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One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over going into this midterm election was “composition” — whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.

So I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we’re going to shock the world? “No,” he told me. “We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us.”

Everyone knows why we lost, and any honest conversation about where we go from here needs to start there.

Well, that opinion looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was nine points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.

There will be a lot of arguing and finger-pointing over why that happened. A pollster I highly respect told me that our economic messaging down the stretch was not sharp enough to motivate voters. I’m sure that is true.

But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.

Another pollster — one of the smartest people I know in politics — told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this prediction. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses, were:

End the Iran war.Focus on the cost of living and inflation.Put America and Americans first.Change our relationship to Israel.

These four priorities are why many of our voters showed up to vote for Democrats yesterday, according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many people spent the day before the elections attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the Iran war, it turns out her political advice was perfectly sound. (She’s also a great person.)

RELATED: Trump’s 2024 coalition was a loan. The bill just came due.

Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Over the next few months, there is going to be a lot of gaslighting. You can expect to hear any number of establishment politicians claim the solution to our woes is amnesty for illegal immigrants. I’m open to the idea that we should change our approach to immigration enforcement — by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. For the record, anyone pushing amnesty as a solution to our electoral issues is lying to you.

The reason we lost the midterms is the Iran war. The president himself said so last night.

If you want to argue that it was worth it — that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it — then go right ahead. At least arguing that it was a worthwhile price to pay is honest. But everyone knows why we lost, and any honest conversation about where we go from here needs to start there.

I remain hopeful for our country. My message to the people who are angry and want to say “I told you so” is simple: You’re right. You did tell us so. Now take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview and priorities. To the people who are just angry at the results: You should be.

Let’s take this anger and use it to get back to the work of saving our country.

Editor’s note: A version of this article was originally posted on X.

​America first, Cost of living, Immigration enforcement, Iran war, Midterm election, Rachel campos duffy, Trump 2024, Voter turnout, Illegal immigrants, Amnesty, Gop, Affordability, Gas prices, Democrats, Midterms, Opinion & analysis 

Amid the Democratic slaughter of Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections, there was good news for the GOP in Nebraska, as U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts defeated independent Dan Osborn, NBC News projected.

Osborn, a pipe fitter, faced a barrage of attacks calling him a secret Democrat, the news network reported, adding that Osborn said he wouldn’t caucus with either party if elected, but the Nebraska Democratic Party still backed him.

‘We don’t need a socialist ideology.’

“Democrat Dan is too extreme, and he would be the most extreme senator we’ve ever sent to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska,” Ricketts said at a September debate, according to NBC News. “And if he were in charge of the Senate and gave it to the Democrats, that would be a disaster for Nebraska.”

More from NBC News:

The sharp attacks underscored the tougher-than-expected nature of the race in a state Donald Trump won by 20 points in 2024. The same year, Ricketts won a special election to serve the final two years of GOP former Sen. Ben Sasse’s term by 25 percentage points. Osborn, however, lost by just 7 points in his first Senate bid, against Republican Sen. Deb Fischer two years ago.

Ricketts’ bid for a full Senate term became competitive amid Trump’s sinking approval ratings, with voters frustrated by high costs and the war with Iran. High diesel prices due to the war with Iran and Trump’s sweeping tariffs also hit farmers in heartland states, including Nebraska.

At a rally in Nebraska in early October, Trump signed an executive order expanding access to diesel used in farming, known as “red dye” diesel.

“Prices are all going down. Prices are all going way down, but they really are going to plummet as soon as that war ends,” Trump said at the rally, according to the news network. “It’s going to be very soon.”

“And today, I’m announcing another unprecedented step to bring down costs for many years. Farm vehicles, construction equipment, and other off-road vehicles have used what is known as ‘red dye’ diesel,” Trump said, NBC News reported. “Do you know what that is? I don’t know what the hell it is, but whatever it is, it’s supposed to be very good.”

The news network noted that Osborn — a Navy veteran and former union organizer — backed Trump’s move but called it a “Band-Aid.” NBC News also noted that while Osborn frequently emphasized Nebraskans’ economic struggles, he “rarely directly criticized Trump by name in a state with plenty of his supporters.”

Ricketts tried to remind voters that they elected him to statewide office three times.

While Ricketts was behind Osborn in the vote tally early Tuesday, the incumbent shot past Osborn later in the night.

RELATED: Democrat Kansas pastor — whom Trump reportedly called a ‘pervert’ — upsets Republican US Senate incumbent in historic win

Ricketts’ chances may never have been too much in doubt, as The Hill on Saturday reported that Ricketts led Osborn by six points in a New York Times/Siena University poll — 49% to 43% — among likely Nebraska voters.

The Associated Press‘ latest vote tally Wednesday showed Ricketts leading Osborn by nearly the same margin: 50.4% to 43.7% with 91% of the votes counted.

On Wednesday morning, Ricketts in his victory speech emphasized that “we don’t need a socialist ideology.”

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​Pete ricketts, Nebraska, Midterm elections, Republican, Politics, Senate 

In the continuous bid to create consciousness through artificial general intelligence, a new AI giant may have cracked the code on cloning human speaking patterns with precise accuracy. The only problem is that this linguistically adept bot is kind of dumb when you get it to open its mouth.

Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey took to X in late October to announce an impressive, yet baffling new AI platform called Dessa. Dessa is a voice AI chatbot that specializes in conversational interactions. In the demos, users speak to the bot like they’re having a conversation with a human, and the bot speaks back with a realistic human voice, complete with pauses, inflections, and other traits that are indistinguishable from the real thing.

Linguistically, it is impressive. Its vocal cadence and inflections are indistinguishable from real people. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem very intelligent.

Many other chatbots have voice modes, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. But so far, all of them are just robotic enough to tell them apart from a real human. Dessa changes that. It is a full-duplex speech-to-speech model that was trained exclusively on human speech samples.

Full-duplex speech is the kind of conversational interactions humans engage in every day. It means that Dessa can both listen in real time and respond in real time without pausing to process what was said. Interactions just feel natural — maybe too natural.

Block Inc., the company behind Dessa, claims that no text-based models were used at all to train the bot — only real voice samples. Ultimately, it learned how to talk like a human by listening to humans, and now it can reply in real time like a human, too.

In this video posted by Block Inc. to X, a real human speaks with Dessa about launching the speech model. In the example, the male human begins by asking Dessa — portrayed as a woman — how it’s doing. It responds that it is well, followed by a hesitant question about the upcoming winter weather. Dessa poses its question with natural hesitancy, as if it knows the male speaker doesn’t like winter. Its voice inflection even shifts with a nervous laugh thrown in for good measure as it dives into the touchy subject.

The near-three-minute clip continues as the two discuss Dessa’s upcoming launch. Throughout, Dessa responds with genuine excitement, natural pauses and stammers, and endearing laughs that make it all feel real. It can speak louder on request by coming closer to the faux microphone that it is talking into. At the end of the demo, Dessa was asked what it would ask itself to do in the future. Dessa suggested that it could be used for something simple like advertising, or something far more complex, like revealing the secrets of consciousness.

