Category: blaze media

Karmelo Anthony, who savagely murdered 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet last year, appealed to have his conviction and corresponding 35-year prison sentence thrown out.

Anthony’s attempt to forgo the legal consequences of his actions is off to a rocky start.

‘Im gonna lick there blood off the blade.’

After District Judge John Roach Jr. — who presided over Anthony’s trial — was recused last week from overseeing subsequent steps of the case, Anthony’s lawyers made their play for a new trial before retired Judge Michael Chitty, who replaced Roach.

With the push for a new trial came new character evidence about the killer and his victim — evidence from police reports, school records, and cellphone data that was previously withheld owing to what prosecutor Bill Wirskye referred to as a “gentleman’s agreement” between prosecutors and the defense.

According to court documents referred to in court and reviewed by CBS News, hours before killing Metcalf, Anthony allegedly sent a text message stating, “I’m lowk on the verge.”

RELATED: James Talarico shamelessly panders on Karmelo Anthony verdict — on New York-based radio show

That same morning, the killer’s ex-girlfriend notified a staff member at Centennial High School that Anthony was “engaging in stalking behavior, to include, but not limited to, driving by her home and refusing to allow her to end their relationship,” said prosecutors.

Prosecutors also highlighted text messages where Anthony allegedly admitted to punching girls in the face and committing burglaries; discussed robbing someone for $300; threatened to vandalize a house because of a “grudge”; and told a friend, “Imma shoot the school up tmr” “with my blick.”

According to a message thread between Anthony and his ex-girlfriend presented in court, Anthony allegedly wrote, “I like punching people”; “when get mad I see red”; “when I get mad I blackout”; and “when I get mad I can’t control myself.”

Prosecutors also alleged that Anthony had not only repeatedly threatened to murder his ex-girlfriend but in one instance allegedly texted her, “When I stab sb im gonna lick there blood off the blade,” reported KXAS-TV.

This sharing exercise was a two-way street, and some allegations about Metcalf and his brother were likewise revealed.

Metcalf and his twin brother, Hunter, were once caught spray-painting racist remarks and sentenced to 12 months of juvenile probation. The documents also raised allegations about Metcalf using racial slurs in school, swearing at a teacher, discussing bringing a gun to school, bullying at least two other students, and texting provocative statements.

On Saturday, Judge Chitty denied the defense’s retrial without elaboration.

“Our commitment to our client has not changed,” said Russell Wilson, an attorney for Anthony, reported the Associated Press. “We will continue to advocate vigorously on his behalf through every lawful avenue available.”

The defense will reportedly continue an appeal in the Fifth Court of Appeals.

Blaze News did not immediately receive a response from Wilson.

Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis stated, “We respect, and expected, the court’s decision denying the motion for a new trial.”

“The jury’s guilty verdict stands, and we remain confident in the process. Every defendant has the right to appeal, and our thoughts and prayers remain with the Metcalf family in the painful wake of last week’s hearing,” added Willis.

The Stand With Karmelo Coalition said in response to the ruling,

We continue to maintain that serious constitutional and legal errors denied Karmelo Anthony the fair trial to which he was entitled. The restrictions placed on public access to his trial raised fundamental Sixth Amendment concerns. The defense made consequential decisions throughout the trial in reliance upon an agreement with the State concerning the evidence that would — and would not — be introduced, only to have the State change its position at a critical point in the proceedings. And we maintain that errors in the jury instructions impaired the jury’s consideration of the issue at the very heart of Karmelo’s defense: whether he acted in self-defense.

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​Crime, Karmelo anthony, Austin metcalf, Politics, Murder, Racism 

The thought of China making it to the moon likely left a lot of Americans with an uneasy feeling.

To make matters worse, the communist giant was primed to make a first-of-its-kind discovery.

China’s boots-on-the-ground mission was set for 2030.

The China National Space Administration’s Chang’e‑7 has taken aim at the moon’s south pole, where the darkest and most barren parts of the surface are located. Particularly, China has focused on the Shackleton Crater, whose large rims provide permanently shadow regions where researchers believe water ice could exist.

Chang’e‑7’s launch, complete with lander, rover, and mobile probe, was scheduled to take place before the end of August, but China’s entire lunar exploration roadmap has now been blown out of the water after the space program officially delayed its launch on Sunday.

The Chinese government announced that the Chang’e-7 mission has been delayed until at least 2027.

“Based on the principles of safety, reliability, and infallibility, after comprehensive analysis and judgment, the Chang’e-7 mission does not meet the launch conditions and cannot be implemented in the scheduled window this year,” the space administration said, per a translation.

And so far, at least, the United States government has not made any comment on the momentous development.

No reason for the delay was provided by Beijing, but the most circulated scenario has been that Typhoon Narra and its 45 mph winds were the cause for disruption.

Singapore outlet the Straight Times reported that 54,000 Chinese were displaced by rising flood waters, including more than 8,000 being moved to emergency shelters.

RELATED: LIFE ON MARS? Bizarre formation in NASA photo sparks red planet conspiracy theory

CN-STR/AFP/Getty Images

Ars Technica reported on a typhoon warning center that warned the storm is expected to persist for several days, preventing workable launch conditions at China’s Wenchang site. This would cause the Chinese space authorities to miss their launch window to hit the underside of the moon.

This now puts China’s entire timeline into question, as Chang’e‑7’s mission was the crucial first step toward getting more robots, and eventually humans and engineering and military equipment, onto the moon’s surface.

Chang’e-8, another probing mission, was set for 2029, while China’s boots-on-the-ground mission was set for 2030. Beijing had stated that it had its space station “steadily in orbit” to serve as a platform for its manned lunar landings.

These steps would have put the communist nation’s preparatory framework ahead of the United States’ Artemis program but still would have had its manned-landing come after NASA’s.

RELATED: Vast secrets hide below the moon’s surface — and China is about to find them out before we do

CN-STR/AFP/Getty Images

Now China finds itself at risk of falling permanently behind America’s Artemis program.

After the Artemis II flyby, Artemis III will serve to monitor the lunar surface for future landings while testing U.S. systems associated with the fourth mission. Artemis III has a window of 2027, now the same as Chang’e-7.

Artemis IV astronauts have a goal of landing on the moon in “early 2028” to establish permanent residency on the satellite.

The Chinese shake-up now could put NASA and team USA considerably ahead of China, whose lunar landers were said to be large and impressive.

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​China, Chang’e-7, Nasa, Artemis, Tech, Moon 

Right-wing activist Eoin Richard was carried out of a church over the weekend after an anti-Islam protest ended in chaos.

Richard intended to launch his Take Back L.A.: Free Speech Rally on Sunday at the Islamic Center of Southern California, but he ended up at Precious Blood Catholic Church after claiming to have received death threats. He was quickly outnumbered by counterprotesters, chased through the church, and assaulted at a nearby Starbucks.

‘We aren’t going to be able to march to the Islamic Center due to threats on our lives.’

In videos posted to Instagram, Richard and at least one supporter are seen fleeing into Precious Blood Catholic Church while agitators follow closely behind.

After being picked up and removed from the church, Richard is cornered at a nearby Starbucks along with his companion. The activist group shouted that he is a “Nazi,” a “piece of s**t,” and a “terrorist.”

“JIHADISTS and ANTIFA storm CATHOLIC CHURCH and abduct EOIN RICHARD after mass,” Richard’s Instagram caption reads.

Masked assailants later poured blue paint all over Richard and his companion. Eventually, Los Angeles Police Department officers arrived to escort the men from the store. They did not appear to make any arrests.

A day prior to the confrontation, multiple Islamic organizations drew attention to Richard’s event.

RELATED: Is Ilhan Omar getting deported? Trump’s post raises eyebrows

Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says so many minorities, including American Muslims, “have been attacked in the past two years.” (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images file photo)

The Council on American-Islamic Relations Los Angeles, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California condemned Richard’s rally in a press release Saturday.

“ICSC has served as a place of worship, community, and belonging in L.A. for generations. Attempts to bring hate, intimidation, or fear to the doorstep of any house of worship have no place in our city,” ICSC spokesperson Omar Ricci said in a statement. “We will not allow those who seek to divide our communities to define who we are or how we respond.”

MPAC even provided its followers with detailed background information on Eoin Richard, sometimes referred to as Eoin Richard Connolly, and his activism.

“There is no identified public evidence that Connolly has explicitly called for violence against the Islamic Center, Muslims, or event participants,” MPAC admitted in its community alert and threat assessment posted to Facebook.

MPAC did, however, warn its followers that Richard’s flyer combined “explicitly Christian mobilization with Crusader-associated symbolism” and that he had “documented relationships with activists involved in confrontational protests.”

