and other black people in Cincinnati that if you get slapped in the face by a white person, a gang of you all should jump on that man and beat up the woman. This is inside of a church! This is insanity; this is lack of humility.”

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​Cincinnati, Mob attack, White male slaps black male, Disorderly conduct charge, Municipal court, Not guilty plea, Beaten up, Race, Racially charged, Alex tchervinski, Crime 

A Democrat easily won a special election in a deep-red Iowa state Senate district on Tuesday, raising serious concerns for Republicans in the state and across the country.

According to unofficial reports from the Woodbury County Auditor’s Office, Democrat Catelin Drey, a 37-year-old activist for abortion rights and gun control, soundly defeated Republican Christopher Prosch for the open District 1 Senate seat, representing the Sioux City area, 55% to 44%. President Donald Trump carried Woodbury County by 23 points less than 10 months ago.

‘Last night, we suffered quite the L in the most Republican part of Iowa.’

Once Drey is sworn into office, Republicans will no longer hold a supermajority in the Iowa Senate as they have had for the past three years.

“I’m just really incredibly honored that the folks in Senate District 1 believed in this campaign as much as the team did, and I am looking forward to representing them well,” Drey told the Des Moines Register.

Other leftists in politics and the media crowed much more loudly, flaunting the results as a harbinger of things to come in the 2026 midterms and beyond.

“Iowans are seeing Republicans for who they are: self-serving liars who will throw their constituents under the bus to rubber stamp Donald Trump’s disastrous agenda — and they’re ready for change,” said a statement from DNC Chairman Ken Martin, according to Fox News.

“Our state is ready for a new direction and Iowa Democrats will keep putting forward candidates who can deliver better representation for Iowans,” added a statement from Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart.

“Every special election is a snapshot of voter energy. And the picture emerging in 2025 suggests a Democratic Party building toward something larger — perhaps a blue wave in 2026,” gloated MeidasTouch News.

RELATED: Don’t let rural America become the next New York City

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A few Republicans tried to shrug the loss off. Republican Party of Iowa Chair Jeff Kaufmann, for instance, even seemed to suggest that Democrats cared more about winning the race than his party did.

“National Democrats were so desperate for a win that they activated 30,000 volunteers and a flood of national money to win a state senate special election by a few hundred votes,” Kaufmann said in a statement, according to the Register. “If the Democrats think things are suddenly so great again for them in Iowa, they will bring back the caucuses.”

However, others like BlazeTV host Steve Deace are taking the results very seriously. “Last night, we suffered quite the L in the most Republican part of Iowa. The kind of special election loss that should be a wake-up call for Republicans nationwide,” he told Blaze News.

“Trump won Woodbury County, which dominates this district, by 23 points in ’24. Yet, we lost this special election by nine points. That is quite the ominous swing. It doesn’t matter how bad Democrats image polling is if we can’t motivate our own voters to show up when Trump isn’t on the ballot.”

Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) called the special election after Republican state Sen. Rocky De Witt died of pancreatic cancer in June. De Witt won the 2022 District 1 Senate race by 10 points.

Drey’s victory marks the second unexpected Democrat win in Iowa in 2025. Back in January, Democrat state Sen. Mike Zimmer won a special election in Senate District 35 in Eastern Iowa, which Trump carried by over 20 points in November.

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​Iowa, ​catelin drey, Christopher prosch, Sioux city, Special election, Politics 

Minneapolis police confirmed there are approximately 20 victims after a shooter opened fire at a church Wednesday morning, KARE-TV reported.

Police and paramedics arrived at Annunciation Church around 8:30 a.m., where police reported a man dressed in black and armed with a rifle was spotted on the scene, KARE said.

‘Please join me in praying for everyone involved!’

Annunciation Church and Catholic School began the new school semester Monday, the station reported, adding that it serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade.

The city said that there is no longer a threat to the community.

The shooting reportedly occurred while students were attending Mass at 8:15 a.m. Law enforcement officials confirmed that the suspect was dead at 9:31 a.m.

“I’m monitoring reports of horrific violence in South Minneapolis. I’m in touch with Chief O’Hara and our emergency response team has been activated. We will share more information as soon as we can. Please give our officers the space they need to respond to the situation,” Mayor Jacob Frey stated.

The Minneapolis Police Department, the FBI, and the ATF responded to the scene.

President Donald Trump stated that he has been “fully briefed on the tragic shooting.”

“The FBI quickly responded and they are on the scene. The White House will continue to monitor this terrible situation. Please join me in praying for everyone involved!” Trump wrote in a post on social media.

This is a developing, breaking news story that will be updated.

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​Minneapolis, Minnesota, Minneapolis police, Minneapolis police department, Fbi, Atf, Jacob frey, Annunciation church and catholic school, Crime 

The Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office told Le Parisien that early Tuesday morning, a Libyan teen allegedly raped a Ukrainian woman in front of the Eiffel Tower.

A 17-year-old Dutch girl was hunted down, then butchered as she tried calling the police last week near Amsterdam. The girl’s suspected killer is a 22-year-old asylum-seeker who was arrested at a migrant center on Friday for an unrelated Aug. 15 rape and is believed to have also sexually assaulted another woman.

Earlier this month, Pakistani asylum-seeker Kamran Khan, 43, appeared in a British court, where he denied having repeatedly raped an 8-year-old girl between September 2024 and July 2025.

Confronted with these stories and other insights into the fallout of mass migration into Europe and the failed assimilation of migrant populations, Tesla CEO Elon Musk — who has long criticized British and European officials for failing to adequately prevent or address the rape of their girls and women by migrant men — posed the question on Monday, “Why are they allowing the rape of Europe?”

On the continent

Migrants helped drive the spike of rapes across Europe, cases of which European Union data indicates increased by 141% between 2013 and 2023.

A Lund University study published earlier this year in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence found that migrants or second-generation migrants accounted for 63% of convictions for rape or attempted rape in Sweden — a nation of 10.5 million that the Telegraph noted opened its doors to roughly 160,000 asylum seekers in 2015 alone.

RELATED: Why the English flag now terrifies the regime

Photo by Martin Pope/Getty Images

Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, an Alternative for Germany politician, was convicted of a hate crime last year for pointing out that in her homeland — which opened its doors to over 670,000 refugees and 680,000 non-refugee immigrants between 2010 and 2016 — Afghan and African asylum-seekers “are proportionally 40x and 70x more involved in gang rapes than Germans,” citing government statistics.

