Category: blaze media

On June 9, Graham Platner won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in Maine, securing approximately 72% of the vote in the primary to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.

His campaign was highly scandal-ridden due to revelations, including a chest tattoo resembling a Nazi SS symbol, sexually explicit texts sent to other women while married, allegations from multiple ex-partners of emotional volatility, heavy drinking, and physically threatening or abusive behavior, and resurfaced Reddit posts containing remarks many found offensive, homophobic, and inflammatory.

Despite these controversies, Platner prevailed with strong grassroots and progressive support.

BlazeTV’s Pat Gray was surprised by the lack of outrage. “None of these scandals have had any effect on his candidacy,” he sighs.

But what shocked him even more was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) comments to reporters on Tuesday. Following Platner’s victory, the democratic socialist — and one of the most vocal critics of Republican scandals — appeared to hypocritically shrug off his numerous controversies.

“When it comes to the substance of this reporting, obviously there’s a lot in that behavior that’s really challenging. It’s hard to stomach … but at the end of the day, I think that this is a choice,” she told CNN’s Manu Raju.

“If the choice on the ballot is between that and a senator who’s voted to take health care away from millions of Americans, that’s the situation that we have to weigh,” she added.

Co-host Keith Malinak translates her words: “Is he sexting with women and wearing Nazi tattoos and mocking those that serve in our armed forces? Yeah, but he would vote for the government to spend money for other people’s health insurance.”

“I mean, she literally said something like, ‘at the end of the day, it’s a choice.’ What a profound statement that is,” scoffs Pat. “Obviously it’s a choice, and you made the bad choice there.”

Jeffy speculates that the scandals surrounding Platner are likely even deeper, considering progressive activists Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, who recruited Platner, admitted in an interview with Wall Street Journal reporter Aaron Zitner to paying a professional vetting/opposition research firm “a whole chunk of money” to scrub Platner before his campaign even began.

But it wasn’t wholly effective given the scandals that have dominated the news cycle of late — including a deleted post from 2021 where Platner wrote, “I got older and became a communist.”

“It’s despicable,” says Pat.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

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 unleashed, Pat gray, Graham platner, Aoc 

Eighty-six is more than just a number. It is slang that for roughly a century has meant “to get rid of” or “to throw out.”

When used in reference to a person, 86-ing can mean the person’s termination of employment or denial of service. To “86 someone” does, however, have another widely understood meaning: to kill that person.

‘Any threat against the president is taken very seriously.’

Just weeks ahead of the primary America250 celebrations in the national capital and days ahead of the UFC match at the White House, a massive “86 47” appeared etched or possibly chemically burned into the grass on the National Mall, just east of the World War II memorial.

The numbers 86 and 47 — the latter an apparent reference to the 47th president, Donald Trump — were still visible on Friday in the live images taken by EarthCam’s camera, which is mounted atop the Washington Monument.

Members of the National Guard and U.S. Park Police responded to the scene of the vandalism, which was reported around 11:30 a.m. on Thursday. The area was promptly roped off by National Park Service workers.

Park Police said that grass samples have been collected for testing.

“The deranged vandalism on our National Mall will not be tolerated,” the U.S. Department of the Interior, which manages national parks like the National Mall, said in a statement obtained by NBC News. “Any threat against the president is taken very seriously by the department, and our U.S. Park Police will investigate this incident and hold those responsible accountable.”

White House spokesman David Ingle condemned the act, stating, “Anyone who engages in or endorses political violence or assassination culture must be condemned in the harshest terms possible.”

RELATED: Texas radical charged with making terroristic threats against Erika Kirk

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Just days ago, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss — an appointee of former President Barack Obama — barred the National Park Service from preventing an anti-Trump group from waving an “86 47” flag around in the area.

The radical group in question, Accountability Now USA, has volunteers calling nonstop for the president’s ouster and protesting the Trump administration near the George Meade statue on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. The group was notified in April by an NPS agent that the display of “unprotected obscenity” was “not protected by the First Amendment and is therefore prohibited and a violation of law.”

The Obama judge evidently didn’t share the NPS’ concerns about the group’s inflammatory messaging targeting a man whom assassins have attempted to murder on at least three occasions. Moss wrote, “The term ’86’ is used far more often to mean ‘throw out’ than ‘kill,’ and it appeared at a demonstration that was focused, of all things, on the constitutional impeachment and ‘removal’ of the President.”

The unknown radical or radicals behind the vandalism at the National Mall and Accountability Now USA’s flag-bearers are hardly the only individuals who have used the numbers to publicly call for Trump’s elimination of one kind or another.

Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted in late April over his since-deleted social media post featuring an image of seashells arranged to form the numbers “86 47.” Comey was charged with threatening the life of the president and transmitting in interstate and foreign commerce a communication that contained a threat to kill the president.

While she has not similarly been indicted, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) faced backlash in 2020 during Trump’s first term for conducting an interview with a pin displayed behind her that read “8645.” Trump was then the 45th president.

The Trump War Room account said at the time, “Whitmer is encouraging assassination attempts against President Trump just weeks after someone sent a ricin-laced packaged to the White House.”

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​James comey, Donald trump, Assassination, Murder, Leftism, National mall, National park service, Secret service, Gretchen whitmer, Politics 

Fans have shelled out hard-earned cash for 007: First Light, making it a smash hit for developer IO Interactive.

But with more than 3 million sales in the first two weeks, there are still questions about the game’s profitability and, of course, its ideological direction for James Bond.

‘We are well above our forecasts at this point.’

The truth is, the James Bond video game franchise has chugged along like a broken locomotive for the better part of 20 years, with First Light being the first console release for the iconic brand since 2012’s 007: Legends, which was viewed quite unfavorably.

However, with help of IO Interactive, Bond has been ported from a mostly nonexistent gaming environment to a fairly good and playable game.

Your gameplay, Mr. Bond

First Light looks and feels an awful lot like the Hitman games — which IO Interactive makes — utilizing stealth elements and interactive characters as its bread and butter. Where the titular hit man has in his repertoire multiple costume changes and the use of closets or containers to dump dead bodies, 007 employs gadgets and persuasion.

On to the game. After getting through a gigantic user license agreement, followed by an exhaustive privacy policy, fans eventually get to find out how Bond became 007.

Gamers will love the fly-by introductory sequence that breezes through game mechanics in a fun way, making it feel like the opening montage of a movie.

However, this introduction eventually turns into several boring training missions where Bond is forced to make decisions in the dreaded “mash X or Y” style to work through scenarios that don’t really matter. For example, after being poisoned, Bond must choose to inject one syringe or another; the antidote or something else. The game prompts you to press both at the same time; if you don’t, nothing happens. Bond injects both anyway, and the story continues.

The unfortunate beginning is the game’s worst part. Soon some mission freedom is allowed. After making their way through forced many forced pathways, gamers eventually land on an extremely James Bond-esque title screen, complete with a Lana Del Rey theme song and a (PG) sex scene. It’s once again an immersive, movie-like environment.