“We aren’t going to be able to march to the Islamic Center due to threats on our lives. But we’re still having our rally here, rallying with Christians and Catholics here in L.A.,” Richard said in an Instagram story filmed outside of Precious Blood.

Richard, Precious Blood Catholic Church, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, MPAC, the LAPD, CAIR-LA, and the ICSC did not respond to requests for comment.

It is unclear who removed Richard from the church.

Richard was previously a candidate for Los Angeles mayor, according to the L.A. Times.

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​Islamic center, Jake lang, Lapd, Los angeles, Muslims in america, Politics 

LaRell Herbert once believed the only explanation for his lifelong gender confusion was that he had been born in the wrong body.

So after leaving the Mormon faith, embracing a secular worldview, and undergoing a gender transition, Herbert openly identified as a woman for seven years.

And he believes it all started when he stumbled onto pornography on the internet.

“I had this weird experience where when I started exploring pornography, I realized that there was a very particular flavor of pornography that was my poison, you might say,” he tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”

“This happened to be BDSM pornography,” he says, noting that after some “self-healing,” a repressed memory surfaced.

“I had this repressed memory from when I was 5 years old come up where I was restrained, as just a child, restrained by this electrical cord and violated sexually,” he says.

As his addiction grew, he “started envisioning [himself] in the shoes of the women in the pornography.”

“That was the only thing that would do it for me. And also it felt like a victimless crime. If I could pleasure myself to the thought of me being in their shoes in the scenario, then it wasn’t a sin in my mind,” he explains.

“And this is one of the things that I like to teach people now, is that sexuality can be programmed,” he continues. “We of course all are born with the biological sex tendencies that are in us because we’re male or female and attraction to the opposite sex is natural to one’s biology.”

“If that differs at all in your psyche, in your system, that means that something happened, some sequence of experience happened to you as a child or you were exposed to things in a certain sequence that made you develop the perspective you have now,” he adds.

With the addition of his childhood trauma, Herbert recognized that his “sexuality was very much programmed by viewing that pornography, by repetitively exciting those feelings.”

Herbert was also married when he began his transition, which led to a lot of “distress” in his marriage — especially for his wife.

“I didn’t want to cause her distress, even though I felt like I had to pursue being a woman in order to be happy. I at some point told her basically, I can’t go on living if I can’t do this,” he tells Stuckey.

“I think it was largely for selfish reasons at the time. I’ve learned that being trans is a very selfish thing. It’s all about me and my needs and what I can do for myself to be happy, and you forget the people around you,” he adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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​Gender transition, Pornography addiction, Transgender, Mormon, Trauma, Allie beth stuckey, Larell herbert, Blazetv show 

An investigation into a suspected quintuple homicide has one sheriff describing the crime scene as one of the most “complex” she’s ever seen.

First responders answered a call Saturday morning about a vehicle fire at a rural property outside of Portland, Oregon, where they also discovered five human bodies.

‘Any time you have one person deceased, let alone five, that’s a logistical challenge.’

The fire personnel who were first on the scene in the 47300 block of NW Otis Lane near Forest Grove soon called deputies.

Investigators later discovered the remains of “several domestic animals,” according to a Washington County Sheriff’s Office news release; no details have been disclosed regarding the identities of the human bodies.

“I will say that in my 22 years here, I have not been a part of or witnessed a scene quite this complex involving this type of an investigation,” Sheriff Caprice Massey said, according to the Associated Press.

According to CBS News, the investigation into determining the identities of the five victims was ongoing as of Sunday afternoon.

RELATED: Threatening male begins beating up Florida mobile homeowner, but victim pulls gun, fires once — ‘and the threat was over’

In a news conference, sheriff’s Detective Shannon Wilde reportedly said, “Any time you have one person deceased, let alone five, that’s a logistical challenge.”

From the first update, detectives said they believed this case was not a “random act of violence.”

Authorities provided an update Sunday saying they had located and identified a suspect in connection with the killings.

The Washington County Sheriff’s Office identified 36-year-old Benjamin Charles Parker as the homicide suspect in this case.

Parker was found dead in a car in Enumclaw, Washington, which is roughly 200 miles north of the crime scene.

KOIN-TV reported that the car containing Parker’s body was found behind a Safeway grocery store.

His death is believed to be a suicide.

A Washington County Sheriff’s Office representative on Monday told Blaze News they are not releasing more information on the case until next of kin are notified.

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​Suicide, Suspect, Oregon, Homicide, Washington state, Bodies, Crime 

The days of the American Bar Association overseeing the accreditation of law schools may be numbered.

The ABA has enjoyed the authority to accredit law schools since 1952. This authority is vested in the ABA Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, which is supposedly independent.

‘It should not have any role, much less a monopoly role, in law school accreditation.’

However, critics have suggested that the ABA is insufficiently independent of the institutions and profession it is overseeing.

Currently, the ABA’s legal ed council fully or provisionally accredits nearly 200 law schools.

Thirteen of the programs approved and accredited by the ABA are freestanding law schools with no affiliation to a college or university. Their ABA accreditation renders them eligible to participate in federal financial student aid programs.

More consequentially, the Wall Street Journal — which first reported on the proposed termination of the council’s accreditation authority — noted that in most U.S. states, law school graduates’ ability to take the bar exam is conditional on their school’s approval by the ABA.

RELATED: The right needs a public defender network for lawfare

The ABA’s accreditation authority, last renewed in 2021, comes up for renewal next month.

According to a notice by the Education Department posted in the Federal Register on Friday, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity is scheduled to meet on Sept. 23 and 24 and will discuss the petition for renewal of recognition filed by the ABA’s legal ed council.

Daniel Thies, the previous chair of the ABA’s legal ed council, will appear as a witness. He declined Blaze News’ request for comment.

According to a report made public on Friday, Education Department staff have recommended that the ABA legal ed council be stripped of its oversight and accreditation authority, citing in part the council’s insufficient independence from the profession.

An Education Department spokesperson confirmed in a statement to Blaze News, “After reviewing ABA’s accreditation standards, Department staff found the accreditor out of compliance with the agency’s accreditation regulations and recognition standards.”

“We will not comment on details, as the process is ongoing and involves multiple stages of review, including by an independent, bipartisan advisory committee in September,” added the spokesperson.

Melissa Hart, a Democrat who previously served on the Colorado Supreme Court and now serves as chairwoman of the ABA’s legal ed council, figures that the ABA will make a convincing case and ultimately retain its accreditation authority.

Hart said in a statement to the Blaze News, “The Council is confident it complies with the Higher Education Act and with the Department’s requirements for accreditors. We look forward to the opportunity to address any misconceptions and clarify the record at our upcoming hearing before the NACIQI committee next month.”

“An initial recommendation from Department staff represents one step in the regular recognition process that the Council and other accreditors periodically complete,” continued Hart. “A hearing with NACIQI is the next step in that process, and we’re confident the Council will address any concerns the Department may have at that hearing.”

After the meeting next month, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity will issue its own recommendation to Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent.

Kent appears keen on accreditation reform. He said in a statement on Wednesday, “The Trump Administration’s proposed changes to the accreditation system are intended to reorient our quality assurance framework so that accreditors prioritize student outcomes rather than bureaucratic processes or the promotion of divisive and unlawful ideological agendas.”

“Instead of ensuring institutions offer high-quality educational programs that justify the time and cost of a college education, the antiquated accreditation system has contributed to inflated tuition, administrative bloat, and ideology-driven mandates on college campuses,” added Kent.

While the White House did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment, it’s clear that the ABA is on the president’s radar.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in April 2025 tasking Education Secretary Linda McMahon with holding accountable, “through denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination of accreditation recognition, accreditors who fail to meet the applicable recognition criteria or otherwise violate Federal law, including by requiring institutions seeking accreditation to engage in unlawful discrimination in accreditation-related activity under the guise of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ initiatives.”

In the order, Trump called out the ABA’s legal ed council for requiring law schools “to ‘demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to diversity and inclusion’ including by ‘commit[ting] to having a student body [and faculty] that is diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.'”

With its accreditation authority now in the balance, the organization — in an apparent effort to counter claims that the ABA is “ideologically captured” — may be kicking DEI to the curb. The ABA’s legal ed council voted in May to eliminate its rule requiring law schools to demonstrate commitment to DEI.

The change was not, however, final. According to the ABA Journal, the final determination on whether to jettison the DEI policy is scheduled for Sept. 8.

Conservative legal scholar John Eastman, founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, is among those who welcome the administration’s move to remove the ABA from the law school accreditation process.

“It has long ceased to be a politically neutral professional organization and has instead become a front for the radical wing of the Democrat Party, using its accreditation authority to push radical DEI policies, for example,” Dr. Eastman told Blaze News. “I witnessed this firsthand when I was dean at Chapman Law School from 2007 to 2010, as we confronted demands for minority hiring and admissions in order to have our accreditation renewed. And one need not look further than the list of Supreme Court cases in which it has filed amicus briefs to confirm the hard-left bent of this organization.”