Of the suspects identified in the rape and sexual assault cases in Germany last year, Deutsche Welle reported that over a third were foreigners.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni acknowledged in a 2024 interview that in her nation, “there is a higher incidence, unfortunately, in cases of sexual violence, by immigrants, especially illegal ones.”

In the isles

In the case of Britain, which has similarly imported a rape crisis, Musk appears ready to fund the legal backlash.

“I would like to help fund legal actions against corrupt officials who aided and abetted the rape of Britain, per the official government inquiry,” Musk wrote on Tuesday.

Thousands of British girls were systematically raped, tortured, and trafficked by Pakistani grooming gangs from the late 1980s well into the new millennium.

Authorities long failed to help the victims and hold the pedophilic rapists accountable in part because of “nervousness about race.”

Earlier this year, British Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe, formerly of the Reform U.K. Party and now the leader of Restore Britain, launched a crowdfunded independent inquiry into the grooming gangs and into the government officials who failed to act.

‘The government simply needs to enforce the law.’

On Tuesday, Lowe’s team of inquisitors revealed that they have “identified eighty-five local authorities in which the gang-based sexual exploitation of children is taking place, or has historically done so” and noted that “patterns of targeted exploitation by predominantly Pakistani males, combined with gross negligence from public bodies, are identifiable.”

RELATED: Austria’s struggle with mass migration holds a lesson for America

Illegal aliens crossing the English Channel to the UK from France. Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images

Lowe’s team further indicated that “ongoing cases have been referred to relevant authorities, and the Rape Gang Inquiry will shortly be writing to all local authorities where these heinous crimes have been identified to request full transparency and cooperation.”

— (@)

Among the areas highlighted on the map shared to X by Lowe that indicates where the grooming gangs were allegedly active was the county of West Yorkshire, where police responding to a freedom of information request recently revealed that over 21% of suspects arrested for sexual offenses last year were foreign nationals. Pakistani nationals accounted for a plurality of the arrestees.

“Existing law is clear that anyone who was an accessory to aggravated rape or murder, especially of children, is guilty of serious crime and must either serve time in prison if a citizen or be deported if not,” wrote Musk. “The government simply needs to enforce the law.”

Lowe noted, “Elon deserves huge credit for what he has done to uncover this scandal.”

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​Pakistan, Immigrant, Migrant, Refugee, Asylum seeker, Rape, Crime, Europe, Immigration, Mass migration, Politics 

The U.S. Institute of Peace acting president Dr. Darren Beattie told Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck on Tuesday about the melee that took place at his agency’s headquarters during its takeover by the Department of Government Efficiency in March.

Beattie, who is also undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, revealed both the lengths that deep-staters went to cover their tracks as well as what illicit trade the agency apparently had an interest in propping up in Afghanistan.

The USIP is a taxpayer-funded think tank established by Congress in 1984 that had a budget last year of $55 million. The Heritage Foundation noted in a 2024 report that the agency lacked transparency and mechanisms to ensure fiscal accountability; was full of partisans; and had greatly overstepped the bounds of its original mission.

Beattie told Beck that the USIP is an “important member of the NGO archipelago,” whose quasi-governmental, quasi-private “chameleon character” helps America’s foreign policy establishment “fulfill some of those more sensitive functions that had been exposed in the course of the Church [Committee] hearings” regarding misconduct by American intelligence agencies, including the CIA.

Pursuant to President Donald Trump’s Feb. 19 executive order concerning the “reduction of the federal bureaucracy,” the DOGE set to work earlier this year on eliminating bloat and inefficiencies at the USIP.

The Trump administration fired the voting members of the agency’s board of directors along with the USIP’s president, former Clinton official George Moose; terminated nearly all of the institute’s staff and activities around the world; had elements of the DOGE take over the institute’s headquarters; and transferred USIP’s property to the General Services Administration.

RELATED: State Department isn’t buying ProPublica’s sob story about Taliban alumnus whose funding was exposed by DOGE

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Deep-staters apparently desperate to cling to power at the agency tried to fight this house-cleaning, not only filing legal challenges but getting physical.

After DOGE member Kenneth Jackson was temporarily made acting president of the agency, Trump’s efficiency team attempted to enter the USIP’s headquarters. However, Moose and agency staffers repeatedly barred their entry.

Finally, on March 17, the DOGE managed to enter with the help of law enforcement.

In response to Moose’s claim that the “DOGE has broken into our building,” the DOGE responded:

Mr. Moose denied lawful access to Kenneth Jackson, the Acting USIP President (as approved by the USIP Board). @DCPoliceDept arrived onsite and escorted Mr. Jackson into the building. The only unlawful individual was Mr. Moose, who refused to comply, and even tried to fire USIP’s private security team when said security team went to give access to Mr. Jackson.

Beattie told Beck that during the DOGE takeover of the agency, USIP staffers “barricaded themselves in the offices. They sabotaged the physical infrastructure of the building. There were reports of there being loaded guns within the offices.”

“There was one hostage situation where they held a security guard under basically kind of a false-imprisonment type of situation,” continued Beattie. “It was extremely intense. Far more so than the better-known story of USAID.”

‘I think even more bizarre than having this former Taliban guy on the payroll is the kind of schizophrenic posture in relation to Afghanistan exhibited by the US Institute of Peace.’

Beattie noted further that “in the course of all of that, they tried to delete terabyte of data — of accounting information that would indicate what kind of stuff they were up to, what kind of people they were paying.”

After the DOGE secured the headquarters, former Trump adviser and DOGE head Elon Musk indicated that the DOGE recovered the terabyte of financial data that USIP staffers allegedly deleted to “cover their crimes.”

RELATED: Democracy promotion is dead: Good riddance

Taliban extremists in Kabul. Photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images

The DOGE not only exposed significant waste and alleged fraud but questionable contracts, including a $132,000 contract with a former Taliban official, Mohammad Qasem Halimi, who served as the extremist regime’s chief of protocol, then later as a “fixer type” in Afghanistan.

“What the heck is an organization like this doing having an individual who is a former Taliban member on their payroll?” Beattie said to Beck.