Once the story moves into actual missions, though, the game settles in to remind you of Hitman in all the best ways. You can beat up anyone you please, wander around the mission looking for secrets, and, in very Bond ways, manipulate enemies.

Fake surrenders, radio frequency poisonings, and malfunctioning vacuum cleaners are just some of the dynamics at play as Bond infiltrates rooms and gets key intel, satisfyingly providing multiple pathways to complete a mission.

RELATED: Idris Elba: Black James Bond was never ‘realistic’ possibility

Jeff Spicer/Getty Images

Diversity or nothing

While the game is the best we’ve seen from Bond in more than a decade, one can’t help but notice that certain elements do feel like an Amazon-backed tribute to diversity, equity, and inclusion was force-fed into the game.

The first stirrings come courtesy of Moneypenny, played by Kiera Lester. Instead of going with how Lester looks in real life, her appearance is warped into a heavily androgenized and non-feminine version of herself, complete with baggy “boss lady” suit pants.

Moneypenny sassily introduces you to M, the leader of British secret service, MI6. This role is now played by British actress Priyanga Burford, a Sri Lankan woman who was significantly de-aged for the role.

Burford previously played MI6 scientist Dr. Symes in 2021’s live-action “No Time to Die,” which of course makes no sense in the game context unless her character took a huge pay cut and became a scientist later in life.

Yet the rest of the game, including all of Bond’s fellow spies, puts the woke away, delivering instead the classic English personalities we have all grown to love. You have to relish the drab disgust with Bond that wafts off of “Walking Dead” actor Lennie James’ John Greenway.

Any trace of what would otherwise seem like typical progressive-style diversity is reserved for nondescript MI6 scientists and background characters, all of whom are given slapstick one-liners and buffoonish behaviors.

The player therefore gets an impression that the DEI-scented British government roles are there to quietly make a point. Moneypenny long served as Bond’s flirtatious counterpart, but since she is now emptied of any feminine charge, the flirting moves to fellow secret agent Cressida, who is quickly framed up as a possible love interest.

RELATED: iPhone’s debut crushed young women’s fertility, new study says

A pretty penny

As reported by Game Developer, IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak has said he’s “very confident” the game will be profitable for the studio, after reports that it had an eye-popping production cost north of $200 million.

“We are well above our forecasts at this point,” Abrak said.

Yet Steam charts, often used as a barometer for game performance, had First Light peaking around 71,000 concurrent players on PC, which reportedly represented about a third of the game’s sales.

This does not look good for a game of this magnitude or budget. Current players have been floating around 19,000 for the past few days at the time of this writing. These figures have First Light barely breaking the top 100 of the charts.

Nevertheless, when all is said and done, 007: First Light represents a significant step forward for the franchise, marking the first game of its kind worth talking about in around a quarter-century. All it took was kind of copying another successful game.

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​Video games, James bond, Dei, Diversity, Tech 

I’m a huge basketball fan. I grew up watching the NBA, arguing about players who retired before I was born, and wasting hours on a no-look pass nobody had asked for. But if basketball is a passion, soccer is something deeper.

I have supported Manchester United since I was old enough to go to the bathroom unsupervised. My father, meanwhile, is a diehard Liverpool supporter. Growing up, our house was less a home and more a demilitarized zone. United against Liverpool was the closest my family came to civil war. If United won, I floated around the house for days. If Liverpool won, my father suddenly became the world’s most insufferable human being.

That rivalry taught me why soccer is special. Half the beauty of soccer is the madness. The missed chances. The terrible refereeing decisions. The goalkeeper who slips at the worst possible moment. The defender who accidentally turns a routine clearance into an own goal.

Perhaps when it’s too late, you realize perfection is often sterile.

Human error is a part of the beautiful game.

For most of soccer’s history, fans accepted that referees would occasionally get things wrong. Sometimes those mistakes hurt. Sometimes they helped. Sometimes they became legendary stories repeated decades later in pubs, living rooms, and stadium parking lots. Then came VAR.

From helper to master

For anyone unfamiliar, VAR stands for video assistant referee. In simple terms, it is soccer’s version of instant replay on AI-infused steroids. A team of officials watches the game through cameras and can tell the referee to stop play and review decisions involving goals, penalties, red cards, and offside calls.

The idea sounds reasonable enough. Use technology to make the game fairer.

The reality has been something rather different.

A striker scores. The crowd erupts. Fans hug strangers. Drinks fly through the air. Somewhere, a man loses his glasses and another loses his mind. Then everyone waits. And waits. And waits.

A group of officials in a room filled with screens begin examining freeze-frames as if they were analyzing evidence from a murder investigation. Lines appear on the screen. Angles are checked. Pixels are interrogated. The striker’s left nostril may have wandered two millimeters beyond the last defender.

Two minutes later, the goal is disallowed. The stadium goes silent. What was once one of the most emotional moments in sports now comes with a mandatory waiting period. Every goal feels like it must survive an IRS audit before it can officially exist. VAR arrived to correct errors and corrected the joy out of the game instead.

RELATED: Top companies admit humans cost less than AI — but still want more bots

L-R: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg/Getty Images; Timothy Hurst/MediaNews Group/Denver Post/Getty Images

The suspense is gone. The spontaneity is gone. Fans now celebrate goals with the enthusiasm of someone waiting for a bank transfer to clear. Nobody knows whether they should cheer immediately or wait for the algorithmic overlords in the replay bunker to issue a ruling.

And now something similar may be coming to basketball.

Like clockwork

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver recently discussed plans to use AI-powered camera systems to automatically make certain officiating decisions, particularly objective calls like out-of-bounds plays. Cameras would surround the court, instantly determining who touched the ball last.

Many will argue that this will eliminate mistakes. Maybe. But sports are rarely damaged by too much humanity. If anything, they are usually damaged by too little. The danger isn’t that AI gets calls wrong, but that it gradually turns the game into a laboratory experiment in which every action is measured, verified, and approved by machines.

Today, it’s out-of-bounds calls. Tomorrow, it’s automatic travel violations. Next year? AI-generated foul probabilities. A few years after that, an algorithm to calculate whether a defender’s facial expression suggested illegal contact. At some point, the referee becomes less an official and more a highly paid hall monitor standing near a very expensive computer.

Basketball fans should pay attention, because technology rarely arrives with a modest appetite. Name one piece of tech that hasn’t colonized everything around it. Even something that began as small as a step counter now grades how you sleep. VAR will not be the exception.

The NBA undoubtedly has officiating problems. Every fan knows it. Every playoff game seems to produce a new controversy. But there’s a real difference between improving officiating and outsourcing the soul of the game.

Sports are compelling because humans play them and humans judge them. Players make mistakes. Coaches make mistakes. Referees make mistakes. Fans make mistakes too. I once bet a ridiculous sum on a United academy prospect I was sure would be the next Ronaldo. Last I checked, he was playing for a third-tier side somewhere in East Asia.

Perfection sounds appealing. Then one day, perhaps when it’s too late, you realize perfection is often sterile. This risk, now facing soccer and basketball, ultimately menaces all our sports. In our obsession with eliminating every error, we seem bent on eliminating everything that makes sports feel alive: all its unpredictable moments. Arguments, controversies, the stories people remember for decades.

