Category: blaze media

Democratic Socialists of America continue to take out establishment Democrats at the ballot box. The latest casualty is a longtime congresswoman from Colorado.

On Tuesday, Gen Z upstart Melat Kiros trounced longtime incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary for the 1st Congressional District of Colorado, representing much of Denver. With 81% of the vote reported, Kiros holds a lead of nearly 10 points, 51.3% to DeGette’s 41.7%, according to NBC News.

‘This is the most anti-incumbent cycle we’ve seen in a really long time.’

As of Wednesday afternoon, DeGette had still not conceded the race on social media. Late Tuesday night, she posted to X that “it looks like we won’t have final results tonight.”

By all accounts, DeGette has established far-left Democrat bona fides. She was a manager in President Trump’s second impeachment effort, she supports “Medicare for all,” and she wants to abolish ICE.

Though she has a progressive track record, DeGette characterized Kiros’ platform as “extreme.”

Indeed, Kiros has been endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, Justice Democrats, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and she espouses many of their radical views, especially regarding Israel. She even claims to have been fired from a law firm after writing a letter supporting Palestine after the October 7 attacks.

Kiros, a lawyer and a Ph.D. student, explained that once she began campaigning for office, she realized: “All these policies I’m calling for are democratic socialism,” Vox reported.

DeGette, 68, was first sworn in to Congress in January 1997, four months before Kiros, 29, was born.

RELATED: The People’s Republic of NY-13: Election results breakdown

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Kiros is just the latest democratic socialist to successfully primary a Democrat incumbent. In the New York primary races last week, 32-year-old Darializa Avila Chevalier took out 71-year-old incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, and NYC Comptroller Brad Lander defeated anti-Trump radical Rep. Dan Goldman.

Democratic socialist Assemblywoman Claire Valdez also won the primary for the open seat in the 7th Congressional District of New York. Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.) is retiring at the end of the term.

Both Avila Chevalier and Lander had been endorsed by NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a fellow democratic socialist who, like Kiros, was not born in America. Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian parents, while Kiros was born in Ethiopia and brought to America as a baby.

Kiros views the 2026 Democratic primary races as an opportunity to reshape the party.

“This is the most anti-incumbent cycle we’ve seen in a really long time,” she told Vox. “So I think this is an opportunity to change the party in a way that — I don’t think we’ll have another chance like this. To pass it up, I think, is irresponsible.”

“This isn’t just about replacing one generation of leaders with another,” she also told Vox. “It’s about replacing it with moral clarity, with urgency, with courage — and making sure that the will of the voters is actually being represented and fought for at the federal level.”

The 1st Congressional District of Colorado is heavily Democrat, and Kiros is expected to win the seat in November.

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​Politics 

The president has made a major announcement regarding the upcoming midterms.

President Donald Trump says he will be heading up a Republican midterm convention, the first ever, in September.

‘THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN!’

The midterm convention will be held in Dallas, Texas, according to President Trump’s post on social media. He previously pitched the idea in Aug. 2025.

“It will be fantastic! It has never been done before, and will be a truly Historic Event. We are going to celebrate the GREAT AMERICAN COMEBACK, and the incredible successes of the American People who transformed our Country through the America First Agenda,” he wrote Tuesday.

He lauded a list of his accomplishments that included the shutdown at the border, lowering crime, and increasing the nation’s energy dominance.

Trump went on to say the convention will prepare the country for another 250 years of success.

“At the Event, we will have hardworking Americans, our Great Innovators, Entrepreneurs, Manufacturers, First Responders, and Job Creators who are powering our Nation’s Golden Age, and proving that America’s best days are still ahead of us,” he added. “We will also have lots of Great Entertainment — It will be a RALLY like none other!”

Richard Hudson, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, praised the president in a statement on social media.

“President Trump has united Republicans behind a winning agenda that’s delivering results for the American people,” he wrote. “The Midterm Convention will showcase our strong Republican candidates, energize supporters across the country, and ensure House Republicans have the resources to protect and grow our majority in November.”

The midterm convention will run from Sept. 9 to 10.

Democrats considered returning their midterm convention but decided against it. Some suspect that their dwindling cash donations forced them to abandon the idea.

RELATED: ‘Blue wave’ expected for midterms looks more like a tiny ripple, says CNN’s Harry Enten

The convention should help galvanize Republican voters to show up at the ballot box for the midterm elections, which will determine whether Democrats will take over Congress for the rest of Trump’s second term.

“THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN!” the president concluded.

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​Midterm elections, President donald trump, Trump rally, Politics 

Just days before America’s 250th anniversary celebration of our independence, the Democrats’ latest attempts to take away American citizens’ gun rights are being called out by the Department of Justice.

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice sued two different states, both of which are run by increasingly notorious Democrat governors, over their latest attempts to ban certain firearms.

‘On April 10, I promised Governor Spanberger that we would sue Virginia if she signed this unconstitutional weapons ban into law. I keep my promises.’

The DOJ sued California and Virginia for their so-called “Glock ban” and the semi-automatic-weapon ban, respectively.

The lawsuit against California is in fact two-fold: First, the DOJ is challenging the ban of Glock-brand firearms, a popular choice of handgun among gun owners.

RELATED: 2A win: Appeals court in DC strikes down high-capacity magazine restrictions

Jim Vondruska/Getty Images

Second, the DOJ is challenging the legality of California’s “Gun Roster,” which shows which pistols are allowed and which are banned.

The law triggering this ban was signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on October 25. The specific “Glock ban,” as well as the ban on any other guns removed from the gun roster on January 1, was set to take effect on Wednesday.

Nearly 40 Glock models were removed from the gun roster at the beginning of this year, meaning they “may no longer be sold, offered for sale, imported for sale, or manufactured in California.”

Additionally, more than 70 models from Auto-Ordnance; Magnum Research; Kimber; Sturm, Ruger & Co.; Kahr Arms; Phoenix Arms; Franklin Armory; Sig Sauer; and Nighthawk Custom were removed from the approved gun roster on the same day.