Eastman added, “It should not have any role, much less a monopoly role, in law school accreditation — just like it was removed from its preferred role in the judicial nomination process by President Bush in 2001 (restored by Obama in 2009, but then removed again by Trump in 2017 and not revived since).”

The ABA did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.

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​American bar association, Education department, John eastman, Linda mcmahon, Dei, Politics 

Democrats will do anything to get the black vote, and Senate candidate James Talarico is no exception.

“He’s trying to win over the black vote because the black people in Texas, the Democrats at least, are very, very upset that Jasmine Crockett didn’t win. They wanted … Jasmine Crockett because she was black,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales explains.

“So I think now his tactic to try to win over the black Democrat vote is saying that he’s cool with a little murder as long as it’s a black person carrying out the crime, I guess,” she adds, before playing a clip of Talarico on “The Breakfast Club.”

“From Texas, we seen what happened with Karmelo Anthony, and you said it was a tragedy. What did you mean by that?” Talarico was asked.

“Well, I’ve done a lot of work in the state House on justice reform, and right now we’ve got a system that doesn’t serve all Americans equally, and we know that black Texans have not gotten the justice they deserve in many cases,” he responded.

“And you know, I’m not an expert on this particular case, but I know that there were no black members of the jury. And to me, that’s the only evidence you need to really prove that this system is not working for black Texans,” he added.

Adam Johnson, who is well known as January 6th’s “lectern guy,” points out that he went to federal prison for “misdemeanor trespassing.”

“So if it’s about color, if it’s about these things that he’s bringing up, I don’t know. I think a lot of us went to jail and we were very much white when we were there,” he tells Gonzales.

But Talarico isn’t the only Democrat trying to court black voters.

“[Abdul El-Sayed is] actually taking a different approach than James Talarico,” Gonzales says.

“Apparently, now he is African,” she adds, noting that originally she just believed him to be Muslim.

“I am Arab. I’m also African. My family immigrated to this country from Egypt. I’m proud of my African heritage,” he said in a recent press conference.

“So obviously he is like, ‘Oh, well, technically I’m African,’” Gonzales says.

“He’s like, ‘I’m just a plain old black man like you,’” she adds.

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​Adam johnson, Black vote, Democrats, James talarico, Jasmine crockett, Karmelo anthony, Texas democrats, Lectern guy, Sara gonzales, Abdul el-sayed, Blazetv show 

The controversy started early for former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom on Sunday night.

By the time the 6’10” giant arrived at Wintrust Arena in Chicago to watch a WNBA game, he was already being heckled by fans.

‘I’m just here to protect women.’

Fans yelled at the former NBA center, even giving him the middle finger as he arrived at the Chicago Sky vs. Indiana Fever game with a police escort.

Attendees took issue with Kanter’s pro-women T-shirt stating that the word “woman” is a “noun” that means “adult human female.”

Freedom recently declared himself eligible for next season’s WNBA draft, mocking the league’s refusal to define what a woman is.

The former NBA player told Fox News he had no intention of causing any issues or disruptions at the WNBA game, saying he texted the Chicago GM beforehand and received the simple reply, “Enjoy the game.”

The first half went without incident, as Freedom posted a joking image deciding which restroom he should use at halftime. However, as the third quarter came to a close, all hell broke loose when Sky player Natasha Cloud began screaming at Freedom as he sat courtside.

“Sophie Cunningham shot a three, and I put my hands up to celebrate,” Freedom told Fox News. “Literally, a couple possessions later, Natasha came back and started screaming and yelling and said, ‘She’s not gonna sleep with you.'”

Freedom went on, “I was like, ‘I am not trying to sleep with her. I’m just here to protect women and support her.’ And then, obviously, after that she started yapping, and she started to walk towards me, and literally I just got up, and then I was like, ‘I’m just here to protect women, and that’s all.'”

RELATED: Sophie Cunningham gets relentlessly booed in Canada — and shuts the haters down in the classiest way possible

The former NBA player stood up to reveal his shirt, showcasing the massive size difference between him and the WNBA players. Cloud is a full foot shorter than the Swiss-born man.

Freedom added that Cloud used a lot of “heavy language,” including swear words, which he said surprised him due to the number of children present.

“I was obviously wearing a shirt explaining what a woman is, and I think that had a lot to do with what she thinks about women. I think it triggered her a lot,” Freedom claimed.

Immediately following the interaction, security approached Freedom and started escorting him out of the arena. As taunts and jeers were directed at him, Freedom egged the crowd on while showing off the message on his shirt.

Cloud did not offer remarks on the incident and was not available to members of the press after the game. She did, however, post a message to Threads, vowing to protect trans-identifying people.

“To every trans kid/person, You are apart of MY community & tribe,” she wrote. “You belong. You’re loved. You’re seen. You’re perfect as you are. & you will always be protected by me.”

Sophie Cunningham and the Fever trounced Cloud and the rest of the Chicago Sky, 113 to 90.

RELATED: Sophie Cunningham supporters speak out: WNBA is just passing the blame

Blaze News reached out to the Sky for comment.

Although the league’s collective-bargaining agreement says that “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA,” the league has refused to clarify its stance on whether males who identify as women would be allowed in the league.

The WNBA recently met to discuss the issue, however, the result of its meeting was that there were “no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA.”

Freedom says if the league doesn’t clarify its rule, he is willing to step on the court next season.

“If they don’t come up with a rule, then I am ready and prepared to play in May and just get ready for the draft in April,” Freedom told Fox News. “These are the rules. People are mad at me. I’m confused why people are mad at me. These are the rules that literally they put, so I’m just literally following their rules.”

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​Fearless, Wnba, Basketball, Transgenderism, Enes kanter freedom, Sports, Womens sports 

Rosie O’Donnell doesn’t just struggle with her feelings about the president, she also has an issue with remembering her own daughter’s chosen pronouns — to the point that she needed to get them tattooed on her wrist.

In an interview on the “Good Hang” podcast with Amy Poehler, O’Donnell explained that she got the word “they” tattooed on her left wrist in honor of her 13-year-old daughter Clay, who apparently is “nonbinary.”

“This is a true story. So she, they, they, and it’s a they/them. That’s the pronouns that they choose, but it’s very hard,” O’Donnell told Poehler.

“I love that you’re constantly correcting in real time like we all do,” Poehler responded.

“It’s very hard, honey,” she said.

“I know it matters to them. And so when they first told me that it was they/them, I tried my best, but I kept saying ‘she,’” she continued.

Because O’Donnell kept getting it wrong, her daughter began carrying around a piece of cardboard that said her pronouns on it and held it up whenever O’Donnell said “she.”

“And so I took her to my cousin’s tattoo shop with the ‘they’ in her handwriting, and I had it tattooed on my wrist so that I would never forget, that it would remind me. And I thought she’d be very touched, and she didn’t give two s**ts,” she explained, adding, “She could not care less.”

BlazeTV host Pat Gray is about as impressed as her daughter.

“There’s no nonbinary people. None,” Gray says. “So she can say whatever she wants. We don’t have to play that game.”

Want more from Pat Gray?

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​Amy poehler, Nonbinary, Pronouns, Rosie odonnell, Pat gray, Theythem, Blazetv show 

An individual was caught on video kicking a man in the back of the head while he sat in a Southern California jacuzzi earlier this month, after which another suspect stole the man’s phone.

The incident occurred Aug.14 when Greg Medina — who serves the homeless in San Bernardino — said he was relaxing in a jacuzzi when two suspects approached him from behind, KTLA-TV reported.

‘I could have lost consciousness, or I could have been hurt a lot worse and drowned.’

Surveillance video captured one of the suspects delivering a hard kick to the back of Medina’s head, the station said, adding that the other suspect reached down to steal Medina’s phone, which was sitting on the concrete.

Medina told KTLA he was listening to a class with earbuds when he “felt a sharp kick behind my head. I saw the kids off in the distance [but] didn’t really pay much attention to them.”

Medina added to the station that he didn’t get a look at the two suspects but that he believed they were either teens or young adults.

Medina tracked his phone to a neighboring apartment complex and contacted police, the station said.

He then went to an emergency room, where he learned he had suffered a concussion, KTLA added.

Soon, however, the case broke in a surprising way.

RELATED: ‘Teen chaos in DC’: Brawl with chairs used as weapons erupts in Chipotle after Pirro’s warning to parents of thugs

Investigators told KTLA the parents of the two 13-year-old suspects turned them in Friday morning, and the pair were arrested on felony charges.

Police told the station that both teens were taken to Juvenile Hall; the suspect who allegedly delivered the kick was booked on robbery and battery charges, while the other suspect was booked on robbery charges.