Yes, once every decision is handed to a machine, the games may become more accurate. They will also become a lot less interesting, because they’ll be so much less human.

To me, at least, a world where nobody can scream at the referee from the couch hardly sounds like progress at all.

​Tech 

A 12-year-old boy and his 11-year-old sister were traumatized by two thugs who robbed their lemonade stand after threatening them with a gun, according to the kids’ father.

David Byrne said his two children were selling lemonade in their south Boston neighborhood when they were approached by two juveniles at 4:40 p.m. on Wednesday.

‘This is appalling; this is grotesque. This is something that should not happen to young kids.’

The juveniles said they wanted to buy lemonade but walked away after claiming they didn’t have any money. A few minutes later they returned, and one flashed a black gun in his waistband.

“My kids immediately just put their hands up and said, ‘Take whatever you want.’ So, I’m proud of my kids for that, and I’m proud of them for basically protecting each other but also being smart in that bad situation,” Byrne said to WBZ-TV.

The juveniles allegedly took all of the cash that the children had earned and fled on foot.

“This is appalling; this is grotesque. This is something that should not happen to young kids,” the father said to WHDH-TV.

“Can’t have a gun and can’t be robbing lemonade stands. It’s as easy as that,” he added.

He went on to say that the children were sad and a little bit disturbed by what happened.

Boston police said they were searching for the juveniles and that no arrests had been made. They did release video and images of suspects they believed to be the juveniles responsible for the armed robbery.

RELATED: Video captures man walking up to kids’ lemonade stand and running away after snatching their money

Boston Police Dept.

Residents of the neighborhood expressed their shock at the incident.

“It’s awful and scary and definitely something you don’t want to come home to after a night. It’s disappointing. I didn’t expect it on our street,” Suzanna Ruotolo said.

RELATED: Sponsor pulls out of Boise Pride Festival after outrage over ‘Drag Kid’ show with children as young as 11 years old

Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn said the residents were getting together to make sure the lemonade stand would reopen with the support of the community.

“Let’s show them how much love and support the Southie community has for them. It is also our understanding that 50% of proceeds will be donated to a local organization working to prevent gun violence,” Flynn said.

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​Lemonade stand, Armed robbery, Boston, Juvenile crime, Crime 

“Accuracy comes before speed.” That was California Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s message to voters in a press release issued two days after officials began counting ballots from June’s primary. In the same release, she reminded voters that the count could continue for up to 30 days after Election Day.

Weber argued that California is “taking the time to do this work correctly” to protect voters’ rights and ensure election integrity.

After 2022, 2024, and this year’s primary, the problem no longer looks like a glitch. It looks like a pattern created by poor policy choices.

She is right about one thing: Accuracy matters.

Every lawful ballot should be counted. Every voter should be confident that election officials will get the count right.

But a week after Election Day, California was still processing 1.4 million ballots under a system that routinely extends vote counting for days and sometimes weeks after voters cast their ballots.

That raises a question California’s leaders seem increasingly unwilling to answer: Why are voters repeatedly told they must choose between accurate elections and timely results?

This is not the first time California has found itself in this mess.

In 2022, several California congressional races remained unresolved long after Election Day while control of the U.S. House hung in limbo. Two years later, California took 38 days to certify its election results. Now in 2026, Californians are again waiting weeks after Election Day for final results.

The details change. The outcome does not. Californians keep waiting.

So why does this keep happening?

The answer starts with California election law. According to CalMatters, the delay is due in part to policies California adopted to make voting easier after the COVID-19 pandemic: Every registered voter receives a mail ballot, and ballots remain valid as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive at county elections offices within seven days.

Election law expert Hans von Spakovsky has argued that California’s slow vote count is not an isolated incident or unexpected complication. It is the way the state’s election system is designed.

RELATED: ‘Fraudster’s paradise’: Feds plan to file election fraud charges in California

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

In other words, California is not experiencing an unexpected delay. It is experiencing the predictable results of the laws it chose.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) helped cement those policies in 2021 when he signed AB 37, making universal vote by mail permanent. His office promoted the law as “landmark elections legislation” that would expand vote by mail and strengthen election integrity.

Yet, Californians are now being sold the idea that waiting days or weeks for election results is simply the reality of modern elections.

It is not. It is the reality of California elections.

Timely results are part of election integrity. The longer ballots remain uncounted, the longer election officials must maintain secure chains of custody, verification systems, and storage. Delay does not automatically mean fraud. But delay does create more opportunities for confusion, suspicion, and avoidable controversy.

If California leaders want faster results, they should examine the policies that slow them down.

Instead, voters are told these delays are the unavoidable cost of administering elections in a large state. That explanation falls apart under scrutiny.

Look at Florida. The 2000 presidential election exposed serious weaknesses in that state’s election system. Legislators responded by reforming the state’s election administration and ballot-processing procedures.

Today, Florida is one of the fastest states in the country to report election results.

Florida allows election officials to begin processing mail ballots before Election Day, giving counties a head start on verification. The state also requires most mail ballots to be received by Election Day rather than days afterward. Voters whose signatures are missing or do not match generally have a much shorter window to fix those problems than California voters do.

Florida proves that accuracy and speed are not mutually exclusive.

California has chosen a different approach.

This is about more than administrative efficiency. In five months, Californians will return to the polls for the midterm election. Voters deserve confidence that the results will be accurate. They also deserve confidence that those results will arrive on time.

RELATED: Homeless people on Skid Row claim they were paid to vote — and not for Spencer Pratt

Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Lawmakers should examine whether ballots should continue arriving after Election Day and still be counted. They should review whether lengthy ballot-curing timelines help voters or simply extend uncertainty. Election officials should also receive every opportunity to process ballots before Election Day so results can be reported faster once polls close.

Most important, California leaders should stop pretending accuracy and speed are enemies. Florida proves they are not.

Weber says accuracy comes before speed. California voters should ask why they cannot have both.

After 2022, 2024, and this year’s primary, the problem no longer looks like a glitch. It looks like a pattern created by poor policy choices.

California built an election process that can take a month after Election Day to resolve.

Voters should stop accepting that as normal.

​Accuracy, Ballots, California, Confidence, Election day, Florida, Primary, Secretary of state, Speed, Voters, Shirley weber, Fraud, Gavin newsom, Elections, Hans von spakovsky, Mail, Karen bass, Spencer pratt, Steve hilton, Los angeles, Tom steyer, Xavier becerra, Justice department, Investigation, Opinion & analysis 

The only things certain in life are death, taxes, and the permanence of a government program. But what happens when a private company turns its agenda into a government program?

You cannot build a more financially secure business model than permanence. That helps explain why OpenAI is now reportedly in discussions with the Trump administration about a possible public equity stake in the company.

Unlike the dot-com bubble, whose infrastructure later supported real economic growth, rotting data centers will not leave behind comparable public value.

After all, what else is a company with $1.4 trillion in obligations and only $14 billion in revenue supposed to do?