All in all, the short conversation sounds like something that could easily happen between two real people. Between a person and a bot, though, the tiny linguistic nuisances in Dessa’s speech patterns are impressive, albeit uncanny. If you close your eyes and listen, you might even forget that Dessa isn’t real.

In a second video posted by Block Inc., a real human girl plays a guessing game with Dessa, this time portrayed as a man. She asks it to guess a number of items she has assembled from around her home with minimal hints. Dessa gets lucky with the first item, guessing a toothbrush from her bathroom on the first round.

The interaction falls apart, though, when she tells Dessa that her next item — a pen — is one thing that people use to study. Dessa guesses a notebook and pen together — clearly two items instead of one, subtly breaking the rules of the game. When the human girl doesn’t tell Dessa that it guessed half correct, it guesses again, this time suggesting a flashlight, which doesn’t even make sense as a study tool. On the third guess, Dessa suggested a toothbrush again, deviating even further from something people would use to study.

After a correction from the human girl and a bit more guidance, Dessa muddles through several more guesses— a pencil and a book before finally landing correctly on a pen.

RELATED: AI is powerful. It is not wise.

Moor Studio/Getty Images

Based on the two videos alone, several things are clear about Dessa. Linguistically, it is impressive. Its vocal cadence and inflections are indistinguishable from real people. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem very intelligent. Some of its responses in the first video were vague and unorganized, forcing the male human to intentionally guide the conversation. As for the second video, Dessa simply failed to follow directions, and it misunderstood the purpose of some of the items it guessed during the game.

This is an early version, though, and Dessa is likely to get better over time. All Block Inc. needs is a smarter model to turn Dessa into a concerning piece of software. Imagine the chaos hackers, scammers, and faux influencers could cause by creating fake humans that sound real as they carry out phishing schemes to trick people out of their money.

In fact, I’m having a hard time understanding why Dessa should exist at all. As the female version said in the first video, maybe Dessa could be used by advertisers. Although AI giants recently retreated from replacing human workers with AI wholesale, Dessa could easily stand in as a fake social media influencer to push marketing campaigns online.

Dessa also thought that it could answer the question on whether consciousness can be programmed into a machine — an existential crisis that the pope already answered definitively for Anthropic. Since this is a question humans — or maybe even only God — can answer, whatever Dessa has to say here is moot.

Maybe Dessa could become a personal friend or a life companion where users waste their time telling all of their deepest secrets to a corporate robot instead of confiding in real people through real relationships. Certainly that won’t end in irreparable bouts of AI psychosis that warp users’ minds as it drags them into digital isolation.

In fact, none of the things Dessa can do today are particularly good for mental health, personal stability, or society at large. Yet Block Inc. and the other AI giants keep trying to make some kind of AI experience that enthralls people enough to finally generate some money — something that looks even less likely now that the AI bubble is primed to burst.

Dessa is not available to the public yet, and there is currently no release date set at this time.

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​Jack dorsey, Ai bubble, Artificial intelligence, Chatbot, Tech 

One bright spot among the midterm devastation for Republicans is that voter ID laws were approved by voters in four states.

Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio all approved measures to ensure election integrity by requiring identification from voters, and they did it by a wide margin. Oklahoma also passed a voter ID measure back in August.

Similar proposals failed in California and Colorado.

Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia voted on Tuesday to ban noncitizens from voting.

Democrats made the usual arguments about possible voter disenfranchisement to oppose the measures.

“It’s going to make it harder for marginalized communities to fight in the courts against proposed legislation,” said Oklahoma state Rep. Andy Fugate, a Democrat. “Those in the legislature defending new changes or restrictions will be able to say hey, we’re just complying with the constitution.”

Oklahomans passed their measure by 54.6% to 45.4%, and Ohioans approved Issue 3 by a whopping 65.3% to 34.7%. A voter ID measure passed by 59.6% in North Carolina, and Nevadans passed their proposition 63.3% to 36.7%.

Voter ID did not win everywhere, however. Similar proposals failed in California and Colorado, and a voter ID proposition is on track to fail in Arizona, according to the AP.

In California, the voter ID proposal failed by a large measure with 60% voting against it and only 40% voting in favor.

RELATED: Trump offers massive reward for tips on voter fraud

“This would advance Trump’s voter suppression agenda by adding costly, unnecessary barriers that could block eligible California voters, expose personal information to identity theft, and waste hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars,” read the opposition statement in the California voter guide.

President Donald Trump had tried to pass the SAVE America Act before the midterm elections, but that did not come to fruition.

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​Blue wave, Election integrity, Midterm elections, Voter id, Politics, North carolina, Ohio, Nevada 

More than a year after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, some liberals still haven’t learned their lesson — and are still mocking his death.

“They, you know, maybe thought it was funny that a family lost a husband and a father. Haha. Because he believed in low taxes and closed borders,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales comments, calling it a “litmus test.”

“It was this litmus test that was like, are you a good person or a bad person? If you mocked it, if you made fun of it, if you thought it was funny, if you, you know, just showed that you had no care in the world, no regard for human life, it’s pretty clear that you were a bad person,” she continues.

And these “grotesque creatures who apparently have not gotten the memo” are getting even bolder in their mockery.

This was made clear when one young woman attending the University of Texas San Antonio spoke at a Turning Point USA Pick Up the Mic event. And not only did she fail the litmus test, she set the bar even lower.

The young woman introduced herself as “Pamper Baby” before telling speaker Christian Collins that she took Plan B that morning and is an immigrant.

She went on to use her time to read a poem she wrote: “It was the night before the Kirkversary, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The flags were hung proudly, the memes all on deck, as we solemnly remembered a shot to the neck.”

“The podcast fell silent, the hot takes grew weary, for tomorrow, dear friends, is the great Kirkversary,” she finished, before advertising her “Squirt for Kirk” event with “vaccines included.”

The woman went on to tell Collins he was “brave” for attending the event without a “neck brace.”

After the exchange went viral, the internet quickly found out that the woman and her mother are from Rio De Janeiro and have not been living in the U.S. for very long — and the mother even advertises that she and her daughters are “citizens of the world.”

“There is a thing called denaturalization. And I’m just wondering if they’re here as immigrants and they are not naturalized citizens or even if they are naturalized citizens. I just have to ask if there is any good reason that we should allow people to immigrate here just to mock Americans dying,” Gonzales comments.

“Why should we not kick that person out of our country?” she asks. “Why should this person be here? I just think the entire family can go back to one of those four other countries that they’ve lived in because they’re so well traveled and they’re ‘citizens of the world.’”

“We don’t need any immigrant who comes here inciting violence,” she adds.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Sara gonzales, Charlie kirk, Turning point usa, Pick up the mic, Pamper baby, Blazetv show 

In the three years that Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) has served as speaker of the House, he has seen his party enjoy a landslide victory and suffer a crushing defeat. Owing to the defeat on Tuesday, his tenure is up on Jan. 3.