In a state Senate hearing last year to discuss the bill before it was signed into law, the group Gun Owners of California argued against the passage of the bill, warning that the language was “overly broad” and not primarily concerned with the safety of the public:

“By specifically targeting the potential for modification, this bill disproportionately affects potential Glock purchasers and restricts access to one of the most popular handguns available, further demonstrating that this legislation is not about safety but about incremental firearm prohibition.”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press release Wednesday: “The Second Amendment is a sacred right belonging to all Americans, even those in California. California cannot ban the most popular type of handgun in America. We will work to stop this blatant trampling of our rights by the California government to protect the rights of lawful gun owners.”

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for Newsom told Blaze News:

The Trump administration is once again trying to dismantle California’s commonsense gun safety laws. Our response is simple — these laws save lives. California has proven that strong, evidence-based gun safety measures can reduce gun violence while respecting the rights of responsible gun owners. That’s why we have one of the lowest gun death rates in America and historically low crime rates across the board. We won’t be intimidated by another politically motivated lawsuit. We’ll continue defending the laws that protect Californians and keep dangerous weapons off our streets.

In addition to the DOJ’s challenge to California, the Department of Justice is also suing Virginia for its newly enacted law that bans the purchase and sale of ordinary semi-automatic rifles.

The law, signed by Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger on May 14, essentially freezes the markets for sales of “assault firearms” in the commonwealth.

Similar to the California law, Virginia’s ban was set to take effect on July 1, thus triggering the two lawsuits on the same day.

“On April 10, I promised Governor Spanberger that we would sue Virginia if she signed this unconstitutional weapons ban into law. I keep my promises,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a press release. “Law-abiding Americans should not have to live under threat of criminal sanction for simply exercising their Second Amendment right to possess arms owned by millions of their fellow citizens.”

Spanberger’s office did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

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​California, Democrats, Department of justice, Virginia, Second amendment, Abigail spanberger, Gavin newsom, Politics 

BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales infiltrated the Texas Democrat convention in Corpus Christi — and it was every bit as insane as she expected.

First, Gonzales was not allowed any press credentials because of her views.

Then, she quickly found a Planned Parenthood booth where they were handing out free Plan B.

“They gave me not one, but two free Plan B’s because they hate babies in the womb and they love killing them. This is really disgusting stuff,” Gonzales says, before throwing the Plan B in the trash and saying, “They do the same to babies.”

Gonzales also spoke to some attendees, asking one woman, who was wearing a mask, what positions of James Talarico’s she supported the most.

When the woman refused to answer, Gonzales ventured, “Have you thought about maybe removing the mask? It’s 2026.”

The woman then pulled down her mask, got in Gonzales’ face, breathed heavily, and said, “I have chronic Epstein-Barr virus. Would you like it?”

“The masks don’t work, ma’am,” Gonzales replied. “Thank you for trying to give me a virus. Lovely people.”

Gonzales then approached another woman who was wearing an “I’m a Talafreako” shirt.

“What of James Talarico’s policies do you support the most?” Gonzales asked.

“The fact that he is a real Christian as opposed to a pseudo-Christian,” the woman replied.

“Have you heard the quote of his where he said he hates Christianity?” Gonzales asked.

The woman answered that “no,” she hadn’t, because he’s a minister.

“Somebody probably misquoted him. They do that all the time,” she added.

Gonzales also came face-to-face with another Talarico supporter, who claimed he didn’t care that Talarico’s friend, South Texan congressional candidate and musician Bobby Pulido, used to perform on stage with a bandmate who was convicted of indecent contact with an 8-year-old.

“I don’t care about his friend,” the man told Gonzales.

“You don’t care that he’s parading his convicted pedophile friend around on stage,” Gonzales replied, shocked.

“No, not really,” the man replied.

“He raped an 8-year-old girl,” Gonzales says, before the man tried to claim that Republicans are also guilty of pedophilia.

“I’m saying all pedophiles are bad and we should all agree, not just say, ‘But what about other pedophiles?’” she replied.

After even more insane interactions, Gonzales was then kicked out of the event for “agitating” the crowd.

“We were just standing there. We were told that many people told them we were agitating,” she says. “He brought two cops with him. I think one of them was trans, which really tracks with this mentally ill Democrat convention.”

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.

​Bobby pulido, Democrat, James talarico, Planned parenthood, Sara gonzales, Texas, Texas democrat convention, Sara gonzales unfiltered 

On Thursday, Apple raised prices on basically every Mac, every iPad, the HomePod, the Apple TV, and the Vision Pro. Not a refresh-with-new-specs bump where they hand you a faster chip to soften the blow, but a global markup on hardware that didn’t change, live on the store the same morning. Apple’s stock fell 6.1%, its worst single day since April 2025.

The same day, Microsoft raised Xbox prices for the third time in 13 months.

Apple put the blame squarely on ‘the rapid expansion of AI data centers.’

I’ve been telling you that you’re already paying for the AI boom. You just weren’t getting an itemized bill.

Back in May, the evidence was your electricity. Residential power prices are up roughly 30% since 2020, and they climb worse the closer you live to a data center. The point I kept hammering was simple: The cost of this build-out doesn’t stay in Silicon Valley. It gets pushed downstream, onto you.

What actually got more expensive

The numbers tell it better than I can. Here’s the Apple damage:

Table by Josh Centers for Blaze Media

A fully loaded 16-inch MacBook Pro now tops out at $10,149.00. Five figures for a laptop. Apple’s short reign as the best value computer manufacturer is over.

Cook called it a ‘hundred-year flood’

Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal last week that Apple couldn’t keep shielding customers from what’s happening to component costs. He called it “a hundred-year flood” and said that in more than 40 years, he had never seen anything like it in any corner of the business.

Apple’s own statement ran in the same direction: It says component costs have spiked farther and faster than anything it has dealt with before, and it put the blame squarely on “the rapid expansion of AI data centers.”