Why was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Capitol Hill last week? According to the Financial Times, he was effectively selling Americans the rope to hang themselves. The plan proposed by OpenAI and other companies would reportedly create a sovereign-wealth-style fund into which AI companies would contribute equity so that the public could share in the sector’s soaring valuations.

That sounds generous until one remembers that this is still a loss-making sector built on staggering capital demands.

What is the rationale? Asked about equity stakes on Air Force One, President Trump suggested that “pieces” of AI companies could be “given to the American public” to quell growing alarm over the rapid rollout of the technology.

In other words, Americans are being asked to surrender farmland, neighborhood continuity, and the reliability of the electric grid to cloud-based, surveillance-enabling chatslop. In return, they may receive the honor of owning the losses from an insolvent business model.

The president confirmed the idea at a press conference on Wednesday, saying he would soon meet with “the top 12 or 15 executives” about “giving back something to the public.” He promised that “the public will become very rich.”

That promise should terrify everyone.

Once generative AI becomes a public project, the industry will move beyond “too big to fail.” Whatever happens to the companies or the broader sector, their success will become artificially and inextricably tied to the economy. Every government favor, subsidy, guarantee, and bailout will then be justified as necessary to protect the public’s stake.

RELATED: The AI boom is turning public meetings into crime scenes

Natalie Behring/Getty Images

Last November, OpenAI’s chief financial officer let the cat out of the bag when she said the company would need the government as a “backstop” for its business model. Sarah Friar later denied seeking a bailout. But a leaked 11-page letter from OpenAI to the Office of Science and Technology Policy urged the government to provide “grants, cost-sharing agreements, loans, or loan guarantees” to build America’s AI industrial base — all, naturally, to “compete with China.”

Fast-forward six months, and “backstop” now appears to mean a public “stake” in the company.

Everyone knows OpenAI’s generative AI model is unsustainable. It is built on unfathomably expensive capital expenditures for every token of AI usage.

Companies such as JPMorgan are reportedly finding that employees, after being pushed to use generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude, are spending more on tokens than their individual salaries. Uber’s chief technology officer said last month that the company burned through its entire 2026 budget for Claude Code and Cursor in just four months. In the irony of ironies, Microsoft itself reportedly told engineers in a major division to stop using an AI coding tool because the cost-to-utility ratio was not there.

The reality is that AI would work better through localized edge computing with low latency than through cloud-based hyperscale data centers that require unsustainable amounts of land, capital, resources, and power while causing other harms. China is producing cheap open-source AI. America is pouring concrete.

But the scale of that concrete — and all the materials, inputs, and power needed to support it — is unsustainable. Everyone knows it. Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle issued 47% more debt in the first five months of this year than they did from 2020 through 2024 combined. Total spending per capita now exceeds spending on the railroads in 1859, which at least served a clear public need that could be monetized over time.

RELATED: After fierce debate, Trump opts for federal controls in AI development

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images

There is no amount of monthly household or business subscription fees that will make this investment break even. The costs will only increase because the model depends on a resource-stripping industrial footprint and GPUs that have few other useful functions and depreciate within a few years.

Unlike the dot-com bubble, whose infrastructure later supported real economic growth, rotting data centers will not leave behind comparable public value.

The tech companies, land developers, and venture capital firms understand that this is a Ponzi scheme. They are racing to take these companies public so that they can be folded into indexes, ensuring that trillions in pension funds are funneled into an unsustainable business model. Once that happens, even if a more efficient approach to AI becomes obvious, the economy and government will already be too dependent on the data center model to let it fail.

That is why these companies are also seeking federal land for their projects, a favor not extended to ordinary industries. SoftBank, the Japanese investment company trying to underwrite much of OpenAI’s speculative build-out, is reportedly pushing for a federal land project in Ohio to reduce costs. But banks are already balking at these ventures after SoftBank failed to secure a $6 billion loan for OpenAI.

Green energy taught us a simple lesson: When the only path to profitability runs through government favors, we should not start down that path.

OpenAI does not need a public stake. It needs public skepticism.

Americans should not be asked to subsidize a speculative industry, sacrifice land and power, and then call the bailout wealth creation. If AI companies cannot survive without government backstops, loan guarantees, public land, and pension-fund capture, then they are not building the future.

They are building the next permanent government program.

​Amazon, Artificial intelligence, Bailout, Chatgpt, China, Claude, Data centers, Debt, Economic growth, Electricity, Google, Grants, Loans, Meta, Microsoft, Openai, Opinion & analysis, Oracle, Ownership, Public property, Sam altman, Socialism, Softbank 

As election integrity debates continue to rage across California, Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck believes state leaders are making a dangerous mistake: treating skepticism as a threat instead of addressing the concerns behind it.

“What’s happening in California is dangerous, and … if you can be reasonable and you can listen without the lens of your tribe, there is a way to an answer here. But nobody seems, especially on the left, nobody seems to want to actually fix the problem,” Glenn says.

“And so what do they want to do? They want to shut you up,” he adds, explaining that Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that “said fines and jail time [for] three years if you are interfering with the election.”

“This particular penalty is aimed at people who physically walk off with boxes of ballots,” Glenn explains. “Listen to the language around it.”

“The governor wrote a letter telling his officials to ‘count fast’ so the ‘election lies’ don’t take hold. Stop and think about that for a second. Wait a minute. The chief executive of the largest state in the union has appointed himself the man who decides which doubts are lies,” he says.

“And in the same season, his allies pass a provision that tells election observers they may no longer challenge the signatures on the ballot they’re watching get counted. So, they didn’t criminalize your doubt. They did something quieter,” he continues. “They turned down the lights in the room where the counting happens. And you’re told it’s a conspiracy theory to ask, ‘Why did it get so dark?’”

Glenn explains that a glaring issue with this is that the government cannot ever “be the arbiter of truth.”

“Especially when the question on the table is about the government itself. You cannot let the accused run the evidence room,” he says.

“You’re accusing California of having fraud, and what do they do? They say, ‘No, we’re in charge.’ Right? You’re the one that everybody’s saying is causing the fraud, and they’re saying, ‘No, you can’t question because there’s no fraud,’” he continues. “That doesn’t help anything.”

“This is not a conservative idea or a liberal idea. It’s just how you keep a free people free,” he adds.

​Glenn beck, The blaze, Gavin newsom, California, Spencer pratt, Nithya raman, Karen bass, Governor, Mayor, Election fraud, The glenn beck program 

The driver and passenger of a tractor trailer are facing federal charges after they sped away from a Border Patrol checkpoint before having to stop after their vehicle caught fire.

Bodycam footage published by WFAA-TV showed police officers frantically trying to open the trailer doors to save the dozens of suspected illegal aliens inside.

All of the migrants were pulled to safety, and no one was harmed.

On June 4 at about 8:36 p.m., Jairo Julian Holguin-Florentino was driving the tractor trailer through the Falfurrias checkpoint before a service canine alerted police to the possible presence of trafficked migrants.

The driver sped away on Highway 281 instead of stopping for a secondary inspection, and various agencies gave chase.

Police used spikes to flatten the vehicle’s tires in an attempt to stop the driver, but he continued to drive on the rims and the vehicle caught fire.