Johnson’s office confirmed to Blaze News that “the speaker will not be running for minority leader.”

‘I know what it will take to lead our Conference in the minority.’

The decision to depart his Republican leadership role in the House constitutes an about-face, given his assertion to CBS News last month that, “if, heaven forbid, we lost the majority, I would expect my colleagues would call upon me to continue to lead the conference in divided government.”

“My intention is to stay and serve, and that’s what I’ve been doing, as best I can,” Johnson added at the time.

Reps. Steve Scalise (La.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio) are two of the Republicans putting their names forward in House Republicans’ leadership elections next week.

A person said to be familiar with Scalise’s plans told Axios that he “is a proven and tested leader who is ready on day one. He’s spent his career unifying Republicans and he is prepared for the big legislative and oversight battles ahead. The conference knows him, how he fights, and that he’s a trusted leader.”

RELATED: Iran conflict was ‘crucial’ factor in Republican rout: Exit polls

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Scalise has served as House majority leader since 2023 — the same year he dropped out of the running for the House speaker role.

Jordan also launched his bid on Wednesday, stating in a letter to colleagues obtained by CNN, “I am battle-tested on the oversight front and I know the Democrats’ playbook. I know what it will take to lead our Conference in the minority, to stay unified, and to coordinate and calibrate our response to the Democrats’ tactics.”

“With your help, I will use every minute of the next two years working to advance our Republican priorities and restore our majority,” he added.

Neither Scalise nor Jordan immediately responded to Blaze News’ request for comment.

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​Jim jordan, Steve scalise, Mike johnson, House speaker, Republicans, Politics 

Vice President JD Vance made his thoughts on the midterms clear Wednesday morning: The Iran conflict sank Republicans.

Vance saw the writing on the wall and noted that many members of the Trump-Vance coalition had gone in another direction. With gas prices high and unabating legislative gridlock, there were few paths to victory for Republicans.

‘If you’d like to argue … that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. … That’s at least honest.’

Vance’s post was frank.

“The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026,” Vance wrote. “There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is.”

“But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone. Another pollster — one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this,” the vice president wrote. “In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team.”

“The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were: 1) End the war 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 3) Put America First 4) Change our relationship to Israel,” the vice president wrote.

Exit polls showed that Iran was a “crucial” factor in the midterm election.

RELATED: Iran conflict was ‘crucial’ factor in Republican rout: Exit polls

Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Getty Images

“Our voters showed up,” Vance said. “And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats.”

Republicans won white men by 12%, but lost their gains among Latinos and other races, according to NBC News exit polls. Young men also defected, swinging 41 points in Democrats’ direction.

The midterms showed that these 2024 Trump-Vance voters are not guaranteed parts of the Republican coalition, despite trusting the GOP more on issues like immigration and crime.

“The reason we lost is the war,” the vice president said. “The president himself said so last night.”

“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay,” Vance wrote. “Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.

“But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”

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​Cost of living, Jd vance, Midterms, Trump voters, Politics, Iran 

The name Jensen Huang might not mean much to most readers, but it should. He is best known for his signature black leather jacket, an odd stylistic choice for a man who effectively controls the modern world’s computational brainpower. As the chief executive of Nvidia, he presides over a multitrillion-dollar empire whose graphics processing units power the global generative AI boom. He is also a key asset in Washington’s rapidly escalating technological cold war with Beijing.

A recent intelligence report about Huang should worry all Americans. It alleges that Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based data center firm Megaspeed, maintained a close relationship with Huang (not related, I assure you) while funneling critical operational intelligence straight back to the communists in Beijing.

Beijing doesn’t have to beat the United States at innovation.

The public loves a spy story with a generous serving of Soviet nostalgia. Popular culture depicts trench coats, fake passports, microdot cameras, and shadowy handoffs on foggy Berlin bridges. Silicon Valley espionage looks more like a catered corporate retreat in Palo Alto, complete with $100 glasses of kombucha and nondisclosure agreements that nobody reads. Foreign intelligence officers rarely need to hack a server when they can simply take a board member out for expensive sushi.

The easy way up

Amy Kremer, a tech transparency expert at Humans First, recently pointed out a simple reality that most corporate boardrooms actively ignore. A rival state like China doesn’t need to copy a proprietary neural network to win a technological race. All it really needs is access to the room where engineers discuss which research avenues failed, which suppliers are falling behind, and where the next billion dollars of capital will flow.

Beijing doesn’t have to beat the United States at innovation. It simply needs to sit back, let American venture capitalists burn through billions of dollars testing dead ends, and then collect the refined results from the back door.

RELATED: The US banned this Chinese tech — it just showed up in more American products

Jay_Zynism/Getty Images

Silicon Valley’s open-door global talent recruitment model is fantastic for share prices. It is less ideal when a company’s primary product doubles as a strategic national security asset. Foreign-born researchers and executives drive much of the innovation coming out of California. Suspecting every foreign engineer of espionage would tank the American tech sector faster than a regulatory crackdown. Yet the opposite strategy — assuming a signed employment contract somehow erases geopolitical loyalties — is an act of spectacular corporate stupidity.

American companies treat national security as an inconvenient chore invented by bureaucrats to ruin quarterly earnings calls. Boardrooms celebrate global supply chains right up until the moment a foreign enemy turns those chains into a pair of handcuffs. A technology firm building military-grade processing power can’t manage risk with the same casual nonchalance as a company selling an app that puts funny filters on cat pictures.

Business at war

The corporate executive suite and the Department of Defense operate on fundamental misalignments. An American chief executive sees an overseas buyer as a path to a massive annual bonus. The Pentagon sees that exact same buyer as a potential threat aiming a hypersonic missile at an aircraft carrier. Corporate profit margins will always demand global expansion, while national defense demands the strictest level of gatekeeping.

When corporate profits collide with national security, corporate PR teams try to split the difference with lofty manifestos about global unity. As the competition for planetary AI supremacy ratchets ever higher, that buttoned-down ploy wears ever more thin.

Washington is currently trying to regulate fifth-generation technological warfare using frameworks written back when people still dialed into AOL. Federal security guidelines for private tech firms resemble a screen door on a submarine. The federal government doesn’t need to build a massive, suffocating bureaucracy to monitor every line of code written in California. Instead it needs to enforce existing trade laws and execute targeted intelligence audits. It must force corporate boards to audit their own inner circles with cold, absolute realism.

The primary battleground of modern geopolitical rivalries has moved from the diplomat’s office to corporate conference rooms. Nvidia’s microchips represent the new oil, the new steel, and the new nuclear capability rolled into silicon squares. Leaving the front gate unlocked while spending billions on internal research is a strategy only an executive with a guaranteed severance package could love.

If the United States insists on building the world’s most advanced computational engine, it should probably stop leaving the valet key sitting on the hood.

​Tech, Nvidia, Jensen huang, Spy, China 

Democrats won control of both the House and Senate in a sweeping blue wave on Tuesday night, flipping seats even in red states like Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina in a sharp rebuke of the Trump administration.