Beattie suggested ProPublica’s recent attempt to paint Halimi as a victim of the DOGE was a “total joke,” stressing that “he was probably one of these people who was playing all sides, made a lot of enemies.”

— (@)

“I think even more bizarre than having this former Taliban guy on the payroll is the kind of schizophrenic posture in relation to Afghanistan exhibited by the U.S. Institute of Peace,” continued Beattie.

The USIP’s acting president suggested that his supposedly peace-focused agency was apparently interested in keeping Afghanistan’s opium trade alive and well.

“One truly bizarre thing is that one of the U.S. Institute of Peace’s main kind of policy agendas was basically lamenting the fact that the opium trade had dissipated under Taliban leadership,” said Beattie. “They had multiple reports coming out, basically saying, ‘This is horrible that the opium trade is diminished under the Taliban. We need to find some way to restore it.’ How bizarre is that?!”

“The whole story of opium and Afghanistan and its connection to government entities is a very intricate and delicate and fascinating one. But it seems very clear that the U.S. Institute of Peace was involved in that story to some degree,” added Beattie.

Beck noted that “this is the real deep-state stuff that I think bothers people so much. Look, we expect our CIA to do stuff — we don’t necessarily want it to do it, but we expect it. But when it’s in the State Department, when it’s in every department … pushing money to NGOs to overthrow governments, it’s out of control.”

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​Darren beattie, Glenn beck, Opium, Afghanistan, United states institute of peace, Institute of peace, Beattie, Beck, Deep state, State department, Politics 

My buddy Jack Hibbs is warning Californians that it may be time to flee before Democrat cultists literally steal their children.

So what will the right do besides post memes? When a pastor as conservative and evangelistic as Calvary Chapel’s Hibbs — a man who has ministered in California for four decades — starts talking about exile, will you finally admit how dire America’s cultural situation has become?

If we don’t wake up, we won’t have any nation at all.

The bell tolls when the nation’s largest state can contemplate a crime of this scale.

And do you know what time it is? The same CEOs who ruined Cracker Barrel still stand ready to take red-state children, too, if given the chance. Conservatives laugh at how foolish the woke Cracker Barrel priestess was for tanking her own company’s stock. What should really trouble them is the church itself — bullied, manipulated, and lulled into endless equivocation instead of awakening.

We must be a Christian nation

Consider the case of Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, who recently argued that it is not possible to have a Christian nation in the United States. While I have a vast amount of respect for Arnn’s past work and the institution he presides over, what are we to make of it when one of the right’s bastions of conservative thought can’t even find the clarity to meet the clear truth of the current moment?

We’ve barely been a nation at all since 2020. Yet Arnn wants to muse from the comfort class while the re-election of nearly 80-year-old President Donald Trump is arguably the only thing holding back the barbarians.

Why is Trump to the right of and more vigorous than the church on so many issues of the day? Who will replace him? Who will identify the equivocators in our midst and hold them accountable before all of us are in Jack Hibbs’ shoes?

Those are the questions before us, and lots of pagan countries throughout history have known the importance of at least answering them. Yet somehow, a great many of our Christian elders are stuck in “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” mode.

The fight is far from over

For all the successes since the 2024 election, we still have many battles to fight. The demonic side of the American equation isn’t even batting an eye at seizing California children like Mola Ram in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” That’s insane and cowardly — but that’s also a regular Tuesday.

Our responses to the duties of citizenship almost never match those of the woke left, a point made recently on my show by Kirk Cameron. He poignantly remarked that the pagan left currently understands Deuteronomy’s commands to actively live out one’s faith through community far better than the church does.

Yikes.

RELATED: No country for angry young men

Nuthawut Somsuk via iStock/Getty Images

If we don’t truly wake up and understand that unless we reward our heroes and punish our enemies in the name of the good, the true, and the beautiful, then we won’t have any nation at all, and Larry Arnn will need to find a studio in Hungary from which to spread the good news about the late, lamented American founding.

The mere thought of such a weak destiny should be revolting to us — and inexcusable. Men should be doing anything and everything short of that which God Almighty says we cannot do to stop it from happening.

We need more men like Jack Hibbs. Many, many more.

​Opinion & analysis 

What’s going on with Cracker Barrel?

The restaurant chain just rolled out a full rebrand, courtesy of CEO and president Julie Felss Masino. It’s so ambitious that the rebrand itself even has a name: “All the More,” a perfectly vague and nauseating brand for a perfectly vague and nauseating rebrand.

Every decision must be backed up by consultants, data firms, and PR agencies so that when things flop, no one at the top can be blamed.

Here’s the old logo:

Gregory Walton/Getty Images

All those little details — the barrel, the old white guy, the dark-yellow pinto-bean-shaped background, the phrase “Old Country Store” — have been thrown out in favor of something with all the charm of a fintech logo:

SOPA Images/Getty Images

And it’s not just the logo. The company has redesigned the inside of the restaurants, too, from their trademark cluttered, homey feel, with tchotchkes and old pictures and fishing reels …

… to something “cleaner” with white walls and minimal decor. All the little quirks and nuances that endeared the brand to consumers in the first place — gone. What used to have an idiosyncratic, country-store feel now resembles a generic $14-per-taco shop in Austin.

Refinement racket

There’s nothing groundbreaking about this makeover, of course. It’s a prime example of what wriiter Paul Skallas (better known online as LindyMan) calls “refinement culture:” the endless corporate drive to shave away quirks, details, and character until everything looks the same — flat, safe, and soulless.

There’s also nothing surprising about the backlash. People don’t like refinement culture. Burberry learned this back in 2018, when the company went from this …

Bloomberg/Getty Images

… to this:

SOPA Images/Getty Images

Not only did it swap the pleasantly ornate logo for something in a blandly utilitarian, sans serif font, the company completely jettisoned the image of the knight — a reference to the brand’s beginning as a purveyor of equestrian apparel.

This “new look” lasted all of five years before Burberry came to its senses and returned to what was already working.

Tone-deaf functionaries

Why didn’t Felss Masino learn from Burberry? Or, for that matter, from Bud Light’s more recent Dylan Mulvaney fiasco?

As for Bud Light, it’s likely that Felss Masino didn’t think she was making the same mistake as her counterpart at Anheuser-Busch; obviously she hasn’t done anything as egregiously misguided as pushing “trans” on an audience with no interest whatsoever in seeing a narcissistic gay man pretend he’s a girl.