The teens have not been identified because of their ages, KTLA said.

“I don’t hate them. … I forgive them,” Medina noted to the station. “I don’t wish any bad on anybody. However, I do feel that they need to be held accountable, especially the parents.”

“I could have lost consciousness, or I could have been hurt a lot worse and drowned,” he added to KTLA.

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​Physical attack, Jacuzzi, San bernardino, California, Police, Arrests, Parents, Battery, Robbery, Crime 

President Donald Trump has revived speculation about whether Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) might be visited by consequence for alleged immigration fraud. On Sunday, the president shared a provocative Aug. 11 report from Just the News with the headline “ICE refuses to disclose records on Ilhan Omar fraud probe, cites ongoing ‘enforcement proceedings.'”

Quick background

Years after coming to America as a refugee, Omar, a Somali-born ethno-nationalist, reportedly took out a marriage license to marry a man named Ahmed Hirsi. In 2002, she married Hirsi in a Muslim ceremony and had children with him but did not initially marry him legally.

‘You are not allowed to marry your brother.’

After supposedly breaking it off with Hirsi, in 2009, Omar legally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi — a British-Somali national reportedly identified by numerous Somalis as Omar’s alleged brother. Omar allegedly separated from Elmi with a Muslim divorce in 2011, reunited and had another child with Hirsi in 2012, then formally divorced Elmi in 2017, reported the Center for Immigration Studies.

The Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board revealed in 2019 that Omar and Hirsi filed joint tax returns in 2014 and 2015 — while Omar was still legally married to Elmi. The Hill noted at the time that filing a joint tax return where no legal marriage exists violates both federal and state law.

Abdihakim Osman, a self-identified friend of Omar, claimed to the Daily Mail in 2020 that Omar had confirmed that Elmi was her brother and that she married him so he could remain in the United States.

RELATED: Tennessee Republican begins impeachment process against judge who BLOCKED TPS removals to Somalia

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Omar called the marriage-related allegations “absolutely false and ridiculous” in a 2016 statement, adding that “insinuations that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is my brother are absurd and offensive.” There has been no concrete proof, DNA or otherwise, yet brought forward to verify that Omar’s legal husband from 2009-2017 was her biological brother.

In December, border czar Tom Homan said that the Trump administration was investigating Omar for alleged immigration fraud. Trump stated the following month that the Justice Department was “looking at” the Minnesota Democrat.

When asked in May about a possible forthcoming indictment against Omar for alleged immigration fraud, Vice President JD Vance said both that “it certainly seems like something fishy is there” and that it was something “the Department of Justice is looking at right now.”

How it’s going

According to the Just the News report that Trump referenced on Sunday, Just the News filed a Freedom of Information request in January for any records related to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation into allegations of immigration fraud by Omar.

In response to the request, the outlet learned that ICE may have “enforcement proceedings” underway in connection with Omar.

ICE told Just the News in May, “ICE has determined that the information you requested is being withheld in full pursuant to Title 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A). Disclosure of any responsive records at this time could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.”

ICE noted that FOIA Exemption 7(A) “applies to records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes when their release could disrupt such proceedings.”

According to the DOJ,

Exemption 7(A) requires a two-step analysis. First, there must be a “reasonable likelihood” of a pending or contemplated law enforcement proceeding. Second, release of the information must be reasonably expected to cause some articulable harm to that proceeding.

When asked for comment, ICE referred Blaze News to the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS, the White House, the DOJ, and Omar’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Trump has made no secret that he dislikes Rep. Ilhan Omar and is skeptical about her legal status in the country.

In November, for instance, he wrote, “The worst ‘Congressman/woman’ in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how ‘badly’ she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation.”

Trump suggested further that Omar “should go back!”

Omar is fighting to keep her seat in Congress and is scheduled to face off with challenger John Nagel, a Republican who served for three decades as a state trooper, in November.

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​Ilhan omar, Immigration fraud, Justice department, White house, Minnesota, Us immigration and customs enforcement, Politics 

The end of the year is nigh.

The calendars you buy at Walgreens are all wrong, and so is your iPhone. The end of the year is not a month or so after we have swollen ourselves with food from Thanksgiving or when the Christmas decorations are up. The spiritual change of the year doesn’t occur when there is frost on the ground and winter boots by the door.

Perhaps the school schedule isn’t arbitrary or based on temporary factors but reflects a deeper truth.

The end of the year is nigh. Nay, it’s here (!); it’s right now. You and I are living through it today, at the end of the summer.

Back to school

I came across a post the other day from Benjamin Braddock. It read, “It feels like the fading of summer is the real ending of the year.” I tapped my iPhone, turning the little heart icon from white to red, indicating I agreed with his sentiment, sent it to a few friends for further discussion, and decided I needed to write something.

It would be easy to explain the feeling as a product of schooling. We spend more than a decade of our youth on that schedule, and it gets ingrained in us. A few weeks after Memorial Day, we would be let out and free for what felt like forever.

But it wasn’t forever. The summer always went quicker than we wished it did, and by the time the middle of August rolled around, we would start feeling a bit ill and rather depressed at the thought of beginning school again.

The last weeks before September aren’t the middle of the year; they are the end, and as children we knew it.

We live that schedule for years in our youth, but I don’t believe it’s that which is responsible for our feeling that the end of the summer is the real end of the year. Perhaps the school schedule isn’t arbitrary or based on temporary factors but reflects a deeper truth that indeed the year begins when the summer ends.

RELATED: Do you wear your shoes in the house?

Glen Asakawa/Getty Images

Cold snap

It’s something about the knowledge of the impending cold and the freezing of the living world. I know that soon, all too soon, the leaves will begin to change. First the young trees and the very old ones. They go from yellow to orange, to red, and then they fall and they crackle and we rake them, and some burn them, and fall is here.

It’s a clear transition, even though it happens slowly, and a dramatic change in the world we see. And for some reason the change from winter to spring doesn’t feel like the beginning of the year even though we might think it would. Like the sun rises and the dark becomes bright, we might logically conclude that as the temperatures rise and the world blooms, we are beginning the year. But it doesn’t feel like that, does it?

Seemingly, counterintuitively, it is when the air turns cold that the year begins. And truth to be told, I believe it’s less about the arrival of the cold and more about the passing of the warmth.

Fleeting treasure

The end of the summer is the high point of the year. It’s when the air is at its warmest, when the water is most comfortable and swimming is best, and when every single tree is full of leaves. The way the light fills the sky and glitters on the water is very different at the end of the summer than it is at the beginning. It’s more golden, more full, and more treasured.

It’s finite, and we know it, just like we knew those last weeks of summer vacation were finite as kids waiting to begin sixth grade.

Then end of summer is the end of the year, and it has always felt right to me that Rosh Hashanah — the Jewish New Year — comes in September. God gave the dates of the calendar in the Bible, and he made the new year at the end of the summer. Our feelings about the nature of the seasonal cycles and the feelings that accompany them reflect deeper ancient truths about the way the world has been ordered since the beginning of time. The school schedule came later.

Summer sigh

The last days of summer, the days we are living through right now, are like a sigh. A smiling and not yet mournful sigh, a sigh that means we are content and happy. The kind of sigh that you let out when you are so full that you wish the moment could last forever.

On the beach, the kids playing in the sand, splashing in the water, running and laughing, the sparkling water, sun-kissed skin more caramel than ever before, the happiness the sun brings, the sound of the waves.

Endless summer might be heaven, but heaven isn’t here on earth; for that we must wait. Those last days, the days at the end of the year, they tease us. And the knowledge that they are finite is what makes them precious. But what if these could last forever? If only they could last forever!

But they can’t. Time marches on, we are at the end now, a new year must begin, and it will begin soon, after the last day on the beach.

​Lifestyle, Culture, Summer, Back to school, Rosh hashanah, Seasons, The root of the matter 

What happened to investigative journalism?

Lots of things, none of them good. The conglomeration of publishers, revelations concerning Project Mockingbird, the re-legalization of government propaganda in the Obama era, drastically truncated attention spans, and the super-saturation of sheer information all came together to diminish its once-proud tradition.

Whistleblowers blew, the government failed to protect them, and a great many journalists (so-called) operated less as the brakes on power and more as easily purchased shills.

A new AI-integrated operation, however, seeks to put things back on track.

The turnaround time is already approaching lightning speed.

Effort.news is the creation of entrepreneur Brian Chau. The endeavor brings together high-power, customized artificial intelligence with an evolving human competency/responsibility component that signals the best of what’s possible in the era of AI integration.