The driver and passenger were dragged out of the cab and arrested when police said they heard screaming coming from the locked cargo trailer of the burning vehicle.

Video showed officers rescuing dozens of migrants as smoke and fire engulfed the trailer. All of the migrants were pulled to safety, and no one was harmed.

Officials later said there were 39 rescued illegal aliens who were from Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela.

The Texas Department of Safety published video of body camera footage from the incident on its YouTube channel.

RELATED: At least 46 illegal aliens found DEAD in a trailer in San Antonio, and death toll may climb higher

“This case highlights the serious risks associated with human smuggling, including dangerous and life-threatening conditions inside concealed vehicles,” reads a statement from the U.S. Border Patrol about the incident.

Holguin-Florentino is the father-in-law of the passenger who was arrested, Cristian Johansel Mirambeaux-Martinez.

“This incident is a reminder of the dangerous lengths human smugglers will go to when engaging in this criminal activity, and DPS is proud to work with our federal partners, like [U.S. Border Patrol], to stop them,” reads a statement from the Texas Department of Public Safety.

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​Bodycam footage, Burning trailer, Human smugglers, Us border patrol, Politics 

Philadelphia police have released surveillance video of suspects wanted in the fatal shooting of a Penn State student in South Philadelphia, WPVI-TV reported.

Billy Schmidt, 22, was shot dead early Saturday morning in the 1900 block of Durfor Street, the station said.

‘He was a really good person who cared about everybody and never hurt or bothered a soul, never bothered anyone, and for him to get shot like that is a travesty.’

Investigators said video released Wednesday shows suspects walking in the area of 20th Street from Ritner Street to Jackson Street before encountering Schmidt, WPVI said.

The suspects also allegedly were seen fleeing on foot in the area of 22nd and Porter streets after the shots were fired, the station said.

Schmidt, a Penn State senior, was shot just yards from his family’s home around 1:30 a.m., WPVI reported.

Family members told the station Schmidt was returning from a nearby bar where he was watching the NBA Finals with friends.

“He was a really good person who cared about everybody and never hurt or bothered a soul, never bothered anyone, and for him to get shot like that is a travesty,” Bill Schmidt, the victim’s father, told WPVI.

More from the station:

Surveillance video captured by nearby cameras appears to show the moments leading up to the shooting. In one video, a man can be seen throwing a cell phone. Seconds later, another man runs around a corner with Schmidt chasing him. The gunman then turns around and shoots Schmidt in the chest.

Bill Schmidt said he later found his son’s phone under a car and turned it over to police.

“I’m shocked he chased them after they took his phone,” the elder Schmidt said, according to WPVI. “From what we’re told, another person came out and shot him.”

Lifelong friends of Schmidt gathered at a memorial in South Philadelphia on Wednesday evening, the station said.

“Leaning on each other is all we did growing up, and that’s what we’ll continue to do,” Jaden Kelly of South Philadelphia told WPVI.

“I hope they find them. I want [them] in jail. That’s what I want. They don’t deserve to get to walk away from what they did,” Matthew Segal of South Philadelphia also told the station.

RELATED: Karmelo Anthony appeals his murder conviction in stabbing death of Austin Metcalf

Friends told WPVI they didn’t learn of Schmidt’s death until the next day; now they’re cherishing the moments they had with him Friday night into Saturday morning.

“The way he always said goodbye. It was a big hug and ‘I love you,’ and I’m happy we got to say that one last time,” Gino Russo of South Philadelphia recalled to the station.

A vigil was set for Thursday night, WPVI said.

“They are animals for doing that to him,” the victim’s sister said, according to a Fox News video.

In addition, police are offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, WPVI said, adding that those with information are asked to call 215-686-TIPS.

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​Crime, Philadelphia, Fatal shooting 

Vance Boelter admitted to shooting Mark Hortman at the entrance of the victim’s home before chasing down Melissa Hortman to shoot her numerous times and place his 9mm gun to her head.

The guilty plea ended the federal criminal prosecution in the horrific murders of a Democratic Minnesota state representative and her husband, as well as the attack on another political couple.

‘While the legal process may provide accountability, true healing requires something more from all of us.’

Boelter was arrested by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office two days after the June 14, 2025, attack that shook Minnesota.

He had impersonated a police officer when he showed up at the home of Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman and shot him and his wife numerous times before he shot at their daughter, Hope Hoffman.

Boelter then went to the Hortmans’ front door to kill the couple.

Prosecutors said he had a list of other lawmakers he was targeting and visited the homes of those lawmakers but found no one at home.

John Hoffman, his wife Yvette Hoffman, and their family were in the audience at today’s hearing.

Boelter pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking, two counts of murder, and two counts of firearm discharge. He agreed to serve two life sentences and another 40 years in prison. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to not seek the death penalty, according to U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen.

“Political violence is a scourge in our nation,” Rosen said after the plea deal. “We now expect Vance Boelter will spend the rest of his natural life in prison without parole. To all of those who would commit political violence: this Justice Department will seek and obtain the longest prison terms for your offense.”

Boelter is also facing numerous state charges related to the attacks, including first-degree premeditated murder, attempted first-degree murder, felony cruelty to an animal, and impersonating a police officer.

RELATED: Exclusive: Assassination suspect Vance Boelter tells STUNNING inside story about shooting

The Hoffman family released a statement Thursday about the plea deal.

“There is not justice when our family and our state will never truly heal. While the legal process may provide accountability, true healing requires something more from all of us,” their statement reads.

“The choice we’ve made is to go forward with public service and being present for our community,” the family added. “The opportunity to justice is for Minnesotans and Americans to serve is to treat people with respect, to stop de-humanizing each other, and to stop dividing our country with hate and rhetoric.”

A GoFundMe page set up to help pay for the Hoffmans’ recovery raised over $265K.

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​Vance boelter, Melissa hortman, Political violence, John hoffman, Impersonating an officer, Politics 

After losing county funding, Los Angeles’ primary homeless services agency has lost federal funding due to its failure to address potential fraud.

The Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, alongside the Department of Housing and Urban Development, sent a letter on Thursday to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to inform the agency that it was immediately suspending funding amid an ongoing probe by HUD’s inspector general. The IG’s office is investigating any potential offenses by the LAHSA and its leadership, according to Fox News Digital, which obtained a copy of the letter.

‘Taxpayers will not bankroll LA’s fraud-filled homelessness industrial complex.’

The department reportedly outlined in its letter conflicts of interest, financial mismanagement, fraud, and oversight failures.

HUD has given the Los Angeles Continuum of Care, which is led by the LAHSA, nearly $1 billion over the last five years.

“Suspending LAHSA’s participation in federal government programs is a necessary step in accomplishing that critical mission in Los Angeles,” the letter read, according to Fox News Digital. “LAHSA’s failures have been so severe and pervasive that Los Angeles County has withdrawn its funding for the agency, and the City of Los Angeles is considering doing so as well.”