But at bottom, Felss Masino exhibits the same tone-deafness — a clear inability or unwillingness to understand her customers and the direction of mainstream culture in general.

So what did Cracker Barrel think it was doing? To answer that, you need to understand the function of people like Felss Masino.

She doesn’t create anything. Never hath she shifted a zero into a one. She is a managerial bureaucrat who just goes from one company to the next.

Not only is she a managerial bureaucrat, she’s not a particularly good one. Cracker Barrel is not the kind of “sexy” brand that people like Felss Masino aspire to run. And you can see her disdain for Cracker Barrel and its customers in her indifference to what makes the brand work.

Deleting the details

Obviously she didn’t set out to tank the brand. Cracker Barrel hasn’t been doing great financially, so most likely she brought in a consultant — consultants being the main drivers of refinement culture — who pointed out how inefficient it was to maintain this complicated logo and interior design.

I imagine the pitch was something like: “Here’s your line-item budget. If you can cut down your design costs by 10%, you’ll save the company $25 million a year.”

That’s what consultants do, while at the same time justifying their own existence. They want to get you to take money that could go to building your business and spend it on their endless little pare-downs. Until you’re left with no details. And culture is details.

Which is why leaders with an actual vision don’t use consultants. Apple founder Steve Jobs famously disdained them.

RELATED: Cracker Barrel’s $700 million recipe for disaster

Trifonenko via iStock/Getty Images

Brand flakes

But very few leaders have vision. A while back I went to dinner with the CEO of a famous consumer packaged goods brand. She had all the right credentials: Ivy League education, high-profile experience in the industry.

It’s what she didn’t have that was notable: even the remotest interest in the product she oversaw. There was not one thing in her home — let alone in her conversation — to indicate her role.

And I realized it was because she is excelling at her job. Which is essentially to act as a bureaucrat maintaining the status quo. These aren’t companies — they’re bureaus. What’s Cracker Barrel to them but the Bureau of Cheap White People Highway Rest-Stop Slop?

Look at Felss Masino’s resume. She’s been at Cracker Barrel for a little over two years. Before that, a five-year stint at Taco Bell, a couple of months at Mattel, three years at Sprinkles Cupcakes. Her longest job was one of her earliest: She spent 12 years rising in the ranks at Starbucks until she became a top marketing executive.

Camel by committee

It’s at this point that the job changes become much more frequent, and that’s no accident. Felss Masino no doubt had to live and breathe Starbucks during her long ascent there, but now that she’s “made it,” she can enjoy life as one of the many interchangeable female CEOs whose only job is take whatever brand she’s in charge of, refine it down to its most efficient version, and maximize its value for the corporate regime.

Yes, sometimes that means pushing through “woke,” LGBT nonsense, but ultimately that’s just a means to an end. The most important qualification of kommissars like Felss Masino is their mastery of CYA.

CYA, short for cover your a**, is a time-honored philosophy of dysfunctional organizations, often associated with its corollary, s**t flows downhill. And marketing today is dominated by CYA culture. Every decision must be backed up by consultants, data firms, and PR agencies so that when things flop, no one at the top can be blamed. Or even in the middle, if you’re good enough at CYA.

That’s why Cracker Barrel didn’t hire one visionary agency. It hired three mediocre ones — Blue Engine, Prophet, and Viral Nation — each surely providing slides, jargon, and “proof” that the rebrand was genius. The result is exactly what you’d expect: a camel built by committee.

New and improved

It doesn’t have to be this way. Back in the 1990s, when I grew up, brands took big marketing risks. They were willing to commit to a strong point of view.

It didn’t always work, but when it did, it made everyday life a little more pleasant. Unless you want to live somewhere completely off the grid, you will be regularly exposed to advertising; it’s indispensable to the innovation and consumer choice we all enjoy. What people in the ad business used to understand is that advertising doesn’t have to be ugly or lowest-common-denominator. Look at old ads by Nike, or Apple, or even McDonald’s — ads that dared to strive for beauty and inspiration.

What changed is the kind of people who go into advertising. What used to be a scrappy, male-dominated field, as in “Mad Men,” is now dominated by overeducated women.

Women’s work

Let me make the standard, tiresome disclaimer: I’ve worked with many talented and funny women marketers. The problem is how the inverted sex ratio changes the business as a whole. Women, generally speaking, just don’t have the same competitive, ego-driven, risk-taking nature as men. And when you’ve spent $250,000 on your education, you’re not about to jeopardize your investment by taking big swings.

This new ecosystem rewards traits that are more traditionally female: presentability, agreeableness, and keeping things tidy and organized. It requires leaders who are fluent in inoffensive, trying-to-please-everybody marketing gobbledygook. Like this quote from Cracker Barrel Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Moore:

We believe in the goodness of country hospitality, a spirit that has always defined us. Our story hasn’t changed. Our values haven’t changed. With “All the More,” we’re honoring our legacy while bringing fresh energy, thoughtful craftsmanship, and heartfelt hospitality to our guests this fall.

Country star Jordan Davis, bard of “heartfelt hospitality.” BG048/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images/Getty Images

As someone with more than a decade of ad industry experience, I’ve been neck-deep in this kind of soul-killing gibberish for years. But there is a bright side.

You gotta believe

If you have the drive and the ambition, the CYA-ification of marketing represents a huge opportunity. Small, upstart brands are better positioned than ever to cut through the noise — provided they’re not afraid to defy business as usual.

That’s exactly why I founded my agency, WILL.

I suppose this is the point at which I’m supposed to issue some faux-humble disclaimer like “shameless self-promotion!” But screw that. Why would I feel any shame? I believe in WILL, and that’s why I work so relentlessly to build it. And I believe just as wholeheartedly in the brands we help.

This says less about my virtue than it does about my sheer pragmatism. For anyone wanting to escape the system-wide managed decline afflicting Cracker Barrel and countless other organizations, sincere, deeply held belief in your mission isn’t optional — it’s the only way out.

Here’s our recent ad for Michigan Enjoyer, a newsletter with an unapologetic bias for the specific people, places, and history that make the state unique:

— (@)

​Lifestyle, Culture, Advertising, Cya, Women and men, Cracker barrel, Will agency, Michigan enjoyer, Rebrand, Burberry, Business, Bottom of the barrel 

North Carolina police are investigating a lethal incident involving a woman who was found shot in the face in Mount Holly early Saturday morning.