BlazeTV host John Doyle argues that the midterm results reflect a deeper demographic shift in the country — especially in places like Texas.

“This is not the same country it was even six years ago. I mean, everybody’s looking at Texas starting to go blue. This is something that a lot of people have been warning about for decades, actually, as the demographic situation in Texas has changed,” he says, highlighting that the state’s white population fell and that the vast majority of Republican votes still come from white voters.

This demographic shift, Doyle suggests, is why Democrats are able to win with candidates who are “insane” and “very low-quality.”

“Now the conversation is not being participated in by people who are Americans, people who have deep roots in this country. It’s this imported permanent underclass of foreigners who are happy to install people like Mamdani in New York or Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan,” he says.

At the same time, he says, Trump’s approval first dipped when the early mass-deportation videos appeared, and the largest swing back left came from Latino men, Latino women, and young Catholics — groups Doyle says are more “sympathetic to the plight of the immigrant” than to “American sovereignty.”

“I also think a lot of this too was driven by the fact that Americans like the idea of not having people flooding in. … They don’t like seeing those videos of mass deportations. … When people actually start to see this stuff play out, the American stomach, I don’t think, is as strong as a lot of people would like to think it is,” he says, highlighting the need “to be better on our messaging.”

Nick Freitas, BlazeTV host of “Making the Argument,” agrees.

“We mass-imported a population from cultures that were not just different than the United States, but in some cases diametrically opposed,” he says.

He points to Europe’s current predicament as a forecast of what is coming in America.

“It wasn’t the first generation of immigrants that came into Europe that were actually the most radical. It was their children,” says Freitas, “which also says something about our own educational systems in the West, where if you really want to radicalize someone, just send them through your university system. That’ll do it.”

“And that’s what we’re actually seeing in the United States now,” he continues. “You’ve had mass immigration with no assimilation from cultures drastically different than the United States, and the end result is that the second generation of that, they haven’t become Americanized.”

Democrats, he argues, have been fundamental in this outcome.

“Why would you [become Americanized] when you can balkanize a significant portion of the United States and actually create subcultures which are completely capable of operating without even learning the language?” he asks.

“And you have one major political party that will just give you a bunch of goodies at the expense of American taxpayers, and the moment those American taxpayers say anything about it, they’re called xenophobes or racist or bigots, and that’s enough to shut down the conversation because our own representatives don’t actually want to stand up and say something about it.”

As for Americans’ reactions to mass deportations, Freitas says no one should have expected the process to go smoothly.

“I don’t know anybody that expected that to look good on camera. Hey, we’ve had 20 million people we got to deport, and they don’t want to leave,” he says.

“There was always going to be problems with that, especially in Democrat jurisdictions where they’re actively obstructing your ability to enforce federal law.”

Like Doyle, Freitas believes the midterm results largely point to the issue of immigration.

“This is what happens when you no longer have a high-trust society. Liberty, freedom, all of these things … are byproducts of high-trust societies,” he says. “We’ve had people playing around with this idea that if we just throw enough freedom at something, oh, well, they’ll all become just like us. That’s absurd.”

“Yes, the United States has a good track record of people becoming Americans, but never through mass migration. Zero. Never. And so if we’re not dealing with that, well, then just be prepared for the fact that we’re actually dealing with a very different electorate.”

To hear more BlazeTV hosts weigh in, watch the video above. You can also watch BlazeTV’s full election-night coverage below.

​Mass deportations, Mass immigration, Trump administration, Blue wave, Midterm elections, Blazetv specials, Blazetv show 

Hundreds were arrested in a recent multi-day undercover operation targeting child predators, prostitution, and human trafficking in Florida. The arrestees included 17 theme park employees, according to law enforcement.

The Polk County Sheriff’s Office launched a seven-day joint-agency undercover operation “focusing on those who prey upon and travel to meet children for unlawful sexual activity, and human trafficking.”

‘He wanted to wear diapers.’

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said the sting, named “Polk Around and Find Out II,” is the “single largest undercover operation we’ve ever done.”

The sheriff’s office said in a statement that the undercover sting resulted in 281 arrests, including 239 related to soliciting prostitutes, offering to commit prostitution, and aiding/abetting or transporting prostitutes.

Authorities also arrested 31 suspects in connection with alleged child sex crimes.

Among those arrested were 17 theme park employees, including 13 from Disney and four from Universal Studios. Of the arrested theme park employees, seven were accused of committing child sex crimes, according to the sheriff’s office.

WKMG-TV reported that a “former Walt Disney World Mickey Mouse character was among those arrested in the child predator operation.”

The sheriff’s office stated that 24-year-old Collin Klaco of Clermont “communicated online with an undercover detective posing as the guardian of a 13-year-old boy.”

“He said he wanted to do something in a public family restroom,” the police statement read. “He drove to the undercover location and was taken into custody; detectives found diapers and wipes in a backpack that he carried into the house.”

“He wanted to wear diapers,” Sheriff Judd explained. “He wanted to put diapers on the children, and he wanted to do all kinds of nasty stuff.”

Judd added, “He had the high squeaky voice, too, by the way.”

Police said Klaco was charged with traveling to meet a minor, use of a computer to solicit a guardian, use of a two-way communication device to commit a felony, and attempted lewd/lascivious battery on a minor.

Judd said all of the Disney employees caught in the sting had been fired.

“These predators are out there, online, trying to groom and violate our children,” Judd said, adding that “the things that these predators say to children are vile, disgusting, and not fit for anyone except trained detectives to read. And even seasoned, trained detectives are repulsed.”

RELATED: US attorney announces indictments against ‘prophet,’ wife for alleged sex trafficking, forced labor in alleged church scheme

The statement said 40-year-old Orange County Deputy Sheriff Eric Raymond was arrested in the sting.

Raymond, from Winter Garden, also is a school resource deputy at Independence Elementary School in Horizon West.

The statement said of Raymond, “He answered an online ad placed by an undercover detective and agreed to pay her $110.00 to have unprotected sex during a ‘quick visit.’ He told detectives he is married.”

Raymond was charged with one count of solicitation of a prostitute.

Sheriff Judd said Raymond “should have known better.”

“His actions demonstrate moral turpitude,” Judd stated.

Sheriff Judd continued:

The online prostitution industry enables and empowers human traffickers, allowing them to profit off the people they exploit. Our goal is to identify victims, offer them help, and arrest those who are fueling the exploitation of human beings like Eric Raymond and those profiting from the exploitation of human beings. Prostitution is not a victimless crime — it results in human exploitation, misery, disease, dysfunction, drug and alcohol addiction, violence, and broken families.

Police noted that 32 illegal aliens from nine different countries were arrested.

WTVJ-TV reported that 16 suspects have been turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

WTVJ added that 32 individuals were charged with drug possession, including methamphetamine, cocaine, and fentanyl.