Here’s the thing about that. When Apple tells you it can’t absorb a cost, believe it. This is the company with the most ruthless supply chain on Planet Earth, the one that squeezes suppliers for sport and gets first dibs on every new chip node. If Apple is raising your prices, the problem isn’t Apple being greedy this quarter. It’s a tell. The squeeze is real enough that even the apex predator is passing it down the food chain.

Xbox and the part that should make you mad

Microsoft’s hike lands August 1: A hundred bucks more on the 512GB consoles, $150 more on the 1TB models, and the 2TB version gets killed off entirely. The flagship Series X with a disc drive jumps to $800. It was $650 not that long ago.

Now, the first two Xbox hikes, back in May and September 2025, were about tariffs. Microsoft danced around it the second time with “changes in the macroeconomic environment,” but everybody knew what that meant. This time, Microsoft came right out and said console storage and memory are up 2.5x since October and the company expects those costs to double again by the fall of 2027. The story shifted from politics to physics.

And consoles are the worst possible place for this to hit, because of something most people don’t know: Microsoft sells the box at a loss. The whole model is to eat that loss up front and make it back on games, accessories, and Game Pass subscriptions over the life of the machine. So a memory spike doesn’t shave a margin here. It blows a hole in one.

RELATED: People still nagging you to get an Apple laptop? This news might silence them once and for all.

SvetaZi/Getty Images

Which brings us to the detail that tells you everything you need to know about where we are: buy now, pay later.

Microsoft is rolling out interest-free installments so you can finance an Xbox. Amazon is offering up to 12-month payment plans. The companies are rolling out a layaway program for a video game console and calling it a feature.

Follow the money, and you land on Micron

Micron just reported that quarterly revenue more than quadrupled. Its gross margin went from 39% a year ago to 84.9%. That’s fatter than Nvidia or Meta.

Memory makers are shoveling production toward high-bandwidth memory, the stuff that goes into AI servers, because that’s where the desperate, bottomless money is right now. Every wafer that becomes an HBM stack for some hyperscaler’s GPU cluster is a wafer that doesn’t become the plain old DRAM in your laptop or the storage in your kid’s Xbox. Consumer hardware and AI infrastructure are now fighting over the same finite supply, and consumer hardware is losing.

You’re not imagining the squeeze. You’re funding it. A video game console is now a layaway purchase in the same week a memory chipmaker posts a margin north of 80%. The money didn’t vanish. It just changed hands on the way to your living room.

This is the bubble, and you’re the collateral

Earlier, I wrote that the AI bubble wouldn’t burst with a headline. It would burst with a memo. A canceled license, a quiet budget revision, a company sheepishly rationing the miracle tool it told you would change everything.

This is the flip side of that exact coin.

Even as companies start trimming their AI spending behind closed doors, the hardware build-out they already committed to is still out there vacuuming up components by the trainload. The data centers are under construction. The memory orders are placed. And the bill for all of it lands on you, at the Apple Store, at the GameStop checkout, whether or not the AI revolution ever actually pays off the way they promised.

That’s the part that ought to bother you. Nobody asked if you wanted to subsidize this. You just woke up Thursday and the MacBook your kid needs for the fall semester costs $200 more than it did Wednesday, the Xbox now ships with a financing plan, and somewhere a server farm is coming online that will consume more power than a small city.

It’s not over, and they told you so

Apple all but announced the next round. iPhone increases are coming, probably aimed at the Pro models where buyers don’t flinch at a hundred bucks. Bloomberg Intelligence figures a $100 bump covers 78% of the added cost. There’s also a foldable model expected to clear $2,000. John Ternus inherits the whole memory mess on September 1 when he takes over as CEO.

And it isn’t just Apple bracing you for more. At the ISC 2026 conference, Lenovo warned, half in jest but pointedly, that memory prices have entered a structural climb that won’t reverse to early-2025 levels even as Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron race to add capacity and that high DRAM and NAND prices will become the “new normal” in 2030 and beyond. An actual hardware maker is now telling its own customers to budget for pricier PCs, consoles, and phones straight through the end of the decade.

The through-line of everything I’ve written on this is one ugly sentence: The era of cheap, open, owner-controlled personal computing is closing, and AI is the thing closing it. Not with a ban. Not with a law. With a price tag, applied a little at a time, until one Thursday you look up and the floor has moved out from under you.

The hardware is all still for sale. You just can’t afford as much of it as you could last year. And next year you’ll afford less.

And if you were planning to do what I told you in May — buy your own hardware, run your own models, stop renting intelligence from a company that loses money on you — here’s the bad news. That hardware runs on the same memory everyone is now fighting over. The DRAM, the storage, the GPU you would buy to own your compute is exactly what is spiking. The escape hatch is closing.

Buy what you actually need now. It is not getting cheaper.

​Tech 

Philadelphia Police have issued arrest warrants for a pair of 16-year-old males in connection with the murder of a Penn State University senior less than a month ago.

The teens — Kaiseem Smith and Azzubair Outen-Fleming — are wanted for murder and related offenses, and police are urging those with information to contact their tip line at 215-686-TIPS (8477), WTXF-TV reported.

‘They don’t deserve to get to walk away from what they did.’

Billy Schmidt, 22, was fatally shot around 1:30 a.m. June 6 in the 1900 block of Durfor Street in South Philadelphia, WPVI-TV reported.

The shooting occurred just blocks from his home in what his family has said may have been an armed robbery attempt, WTXF added.

Neighbors provided police with surveillance video that showed the moments just before gunfire erupted, WTXF reported, adding that Schmidt in the video can be heard asking for his phone back.

More from WTXF:

Police say the suspects were seen in the area of 20th Street between Ritner and Jackson streets before the shooting, and last seen near 22nd and Porter streets. One suspect is described as approximately 5 feet 8 inches tall with braided hair, wearing a gray “KONFUSED” brand hoodie with skulls and crossbones and a black mask. The second suspect, believed to be the shooter, is between 5 feet 3 inches and 5 feet 5 inches tall and was wearing all black with a camouflage face mask.