The Mount Holly Police Department said it was called to the home on Tomberlin Road at about 1:20 a.m. Police found a woman with the gunshot wound at the home of her next-door neighbor.

The children were placed in the custody of their family members.

The woman was breathing and conscious despite the injury. Neighbors told police that the woman said she ran to the neighbors’ house after the man shot her.

When police investigated the woman’s home, they found a dead man inside, but it was unclear how he died. Police also found two children who were safe asleep in separate bedrooms in the upstairs of the home.

The woman was transported to a hospital for treatment of the gunshot wound to her face.

Police said there was no threat to the community based on the evidence they collected at the home. They added that the investigation was ongoing but that they were not releasing any more information about the case. No arrests have been made in the case.

WSOC-TV reported that the dead man was identified as Montana Ennenga.

RELATED: 1-year-old girl mauled to death by family’s pit bull, police say

The children were placed in the custody of their family members.

Mount Holly is a suburb of Charlotte with about 17,500 residents in Gaston County.

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​Woman shot in the face, North carolina crime, Man found dead, Children sleeping during crime, Crime 

President Donald Trump made headlines this week by signaling a rebrand of the Defense Department — restoring its original name, the Department of War.

At first, I was skeptical. “Defense” suggests restraint, a principle I consider vital to U.S. foreign policy. “War” suggests aggression. But for the first 158 years of the republic, that was the honest name: the Department of War.

A Department of War recognizes the truth: The military exists to fight and, if necessary, to win decisively.

The founders never intended a permanent standing army. When conflict came — the Revolution, the War of 1812, the trenches of France, the beaches of Normandy — the nation called men to arms, fought, and then sent them home. Each campaign was temporary, targeted, and necessary.

From ‘war’ to ‘military-industrial complex’

Everything changed in 1947. President Harry Truman — facing the new reality of nuclear weapons, global tension, and two world wars within 20 years — established a full-time military and rebranded the Department of War as the Department of Defense. Americans resisted; we had never wanted a permanent army. But Truman convinced the country it was necessary.

Was the name change an early form of political correctness? A way to soften America’s image as a global aggressor? Or was it simply practical? Regardless, the move created a permanent, professional military. But it also set the stage for something Truman’s successor, President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower famously warned about: the military-industrial complex.

Ike, the five-star general who commanded Allied forces in World War II and stormed Normandy, delivered a harrowing warning during his farewell address: The military-industrial complex would grow powerful. Left unchecked, it could influence policy and push the nation toward unnecessary wars.

And that’s exactly what happened. The Department of Defense, with its full-time and permanent army, began spending like there was no tomorrow. Weapons were developed, deployed, and sometimes used simply to justify their existence.

Peace through strength

When Donald Trump said this week, “I don’t want to be defense only. We want defense, but we want offense too,” some people freaked out. They called him a warmonger. He isn’t. Trump is channeling a principle older than him: peace through strength. Ronald Reagan preached it; Trump is taking it a step further.

Just this week, Trump also suggested limiting nuclear missiles — hardly the considerations of a warmonger — echoing Reagan, who wanted to remove missiles from silos while keeping them deployable on planes.

The seemingly contradictory move of Trump calling for a Department of War sends a clear message: He wants Americans to recognize that our military exists not just for defense, but to project power when necessary.

Trump has pointed to something critically important: The best way to prevent war is to have a leader who knows exactly who he is and what he will do. Trump signals strength, deterrence, and resolve. You want to negotiate? Great. You don’t? Then we’ll finish the fight decisively.

That’s why the world listens to us. That’s why nations come to the table — not because Trump is reckless, but because he means what he says and says what he means. Peace under weakness invites aggression. Peace under strength commands respect.

Trump is the most anti-war president we’ve had since Jimmy Carter. But unlike Carter, Trump isn’t weak. Carter’s indecision emboldened enemies and made the world less safe. Trump’s strength makes the country stronger. He believes in peace as much as any president. But he knows peace requires readiness for war.

Names matter

When we think of “defense,” we imagine cybersecurity, spy programs, and missile shields. But when we think of “war,” we recall its harsh reality: death, destruction, and national survival. Trump is reminding us what the Department of Defense is really for: war. Not nation-building, not diplomacy disguised as military action, not endless training missions. War — full stop.

RELATED: Trump makes a bold push for global competitors to abandon nukes: ‘The power is too great’

Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Staff via Getty Images

Names matter. Words matter. They shape identity and character. A Department of Defense implies passivity, a posture of reaction. A Department of War recognizes the truth: The military exists to fight and, if necessary, to win decisively.

So yes, I’ve changed my mind. I’m for the rebranding to the Department of War. It shows strength to the world. It reminds Americans, internally and externally, of the reality we face. The Department of Defense can no longer be a euphemism. Our military exists for war — not without deterrence, but not without strength either. And we need to stop deluding ourselves.

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​Opinion & analysis, Opinion, Department of war, Department of defense, Defense department, Peace through strength, National defense, National security, Donald trump, Harry truman, Ronald reagan, Dwight d. eisenhower, Military industrial complex 

Snoop Dogg is not a fan of LGBTQ+ representation in kids’ movies — and apparently he’s not afraid to say it.

During a recent interview on Sarah Fontenot’s “It’s Giving” podcast, the famous rapper made controversial comments regarding the film “Lightyear,” which he took his grandson to see.

While they were watching it, he was surprised to find that one of the characters has two moms.

“They’re like, ‘She had a baby — with a woman.’ Well, my grandson, in the middle of the movie, is like, ‘Papa Snoop? How she have a baby with a woman? She’s a woman!’” he said.

Snoop said his grandson was confused by the same-sex couple and asked, “They just said she and she had a baby — they’re both women. How does she have a baby?”

“So it’s like, f**k me, I’m like scared to go to the movies,” Snoop explained. “Y’all throwing me in the middle of s**t that I don’t have an answer for.”

BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock agrees with Snoop, but he doesn’t agree with Snoop being the one to say it.