Police said the suspects were charged with a total of 198 felonies and 290 misdemeanors. The statement added that the suspects had previous criminal charges totaling 358 felonies and 440 misdemeanors.

Law enforcement also identified 11 human trafficking victims during the operation.

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​Child sex crimes, Child sex abuse, Child sex predators, Florida, Disney, Polk county sheriff, Grooming, Sting operation, Crime, Grady judd 

It turns out Texas’ 21st Congressional District is a big fan of baseball.

Running as a Republican to replace longtime Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), former MLB slugger Mark Teixeira took home the easy victory over Democrat Kristin Hook, who lost for the second straight time.

‘TOTAL WINNER, on and off the field.’

In the center of Texas sits Congressional District 21, where Teixeira was heavily favored to take the dark-red seat.

“Big Tex,” a former New York Yankees and Texas Rangers player, was a massive favorite just days before the election. Pollsmax had him sitting at a 99% chance of winning, while Smarter.Vote gave him a 95% chance and an estimated 20-point margin of victory.

Both sources were right to predict Teixeira as the winner. He fended off the blue wave that crashed through Texas on Tuesday and took home a win with 54.5% of the vote and a nine-point margin of victory, according to the AP.

RELATED: Former MLB star wins GOP primary to replace Chip Roy in Texas

Sam Hodde/MLB Photos/Getty Images

Teixeira had a very strong endorsement from President Donald Trump ahead of his Republican primary.

The president called Teixeira a “TOTAL WINNER, on and off the field” on Truth Social in February.

“Mark has a great wife, Leigh, and three beautiful children.”

Both Teixeira and Hook breezed through their primaries with over 60% of the vote back in March. However, Democrats totaled just over 66,000 votes against Republicans’ 95,500, a bad sign for the Democrat.

RELATED: Who put the left in charge of America’s working class?

Winslow Townson/Getty Images

During her campaign, Hook promoted policies like making billionaires “pay their fair share,” expanding voting accessibility (including by mail), and restoring abortion “freedoms.”

Teixeira, however, promoted very MAGA-aligned policies like the expansion of the DOGE, border security, and fighting against “cultural Marxism.”

In 2024, Hook lost to Roy by more than 100,000 votes, a difference of more than 15 percentage points.

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​Mark teixeira, Mlb, Baseball, Politics, Texas 

The lengthy and unpopular conflict in Iran has evidently had an outsized impact on the midterm election.

Exit polling conducted by NBC News and other media outfits showed that when thinking about their vote for Congress, 34% of voters said that the conflict in Iran was “crucial”; 40% said it was a “major factor”; and 19% said it was a “minor factor.”

‘The Iran War is the greatest political blunder in the last two decades at least.’

Twenty-seven percent of those who said the conflict was “crucial” and 42% of those who said it was a “major factor” were Republicans.

Weeks ahead of the election, a Gallup survey indicated that Iran was a top issue among voters, with 47% of respondents stating that the situation in Iran was “extremely important” and 30% saying it was “very important.”

After Republicans lost the U.S. House and Senate in a landslide on Tuesday, President Donald Trump acknowledged in a phone interview with Fox News that “part of it was Iran.” He also admitted that the conflict drove up gasoline prices and that price increases hurt Republicans at the polls.

The president suggested, however, that historically, the military operation in Iran is “going to be much more important than this evening because you can’t let the number-one state sponsor of terror have a nuclear weapon.” He also said that he “had no choice,” in part because the nuclear deal brokered by former President Barack Obama “was the road to a nuclear weapon.”

RELATED: Trump’s 2024 coalition was a loan. The bill just came due.

Trump was long a critic of his predecessors’ costly foreign entanglements, stating both that he would end “the era of endless wars” and that it was not the job of American forces to “solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have not even heard of.”

After brokering numerous peaceful resolutions between warring parties, Trump kicked off a conflict with Iran on Feb. 28.

While there were clear indications that such a military operation would be unpopular, a chorus of interventionists inside and outside Congress suggested it was worthwhile. The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen, for instance, penned an op-ed in January titled “There is no U.S. downside to striking the Iranian regime.”

Support for the unresolved conflict — the projected cost of which the Pentagon told Congress last month was roughly $47.1 billion — currently sits at 35.9%, according to the Silver Bulletin’s polling average. Opposition sits at 56.5%.

Despite the unpopularity of the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran and the apparent backlash by voters, Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that he “did the right thing” and if afforded a do-over, he “would have done it again.”

“The Iranian regime is evil. Few people have been as consistently vocal on this issue as I have,” BlazeTV host Steve Deace wrote in an aftermath reflection. “But it’s one thing to use American air power to ensure Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon and quite another to drag our military and economy into a months-long quagmire with no end in sight and no clear definition of victory.”

BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre tweeted, “The real retard right were the people who told you the war wouldn’t matter.”

Conservative commentator Matt Walsh wrote, “The Iran War is the greatest political blunder in the last two decades at least. A catastrophically stupid decision. An unforgivable betrayal of America First principles.”

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​Midterm elections, Donald trump, Iran, Republican, Democrat, Politics 

Recent polls suggested that Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi was going to cruise to victory in her re-election race against George Soros-backed Democratic prosecutor Scott Colom. Like many of her GOP colleagues, Hyde-Smith had a rude awakening on Election Day.

As of Wednesday morning, Hyde-Smith and Colom were tied at 48.9% with over 95% of the votes in, according to the Associated Press.

‘Sometimes when you think somebody is doing so well, nobody votes.’

Colom told supporters early Wednesday, “Our race is too close to call. We are going to make sure every single vote has been counted, and I am confident we will ultimately flip this seat.”

If successful in unseating Hyde-Smith — a former state commissioner of agriculture and commerce who assumed office in 2018 — Colom will become Mississippi’s first Democratic U.S. senator since 1982.

Hyde-Smith ran on supporting the Second Amendment, fiscal conservatism, defending the unborn, stopping illegal immigration, lowering taxes, and standing with Israel.

RELATED: Trump takes DEFIANT tone after Democrats take the House: ‘Buckle up’

Kent NISHIMURA/AFP/Getty Images

She enjoyed an endorsement from President Donald Trump, who joined her on the campaign trail last week and expressed concern about voters staying home.

“I’m here because Cindy’s doing great, but I just got to make sure,” said the president, reported the Mississippi Free Press. “I can’t take a chance. I can’t take a chance. She’s got no problem. The only problem is sometimes, and this happens in — sometimes when you think somebody is doing so well, nobody votes. They all stay home.”

Colom, who may ultimately reap the benefits of some voters staying home, ran on lowering costs, raising wages, making “Big Tech pay its own way,” and combating corruption in Washington, D.C.

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​George soros, Mississippi, Donald trump, Politics 

Redistricting has been a hot topic lately. Democrats generally support gerrymandering when it gives them more political power, yet they oppose the effort when Republicans do the same. This time, however, Democrats can’t stand in the way as a redistricting proposal made it onto the Missouri ballot for a vote. Here’s what the people decided.