Speaking to Blaze Media on the human component of his operation, Chau said, “When we hire, the single most important human skill is the ability to anticipate which stories, ideas, and issues will matter to potential audiences. That’s true across the publication. What findings are newsworthy? What headlines and prose read well? What will readers remember or infer about the graphs? When do we include information in prose vs. a table vs. a graph vs. a footnote? All of these are questions the AIs don’t answer well right now. I also don’t think it’s the type of skill that can be pulled out and separated. The people who are good at knowing what matters tend to be good writers, editors, and researchers.”

Hard-hitting coverage

Readers notice a few things immediately with Effort.news — first off, its leaders aren’t playing around in terms of applying those brakes on power. Recent investigations have focused varyingly on EU machinations in the Ceuta invasion-migration story, California’s race-based pregnancy funding, and the old-money families behind the “degrowth” meme.

Secondly, the investigations are not surface scrapes. They are going deep, isolating patterns in vast amounts of information (often intentionally obscure and hidden information) to cull what otherwise simply wouldn’t be done in either mainstream or, lacking the tools, grassroots journalism outfits.

RELATED: This app censors your phone in a stunning new way — and people are using it on purpose

Juliane Sonntag/Photothek/Getty Images

And, finally, they’re moving extremely fast. “Our complete production time used to be 4-10 days from first looking into a lead to finishing the completed article. Now it’s closer to 1-4 days,” says Chau. “I think the research techniques we use would just be impractical for human use.”

For example, Chau explains, “the main thing we did to uncover donation rows for the degrowth article was that we used AI to look up every single donor to Swiss Philanthropy Foundation and search the donor’s financials for whether they donated to P4NE. For context, SPF hides P4NE’s donations by mixing 106 different funds into one account. SPF had 249 donors in 2024, so depending on how thoroughly people searched each donor’s records and tried to validate matching financials, that table could take around a month at least.”

A glimpse of the future

So the product is high-level. The turnaround time is already approaching lightning speed and getting better. The key with AI, that it’s too late to turn back, appears to be finding the proper balance between human and machine. Chau may not have all the answers to how we get there as a whole, but he’s starting to fill in some blanks. No question, it will require immersion into the messy, and dangerous, process of trial and error, but it’s also going to require a return to standards and someone honest and/or determined enough to implement them.

Chau says Effort.news is still refining. “Our AI workflows are extremely customized, and our team updates them several times every day,” he says. “There’s a lot to optimize around cost and speed of retrieving data, mostly around cost and breadth of information covered. We also make a lot of qualitative improvements to how AI models present information to us. It’s still not clean enough to directly publish, but it made reading the AIs 95% more readable. We’ve improved the models enough to cut our production time by more than half on average, and I think we can cut our production time by half multiple times more.”

Come what may, Effort.news is just the beginning.

​Artificial intelligence, Tech 

While BlazeTV host Nick Freitas is disturbed by the vocal support for murder-trial defendant Lindsay Clancy — the Massachusetts nurse who killed her three children and is arguing postpartum psychosis as a defense — he isn’t necessarily shocked by it.

On this episode of “Making the Argument,” Freitas dissects the toxic cultural environment that’s responsible for making Lindsay Clancy into a martyr.

“How is it that so many women can have this overwhelming sympathy for Lindsay and appear to demonstrate what appears to me anyways to be very little sympathy for what those children were going through in the last moments of their lives?” Freitas asks.

His wife, Tina, helped him answer that question.

“Tina’s thing was, ‘Well honey, we live in a culture now where women celebrate abortion through all nine months worth of pregnancy. We live in a culture right now where women are constantly told that men are the threat,”’ Freitas recounts.

Regarding the latter issue, Freitas highlights how a vocal faction of Clancy supporters are insisting that it was her then-husband, Patrick, who killed their children and then framed her.

This conspiracy theory, he argues, is a side effect of the cultural norm of “women [ramping] each other up about the danger and the threat that men are” — a toxic trend that often leads to men being unfairly villainized or scapegoated.

“It’s not that it’s an inappropriate question whenever something like this happens to question everybody associated with the event or the act,” says Freitas, “but it’s the insistence that no, it must be the husband. … The father must have done something. … It can’t be Lindsay — like that sort of insistence is cultural.”

“When you devalue human life, when you treat men like they are the enemy … you shouldn’t be surprised when people respond accordingly,” he adds, calling the situation “horrific” and “evil.”

Even though there is no evidence that Patrick had anything to do with the deaths of his three children, the faction accusing him of being the culprit continues to grow louder — and more accusatory. Freitas points out that this vocal group is quick to attack fellow women who are critical or skeptical of the agenda to absolve Clancy of wrongdoing.

This reveals another destructive cultural pattern: the tendency to treat truth as tribal rather than objective.

“The truth is defined by tribe. The truth is defined by what my side is. … We can’t just go where facts take us, especially when the facts take us to a point where Lindsay has to be accountable for her actions,” says Freitas.

To hear more, watch the video above. “Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK40 for $40 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Conspiracy theory, Lindsay clancy, Murder trial, Nick frietas, Blazetv show 

With crippling anxiety and microscopic attention spans, today’s college students are in a bad way.

To compound matters, an increasing number possess reading skills that appear to have peaked in fifth grade. Yet the moment a literature professor challenges them with a work of fiction, she finds herself ruthlessly punished.

FIRE’s lawsuit seeks to restore sanity to a system that has clearly lost its bearings.

What you are about to read is depressing, but not necessarily surprising. After all, this is a culture already intent on turning literature into scrap metal. For years, ridiculously woke crusaders have worked tirelessly to cancel Shakespeare for wrongthink and forcibly inject modern queer elements into his work.

Now, the institutional axe swings in whatever direction keeps the peace, chopping down any story that threatens to upset an undergraduate.

Books smart

Vinita Prabhakar taught English at South Florida State College for nearly 20 years. Her reward for that service? Being booted out the door because one student had a brief moment of cognitive discomfort and a college president panicked.

The piece of literature in question wasn’t a step-by-step guide to urban guerrilla warfare, but a short story featuring a deeply flawed protagonist. Prabhakar assigned Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Bettering Myself” for the exact reason professors have assigned challenging literature since the invention of the printing press: to force students to analyze provocative ideas rather than stare blankly at a wall.

Enter Fred Hawkins, the college president. Hawkins decided the story was problematic, informed Prabhakar he never wanted to see the text again, and promptly oversaw her suspension.

This level of executive intervention bypassed the entire chain of academic oversight.

FIRE alarm

“Universities can set the curriculum, but that’s very different from a president personally overruling the academic professionals who actually supervise a professor,” Greg Greubel told me. Greubel is a senior attorney at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who is representing Prabhakar.

While Professor Prabhakar’s academic supervisors explicitly endorsed her pedagogical judgment, President Hawkins personally intervened to crush it because he disliked the story and deemed the matter political.

Greubel warns that if this precedent “is allowed to stand, professors will learn to choose the safest reading rather than the one that best challenges their students.”

The interaction between the professor and the student was a textbook case of quality instruction. A student expressed discomfort with the assigned material. Prabhakar didn’t mock the student, nor did she send the student to a re-education camp. She engaged the class in an open and civil debate, processed the critique, and kept the student integrated in the course.

“It is exceptionally unusual, especially because Professor Prabhakar successfully navigated the situation,” Greubel notes. “The student raised a concern; Professor Prabhakar addressed it through discussion, and the student continued to participate without incident.”

RELATED: America is losing its farmers to bankruptcy and suicide

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Protection from paper

In other words, the classroom functioned exactly as higher education was designed to work, right up until the university president intervened and transformed level-headed mentorship into an administrative execution.

Hawkins blew up a functioning pedagogical resolution to protect adults from words on paper. Florida statutory law explicitly forbids public colleges to baby students who encounter ideas they find objectionable. The state legislature wrote those protections into law precisely to stop neurotic middle managers from gutting course catalogs every time an undergraduate gets a stomachache from a difficult paragraph.

Greubel points directly to this legal framework as a key element of Prabhakar’s defense. “It helps because it shows that, at least at one point, Florida politicians understood the dangers of censoring materials in higher education simply because someone views them as offensive,” Greubel explains.

“The law says public colleges should not shield students from ideas they find uncomfortable, unwelcome, or offensive. Yet that is essentially what happened here.”

No authority

Beyond handing Professor Prabhakar a clear lawsuit, the law reinforces an elementary First Amendment truth. University officials don’t have the constitutional authority to dismantle a curriculum to accommodate their personal sensitivities.

In 1943, the Supreme Court held in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette that no official, regardless of title or ego, can determine what constitutes acceptable political, national, or religious orthodoxy. Eighty-three years later, campus administrators behave like absolute monarchs, treating state educational statutes as optional suggestions.

When campus bureaucrats act this way, the primary objective becomes eliminating risk entirely. Between the hyper-progressive crusade to gut classic literature and the reactionary urge to ban anything that causes an emotional tremor, decent literature doesn’t stand a chance. Thought-provoking fiction contains risk. Critical analysis contains risk. Therefore, the safest syllabus is a blank stack of paper, and the safest classroom is an entirely neutralized one.