“Not a bad message. Wrong messenger. And I think if he wanted to send a real message, the story should have ended with, ‘Yeah, I pulled my grandson up out of this movie, and we left and, you know, went and streamed an old-school movie for kids,’” Whitlock says.

“My real thought is, Snoop needs to evaluate what his music has done to little kids and that his music has groomed as many kids for sexual degeneracy as any Disney movie,” he adds.

BlazeTV contributor Shemeka Michelle agrees, calling him “the wrong messenger” as well.

“For one, I don’t think he’s going to stand ten toes down. If he does, I’ll be surprised, but I’m so used to them backtracking and saying, ‘That’s not what I meant,’ or, ‘I love the LGBTQ community,’” Michelle explains.

“And I’m like you,” she continues, adding, “I would have gotten up and left the movie.”

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The universities preaching that America is structurally racist now say they need international students to survive. Sad but true.

President Trump on Monday floated a proposal that has conservatives buzzing. Just before meeting with the president of South Korea, while discussing trade negotiations with China, Trump suggested that the deal might include allowing 600,000 Chinese students to attend American universities.

Instead of winning hearts and minds, universities would be exporting American self-loathing. Why should taxpayers fund that?

I’ve learned not to sprint ahead of Trump’s negotiations. He often uses public remarks as part of the bargaining table — dangling outrageous possibilities to shove the other side into error. And inconveniently for his critics, it usually works. Still, this one deserves a closer look.

Universities built on sand

As a professor at Arizona State University, the nation’s largest state school, I see firsthand how fragile higher education has become. Universities increasingly depend on international students to prop up their budgets. They reorient themselves not around local students but around foreign ones, reshaping programs and communications to make sure outsiders feel at home.

ASU boasts 195,000 students. Yet when the semester began, the university’s homepage highlighted international arrivals, not Arizona students. The welcome-back email did the same. Arizona families — the taxpayers who actually fund the place — were treated as an afterthought.

Administrators justify this by pointing to economic contributions, diversity, and talent. But native students notice the slight. Parents notice it too. The message is clear: Tuition dollars matter more than the citizens who built these schools. ASU may call itself the “New American University,” but more often it presents itself as the “No Longer American University.”

RELATED: Chinese nationals on student visas allegedly ripped off elderly Americans in nasty scheme

Moor Studio via iStock/Getty Images

A house of cards

Here’s the truth: Many American universities cannot survive without international tuition checks.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted as much on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, saying the bottom 15% of U.S. colleges would simply shut down without that revenue. Universities have operated like Ponzi schemes, built on the illusion that enrollment growth never ends. But as American students tire of being hectored with radical political agendas, growth slows and the budgets collapse.

The U.S. already hosts about 270,000 Chinese students, not counting tens of thousands more from India, South Korea, and elsewhere. ASU alone has 16,000 international students, down from 18,000 last year. Trump’s proposed deal would more than double the number of Chinese students nationwide overnight.

What are they learning?

Even if you grant the economic benefits, the bigger question — maybe the biggest — is: What sort of education would these 600,000 students receive?

We could introduce them to the greatness of the American experiment, the sweep of Western civilization, and the biblical truths that shaped both. We could even present the gospel to hundreds of thousands of students who may never have heard it before. That would be a noble exchange.

But that isn’t what happens on most campuses.

Drop them into a humanities classroom and they’ll be steeped in anti-racism, DEI dogma, LGBTQ activism, “decolonizing the curriculum,” and the thesis that America and the West are irredeemably wicked. Instead of winning hearts and minds, universities would be exporting American self-loathing — either by turning foreign students into residents who despise their host country or sending them home as ambassadors of contempt.

Why should American taxpayers fund that?

A higher-ed reckoning

Universities like ASU showcase international students while sidelining their own. They rely on foreign tuition to mask fiscal rot. And in exchange, they sell a curriculum that treats America as racist, the West as evil, and Christianity as oppressive.

No “economic benefit” offsets that catastrophic formula.

If American universities want to survive, they must first clean their own house.

Admit the harm caused by their reckless anti-America, anti-West, anti-Christian curriculum.Abandon DEI dogma, corrosive identity politics, and “decolonized” philosophy.Value American students — the citizens and taxpayers who fund these schools.Reorient higher education toward the people of the states and communities that built it.Teach again that we are created by God, equal in worth, and capable of knowing truth, goodness, and beauty.

Only then can we discuss whether more international students make sense. Until then, it is rich with irony: The same universities that teach contempt for America now admit they need foreign students to survive.

​Opinion & analysis, China, Students, Student visas, Donald trump, Xi jinping, Trade, Tariffs, Dollars, Universities, Colleges, Arizona state university, America, America first, Taxpayer dollars, Anti-american, Diversity equity inclusion, Dei, Ideology, Decolonize 

After a week of online outrage over its rebranding, the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain announced that it was giving in on one key part of its revised image.

In a statement to Fox Business on Tuesday, the company said it would be reverting back to its original logo after having released a cleaner, text-only logo that excised the “old-timer” character.

‘We said we would listen, and we have.’

“We thank your guests for sharing your voices and love for Cracker Barrel,” the company said. “We said we would listen, and we have. Our new logo is going away, and our ‘Old-Timer’ will remain. At Cracker Barrel, it’s always been — and always will be — about serving up delicious food, warm welcomes, and the kind of country hospitality that feels like family.”

Some on social media tied the announcement to advice given by President Donald Trump earlier that day on Truth Social.

“Cracker Barrel should go back to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before. They got a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity if they play their cards right,” the president wrote.

“Very tricky to do, but a great opportunity. Have a major News Conference today. Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again,” he added.

The rebranding also included a decluttering of the famous interiors to make them more sleek and modern.

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

Photo by GREGORY WALTON/AFP via Getty Images

The day after the rebranding announcement, the stock price for the company plummeted initially by about 15%. It has since regained much of that loss.

Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck vehemently criticized the rebranding.

“Woke ideology has changed our country in countless ways, some of which we may never get back. But Cracker Barrel has always represented the one thing I think so many Americans currently crave: nostalgia,” Beck said.

“‘Rebrand’ all of that to something more modern, something more inclusive, and something that erases those feelings, and you’re ‘rebranding’ the sole reason why anyone goes there to begin with,” Beck added.

Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino had previously said the rebrand effort was an attempt to make the chain relevant again.