This year, Proposition A on the Missouri ballot covered the next phase of a mass congressional redistricting effort across the Show Me State. It’s based on House Bill 1 from 2025 that splits Kansas City into new zones designed to give Republicans more representation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

A vote ‘yes’ on Proposition A upholds the newest district map that gives Republicans more representation.

The original plan was approved in 2022 under House Bill 2909, and former Republican Gov. Mike Parson signed it. The new map solidified Missouri’s eight congressional districts, with six Republican-leaning districts and two Democrat-leaning districts — all based on the 2020 U.S. Census.

Years later, current Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe signed HB1, a revised district bill that further divided Kansas City into smaller portions that could ultimately give Republicans control over seven of the eight districts within Missouri, further tipping the scale of power to the right.

Missouri Congressional District Maps/Ballotpedia

Proposition A put the revised map on the Missouri ballot.

After 99% of the results were tallied, the measure officially failed with 61.8% opposed and 38.2% in favor. That means Missouri’s congressional map will change back to the last version approved in 2022, where six districts will lean Republican, while Democrats will be favored in the two districts over St. Louis and Kansas City.

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​Election results, Gerrymandering, Midterms, Redistricting, Politics, Missouri 

Missouri has once again voted in favor of a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion “rights” in the formerly pro-life state’s constitution. The amendment first passed narrowly in 2024.

Republican lawmakers provided Missouri on Tuesday with an opportunity not only to undo the 2024 constitutional amendment and restore the state’s previous near-total abortion ban but to prohibit sex-rejection mutilations and sterilizing puberty blockers to minors.

‘We won’t go back.’

Missouri state Rep. Ed Lewis, the Republican who introduced the amendment that ultimately made its way to the ballot in 2026, told the Columbia Missourian, “We just think that, obviously, transition surgeries should not be allowed, that abortion through the second and third trimesters is barbaric, that it’s a human life.”

Planned Parenthood, which is not only a champion of abortion but a top provider of sex-rejection drugs, was among the organizations that concern-mongered about the amendment.

RELATED: Allie Beth Stuckey and Ginna Cross talk equal protection and the growing divide in the pro-life movement

Missouri Secretary of State.

Planned Parenthood Great Rivers Action, which resumed aborting babies after the state constitution was amended in 2024, accused Republican lawmakers of attempting to “trick Missourians into voting away their own rights.”

Abortion Action Missouri similarly characterized the opportunity for Missourians to vote as a trick, stating, “We won’t go back.”

Evidently, voters largely agreed, deciding not to take Gov. Mike Kehoe (R) up on the opportunity to “restore common sense in our state’s constitution.”

With over 95% of the votes counted, the amendment was defeated 55.5%-44.5%, according to the Associated Press.

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​Abortion, Constitutional amendment, Midterm election, Missouri, Planned parenthood, Politics, Puberty blockers 

Rebellion against the administrative state used to entail packing up, moving to a log cabin in Montana, and trying your best to survive off the land. Now all it takes is a Venmo account and decent internet.

As Wired recently reported, Kristin LaHargoue, a Utah-based influencer who goes by “Minister Veda,” caters to a hyper-specific, delusional niche: convincing people that it is patriotic not to register their children with the government. On Instagram (@veda.revival), she posts videos of her family traveling internationally without birth certificates or Social Security numbers for her children. In her view, registering a baby with the government is an unforgivable surrender of parental freedom.

The great escape from the administrative state still requires the administrative state to stamp your little blue book.

Her business model is simple: commodified chaos. For $997, LaHargoue offers personal coaching on how to obtain a passport for an unregistered child, including guidance for dealing with Department of State officials. If that’s too pricey, another option is available. For $497, she sells a downloadable bundle to navigate the bureaucratic minefield.

The problem, of course, is that the parents aren’t the only ones who must live with the consequences.

Off the record

Wired highlighted the real-world fallout through the story of Sarah Ashley Townsend. Raised by a sovereign-minded mother without a birth certificate or Social Security number, Townsend spent her childhood largely isolated from ordinary society. At 16, she repeatedly struggled to get a driver’s license. In her early 20s, she discovered that supposedly having her documents straightened out had not solved the problem. When she gave birth to her own son, officials couldn’t establish her birth records, and his birth certificate had to be amended twice.

Townsend was 22, newly postpartum, and running around Maryland collecting notarized documents just to get her son the paperwork her own mother had denied her.

This sovereign baby concept isn’t new. Its roots trace back to William Potter Gale, a former Army lieutenant colonel who founded Posse Comitatus in Southern California around 1970. Gale preached distrust of the federal government, insisting that county sheriffs were the highest lawful authority and that Washington had vastly exceeded its constitutional powers. His followers rejected federal taxation and claimed the right to resist authorities they considered illegitimate.

Posse Comitatus helped inspire later sovereign-citizen groups, whose members developed increasingly inventive theories about secret government contracts, fictitious legal identities, and the supposed power of declaring oneself exempt from ordinary laws. Some issued bogus liens against judges and public officials, attempting to weaponize paperwork against the very institutions they rejected. Others refused to recognize courts, taxes, or government authority, sometimes with violent consequences.

The underlying fantasy remained remarkably consistent. Reality was supposedly negotiable, provided one knew the right words and possessed enough contempt for the rules everyone else had to follow.

Monetizing paranoia

Today’s influencers have traded backwater meetups and photocopied manifestos for selfies in front of Barcelona’s Sagrada Família. Take Minister Dionne, who peddles a $555 “Status Correction” package. Or Marisse Vista, whose $7,777 “Sovereign Conception Program” promises such delights as ancestral clearing and womb activation. Yes, it’s absurd, but it perfectly captures the current zeitgeist, with online chancers monetizing paranoia.

Now, to be clear, I am no fan of the paperwork police, and I am all for parents being free to make the best decisions for their children. But the claim that birth certificates make newborns government assets relies on the long-discredited straw man legal theory. According to this fantasy, a birth certificate creates a separate legal identity that the government uses as collateral for its debts. By declaring themselves separate from this fictitious identity, believers supposedly escape government authority. Courts have repeatedly rejected the theory, yet influencers continue peddling it as gospel.

They claim to be selling rebellion. What they’re really selling is a bureaucratic nightmare.

The irony is that the passport procedure itself is perfectly legitimate. The State Department allows applicants without conventional birth certificates to establish citizenship through secondary evidence, including baptismal records, early school records, family Bible entries, and affidavits. This exists for people who genuinely lack ordinary birth records, not as some secret sovereign-citizen loophole.

LaHargoue and her peers frame opting out of government records as grand independence, but it is pure hypocrisy. These influencers reject the obligations of a functioning society while demanding its perks and protection abroad. Having declined to obtain the usual documents, they must then assemble alternative paperwork and persuade the very government they supposedly reject to issue a passport.

The great escape from the administrative state still requires the administrative state to stamp your little blue book.