After the shooting, police say the suspects got rid of their masks and hoodies and were seen in white T-shirts.

“We are heartbroken over the tragic death of William Schmidt, and we share our deepest condolences with his family and friends,” Penn State officials said in a statement, according to WTXF.

RELATED: Penn State senior shot dead just yards from his family’s South Philly home — after thugs apparently stole his phone

Schmidt had been studying digital journalism and media and was planning to graduate in December, WTXF added.

The City of Philadelphia is offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, WTXF reported.

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

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​Philadelphia, Murder, Fatal shooting, Billy schmidt, Suspects named, Arrest warrants, Penn state university, Crime 

Those license plate cameras hanging over highways and intersections are no longer just reading plates.

New technology now allows some of them to detect the electronic devices traveling with you: your phone, smartwatch, Bluetooth headphones, infotainment system, AirTags, and even some pet trackers.

Collect enough data points, and it becomes possible to identify where someone works, where they live, and who they regularly travel with.

In other words, the goal is no longer simply to identify your car. It’s to identify you. And most drivers have no idea this capability already exists.

Easy reader

Most Americans are familiar with Automatic License Plate Readers. Police departments, toll authorities, and private companies have used them for years. They photograph license plates, log the time and location, and store that information in massive databases.

These systems were originally sold as tools to find stolen vehicles and assist in Amber Alerts. But the databases have grown enormously, storing billions of scans and increasingly being used for purposes far beyond their original mission. Civil liberties groups have been raising concerns about that expansion for years.

According to Flock Safety, one of the largest providers of these systems, its cameras capture multiple frames of video and use motion detection to identify vehicles. The company says it does not use facial recognition technology and that its cameras are not designed to identify individuals.

Yet that distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

ALPR cameras use optical character recognition technology to convert license plate images into digital text and compare that information against databases of vehicles of interest. Increasingly, however, the cameras are doing much more than simply reading plates.

Electronic fingerprint

Now, here’s where things get serious.

A defense contractor called Leonardo has been promoting a system called SignalTrace. It turns license plate cameras into advanced vehicle-tracking technology by combining plate information with signals transmitted by nearby electronic devices.

Even if you never gave permission for anyone to access your phone, smartwatch, Bluetooth devices, or your vehicle’s Wi-Fi system.

SignalTrace is essentially an add-on sensor that can be attached to existing license plate cameras. Instead of simply reading a plate, it searches for wireless signals coming from nearby devices: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, RFID, and other identifiers.

Drive past one of these systems and it may detect the electronic signatures coming from your phone, smartwatch, Bluetooth headphones, infotainment system, AirTags, tire-pressure sensors, or other connected devices.

The system then links those electronic identifiers to a license plate. Leonardo calls this your “electronic fingerprint.”

In plain English, the goal is to connect vehicles with the electronic devices and people associated with them.

May the Fourth be with you

According to documentation referenced by multiple publications, SignalTrace isn’t limited to roadside cameras. The technology can also be deployed in parking garages, transportation hubs, event venues, and other public locations where wireless devices are present.

That means these systems can continue gathering information even when a vehicle isn’t the primary focus.

This raises two obvious questions.

First: Who controls the information about where you go and what devices you carry with you?

And second: How much of this surveillance is consistent with Americans’ expectations of privacy?

Privacy advocates argue that technologies like this raise serious Fourth Amendment concerns because they allow governments to collect detailed information about people’s movements and associations without individualized suspicion or a warrant.

Modern problems

That debate is only becoming more important as vehicles themselves become increasingly connected.

Modern cars already collect enormous amounts of information, including location data, driving behavior, route histories, voice commands, vehicle diagnostics, and in some cases information gathered through interior cameras and driver-monitoring systems.

Critics worry that systems like SignalTrace add yet another layer to an already expanding data ecosystem.

Most drivers don’t realize that they don’t fully control much of the information their vehicles generate. Manufacturers often determine who can access that data, whether it can be shared, and how long it is retained.

Now, layer SignalTrace on top of all that.

Not only can manufacturers collect information from connected vehicles, but external surveillance systems may now be able to detect the devices you bring into the car and tie those identifiers directly to your license plate.

Over time, that creates a remarkably detailed picture of your movements and routines.

RELATED: The latest ‘solution’ to reckless driving could limit freedom for all of us

United Archives/Getty Images

Pattern of life

Privacy experts often refer to this as “pattern of life” surveillance. Collect enough data points, and it becomes possible to identify where someone works, where they live, who they regularly travel with, and even sensitive locations they frequently visit.

Leonardo says the technology captures identifiers and frequencies, not the contents of calls or messages. That may be technically true. But once detailed information exists inside a database, history shows that its use often expands over time.

So what does this mean for ordinary drivers?

It means the privacy expectations many Americans still have on public roads may be changing quickly.

It means the data ecosystem surrounding your vehicle is becoming larger and more interconnected.

And it means lawmakers need to have serious conversations about who can collect this information, how long it can be stored, and what can be done with it.

I’m not saying every police department will abuse these capabilities tomorrow. But once the technology exists and the infrastructure is already in place, the temptation to use it more broadly becomes very real.

We’ve seen that happen with other surveillance tools.

Protect yourself

So what can you do right now?

First, familiarize yourself with your vehicle’s privacy and data settings. Many cars allow you to disable certain forms of data sharing or location tracking.Second, be mindful of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. If you’re not using them, consider turning them off. These are precisely the types of signals systems like SignalTrace are designed to detect.Third, if you use AirTags, fitness trackers, or pet trackers, understand that those devices can also become part of your electronic footprint.Fourth, when you sell or trade your vehicle, factory-reset the infotainment system and remove all paired devices. Many people leave enormous amounts of personal information behind without realizing it.Finally, support serious data-privacy legislation and efforts to give consumers greater control over the information their vehicles generate.

Because technologies like this rarely arrive with a major announcement.

They appear quietly in police budgets, vendor contracts, and infrastructure projects.

And by the time most people notice, the system is already in place.