“HUD cannot ignore LAHSA’s wanton mismanagement of public funds. HUD’s mission is to reduce the plague of homelessness in America,” the agency’s letter continued. “Turning over billions of dollars from American taxpayers to an organization under investigation and suspected of gross misuse of federal funding and ‘obvious fraud’ does nothing to reduce homelessness. Indeed, diverting dollars from worthy programs to LAHSA merely makes the homeless crisis worse.”

RELATED: Socialist mayoral candidate is outraged at encampment outside her LA home — but it’s not what it seems

Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

HUD’s letter quoted a federal judge who stated last year that the LAHSA had committed “obvious fraud” after it allegedly sought full funding for an 88-bed shelter despite maintaining only roughly half occupancy.

HUD also noted that a former top LAHSA official, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, was caught up in a conflict-of-interest scandal. The LAist reported in Feb. 2025 that the executive signed contracts that funneled $2.1 million to a nonprofit where her husband held a senior leadership position. The LAHSA told the outlet that Adams Kellum was “completely recused” from any business related to the nonprofit, and the contracts were inadvertently given to her for signature.

The LAist reported that the LAHSA has an $828 million budget this fiscal year, 46% of which comes from Los Angeles County, 35% from the city of Los Angeles, 11% from the federal government, over 8% from California, and a smaller amount from private philanthropy.

RELATED: Homeless people on Skid Row claim they were PAID TO VOTE — and not for Spencer Pratt

Scott Turner. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images.

L.A. County voted last year to cut $300 million in funding from the LAHSA, beginning in July. The county has formed a new department to address homelessness, which it believes will increase accountability by “streamlining bureaucracy to stretch our dollars further, and improving care for people experiencing homelessness.”

HUD Secretary Scott Turner stated that the agency “will fund results, not corrupt failure.”

“While hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were funneled to LAHSA with little accountability, homelessness skyrocketed,” Turner wrote. “Taxpayers will not bankroll L.A.’s fraud-filled homelessness industrial complex.”

“For years, American taxpayers have been sending billions of dollars to Los Angeles to house the homeless and other vulnerable Americans. The result? Fraud and corruption. That ends today,” White House Task Force Executive Director Scott Brady stated, according to a HUD press release.

The LAHSA confirmed receipt of HUD’s letter and warned that the department’s actions “could put thousands of formerly homeless people back on the street,” the agency said in a statement provided to Blaze News.

“After initial review, this appears to be a blatant attempt to pull yet more resources from Los Angeles, a city they have targeted time and again, when it is clear that LAHSA has either corrected or is in the process of correcting nearly all of the issues raised,” the agency said. “Local oversight actions have already resulted in strong repairs and reforms to LAHSA’s internal controls, which are accountable and viewable to the public.”

The LAHSA noted that it is also modernizing its financial systems.

“If HUD’s inspector general actually conducts a fair review of LAHSA’s current and future practices, they will clearly see how our systems now allow us to clearly track the work and investments that have resulted in L.A. outperforming the nation by reducing homelessness over the last two years,” the statement continued. “While the review plays out, our immediate priority is to explore all available options to ensure that federal funds continue to support the thousands of people who have been housed through LAHSA and our broader rehousing system.”

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​News, Los angeles, Homeless, Task force to eliminate fraud, Housing and urban development, Hud, Scott turner, Los angeles homeless services authority, Lahsa, Politics 

On June 9, Karmelo Anthony, 19, was convicted of murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

He was found guilty in the April 2, 2025, fatal stabbing of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf, a track athlete from a rival high school, during a Frisco Independent School District track meet in Frisco, Texas. Anthony, then a student at Centennial High, stabbed Metcalf in the chest during an altercation.

Anthony’s defense claimed he acted in self-defense, despite Metcalf being unarmed.

While both the prosecution and defense maintained that race played no role in the crime, the story has been heavily racialized publicly due to the fact that Anthony is black, Metcalf was white, and no black jurors were seated.

“They want you to see not the dead boy and the knife and even the testimony. They just want you to see color. They want you to see a black defendant and a white victim. That’s it,” says Glenn Beck.

To prove his point, Glenn plays clips from TPUSA frontlines reporter Savanah Hernandez interviewing Anthony supporters outside the courthouse.

In the first clip, she speaks with a black mother.

“If evidence does come out that Karmelo was not in fact fighting for his life when he stabbed and killed Austin Metcalf, do you think that the black community will accept that?” Hernandez asked.

“No, we going to stand by ours regardless,” she said, acknowledging that the trial “is about race.”

Glenn is sickened by this response and argues that it is possible to stand by someone in love without defending objectively evil actions.

“We stay by our kids’ side just as God stays by our side when we screw up. He loves us. He’s with us. But he requires a penalty,” he says.

He then plays a second clip from Hernandez speaking with a black minister.

“I come out here every Thursday, and we pray for people going to court because we know this is the final frontier of racism, and it’s legalized here,” he said, before adding that he “just [wants] justice done.”

“I believe he’s got a good heart. I just think he is misguided … because people want you to believe that this is just an endless American morality play of systemic racism over and over again,” says Glenn.

“They want you to ignore that Anthony was asked to leave 15 times, that he put his hand into the bag and dared them. He said, ‘I’m not leaving. F you all,’” he continues. “They want outrage; they don’t want evidence. Division, not truth.”

As for the jury, Glenn defends it, arguing “a jury of your peers doesn’t mean people who look like you.”

“It does mean this: citizens who can set aside their bias — racial, political, cultural — and weigh the evidence with integrity,” he says.

“Perhaps we think that the juror needs to look like us because we don’t think people of other color hold the same values, and that is terrifying if that is true,” he continues. “And these voices here that I just played for you make me think that is true.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Karmelo anthony, Austin metcalf 

Karmelo Anthony says he is unable to pay for an attorney for his appeal after being convicted in the murder of high school track star Austin Metcalf.

Anthony is requesting a court-appointed attorney, according to a filing that claimed he was a “penniless, destitute, and indigent person.”

The Anthony family reportedly purchased a new car and moved into a ritzy neighborhood in a gated community after the killer’s bond was lowered.

The high-profile murder case has led to suspicions that the Anthony family misspent $625,000 that was raised from their supporters.

Anthony was convicted of murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison for stabbing Metcalf during an altercation at a track meet event in Frisco, Texas. His attorney, Mike Howard, said they were going to immediately file an appeal.

“After the conclusion of the trial yesterday, we gave the court our official notice that Karmelo Anthony is filing an appeal,” said Howard. “We believe there are several important issues for the appellate courts to consider. An appeal is the next part of the legal process and a right afforded every American.”

The case has become a flash point in the public debate between those claiming the U.S. is irredeemably racist and others who say the conviction and sentence were appropriate for Anthony’s violent attack.

Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas responded to the conviction by claiming that the Metcalf family didn’t know the depth of agony that all black mothers feel.

“Black women, especially black women who have black male children, live in fear and agony every single day, a fear and agony that, I promise you, the Metcalfs probably never spend a day living that way,” the congresswoman said.

“We’re gonna have to have just some real conversations about race in this country,” she added, “but also just, like, what are we going to do to protect ourselves.”