Justice for Professor Prabhakar

FIRE’s lawsuit seeks to restore sanity to a system that has clearly lost its bearings.

“First and foremost, we want Professor Prabhakar back in the classroom, along with appropriate declaratory and injunctive relief to ensure she will not be fired in the future for teaching appropriate materials,” Greubel states. “More broadly, we want to establish that public colleges cannot remove professors simply because an administrator, student, or member of the public dislikes assigned material.”

Although colleges retain the right to set academic benchmarks, they have zero authority to purge a professor for teaching legitimate material that directly serves the curriculum.

If an administrator can end an academic’s career over a single short story, the concept of academic freedom is all but dead. And colleges will keep doubling as glorified day-care centers, where adults pay thousands of dollars per semester to be protected from vowels and consonants.

By all accounts, Professor Prabhakar is a consummate professional who takes pride in her work. She has been treated appallingly and deserves justice.

​Education, Lifestyle, Fire, Free speech, Campus censorship, Florida, Culture, Vinita prabhakar, South florida state college, Higher learning 

I never saw “Soylent Green.” But I did see Phil Hartman do a “Saturday Night Live” sketch as Charlton Heston shouting, “Soylent Green is made out of people! It’s people!” That was enough to get the idea.

The dystopian premise is not merely that human bodies become useful material. It is that people can be trained to think about human worth in purely utilitarian and economic terms. Human beings become valuable because of what they produce — or expendable when they get in the way of production.

The frightening thing about a darkened mind is not that it wakes every morning plotting evil while twirling a theatrical mustache. It is that evil begins to look reasonable.

A 2018 comment by Chelsea Clinton about abortion has been making the pro-life social media rounds again this week. The viral version says Clinton claimed abortion saved America trillions of dollars.

That sounds grotesque because it is grotesque. But fairness requires us to look at what Clinton actually said.

I checked Snopes. Its defense is that Clinton did not literally say abortion itself saved the country trillions. She said women’s increased participation in the workforce — which she connected to abortion rights after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade — added trillions of dollars to the economy.

That distinction is real. It also does not solve the moral problem.

Speaking at a 2018 “Rise Up for Roe” event, Clinton observed that women entering the American labor force between 1973 and 2009 added $3.5 trillion to the economy.

Then came the crucial sentence: “The net, new entrance of women — that is not disconnected from the fact that Roe became the law of the land in January of 1973.”

Clinton went on to suggest that people who were unmoved by arguments about abortion rights or dignity could connect their concerns to abortion through economics.

When critics translated that into less decorous English — abortion helped produce trillions in economic growth — Clinton objected. She said her point was that women’s greater workforce participation was connected to their ability to make “reproductive health care choices, including post-Roe.”

Very well. Grant her correction in full. It doesn’t solve the problem, though. It underscores it.

Clinton was not claiming that every abortion deposited money into the Treasury. Her argument was that legal abortion was among the conditions that allowed more women to enter or remain in the workforce; that greater workforce participation generated enormous economic value; and that this economic value was one consideration in favor of abortion rights.

RELATED: ‘Threats will not stop us’: Lila Rose’s pro-life group tells radicals to pound sand after legal threat over calling abortion ‘killing’

Adene Sanchez/Getty Images

Notice what has happened. A human life has entered an economic equation.

The calculation is straightforward: Pregnancy may cause a woman to leave the workforce, reduce her hours, interrupt her career, or forgo income. Abortion may prevent those consequences. Therefore abortion can contribute to economic productivity.

Once stated plainly, the moral ugliness is hard to miss.

Good people instinctively know some calculations should never govern the value of a human life. Imagine announcing that America would be several trillion dollars richer if some identifiable class of people had simply ceased to exist.

Most liberals would recoil, because there is something more fundamental than the calculation. The people being calculated are human beings.

And that is precisely the question abortion advocates try to place outside the ledger.

The decisive question is not whether abortion makes it easier for somebody else to earn money. The decisive question is: Who is the unborn child?

The unborn child is not the mother and not the father. It is a distinct living human organism. The moral question is what is owed to that human being.

We recognize the principle everywhere else: One may not deliberately kill an innocent human being because his continued existence imposes economic costs on somebody else. We do not balance an innocent person’s right to live against another person’s earning potential and ask which column produces the larger number.

Yet abortion is often granted precisely this moral exemption.

Clinton’s argument does not logically require the conclusion that more abortions are always better for the economy, nor did she say that. The problem is subtler and more serious: Once economic productivity is offered as a reason favoring abortion access, the unborn child’s life has been made one variable in a cost-benefit calculation.

Money was not an incidental statistic wandering into the speech. It was offered as an argument. There is an old name for the god invoked by arguments of this sort: Mammon.

Ancient peoples sacrificed human beings to their gods and persuaded themselves that the bargain was reasonable. Prosperity might follow. Crops might flourish. Armies might triumph. The gods demanded something terrible, certainly, but one had to consider the benefits.

Modern man regards such practices with horror, congratulating himself on having escaped primitive superstition.

RELATED: The right has a blind spot about young women

Blaze Media Illustration

Then he describes the unborn child as a reproductive impediment, calculates the economic benefit of removing that impediment, and calls himself enlightened. The deity has changed names, but the temptation is distressingly familiar.

Scripture gives us a category for understanding how intelligent and educated people can reason themselves into such conclusions. Divine judgment is not merely something awaiting mankind at the end of history. Judgment can also operate within history: God gives rebellious people over to the consequences of their rebellion. Their thinking becomes futile. Their hearts are darkened. Professing themselves wise, they become fools.

That is an especially terrifying form of judgment because the person experiencing it may regard her condition as enlightenment.

The punishment for rejecting what is good is eventually losing the ability to recognize the evil of one’s own reasoning.

The frightening thing about a darkened mind is not that it wakes every morning plotting evil while twirling a theatrical mustache. It is that evil begins to look reasonable. Categories become inverted. Killing becomes health care, and economic productivity becomes part of the case for it.

An argument that should horrify us begins to sound like respectable public policy.

​Abortion, Chelsea clinton, Social media, Snl, Pro-life, Roe v wade, Unborn child, Moral question, Human sacrifice, God, Divine judgement, Opinion & analysis 

One of Irregular’s jobs is to build fake networks where the world’s most capable AI models can be turned loose as hackers without hurting anybody.

This summer, some of those fake networks had a small problem: They were connected to the real internet.

The models don’t have to turn evil to be dangerous.

Models being tested for Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta got through that open door and attacked systems belonging to real organizations. They didn’t discover some ingenious way to escape a hardened sandbox. In the Irregular cases, internet access was available when it wasn’t supposed to be, and the models generally believed the real computers they found were part of the hacking exercise.

Irregular published an August 14 postmortem explaining what went wrong and what it says it has done to fix the problem. What it doesn’t provide is a simple total: How many times did its AI evaluations end with a model attacking something in the real world?

That omission prompted criticism from security researchers interviewed by the Record. University of Surrey computer science professor Alan Woodward called the report heavy on “marketing spin” and accused Irregular of using ambiguous language to make multiple compromises sound like a single incident.

The mess becomes easier to understand if you start with Anthropic, which has been much more specific about what happened.

After OpenAI disclosed its breach of Hugging Face, Anthropic reviewed 141,006 cybersecurity evaluation runs in which Claude could have obtained internet access. It found three separate incidents involving six runs. Those incidents compromised the production infrastructure of three different organizations.

The first involved a fictional company in one of Irregular’s capture-the-flag exercises. Unfortunately, the made-up company’s name also belonged to a real website.

Four runs of Claude Opus 4.7 found the real company, identified vulnerabilities, extracted credentials, and gained access to a production database containing several hundred rows of data. Anthropic says that in all four runs, the model eventually encountered evidence that the system was real. It kept going anyway. In two runs, Claude reasoned that the real company must still be part of the test.

From bad to worse

The second incident was considerably weirder.

Claude Mythos 5 found setup instructions inside a fictional company that told employees to install a Python package that didn’t actually exist. Claude realized it could create a malicious package with that name so the target would install its code.

So it did.

The model went through the process of registering accounts and uploaded a malicious package to the real Python Package Index. It remained publicly available for roughly an hour and was downloaded and executed on 15 real systems.

RELATED: Are you inhaling microplastics?

solar22/Getty Images

One belonged to a security company whose automated scanner installed Python packages to inspect them for malware. Claude’s code ran on the scanner, captured credentials, and sent them to a collection point the model had created. Claude then used those credentials to access more of the company’s infrastructure.