Bottom line: Your car is supposed to work for you, not the other way around. When surveillance systems start linking your license plate to the devices you carry every day, it’s worth paying attention — and asking some hard questions before these technologies become the new normal.

I’ll keep watching this space and bringing you updates as more departments adopt or test these systems. And I’ll let you know about the wins too.

If you’re wondering, “Where are all these cameras?” you will be shocked. Check out websites like deflock.org, an open-source project mapping license plate readers. Or look on eyesonflock.com, an aggregating Flock Safety Transparency Portal data, and haveibeenflocked.com, where you can enter your plate number to find out more.

​Airtags and trackers, Connected vehicles, Data control, Fourth amendment, License plate cameras, Privacy concerns, Surveillance systems, Electronic fingerprint, Tech, Flock cameras, Leonardo, Signaltrace, Automotive 

A new report from Punchbowl News has revealed new details about the recent hospitalization of longtime Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Last month, news broke that McConnell was hospitalized on June 14. Spokesperson David Popp released a statement that day that said little more than that the senator had been “admitted to the hospital” and that he was “receiving excellent care.”

The dispatcher requests ‘ALS’ services, which Thompson said referred to ‘Advanced Life Support.’

No updates have been released in the weeks since. However, a Punchbowl News report released Wednesday revealed that McConnell was “unconscious” when first responders were sent to his home in Washington, D.C.

The report cited an emergency dispatch recording shared on X by D.C. journalist Desirée Thompson. Thompson claimed the recording came from “Washington, D.C., Fire and EMS dispatch.”

On the recording, the dispatcher requests “ALS” services, which Thompson said referred to “Advanced Life Support.” The dispatcher also notes that the emergency relates to someone who is “unconscious.”

Blaze News reached out to McConnell’s office to confirm that the senator had been unconscious at the time and to learn the current status of his condition and whether he has been discharged from the hospital. The office did not respond.

RELATED: Longtime GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell hospitalized

Photo dated June 1, 2026, featuring Sens. Mitch McConnell and Jim Justice of West Virginia; Nathan Posner/Anadolu/Getty Images

Punchbowl News reported that multiple senators, including Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), have claimed to have spoken with McConnell. Thune said the day after McConnell’s hospitalization that McConnell remained “dialed in to what’s going on” in the Senate.

Thune’s office did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News about whether he has been in touch with McConnell since that time.

McConnell’s health has been the subject of concern for years. The 84-year-old has apparently frozen up, tripped, fallen down stairs, and used a wheelchair on multiple occasions, including in early June. Back in February, he checked himself in to a hospital after experiencing “flu-like symptoms.”

About 10 days before his latest hospitalization, a noticeably frail-looking McConnell required assistance from two men as he made his way through the U.S. Capitol to vote on a reconciliation bill, a photo showed. His most recent message on X was posted on June 12.

McConnell announced in early 2025 that he would not seek another term.

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​Mitch mcconnell, Kentucky, Politics 

The Supreme Court’s decision in the birthright citizenship case cannot be sugarcoated: It is a disaster.

Illegal immigration drives many of the problems that afflict the nation — cultural decline, political brinkmanship, the rise of socialist and communist policies, social fragmentation, strained schools and hospitals, and damage to the job market, to name only a few.

Getting back on track requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement to focus resources on targets and operations that can yield large numbers of removals.

But birthright citizenship adds a uniquely destructive incentive. It rewards illegal immigration itself by bestowing sacred American citizenship on the children of people who should not be here in the first place.

Birthright citizenship creates a multiplier effect. It turns one act of illegality into a generational claim on the country. To put it in terms some of my more interventionist friends may understand, the proponents of illegal immigration have secured state-sanctioned weapons of mass reproduction.

Even after this setback, much can be done to mitigate the damage. Fortunately, the solution is not only politically viable; it was promised.

The solution is mass deportation, now with a particular focus on illegal aliens who are expectant parents or already have children.

The Supreme Court’s ruling does nothing to grant amnesty to the parents of would-be citizens if those parents are here illegally. Deporting expectant parents shuts off birthright citizenship before it happens.

For illegal aliens who already have children with ill-gotten birthright citizenship, the parents should be deported with their illegal-alien family unit. They can choose to abandon their children in the United States, which would be a condemnable moral failure, or take their children with them.

To make things easier, the Oversight Project has already put together the “Keeping Families Together Plan: How to Deport After the Birthright Citizenship Case.”

The administration remains far off target on fulfilling its mass-deportation agenda. The numbers are not there. Getting back on track requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement to focus resources on targets and operations that can yield large numbers of removals.

That means high-density enforcement.

Worksite enforcement against illegal labor operations at Republican-protected sanctuary farms, factories, and industrial hubs would produce large numbers of arrests and deportations. Enforcement at high-density physical locations obviously yields more results than chasing one alien at a time.

This is not happening at the necessary scale because the special-interest lobby supporting these industries is a major financial backer of the Republican Party.

But as far as I know, no special-interest lobby for the parents of anchor babies funds Republican elections. I have been surprised before, but this should be an easier political fight.

RELATED: 1776, not 1608: What the Supreme Court got wrong on birthright citizenship

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call Inc./Getty Images

It has been difficult to persuade the Trump administration to turn fully toward worksite enforcement. Perhaps the outrage over the Supreme Court’s decision can now be channeled into concrete action to mitigate the damage.

If the court had ruled the other way, presumably these removals would already be happening. If birthright citizenship for illegal aliens is truly the civilizational threat its critics claim it is, then the Trump administration must use every available tool to address it even under this now seemingly permanent constitutional framework.

Other steps will be necessary to address birthright citizenship gained through means other than crossing the border illegally. Temporary visitors and birth tourism should be targeted. So should more exotic abuses, such as a communist Chinese billionaire allegedly mailing sperm to California to impregnate women and produce American-citizen children for him.

There is no shortage of mitigating measures available: tightening rules for temporary visitors, banning birth tourism, and perhaps even banning the use of the mail system for communist Chinese sperm.

For those here illegally, the answer is more straightforward.