RELATED: White-hating agitator claiming Karmelo Anthony was ‘legally lynched’ is a criminal, disgraced ex-judge

A Daily Mail report said the Anthony family purchased a new car and moved into a ritzy neighborhood in a gated community after the killer’s bond was lowered from $1 million to $250,000 in April 2025.

Anthony had claimed that he was protecting himself and that Metcalf had put his hands on Anthony before the lethal stabbing. Officials admitted that the knife Anthony brought to the event was not illegal according to Texas law.

He will eligible for parole after serving at least half of his sentence.

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​Appeal, Donations, Karmelo anthony, Murder, Politics 

President Donald Trump named Jay Clayton, the former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, as his next director of national intelligence.

The president made the announcement on Truth Social after many Republicans objected to his nomination of Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as temporary DNI.

‘Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay.’

“I am pleased to announce the Nomination of very Highly Respected Jay Clayton, former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the former Head of Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the most prominent and successful Law Firms anywhere in the World,” the president wrote, “and the current United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to be the next Director of National Intelligence and, importantly, to serve in my Cabinet.”

Clayton was previously confirmed by the U.S. Senate in a vote of 61-37 to lead the SEC.

“Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay,” the president added. “I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible.”

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina praised the pick in a statement on social media.

“Jay Clayton is an OUTSTANDING choice by President Trump to serve as Director of National Intelligence,” he wrote. “Jay is a proven leader with a distinguished record of public service and sound judgment needed to lead our intelligence community. I look forward to working with my colleagues to ensure his swift confirmation.”

Tillis vehemently opposed the nomination of Pulte, whom he called an “incendiary attack dog” that didn’t have “a prayer” to get past the Senate.

RELATED: Federal housing director calls for investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell — and for his removal

“Whoever told the president to go ahead and commit to this publicly before vetting it should lose their jobs, because they should know that the math just works against Pulte being confirmed,” Tillis said at the time.

Democrats warned that they would oppose Pulte as well as the extension of FISA surveillance authorization.

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​Bill pulte, Director of national intelligence, Jay clayton, President donald trump, Tulsi gabbard, Politics 

Sens. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and Ed Markey (Mass.) are just the latest high-profile Democrats to throw their support behind scandal-plagued Senate candidate Graham Platner.

The progressive oyster farmer from Maine won the Democratic nomination Tuesday night, a result that was widely expected after Gov. Janet Mills (D) suspended her campaign in April. Despite Mills still appearing on the ballot, Platner managed to secure 72% of the vote share, setting up a general election against five-term incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R).

‘In November, Maine voters will elect Graham Platner, and we will win a Senate majority.’

Prior to Election Night, Platner had received the endorsements of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).

Many moderate Democrats have been hesitant to endorse the anti-establishment populist over the course of his candidacy due to his troubling past, including a now-covered-up chest tattoo that resembled a symbol used by Nazi concentration camp guards, sexually explicit messages he sent to several women while married, and past Reddit posts in which he downplayed sexual assault in the military.

Although Schumer initially backed Mills, he and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) released a joint statement on Wednesday saying, “In November, Maine voters will elect Graham Platner, and we will win a Senate majority.”

Gillibrand reiterated her position when asked by reporters about Platner’s victory. “We are going to win Maine, and we are going to flip the Senate,” she said.

RELATED: Graham Platner trots out wife to deal with his extramarital sexting scandal, giving some Democrats the ick

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

After Platner clinched the nomination, Markey posted on his X account: “We need more leaders in Washington who will stand up to corporate power, fight for working families, and take bold action on the climate crisis. That’s what Graham Platner is fighting for in Maine. And that’s how he will help Democrats take back our Senate majority.”

The senator’s statement stands in contrast with his awkward CNN interview last Thursday during which he evaded endorsing Platner while praising his campaign and policies to anchor Boris Sanchez.

“So why not say that you endorse him?” Sanchez asked.

Markey responded, “In my opinion, he has taken the issues and he’s galvanized a grassroots movement all across Maine. People are responding at the town meetings, they are up, they’re energized, and in my opinion he is on a pathway to victory in the state of Maine.”

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) also proclaimed she would support Platner against Collins even as she denounced his past comments.

“I’m disgusted by what [Platner] posted, and I’ve been disgusted by some of his other, you know, behaviors and antics. But here’s the thing: You know, come November, there’s going to be a clear choice,” she said. “There’s going to be Susan Collins on the one hand, who has stood with Trump.”

While both Sens. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) stopped short of official endorsements, Welch expressed his support for the voters’ decision, while Schatz is working to raise funds for Platner’s campaign.

“He’s got a lot of controversy around him, but that’s been out there. The Democratic voters in Maine were fully aware of it, and they gave him a very solid Democratic victory in the primary,” Welch said.

Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) followed suit, posting on X early Wednesday morning: “Graham Platner made a passionate case for loving and serving Maine. Powerful.”

“I’ve made mistakes in my life, mistakes that I regret, that I live with and that I continue to learn from. And I’m still far from perfect,” Platner said in his victory speech Tuesday night.

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In addition to killing unborn children in the womb and exposing their mothers to potentially fatal health risks, the abortion pill mifepristone might be contaminating America’s water supply.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration claimed when the drug was approved 26 years ago that mifepristone — which “may enter the environment from excretion by patients, from disposal of pharmaceutical waste, or from emissions from manufacturing sites” — would have a negligible environmental impact.

‘It risks contaminating the very water supply millions of Americans drink every day.’

Whereas medical abortions accounted for only 6% of all abortions in the formal U.S. health care system in the year immediately following mifepristone’s approval, that number climbed to 53% in 2020 and again to 63% in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Given the drug’s massively increased use in recent years and the coinciding loosening of relevant regulations, a coalition of 14 state attorneys general is asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to investigate whether mifepristone has contaminated American waters and adversely impacted public health — especially the health of expectant mothers.

The coalition’s recent letter to the EPA states that while the FDA promulgated a regimen and risk evaluation and mitigation strategy when mifepristone was first approved, “The FDA has eliminated many of the protections that minimized the health risks posed by mifepristone and its approved generics, including the in-person dispensing and check-up requirements that kept medical staff involved in the process.”

In addition to the FDA dropping these protections, the coalition noted that regulations have been greatly relaxed, paving the way for far more “chemical abortions occurring in the home” and resulting, in turn, “in tons of chemically tainted medical waste being flushed into American waterways.”

Aid Access, a group that works with registered abortion providers who provide abortion pills, states on its website, “It is best to flush everything [placenta, embryo, and blood] down the toilet or to wrap the sanitary pads in a plastic bag.”

RELATED: Colorado Democrats really want college women to abort the next generation

DREW ANGERER/AFP/Getty Images

The death of hundreds of thousands of children via medical abortions every year has “serious implications for the Safe Drinking Water Act,” said the coalition’s letter, not only because conventional wastewater treatment is not designed to remove the contaminants involved but because “the metabolites in mifepristone and its approved generics remain active post-excretion, meaning they ‘retain [their] considerable affinity towards the human progesterone and glucocorticoid receptors’ after disposal.”