“As a proud American institution, our 70,000 hardworking employees look forward to welcoming you to our table soon,” the company concluded.

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​Cracker barrel caves, Cracker barrel backlash, Online controversy, Woke rebranding, Politics 

It’s election season, and Texas Senator John Cornyn (R) wants voters to believe that he’s an America First candidate and a close ally of President Donald Trump — but BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales knows that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Actions speak louder than words,” Gonzales says on “Come and Take It.” “And so instead of just taking John at his word right now in 2025 when he is just trying to win an election, which, by the way, the polls show he’s probably not going to win. … Let’s look at actions.”

Conservative Review assigns federal officeholders a grade based on their “Liberty Score,” which is based on the top 50 votes that officeholder has taken in the duration of a rolling six-year window.

And Gonzales has Cornyn’s Liberty Score.

“Let’s give reasonable perspective. So, our other Texas senator, Ted Cruz, let’s look at his Liberty Score. He has a respectable 88%. Not perfect. I would expect an A from any senator from the state of Texas,” Gonzales explains.

“John Cornyn is coming in at [an] abysmal 54%,” she says, disturbed. “Now, I’m not great at math, but I believe that that’s an F. That is a failing Liberty grade. John Cornyn is failing in liberty, and this is coming from a Texas senator. That is embarrassing.”

Gonzales points to several things that could have contributed to Cornyn’s failing score.

“Did you know that John Cornyn was one of Joe Biden’s biggest cheerleaders on, well, many things, but one of which was his gun control legislation? Did you know that?” she explains. “Yeah, under Joe Biden, John Cornyn was pretty instrumental in the negotiation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.”

“It increased federal grant money to states who enacted red flag laws. So it’s giving an incentive,” she adds.

And President Trump agrees with Gonzales.

“The deal on ‘Gun Control’ currently being structured and pushed in the Senate by the Radical Left Democrats, with the help of Mitch McConnell, RINO Senator John Cornyn of Texas, and others, will go down in history as the first step in the movement to TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY. Republicans, be careful what you wish for!!!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

“John Cornyn is the one that is being paired together, lumped in with Mitch McConnell, for good reason, because birds of a feather flock together, and the two of them were doing Joe Biden’s bidding with his gun control legislation,” Gonzales says.

“John Cornyn was as anti-MAGA as it gets,” she adds.

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​Camera phone, Video, Video phone, Upload, Sharing, Free, Youtube.com, Come and take it, Come and take it with sara gonzales, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, John cornyn, Joe biden, Maga, America first, Texas senator, Liberty score, The conservative review 

Parents are outraged after a Massachusetts school district allegedly forced children to take a survey their parents had recused them from, and now the Trump administration is investigating some of the complaints.

Burlington Public Schools is under fire from the feds for allegedly forcing students to participate in surveys that were graphic and sexual in nature.

The Boston Herald reported that students as young as 11 years old were required to take the survey.

According to the Boston Herald, the school district required students to take the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which included questions concerning “sexual intercourse, sexual orientation, gender identity, sexting, experiences with sexual assault, alcohol use, and more.”

Even students whose parents had supposedly opted them out of participating in the survey allegedly took it, which, the Trump administration argues, may be a violation of the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, given the nature of the questions.

RELATED: Trump’s Education Department stops Clinton-era giveaway for illegal aliens

One of the survey questions reportedly read: “Sexual intercourse includes vaginal sex which is when a penis goes inside of a vagina, oral sex which is contact between the mouth and genitals, anal sex which is when the penis goes inside an anus (butt), and use of toys or props (vaginal or anal). Have you ever had sexual intercourse?”

A document on the Department of Education website explains that the PPRA protects the right of parents to consent to surveys and data collection of their students related to “eight protected areas,” including “sex behavior and attitudes.”

Parents also have the right to “receive notice and an opportunity to opt out of … any protected information survey administered or distributed to a student by [a] local educational agency that is a recipient of funds under an applicable program,” among a few other conditions.

Since the Department of Education states that parents must give “consent before students are required to submit” to such DOE-funded protected information surveys, the incident may have been a violation of the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, as is being alleged in the investigation.

“Entities which are found to be in violation of PPRA and fail to take corrective action may lose federal funding,” a source familiar with the investigation at the Department of Education told Blaze News.

Notably, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey is produced and collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System.

While the CDC’s website says that the YRBS is given only to students in grades 9-12, the Boston Herald reported that students as young as 11 years old were required to take the survey.

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​Politics, Burlington public schools, Trump administration, Department of education, Youth risk behavior survey, Protection of pupil rights amendment, Centers for disease control and prevention, Youth risk behavior surveillance system 

Artificial general intelligence is coming sooner than many originally anticipated, as Elon Musk recently announced he believes his latest iteration of Grok could be the first real step in achieving AGI.

AGI refers to a machine capable of understanding or learning any intellectual task that a human being can — and aims to mimic the cognitive abilities of the human brain.

“Coding is now what AI does,” Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck explains. “Okay, that can develop any software. However, it still requires me to prompt. I think prompting is the new coding.”

“And now that AI remembers your conversations and it remembers your prompts, it will get a different answer for you than it will for me. And that’s where the uniqueness comes from,” he continues.

“You can essentially personalize it, right, to you,” BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere confirms. “It’s going to understand the way you think rather than just a general person would think.”

And this makes it even more dangerous.

“This is something that I said to Ray Kurzweil back in 2011. … I said, ‘So, Ray, we get all this. It can read our minds. It knows everything about us. Knows more about us than anything, than any of us know. How could I possibly ever create something unique?’” Glenn recalls.

“And he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s say I wanted to come up with a competitor for Google. If I’m doing research online and Google is able to watch my every keystroke and it has AI, it’s knowing what I’m looking for. It then thinks, “What is he trying to put together?” And if it figures it out, it will complete it faster than me and give it to the mother ship, which has the distribution and the money and everything else,’” he continues.

“And so you become a serf. The lord of the manor takes your idea and does it because they have control. That’s what the free market stopped. And unless we have control of our own thoughts and our own ideas and we have some safety to where it cannot intrude on those things … then it’s just a tool of oppression,” he adds.

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The controversial viral video that showed a Minnesota mother using a racial slur against a black child has led to criminal charges that may mean jail time and a fine.