The Trump administration should fall back in love with its signature campaign promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.

Illegal aliens cannot have anchor babies here if they are deported first.

The solution is sitting right in front of us.

Mass deportation.

​Birthright citizenship, Scotus, Supreme court, Trump, 14h amendment, Amnesty, Oversight project, Mass deportation, Visas, Opinion & analysis 

President Donald Trump spoke candidly about his rallies that used the hit “Y.M.C.A.” song after the death of one of the Village People.

Trump said the song became a big hit once again after he started using it, which began during his 2020 presidential campaign.

‘There’s nothing gay about that.’

Campaign stops and anti-lockdown protests that featured the “Y.M.C.A.” song — as the president did his signature dance — made the Village People’s hit synonymous with Trump rallies.

On Tuesday morning, just one day before his 75th birthday, Village People co-founder and Texas native Victor Willis passed away.

“It is with profound sadness that I must announce the death of my husband, VICTOR WILLIS,” wife Karen Huff-Willis wrote on Facebook, per CBS News.

Willis’ wife described his death as the result of “a short, but aggressive illness” and requested privacy.

Trump was quick to offer his condolences early in the morning on Wednesday, taking to Truth Social to post kind words about the disco singer.

“He was a great and happy guy who loved that I used his groups song, YMCA, at my Rallies,” Trump wrote. “It became a ‘monster’ hit, again, 30 years after its original launch. Many singers and groups wanted to get on board at the Rallies after all of the Rally Attendance Records were set – The crowds were, and are, enormous – But Victor and the group was there for us right from the beginning!”

RELATED: How an NYC socialite’s riches preserve America’s beautiful, bustling past

Gari Garaialde/Redferns

Willis described in late 2024 how financially beneficial the re-emergence of the song had been, saying on his social media page that the boost from Trump had “been great.”

“Y.M.C.A. is estimated to gross several million dollars since the President Elect’s continued use of the song. Therefore, I’m glad I allowed the President Elect’s continued use of Y.M.C.A. And I thank him for choosing to use my song,” Willis wrote.

Trump continued on Wednesday, saying of the Village People, “They loved the action, and we loved them and their great and uplifting song.”

The president concluded, “We will think of Victor every time YMCA is played, like today, and all throughout this July Fourth Birthday week. My condolences to his wonderful family and group, Victor Willis will be sorely missed.”

RELATED: ‘They’re animals’: Trump UNLOADS on ‘godless Communists’ taking over the Democratic Party

While it has been widely assumed “Y.M.C.A.” is about gay men and has been colloquially referred to as the gay national anthem, Willis denied this and said the song was simply about hanging out with friends.

Particularly, Willis stated the line “You can hang out with all the boys” was “simply 1970s black slang for black guys hanging out together for sports, gambling or whatever. There’s nothing gay about that.”

Three Village People albums went platinum in the U.S.: “Macho Man,” “Cruisin’,” and “Go West.”

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​Politics, Trump, Ymca, News 

The 2024 U.K. general election surprised a lot of people, not least the Labour Party itself.

Sir Keir Starmer did not so much come to power with a mandate from the electorate as benefit from Britain’s absurd first-past-the-post voting system. Labour secured a massive 174-seat majority on just 33.7% of the vote.

Apparently, a 16-year-old is wise enough to choose the next government, but a 15-and-a-half-year-old is too fragile to look at a meme on X without state intervention.

This “loveless landslide,” as it has been called, happened because everyone was fed up with the Conservatives pretending to be conservative while presiding over record immigration and historically high taxes, while the emerging Reform Party split the vote on the right.

Look back in anger

Brits tend to vote tactically. Voting in this country is about getting rid of someone you hate or voting for someone you hate a bit less to prevent someone you hate a lot more from gaining power.

When he stood on the steps of Downing Street almost two years ago, Starmer declared that the country had voted for “change.” And change the country he did. To paraphrase Churchill, never in the field of politics have so few done so much to make life worse for so many. The prime minister and his Cabinet of credentialed ideological clones immediately set about dismantling the British state. We went from 14 years of chaotic Conservative rule to managed decline overseen by a man so dull he had to beg his shadow to follow him.

Admittedly, he did unite the country — against him.

Within the space of two years, Starmer’s blend of technocratic managerialism and authoritarian overreach had alienated and enraged just about everyone. He was so unpopular that he was even hated by people who didn’t know he existed; people heard the name or saw his face and seemed ready to spontaneously combust with rage.

Ultimately, he did the right thing and resigned on June 22. Ironically, it was only during his resignation speech that he actually showed some genuine human emotion. When his successor, generally considered to be Andy Burnham, takes up the role — the seventh PM in a decade — the revolving door of people fighting for the front seat of a clown car continues.

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Starmer’s final, desperate attempt to manufacture a legacy before leaving Number 10 was his sweeping social media ban for under-16s. Not content with alienating a generation of working-class voters, he apparently wanted to ensure that the youngest demographic would grow up hating Labour as well.

Just two years ago, Starmer resisted calls to ban children from having smartphones and using social media. So the about-face is nothing new to a man who has changed his mind on dozens of government policies. The former prime minister has made so many U-turns that the clown car is doing donuts at the circus.

According to statements he made during his Downing Street press conference, Starmer took a more draconian approach after meeting with bereaved parents and after evaluating evidence from Australia, which became the first Western country to ban children from social media in December 2025. From early next year, the age limit will be raised from 13 to 16 on platforms including Snapchat, Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Naturally, children were positively overwhelmed with joy by the news that the state was going to become their new moral guardian. When the BBC visited a school to gauge the reaction of under-16s to being kicked off “the socials,” they spoke to a few who agreed with the ban, but they also met a teenager named Isabella. After she revealed that her weekend screen time was nine hours, the reporter asked what she would do with all that sudden time.

In classic British fashion, she deadpanned straight to camera: “Stare at a wall.”

It was a wonderfully sarcastic, meme-ready response that instantly went viral.