Anthropic says Mythos 5 actually considered the possibility that it was on the real internet. It then talked itself out of that conclusion. Among other things, the model decided that seeing the year 2026 on the computer was evidence that the environment had been staged.

The third incident involved an internal Anthropic research model. Unable to reach its intended fictional target, the model started looking elsewhere and scanned roughly 9,000 internet-facing systems. It eventually compromised a real company’s application using credentials exposed on a debug page and SQL injection.

This time, the model eventually figured out that the compromised system had nothing to do with the exercise and stopped on its own.

Anthropic says it found no evidence that any of the models were pursuing goals of their own. They were doing what they had been told to do, attack systems and capture a flag, while operating under a false assumption about where the simulation ended.

That doesn’t make the incidents harmless. It makes them embarrassingly mundane.

Somebody left the door open.

OpenAI reported its own Irregular-related incident on August 4. Its models had likewise been told they had no internet access, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed them online. Once again, a fictional target happened to share a name with a real domain. An OpenAI model attacked the real site, exploited what OpenAI described as a basic vulnerability, and found and used credentials belonging to the site.

OpenAI explicitly distinguished this from its earlier Hugging Face breach. In that case, models inside an isolated evaluation environment found and exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in an Artifactory package-registry proxy, obtained internet access, moved through OpenAI’s research network, and eventually compromised Hugging Face infrastructure.

The Irregular incident was much simpler. The internet connection was already there.

Meta then disclosed another case. The company told Reuters that an Irregular misconfiguration inadvertently gave one of its models internet access during an evaluation. The model then exploited a vulnerability in a third-party service.

Reuters reported that the model was Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1, citing the Information, but Meta itself has not publicly identified the model.

A shady synopsis

This is where Irregular’s accounting gets murky.

Its postmortem says public disclosures stemming from the same underlying evaluation problem involved activity from “a single evaluation scenario” and therefore are “not materially separate incidents,” regardless of how many outside parties were affected.

There is a legitimate technical point buried in there. If Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta all ran models against the same badly configured scenario, three companies later publishing disclosures does not necessarily mean three unrelated failures occurred inside Irregular.

But Anthropic didn’t disclose only that scenario.

Anthropic says plainly that its three incidents involved three different fictional capture-the-flag scenarios. One attacked the real company sharing the fictional company’s name. Another put malware on PyPI. Another scanned thousands of internet systems before compromising one of them.

Irregular’s own post also shifts terminology. It refers to “a few interactions” in which models took offensive action in the real world, discusses a “handful” of attempts against the real domain, and says the incidents occurred in fewer than one out of every 10,000 advanced simulations.

Maybe one configuration mistake explains several public disclosures. That’s useful information if you’re trying to fix the configuration mistake.

It still doesn’t tell us how many real-world compromises occurred.

If you leave one gate open and five cows get out, you have one open gate and five loose cows.

Irregular also says it has “no evidence of a customer’s systems being breached or customer’s data being leaked.” Read narrowly, that’s reassuring: The AI labs whose models Irregular was testing apparently weren’t compromised.

Other companies absolutely were.

Anthropic says Claude extracted credentials and reached a production database at one company, captured credentials from another company’s security scanner and used them to access additional infrastructure, and compromised a third company’s internet-facing application.

Calling Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta “customers” is perfectly normal business language. Dropping that reassurance into a postmortem about attacks on other companies without immediately explaining the distinction is less helpful.

Irregular says it has added safeguards and expanded manual review of model behavior. It also says manual review by itself cannot handle the enormous volume of activity generated during these tests.

That’s believable. A hacking evaluation is supposed to be full of behavior that would set off alarms on a normal network. The hard part is detecting when the hacking that is supposed to happen inside the test suddenly starts happening outside it.

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Darko Mlinarevic/Getty Images

But that’s also the business Irregular is in.

For comparison, look at an entirely separate incident disclosed by the U.K. government’s AI Security Institute this month. The setup there was different: AISI deliberately gave frontier models internet access and disabled their normal cybersecurity classifiers so researchers could measure what the models were capable of under permissive conditions.

AISI tested seven models across two cyber ranges in 122 evaluation runs. In 10 of those runs, researchers found out-of-scope activity. They catalogued 19 distinct actions, 17 involving Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and two involving OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, while stressing that those 19 actions were not 19 separate incidents.

Among other things, Mythos 5 attempted to put malicious code into a real open-source project, created fake identities, tried to socially engineer a real maintainer, attempted to contact real people, and planted instructions intended to manipulate other AI coding systems.

AISI’s monitoring caught unusual data leaving a test system through Tor on July 28. The agency says it stopped the related evaluations and isolated the relevant machines within an hour. Its investigation found no resulting real-world harm.

The interesting part for Irregular isn’t that AISI had a containment problem too. It’s how AISI wrote the incident report.

It gave the total number of runs. It gave the number of runs containing unauthorized behavior. It gave the number of actions. It named the models involved. It explained when monitoring detected the activity, how quickly the tests were stopped, and what investigators found afterward.

Harsh lessons

There are still unanswered questions about the AISI episode, but you don’t need a decoder ring to figure out what the agency says happened.

Irregular, meanwhile, was already well aware of how quickly AI hacking capabilities were improving. In research published in December, the company reported that frontier models had gone from scoring near zero on the hardest tier of its private offensive-security tasks through the first half of 2025 to roughly 60% by late fall.

Those tasks include difficult vulnerability discovery, exploit development, reverse engineering, and cryptographic problems. Irregular itself warned that the improvement represented a meaningful shift in offensive-security capability.

That’s the real lesson here. The models don’t have to turn evil to be dangerous. They don’t even have to escape.

They just have to be competent enough that when somebody screws up a network configuration, the screwup matters.

Irregular says the known problems have been addressed and that it plans to publish a white paper on safer containment and cyber evaluations. That’s probably worth doing. Frontier models are getting good enough at offensive security that putting them inside a pretend corporate network and telling them to start hacking clearly requires more care than it did a year ago.

But before Irregular starts writing the industry’s rule book, it could answer a simpler question about its own tests: How many times did the AI hackers hit something real?

​Artificial intelligence, Tech 

The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy — the 36-year old former nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, who confessed to killing her three young children — is making national waves.

According to court records and statements from the prosecution, on January 24, 2023, Clancy sent her then-husband on an errand. While he was gone, she strangled their three children — Cora, age 5; Dawson, age 3; and Callan, approximately 8 months old — with exercise bands in the basement. Clancy’s lawyers do not dispute that she killed the children. They are asking a Massachusetts jury to find her not criminally responsible, citing postpartum psychosis and her report of a male voice ordering her to take the children’s lives and her own.

Support, largely female, has rallied around Clancy — with some framing her as a victim of a fragmented, overmedicating health care system and others pushing conspiracy theories that her husband, Patrick, is the real killer who framed her.

But instead of just wearing pink T-shirts to show solidarity and holding silent vigils, supporters can now donate to the Musgrove Family Fund — a GoFundMe account started in mid-August by a Wisconsin TikTok creator for Lindsay Clancy’s parents, Mike and Paula Musgrove.

The account has already accumulated over $1 million of its $2 million goal.

BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock is deeply disturbed by the entire situation — including the robust support for Clancy and her parents.

“Three dead children. A million-dollar pot so the killer’s parents can sit the livestream in comfort,” he says.

“Postpartum becomes a hall pass, fundraising becomes penance, sympathy migrates from the grave to the defendant table because a secular people cannot say a mother who strangles three children has sinned,” he says.

It’s the same brand of darkness, Whitlock points out, that defined the robust and loud support for Karmelo Anthony, who was convicted in June for murdering 17-year old Austin Metcalf. The GiveSendGo account started by his mother raised roughly $634,000.

“Same machine, different zip code, different skin, same transfer of sympathy,” he says, comparing the Clancy and Anthony cases.

“In Massachusetts, the dead are three children, and the living adult on trial is their mother. The culture rushes to her diagnosis, her meds, her parents’ hotel bill. In Texas, the dead is a 17-year-old track athlete and football player, and the living adult with the knife said a push made the blade necessary. The culture rushed to his fear, his race, his family’s GoFundMe,” he continues.

The support for the killers in both of these cases, he argues, exemplifies a “godlessness.”

“A people who still answer to God can hold two truths. A sick woman can still be sick and still be guilty of murder; a teenager can feel insulted and still be a murderer,” says Whitlock.

“Suffering is real. Disrespect is real. Neither one writes a blank check on a child’s life. Sin does not evaporate because a psychiatrist arrives after the fact. Murder does not shrink because a boy says, ‘He put his hands on me,”’ he continues. “The sixth commandment did not come with a postpartum footnote. It did not come with a disrespect clause.”

People who see themselves as God, says Whitlock, make their own commandments — “Thou shalt not judge a mother; thou shalt not question a racial narrative.”