The video from April shows Shiloh Hendrix defiantly insulting a man who was recording her at a local playground in the city of Rochester and accusing her of being racist against a child. At one point, Hendrix flips off the man and then repeats the N-word several times while clutching her own child.

‘This was a situation that deeply affected many people, especially our communities of color, and caused real turmoil in our community.’

“He took my son’s stuff!” she tells the man who follows her in the park, according to the video.

“You know that’s a hate speech?” the man recording says.

“I don’t give a s**t!” she responds.

On Tuesday, the Rochester city attorney filed three counts of disorderly conduct against Hendrix. If she’s convicted of the misdemeanors, she could face 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.

“This was a situation that deeply affected many people, especially our communities of color, and caused real turmoil in our community,” Rochester Mayor Kim Norton said. “We acknowledge the lasting impact this incident has had, not only on those directly involved and across our community, but also in the broader conversations happening at the state and national level.”

While many critics immediately assailed the woman for her behavior, others jumped to her defense after her side of the story was offered up in a post on GiveSendGo. She claimed that her address and personal details had been leaked online.

“We are taking the proper procedures in order to stay safe from these constant threats,” she wrote. “I’m still very frightened, and I don’t think I will feel safe until we can escape completely. I am so grateful to all of you who have donated to my family. I never would have imagined that we would be supported to such an extreme.”

The campaign raised over $700,000 before it was unpublished. The site said it disabled comments because some had used racist phrases. A separate donation page for the black child and his family raised over $340,000.

RELATED: Exile on Sesame Street: The terrible glamour of white guilt

In May, the Rochester branch of the NAACP called for charges against Hendrix and offered a list of possible violations that were applicable in the case.

“Even though the law may not change the heart of a heartless adult who traumatized a vulnerable child, it can and must send a strong message — a message that our children have rights to be protected from heartless adults who terrorize and traumatize them,” reads a statement from NAACP branch president Wale Elegbede.

“This child, family, and our community deserve justice for the unjustified harm that was brought upon them by this adult woman,” he added. “Accountability is the only way to ensure these dangerous habits of hate and abuse are curbed and have no place in Rochester, Minnesota.”

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The possibility of first lady Melania Trump appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair is apparently outraging many workers who may quit their jobs, according to a report in the Daily Mail.

Semafor reported that 37-year-old Mark Guiducci was considering the option after becoming the global editorial director for Vanity Fair.

‘We are not going to normalize this despot and his wife; we’re just not going to do it.’

That revelation was not acceptable to some at the magazine.

“I will walk out the motherf**king door, and half my staff will follow me,” one unidentified editor said to the Mail.

“We are not going to normalize this despot and his wife; we’re just not going to do it. We’re going to stand for what’s right,” the editor continued. “If I have to work bagging groceries at Trader Joe’s, I’ll do it. If [Guiducci] puts Melania on the cover, half of the editorial staff will walk out, I guarantee it.”

The first lady had previously appeared on the cover of the Mexico edition of Vanity Fair in Jan. 2017.

RELATED: Bronze statue of Melania Trump stolen after being sawed off at the ankles

Photo by PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images

A different employee cast doubt on the editor’s claims.

“It’s all talk,” the employee said. “If they put her on the cover, people will protest and gripe about it, but I don’t see anyone quitting such a prestigious job over that.”

A New York Post report noted that former first lady Michelle Obama appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair three times, while Melania Trump didn’t appear once on the covers for Vanity Fair or Vogue, which is also owned by Condé Nast.

The current first lady has also been dismissive about the cover appearances.

“Look, I’ve been there on the covers … on the covers of many magazines before. … We have so many other important things to do than to be on the cover of any magazine,” she said to Fox News.

“I think that life would not change for anybody if I’m on the cover,” she added.

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Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has been an instrumental figure in dismantling the climate science regime during the second Trump administration, including major funding cuts in partnership with the Department of Government Efficiency. Now, nearly half of the states’ attorneys general have called on Zeldin to strike at the head of another climate institution: the Environmental Law Institute.

Headed by Attorney General Austin Knudsen of Montana and signed by 22 other state AGs, the letter calls on Zeldin to cut funding grants for the Environmental Law Institute, which operates the Climate Judiciary Project.

‘The Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project is using woke climate propaganda, under the guise of what they call “neutral” education, to persuade judges and push their wildly unpopular agenda through the court system.’

The letter says that ELI “received approximately 13% of its revenue in 2023 and 8.4% in 2024” from federal grants and appears to expect this funding to continue, according to its financial records.

RELATED: Trump targets 2009 EPA climate rule in bold regulatory shift

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“As attorney general, I refuse to stand by while Americans’ tax dollars fund radical environmental training for judges across the country. The Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project is using woke climate propaganda, under the guise of what they call ‘neutral’ education, to persuade judges and push their wildly unpopular agenda through the court system,” Knudsen said in a statement obtained by Blaze News.

The Climate Judiciary Project, the letter continues, has a clear mission: “Lobby judges in order to make climate change policy through the courts.”

The Climate Judiciary Project claims it “is a first-of-its-kind effort that provides judges with authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science, the impacts of climate change, and the ways climate science is arising in the law. Since its creation in 2018, the Climate Judiciary Project estimates that it has hosted more than 50 events and trained more than 2,000 judges.”

The revelations about ELI make clear that it is not shy about political lobbying.

Jason Isaac, the CEO of the American Energy Institute, said in a statement obtained by Blaze News: “Its curriculum is developed by climate alarmist allies of the plaintiffs and delivered to judges behind closed doors. Public funds should never be used to finance political advocacy disguised as judicial education.”

Many supporters of this move have cited legal and ethical concerns as well as issues with consumer protection. “As we have long warned, the left has a plan to reshape American society by using lawsuits in courts all across the country, especially in places like Hawaii and other coastal enclaves. The new wave of revelations about ELI is further concerning evidence of how committed the left is to imposing mandatory Progressive Lifestyle Choices through this courtroom maneuvering and how big a threat it really is to all our ways of life,” O.H. Skinner, the executive director of Alliance for Consumers, said.

The letter was signed by the attorneys general of Montana, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

The signatories are calling on Zeldin to have the EPA “cancel any on-going grants to ELI and ensure that ELI does not receive any future grants while it is sponsoring the Climate Judiciary Project.”

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