RELATED: How to thrive without a Social Security number

Print Collector/Getty Images

Sovereign headache

As Wired reported, one woman who purchased LaHargoue’s instructional material eventually obtained a passport for her infant without a birth certificate. She submitted baptismal records, a family Bible, an affidavit, and a newspaper birth announcement. After considerable back-and-forth, the State Department approved the application.

In other words, parents are paying hundreds of dollars to navigate an elaborate government procedure made necessary by their refusal to follow a much simpler one.

A New York family lawyer told Wired he has seen an increase in parents attempting to reject or undo their children’s official identification documents, while a law enforcement consultant described motorists refusing to show identification because they insist they are merely “traveling” rather than driving. Healthy skepticism is one thing. Pursuing a fantasy of total independence that only creates problems for you and your loved ones is another. Freedom is fantastic and necessary, but it doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.

When a boy or girl grows up and runs into trouble opening a bank account, getting a driver’s license, signing a lease, enrolling in college, or finding a job, the opportunist who cashed that fat check is long gone. The parent may get a fleeting rush of anti-establishment heroism; the child, however, is left with an endless headache, forced to spend years proving to the clipboard class that he is who he says he is — and that he actually exists.

​Administrative state, Birth certificates, Bureaucracy, Constitutional powers, Culture, Drivers license, Family, Influencers, Passport, Posse comitatus, Social security, Sovereign baby, Sovereign citizen, Lifestyle 

The Constitution is not a suicide pact. Donald Trump most certainly isn’t one. After Tuesday’s electoral massacre, the right faces a choice: Ride or die with this man through 2028, or declare independence and rebuild a movement capable of winning power and actually using it.

On Tuesday, we held an election between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks won. When do conservatives get on the ballot under our own banner? When do we get an at-bat? We won’t if we keep running on the same hamster wheel and calling it progress.

Tuesday proved how much the status quo can cost. We have nothing left to gain by pretending it’s working.

Name the conservative issue that lost Tuesday night. Voters in states that overwhelmingly backed Trump in 2024 didn’t suddenly embrace woke radicalism. They rejected Trump and a corporatist, corrupt, listless, and hypocritical Republican Party. Democrats even borrowed issues that conservatives like me have been pushing for two years.

Look at the wreckage: Democratic Senate victories in Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, and Ohio; the loss of the Texas governorship; and a sweep through places Republicans had come to regard as safe territory. Democrats took control of the Senate and picked up at least 31 House seats. The full down-ballot damage will take time to assess, but the partisan realignment we were promised has been torn apart.

Everyone will manufacture an excuse based on his favorite issue. Some will blame the economy, others the Iran war, tariffs, bad candidates, or the usual midterm curse. Most of the conservative influencer class will perform amazing contortions to avoid uttering the name Donald Trump.

But it was all of the above, bound together by a Marie Antoinette presidency. Voters worried about paying their bills got a president boasting about a “golden economy,” stock portfolios, and a ballroom. Let them eat capital gains!

It was the tariffs. It was the war with Iran, launched with enormous fanfare and left without a convincing account of what victory means. It was the aimless legislative agenda, the Greenland fantasies, the narcissism, the Big Tech courtship, and the enthusiasm for data centers and the surveillance state. It was the endless spectacle of family business interests and questions about conflicts of interest.

This was the antithesis of Trump’s 2016 message. That message was directed at people who believed their country had been sold to the highest bidder. Now the White House seems astonished that those same people don’t celebrate every new accommodation with powerful interests.

RELATED: Democrats seize control of the US Senate

Tom Brenner/Getty Images

Of course, some good has been done. Border enforcement and other executive actions deserve credit. Nor can every Republican defeat be laid at Trump’s feet. But too many accomplishments remain vulnerable because the administration has failed to build lasting legislative victories. Worse, nothing resembling a fresh conservative movement can take shape while one man monopolizes its message, candidates, strategy, and imagination.

The party has become a personality cult with a fundraising operation attached. Trump endorses one dreary candidate after another, and the rest of the right is instructed to applaud. If you question the candidate, you are accused of betraying the cause. Which cause, exactly?

Tuesday also offered an answer to the claim that conservative principles themselves have become unelectable. Florida voters approved a DeSantis-backed property-tax amendment with about 62% of the vote, even as Republicans elsewhere suffered crushing defeats. Voters were also asked to decide 41 local data-center measures in 10 states, 28 of which would restrict development. These fights reflect genuine public hostility to political favoritism and unchecked corporate power.

Florida, for all its narrow margins, at least held its Republican governorship. The state has a governor with an identifiable record, a clear set of priorities, and an agenda he spent years putting into practice. Ron DeSantis didn’t build that record by changing the subject every time a shiny object appeared. Florida supplied the one-state wave in 2022. This year, it offered a one-state save.

RELATED: If Republicans can’t get Wyoming right, what are they fighting for?

id-work/iStock/Getty Images

Instead of learning from that contrast, the GOP base and the Conservatism Inc. influencer class will be tempted to spend the next two years defending everything Trump says, excusing every failure, and hunting for a new reason to attack anyone who asks for results.

Here is the question every so-called conservative must answer: How do we rebuild for 2028 while Trump remains the godlike leader of the right for another 26 months? How do we recruit candidates with convictions of their own when he insists on anointing his favorites? How do we talk about a serious governing agenda when every day brings a new diversion?

We cannot spend the next two years defending corruption allegations, praising a “golden economy” voters do not recognize, and explaining away policies that benefit special interests. The president will remain the most visible Republican in America, and no amount of spin will change that. Believe me, he will remind the public of that fact every day The rest of the party must decide whether it has a voice independent of his.

For how much longer will we be a conservative soul trapped in the contaminated body of the gay old party? Tuesday proved how much the status quo can cost. We have nothing left to gain by pretending it’s working.

​2026 midterms, Capital gains, Donald trump, Opinion & analysis, Big tech, Republicans, Democrats, Bolsheviks, Conservative, Elections, Corporatism, Economy, Florida, Ron desantis, Iran war, Congress 

Are American sports simply having a bad season — or is something much bigger happening? BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock believes the latter, explaining why he thinks the chaos plaguing professional and college sports could be a form of biblical judgment.

Whitlock explains that not only have sports turned their back on “all biblical values,” but they were founded and organized in the mid-1800s by Christians.

“This is all documented history. You can even find this information on Wikipedia. This isn’t hidden information. The Young Men’s Christian Association organized sports in the mid- to late 1800s and early 1900s as a tool to fight first-wave feminism,” Whitlock explains.

“They started organizing sports to disciple young men in muscular, masculine Christianity. So, this is a gift — sports, organized sports — handed to us by God. And we’ve turned our back on it, and/or we have allowed non-Christians, the secular crowd, to snatch sports away from us,” he continues.

“And that’s why I sit here today, pondering, halfway believing, if not fully believing, sports are under judgment,” he adds, citing the “six woes of judgment” in Isaiah 5.

“Greed and land-grabbing, endless partying and escapism, defiance and mockery, moral confusion — when you start calling evil ‘good’ and good ‘evil’ — arrogance and self-wisdom, and then corrupt justice through bribery,” he explains.