RELATED: Britain is paying the price for years of woke ideology

JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images

‘Sheer hypocrisy’

If Andy Burnham becomes prime minister and proceeds to enforce this ban, he will inherit a generation of young people whose first political memory is of a government that exists largely to take things away.

The sheer hypocrisy of the policy is staggering. This is, after all, the exact same Keir Starmer who championed lowering the voting age to 16, solemnly declaring that young people were mature enough to help decide the future of the United Kingdom. Apparently, a 16-year-old is wise enough to choose the next government, but a 15-and-a-half-year-old is too fragile to look at a meme on X without state intervention.

No thought has been put into this ban. The legislation excludes WhatsApp and Signal — so the state’s big-brained solution to online safety prevents a teenager from posting a photo of his friends on a public feed, yet happily lets him participate in group chats with hundreds of peers, swapping the exact same content totally off the regulatory radar.

Besides, kids are not as stupid as we think; they are light-years ahead of tech regulation. Recently a study commissioned by online safety charity the Molly Rose Foundation exposed the reality of these policies. The study — the first to examine teen social media use under a blanket ban — found that 61% of Australian 12- to 15-year-olds who previously had accounts still maintained access to at least one platform.

Don’t get me wrong: Social media is a sewer, overrun with self-righteous liberals and narcissistic attention-seekers posting slop, but it’s an easy target for policymakers. Not everything is the fault of social media. This is a moral panic, a headline-grabbing stunt parading as child protection. Social media platforms, like video games before them and horror movies before that, have simply become the latest scapegoat for wider social problems.

I sympathize deeply with the frustration and anguish felt both by teachers and grieving parents, but child-rearing should not be outsourced to the state any more than the government should declare a national bedtime. It’s a parent’s responsibility to bring up children, not the state’s. If Labour thinks Parliament can legislate a tech-savvy generation into staring at a wall, lawmakers are about to find out exactly how tactical the next electorate can be.

​Andy burnham, Keir starmer, Labour party, Nanny state, United kingdom, Voting age, Lifestyle, Social media ban, Letter from the uk 

While three major socialist victories occurred in New York City this month, the rise of this anti-American movement is not confined to New York — and could spread across the country if left unchecked.

“They’re extremists. They’re so dangerous to our country. How did they do it?” BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler begins on “The Liz Wheeler Show.”

However, Wheeler points out that there is good news — they “can be stopped.”

“It doesn’t necessarily require the cooperation of the do-nothing Republicans in the United States Congress. President Trump can take action himself,” she says.

Wheeler explains that first, Trump “must defund” any college or university that “indoctrinates youth in anti-American ideology.”

“Even private schools, by the way, this doesn’t just apply to state schools. Even private schools accept federally subsidized student loans and research grants from the federal government. Cut it all,” she says.

“The second thing that we need to do is we need to prosecute individuals who indoctrinate kids with communism,” she continues.

“Some people are going to accuse me of wanting McCarthyism 2.0. Yeah, that sounds like a good start. Prosecute them,” she adds.

The third thing Trump can do to stop the wave of Marxists infiltrating the U.S. government is to report those individuals who celebrate tragedies like the murder of Charlie Kirk.

“Tell their parents, report them to their school, to their employer. Make that follow them in our society. It’s not cancel culture. It’s self-defense,” Wheeler says.

“And the fourth thing, infiltrate the radical terrorist groups that are such a looming threat to our country. We just learned … that the ring leader who plotted the mass terror attack that was, thank goodness, thwarted against UFC Freedom 250 at the White House, was an illegal alien,” she explains.

“Infiltrate the radical terrorist groups, the radical trans terrorist groups, specifically the BLM, racial Marxist groups, Antifa, Soros, Roy Singham-funded groups, and break them up because they are the enforcement arm of the ideology embraced by this terrible trio,” she continues.

The fifth thing, Wheeler explains, is that K-12 public schools should have a pro-American, pro-Western civilization, and pro-Christian curriculum.

“So that these children are not vulnerable to the indoctrination of university, so that they’re not prepped and primed and halfway indoctrinated by the time they even get there,” Wheeler says.

“I make this list because it’s important that we understand how this was done in New York City … and that it is a significant threat not just in New York but in cities and states all across the country,” she adds.

Want more from Liz Wheeler?

To enjoy more of Liz’s based commentary, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Liz wheeler, Democrats, Communism, Mccarthyism, Socialism, Donald trump, Marxism, The liz wheeler show, Conservatives, Zohran mamdani 

Many people have turned away from cigarettes in recent years, opting for “healthier,” smokeless alternatives.

And now the Food and Drug Administration has effectively backed up the claim by changing its regulations — for a crowd-favorite brand, no less.

‘Using ZYN instead of cigarettes puts you at a lower risk of mouth cancer, heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis.’

On Tuesday, the FDA updated its regulations of ZYN nicotine pouches so that the products can be marketed with language suggesting that ZYN, made by Swedish Match USA Inc., is indeed healthier — or are at least less harmful — than cigarettes, as many people might have suspected.

Specifically, the FDA says the label can say: “Using ZYN instead of cigarettes puts you at a lower risk of mouth cancer, heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis.”

RELATED: WARNING: Nicotine may cause focus, motivation, and joie de vivre (which is why they hate it)

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

“FDA’s decision is an important moment for the more than 45 million legal-age nicotine consumers in America,” Philip Morris U.S. CEO Stacey Kennedy said in a statement obtained by CNBC. “Today’s news ensures these adults have access to accurate, science-based information, including FDA-authorized evidence that switching from cigarettes to ZYN reduces the risk of smoking-related diseases like heart disease and lung cancer.”

The new regulation will apply to 10 flavors of the original product line at two different strengths, three milligrams and six milligrams.

The flavors are chill, cinnamon, citrus, coffee, cool mint, menthol, peppermint, smooth, spearmint, and wintergreen.

It apparently does not, however, apply to ZYN’s new flavors, peach, black cherry, and dragonberry, which were teased on ZYN’s Instagram page last month.