The coalition expressed concern that if the mifepristone entering the American water supply reaches a sufficient concentration, then pregnant women who unwittingly ingest the drug may disproportionately suffer health complications.

After all, the drug harms an existing pregnancy by inhibiting the actions of progesterone at progesterone-receptor sites and promoting both uterine contractions and a softening of the cervix, according to the National Library of Medicine’s Hazardous Substances Data Bank.

The Republican state attorneys general — hailing from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas — have asked for the EPA to add mifepristone and its generics to the Contaminant Candidate List — “a list of drinking water contaminants that are known or anticipated to occur in public water systems and are not currently subject to EPA drinking water regulations.”

“The health of pregnant women and Americans everywhere may depend on it,” said the letter.

“As medical waste is discarded and washed away, it risks contaminating the very water supply millions of Americans drink every day, and the long-term consequences could be severe,” Alabama AG Steve Marshall said in a statement on Wednesday.

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​Epa, Water, Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals, Abortion, Fda, Drugs, Republican, Politics, Mifepristone 

Actor Neal McDonough is shedding light on how he lost his house and almost lost his career.

The “Band of Brothers” and “Yellowstone” alumnus explained the combination of factors that almost put him in an insurmountable hole, which stemmed from substance abuse and his career choices.

‘I didn’t think I was worth anything.’

Lip service

During a recent interview with Fox News Digital, McDonough said his frame of mind used to always revolve around the bottle.

“What time is the bar open? That was generally my thought process back then,” he told the outlet.

McDonough continued, “I was always a drinker. I’m Irish, I’m from Boston, it’s what we do. It wasn’t ever a problem. But it became a bad problem.”

That was just one issue, though. The other was an apparent Hollywood blackballing because of McDonough’s firm position regarding being intimate with other women on-screen.

“It was, you know, fired from a show because I wouldn’t kiss a woman,” McDonough revealed. “No one would hire me because they thought I was this religious nut bag, which is that I love my wife so much. And no one can understand it, no one could understand it.”

This seemingly started a downward spiral for McDonough, who drank more and more after being blacklisted for refusing to kiss his co-star, the outlet reported.

RELATED: From ‘Homestead’ to the decision that nearly destroyed his career — Neal McDonough spills all in Glenn Beck interview

Friend indeed

“I lost the house, lost the cars, lost everything,” the 60-year-old recalled.

Despite successes on shows like “Desperate Housewives,” McDonough still couldn’t get work until he was given a role in the TV series “Justified.”

However, by then the actor’s confidence was shot. He explained to Fox News Digital that he didn’t think he was “worth anything.”

“I failed my family. I failed [my wife] Ruve, my five kids. … I lost our house. I lost all the beautiful things that were the shiny widgets that I had accumulated, were all taken away from me. And that crucifixion caused me so much inner pain because I made it all about me. How could I let the team down?” he asked.

McDonough remembered running into actor and friend Luke Perry at a movie premiere; the two had been in a 1997 miniseries called “Invasion” and were still friends.

“He saw I was a mess,” McDonough said. He opened up to Perry about his life and the loss of his home, to which Perry responded by offering his vacant home to the McDonough family, telling his friend it was empty and close by.

“Stay there for as long as you want,” Perry told him.

RELATED: The one big liberal media lie about Spencer Pratt that no one is mentioning

Bottle stopper

This helped get the “Project Blue Book” star back on his feet, but he still credited his wife with the motivation he needed to quit drinking.

Ruve, his better half for 25 years, can be seen alongside McDonough at countless premieres throughout his career.

“She grabbed me and says, ‘It’s us or the bottle. You choose.'” McDonough said he “never looked back” from that moment.

The actor then attributed having his teammate as just a “cold, hard fact that God gave me an amazing, incredible, most amazing woman that I’ve ever met.”

McDonough concluded by describing Ruve as his “good luck charm” who got him through hell.

The duo are now producing movies together.

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​Align, Faith, Neal mcdonough, Luke perry, Band of brothers, News 

Zach Lahn’s upset victory in Iowa’s GOP gubernatorial primary has BlazeTV host Steve Deace asking whether or not the MAHA movement is becoming the foundation of a new conservative coalition.

“Iowa has the fastest-growing cancer rate in the world. We all know something is terribly wrong. But too many politicians from Washington, D.C., to Des Moines have had their heads stuck in the sand while Big Ag and Big Pharma printed money,” Lahn said in a campaign speech.

“Zach also ran on a really based immigration message — some of the most aggressive immigration messaging I’ve ever seen on Iowa airwaves,” Deace comments.

“The messaging that he combined there essentially mobilized evangelicals or Christian conservatives — in Iowa, most of those would be evangelicals — with the MAHA language that you saw … in his speech,” he continues. “So is this an omen or an outlier? Is this the grassroots coalition of the future?”

“I obviously hope so,” co-host Todd Erzen says.

Author Jon Harris points out that he sees this attitude everywhere now, especially in his own home.

“I think on the grassroots level, this is happening quite a bit. So my own wife has basically gotten all the plastic out of our kitchen. My brother was the first one to do a home birth in the family — it was actually during 2020 — and didn’t want to do any vaccines,” he explains.

“I thought that was kind of crazy at the time — that that didn’t make a lot of sense. What if there’s a complication? Don’t you need a hospital nearby?” Harris recalls.

“Well, my daughter was born, and we did the same thing that he did, and we’re very happy with it. And I never thought I’d be in a doula’s office with a bunch of hippies talking about how to bring a baby into the world. I thought that was the doctor’s job,” he says.

Harris believes the reason for this is that there are “a lot of Christians are also more connected to the natural order of things.”

“And fundamentally, MAHA, I think, is a conservative move in a way, because what they’re saying is we don’t trust the government to regulate these things. We need to have personal responsibility over our lives. And the reason is because God created this world,” he explains.

“There’s a design that we’re supposed to function by. And so if we go back to the ways our bodies should function and the nutrients that they actually need, then I think that’s a conservative move — that’s a Christian move on a fundamental level,” he continues. And at least it’s an on-ramp to those things.”

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HelloFresh is a company that delivers meal kits to ease the burden of grocery shopping and cooking on customers — but now it is facing online backlash for something that has nothing to do with food.

The company used Pride Month to post an explicit advertisement, suggesting that its high-fiber meals could help customers “prep” for Pride Month.

In a post on Instagram, the company wrote, “We know eating isn’t always a top priority this month. We respect that. But for those of you who are … prepping … we have an extensive lineup of high-fiber recipes available. Happy Pride.”

“And just to accentuate the joke,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray comments, “they said, ‘Use the code BOTTOMSUP for a Pride Month discount.’”

“I will absolutely be saying goodbye, HelloFresh. I mean, that’s just sick and completely inappropriate,” he says.

“How are you sitting around a conference table at HelloFresh and you’re in a marketing meeting and somebody says, ‘Hey, I know’ … and the person in charge says, ‘Yes, that’ll go over hugely with the 94% of Americans who aren’t living that lifestyle. They’ll love it,’” he continues.

“It’s not funny, and it’s not appropriate,” he adds.

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