“And in the book of Isaiah, God tells you there’s going to be this coming foreign invasion,” he continues. “And so, I just want you to think about what we’re witnessing in America. Do we not have these judgments? Are these not all obvious? Are we not experiencing a foreign invasion and a hijacking of our Christian culture?”

God, Whitlock says, came up “with a way through sports to encourage and disciple and develop masculine men with the right values.”

“And so, basketball and football and baseball, they’re all being organized so that Christian men can disciple young men in a masculine form of Christianity. And we’ve handed this over,” he explains, noting that “we’ve turned our back on this blessing.”

“And you wonder why sports are in total collapse. You wonder why they’re totally invaded by corruption — bad, corrupt officiating. You wonder why the athletes are falling injured at record pace. You wonder why the games, the quality of play, is no good,” he continues.

“You’re not going to produce good fruit from the world of sports when it’s been turned over to radical materialism and money,” he adds.

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

To enjoy more fearless conversations at the crossroads of culture, faith, sports, and comedy with Jason Whitlock, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Jason whitlock, Ymca, Christianity, Sports, Nfl, Nba, Blazetv show 

Republicans lost more than just a midterm election on Tuesday night. They lost an essential part of the coalition that put them in power. And if they respond by blaming fraud, bad luck, or the usual midterm headwinds, you may as well start planning for another defeat in 2028.

This election is not a story about swing voters suddenly falling in love with Democrats. It’s about the Trump coalition hemorrhaging support from its base, and that is a much bigger problem. It is also one the Republican establishment seems uniquely incapable of confronting.

Presidents lose midterms. That is nothing new. What is new is losing voters from your base on an unprecedented scale.

In 2024, Donald Trump won with a coalition that included Gen X by 11 points, young men, and Hispanic men who had grown tired of the Democrats’ cultural insanity and economic failures. Those voters did not sign up for the latest corporate Republican seminar on how to lose gracefully.

They voted for mass deportations, law and order, accountability, and — most importantly — no new wars. Remember that campaign promise?

Did they get what they voted for?

The first two years of the Trump administration have seen some genuine, remarkable accomplishments. The FBI reports that murders fell by roughly 18% in 2025. Illegal border crossings have sunk to almost nothing. Don’t discount those achievements.

But where is the promised accountability for the abuses of the Biden and Obama years? Where is the follow-through on the Epstein files? Why do Republicans always seem to discover new procedural hurdles whenever the voters ask them to deliver on their promises?

And then there’s Iran.

Let me be clear: The Iranian regime is evil. Few people have been as consistently vocal on this issue as I have. But it’s one thing to use American air power to ensure Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon and quite another to drag our military and economy into a monthslong quagmire with no end in sight and no clear definition of victory.

What does winning look like? When is the mission over? What, exactly, are Americans being asked to sacrifice?

Meanwhile, Republicans still haven’t figured out how to govern. They excel at being a loud minority. Give them a Democrat to denounce, a hearing to stage, or a fundraising email to send, and they have all the energy in the world. Give them power, and they start explaining why they can’t give the base what they asked for.

Here is the question at the heart of Tuesday’s electoral wipeout: Is the GOP a populist party that answers to its voters, or a corporate party that strings the base along when it’s convenient? We cannot keep pretending these are the same thing.

RELATED: Iowa picks a Democrat senator

Photo by Scott Morgan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Look at South Carolina. Trump backed Darline Graham, sister of the late Lindsey Graham, for the Senate seat, and she went on to lose in one of the most humiliating Republican defeats imaginable. A completely preventable slap in the face to the president’s own base.

Tarrant County, Texas, is another example. That county has been a Republican stronghold, and it swung 30 points to the Democrats. You cannot blame a shift like that on voter fraud or independents.

Democrats didn’t need to reinvent themselves to capitalize on Republican failure. They borrowed the language of affordability and accountability while their ideological vanguard — represented by Democratic Socialist candidates across the country — kept moving left. When they take power, expect the mask to drop in a hurry. Investigations, lawfare, and political retaliation will be the order of the day.

To end on a high note, such as it is, we are not going to lose the Republic overnight. As long as Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito remain on the Supreme Court, the constitutional order will stay more or less where it is. Without 60 votes in the Senate, Democrats can only do so much.

Presidents lose midterms. That is nothing new. What is new is losing voters from your base on an unprecedented scale. The White House needs to have a serious conversation about what happened if they want to stop this problem from getting worse.

President Trump needs to remember who put him in office. The historic coalition that made his presidency possible can take its support elsewhere if he does not follow through for them.

Republicans need to ask why its own voters abandoned them. And this time, they might try listening to the answers.

​2026 midterms, Darline graham, Democrats, Donald trump, Epstein files, Gen x, Law and order, Lindsey graham, Mass deportations, Opinion & analysis, Republicans, South carolina, Tarrant county, Crushing defeat 

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who survived confirming Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and a litany of other policy fights, was finally defeated Wednesday morning by Democrat Troy Jackson.

Jackson led 52.4% to 47.5% with 69.2% of the expected vote in, according to NBC News. Collins conceded early Wednesday morning.

‘Maine, I owe you everything.’

“It has been the honor of my life to serve the people of Maine in the United States Senate. I’m proud of all I have been able to accomplish for our state and for our country in the past 30 years,” Collins said in a statement.

“I called Troy Jackson tonight to congratulate him and to assure him that my staff and I will work to ensure a smooth transition,” she said.

Jackson addressed supporters at his election party in Portland early Wednesday, according to the AP.

Oysterman Graham Platner, Democrats’ pick prior to Troy Jackson, won the June 9 primary with 72.1% of the vote. He withdrew in July after allegations of sexual assault, PBS NewsHour reported.

Platner called the allegation “categorically false.”

Delegates picked Jackson, 58, a former Maine Senate president, to replace Platner on July 25 by a vote of 566 to five.

RELATED: Democrat Roy Cooper sails to victory in North Carolina

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Jackson expressed his gratitude on X early Wednesday morning.

“Maine, I owe you everything,” Jackson wrote. “I’m ready to get to work for Mainers in the U.S. Senate, and I promise you this: I’ll never forget where I came from or who I’m fighting for. Thank you. Let’s go build a government that works for all of us.

Jackson raised $20.4 million in the quarter ending in September, nearly four times Collins’ $5.2 million, according to the Bangor Daily News. Pro-Collins groups still outspent pro-Jackson groups on ads, $85.3 million to $53.9 million, according to AdImpact data.

Collins was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996. She was the last Republican in Congress from New England, according to the AP. She ran on her record of crossing President Donald Trump.

“I voted against my party more than any other senator on either side of the aisle,” she said in the Oct. 6 debate.

Her loss capped a rough night for Republicans. Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate, according to NBC News.

No sitting Maine senator had lost re-election since 1978, according to Maine Public.

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​Brett kavanaugh, Donald trump, Maine, Politics, Susan collins, Troy jackson