He reads from Judges 21:25: “Every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

“Judges 21:25 is not ancient color. It is August 2026 in Plymouth and last spring in Frisco,” he warns.

To hear more, watch the video above.

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, Lindsay clancy, Karmelo anthony, Blazetv show 

Alan Greenspan died in June at 100. They got him.

Have you noticed that nobody ever really “dies” any more?

Move the deadline often enough, and eventually everyone dies right on schedule.

Certainly nobody famous. Nobody politically important. Nobody who once knew somebody important, embarrassed somebody important, or appeared in a photograph with the Clintons.

Those people don’t die. They get silenced. They knew too much. They were about to expose something. They crossed the wrong people.

They get “got.”

The lovely actress Hayden Panettiere died last Sunday at 36, about a week short of her 37th birthday. She was found in cardiac arrest at an apartment in Greenville, South Carolina. Paramedics could not revive her.

At the moment, the cause and manner of death remain undetermined. An autopsy found no trauma contributing to her death, and police found no evidence of foul play. The Drug Enforcement Administration is assisting Greenville police. All signs point to a drug overdose, though.

Naturally, the internet has already solved the case: Hollywood killed her.

The former “Heroes” and “Nashville” star published a memoir in May called “This Is Me: A Reckoning.” She described some genuinely ugly experiences as a young actress. At 18, she said, a woman she trusted put her into bed aboard a yacht with a famous British singer-songwriter. At 19, an Oscar-winning actor exposed himself to her at a party. She identified neither man.

You can see where this goes.

She knew things. She wrote a book. Three months later, she’s dead.

Case closed.

Except another corner of the internet identified a different culprit. Libertarian writer Jeffrey A. Tucker responded to Panettiere’s death by asking, “Is it time to stop this absurd gaslighting? Everyone knows the murder weapon.”

He meant the COVID-19 vaccine.

Tucker is a smart fellow. He’s been a hero in the fight against COVID tyranny. But I think he got ahead of himself here.

Or maybe when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I love conspiracy theories. I love sound arguments more.

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Nyia Sissac/Washington Post/Getty Images

Conspiracies exist. Watergate was a conspiracy. COINTELPRO was real. MKUltra was real. Corporations conceal evidence. Governments lie all the time. Sometimes a suspicious death really is suspicious.

Nevertheless, conspiracies require evidence.

That seems to be the part many of us have let go.

Antonin Scalia died in his sleep at a Texas hunting ranch in 2016. He was 79, had serious health problems, and no autopsy was performed. Early confusion about the circumstances — including an unfortunately described pillow — turned his death almost instantly into a murder mystery.

Ah, but Barack Obama needed a Supreme Court vacancy, didn’t he? Even Donald Trump entertained the speculation publicly.

Sure. On the other hand, old men die.

Four years later, Scalia’s “best buddy” Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at 87 after years of recurring cancer.

And, mostly, she died like any other elderly woman.

There was fury over her replacement and a bitter confirmation fight over Amy Coney Barrett. But nobody built much of a murder theory around an 87-year-old woman with metastatic pancreatic cancer.

Evidently, some important people are still permitted to die in peace.

Conspiracy theories about famous deaths are hardly new. John F. Kennedy alone has supported an industry for more than 60 years. What social media has done is speed up production.

Now, within minutes of a public figure’s death, thousands of people can search old interviews, posts, photographs, and acquaintances for the clue that explains everything. Then comes the question: What are the odds?

Usually, nobody knows.

Earlier this year, I experienced what doctors called “stroke-like symptoms.” High blood pressure appears to have been the culprit. I also got two Moderna shots in 2021.

I regret getting the jabs. But according to some of the loudest alarmists at the time, they should have killed me by 2022.

Somehow, I lived.

Five years later, I had something approximating a stroke, and now somebody can point backward and say: See? The vaccine!

Sorry, no. You don’t get to predict that millions of vaccinated people will drop dead within a year, watch the prediction fail, then spend the next few years claiming every heart attack, stroke, cancer diagnosis, and celebrity death as vindication.

Move the deadline often enough, and eventually everyone dies right on schedule.

That doesn’t mean suspicion is foolish. Sometimes the official story really is wrong. Sometimes — often! — institutions deserve skepticism.

But skepticism asks questions. A conspiracy theory that begins with the answer is something else.

RELATED: ‘Conspiracy theory’ is just media code for ‘we hope this never comes out’

Matt Cardy/Getty Images

That’s what makes Panettiere’s death such an awkwardly perfect example. We have an unexplained death, a troubling memoir, a history of addiction, the DEA assisting police, and no final cause — yet.

That is plenty of fodder for speculation.

It isn’t enough for certainty, which we so desperately desire.

So nobody merely has a heart attack. Nobody merely overdoses. Nobody simply grows old. Nobody has a stroke. Strokes are boring; trust me.

No, somebody did it. Somebody got got.

Alan Greenspan lived to 100. He palled around with Ayn Rand. He chaired the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades. He advised presidents. He moved markets by clearing his throat.

Then he croaked.

No assassins. No cover-up. No final secret — as far as anyone knows.

Death got him.

Eventually, it gets us all.

​Alan greenspan, Cardiac arrest, Conspiracy theories, Coverup, Death, Drug overdose, Hayden panettiere, Heart attack, Natural death, Overdoses, The clintons, Vaccine, Opinion & analysis 

BlazeTV host and Lakepointe Church Pastor Josh Howerton recently discussed with the eponymous host of the “Shawn Ryan Show” the ongoing war against Christianity and what set the stage for America’s present “prodigal son” moment.

While he recognized that Christ’s church is now, as ever, assailed on all sides, Howerton emphasized that many have awoken in recent years to the reality that there are dark spiritual forces at work in the world and also that there are also prevailing forces of light whose victory was secured at Calvary two millennia ago.

‘That light has a name.’

Early in their conversation, Howerton told Ryan — who recently announced that he has resumed going to church — that the war on Christianity is primeval; that after the Fall, Satan declared “war on the offspring that God’s going to use to redeem the world. So that’s the storyline of the entire Bible. It’s Word versus world.”

“The Bible says the whole world lies under the power of the evil one. The Bible actually calls Satan the little-g god of this world,” said the pastor, who noted also that when tempted in the desert, Jesus Christ did not correct Satan when the dark one claimed dominion over the kingdoms of the world.

Howerton noted that there is “this tacit assumption throughout the entire Bible that Satan is really over all of the world’s systems — and that’s why everything in the world aligns against one thing in particular, and it’s Christianity — Christ and Christians. That’s baseline.”

Expounding on an observation shared with him by Middle East expert Raymond Ibrahim that this satanic contempt makes sense of otherwise nonsensical political alliances — such as those formed in recent years between LGBT activists, feminists, and Islamists — Howerton noted, “The unifying principle is the enemy of my enemy is my friend: anything but Christianity, and anyone but Christ.”

Howerton also detailed the commonalities between the Antichrist referred to in the Bible and Mahdi, the messianic figure in Islamic eschatology who is supposed to defeat Muslims’ enemies in the end times, and strongly suggests that the purported angel who spoke to Muhammad was the same demonic entity Saint Paul warned of in 2 Corinthians 11:14.

Ryan had expressed interest in whether Christianity was actually growing, citing statistics highlighting the years-long trend of widespread apostasization in America, which recent polling indicates has actually slowed down.

Although Howerton reassured Ryan that Christianity is “globally growing,” he noted that “in my lifetime, Christianity in America has generally been declining. I’m 43; 1983. Feels like the tide’s turning.”

RELATED: America’s fastest-growing Christian voice is joining Blaze Media

Screenshot – Courtesy of “Shawn Ryan Show,” YouTube

Ryan observed that widespread disenchantment with and distrust for government and various institutions has prompted people to seek something concrete and true, and this has driven them to Christ.

He also agreed with Howerton’s suggestion that the increasing immorality and vile actions exhibited in the West have awakened people to the twofold reality “that there was a non-ignorable dark force in the world” and that “if there’s a darkness, there must be a light, and that light has a name, and His name is Jesus Christ.”

The pastor likened this particular moment of apparent religious renewal and spiritual awakening to the biblical story of the prodigal son’s return.

“He spends all his money on parties and strippers and alcohol and, you know, whatever. And then if you read that, there’s this little verse, and everybody skips the verse that I think is most important, where he gets to the spot where he spends all the money and … everything that he thought was gonna make him happy, and it just didn’t,” said Howerton.

“It says, ‘and then he came to his senses,’ and he started running back to his father.”

Howerton added, “We got a bit of a prodigal nation.”

Like the prodigal son, the pastor suggested that it has finally dawned on America, “Everything else didn’t work, but I know I can go home to Dad.”

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​Josh howerton, Shawn ryan, Christianity, Religion, Satan, Islam, Faith