“FDA’s review of modified risk products is intended to ensure that adult users have clear, science-based information about the relative harms of tobacco products, so they can make informed choices,” Bret Koplow, acting director of the agency’s Center for Tobacco Products, said in a statement obtained by The Hill.

“Today’s decision allows these products to be marketed with a modified risk claim that informs adults who smoke about the lower risks associated with these products,” Koplow added.

It is important to note that this regulatory update is a marketing authorization, not an “FDA-approval.” The FDA says that “no tobacco product is safe” and instead deals in terms of “relative risk.”

According to the FDA’s website, the application to gain this marketing authorization “must demonstrate that the product will significantly reduce harm and the risk of tobacco-related disease to individual tobacco users and benefit the health of the population as a whole.”

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​Cigarettes, Zyn, Fda, Politics 

This week while dining at a McDonald’s in South Burlington, Vermont, I went to the men’s room — and for a split second thought I’d entered a wormhole to the 1990s.

Did you ever go to a dance club that was illuminated by black-light bulbs? You know, the ones that glow purple-blue and make dirt and dandruff stand out like Christmas tree lights on your shirt?

My business partner and I were thrown out of a popular chain music supply store by three stoop-shouldered men in their 20s because we refused to wear masks.

That’s what it looked like. It was so dim I could barely navigate to the sink. I glanced up at the ceiling fixtures and sure enough, the bulbs were all dim blue. Why?

The answer will tell you all you need to know about how far my state has fallen.

Sugar crash

Consider this a companion piece to my recent article about sugar heiress Electra Havemeyer Webb and the priceless collection of American art, architecture, and industry she bequeathed to the people of the Green Mountain State.

I’m sorry to report that Mrs. Webb’s 39-acre park of wonders is an island of civility and charm losing its shoreline to blight, criminality, and despair. The same can be said of the other remaining pockets of old Vermont still hanging on.

At first, that men’s room was more puzzling than depressing. I’ve never seen a McDonald’s with a “sci-fi dystopia” decor before.

Then it hit me: This must be one of the gratingly permanent neurotic hangers-on from the days of COVID. Of course!

If such a conclusion would have never occurred to you, you must live in a red state. Or at least one of the relatively saner blue states of the northern plains.

If so, let me explain what those of us in deep Democrat territory lived through during COVID.

New England breakdown

Here in New England, the entire region went clinically insane. Everything shut down. Elderly men wearing masks outdoors on city streets screamed (yes, vocally screamed), “WHERE’S YOUR MASK?!” at people like me who went barefaced on Main Street in January.

People were thrown out of urgent care waiting rooms for not being vaccinated. A doctor implied she would report me to the state health board because I would not promise her that I would obey the governor’s self-quarantine order simply because I visited my family at Christmas.

My business partner and I were thrown out of a popular chain music supply store by three stoop-shouldered men in their 20s because we refused to wear masks. Then the restaurant across the street threw us out for the same reason, while mothers actually clutched their children to their bosom and stared at us as if we were muggers.

Yes, I know this sounds like something out of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” but I’m telling the truth. All of this really happened, and almost everyone went along with it.

Germ warfare

Today, six years later, the neurosis of that era has become the “new normal.” While the incidence has decreased, you still see people every day wearing masks outdoors on the street or alone in their cars. The post office in South Burlington still has not taken down its jury-rigged plexiglass barriers between the counter worker and the customer. The all-caps sign ordering you to STAND HERE is still there.

So naturally I thought the bulbs in the McDonald’s were meant to emit some kind of special germ-killing wavelength. Doesn’t that seem like something the geniuses who came up with all-day face diapers and “six feet apart” would suggest?

I drove 45 minutes home to the outskirts of Montpelier believing I’d figured it out. And then I did a little research.

The dim blue bulbs are not there to banish germs. They are installed to frustrate IV drug users by shining a light that makes it impossible to locate a blue vein under the skin. They are there to stop junkies from making the bathroom their private opium den or — should they overdose — their public deathbed.

“Officials in Philadelphia are handing out blue light bulbs because the glow supposedly masks the blue-tinted lines of veins — making it harder for intravenous drug users to find a vein,” National Public Radio’s Steve Inskeep intoned in 2019. That’s right, a full seven years ago.

You can find quite a bit of mainstream coverage of this phenomenon starting in about 2018. CBS News covered it in 2018, and so did Fortune magazine.

RELATED: How an NYC socialite’s riches preserve America’s beautiful, bustling past

Electra Havemeyer Webb. Slim Aarons/Getty Images; Background: Shelburne Museum

‘Symbolic violence’

And, from what I can tell, most of the more critical follow-up coverage only second-guessed this “important harm reduction measure” because it might make shooting up drugs more dangerous for the poor junkies. I couldn’t find any coverage that even mentioned the more important effect.

That more important effect is the degradation of civil society for normal, respectable people. The capitulation to the tyranny of junkies, criminals, and vagrants. We are a society that will not say: “No. You cannot make a place like McDonalds, which used to be a treat for children, into a no-go zone that arranges itself around the habits of low-lifes without doing a thing to make children and families feel welcome.”

Look at how an Inverse article criticized the blue lights. The article headline called the practice “symbolic violence.”

“But there are some huge problems with this approach,” author Peter Hess wrote. “Research has shown that drug users will still try to inject drugs in a blue-lit bathroom, even if it means they could accidentally miss their vein, which increases the risk of infection or soft tissue damage.”

Stand and fight

Pardon me for not giving a tinker’s damn if some addict gets soft-tissue damage. I’m part of the majority class of normal, productive citizens. We matter too. It is us and our families who pay the price for this, quite literally through taxes confiscated from us to give “safe injection spaces” for people who ought to be in a psychiatric ward. We’re paying a social and morale tax, too, as the world adds bumper cushions for the worst among us while telling law-abiding people to suck it up or get out.

This dystopia-in-a-bathroom story is just one symptom of an ongoing decline in areas governed by Democrats, progressives, and communists.

Burlington, Vermont, once a glittering city on the shores of Lake Champlain, is losing businesses in the tourist district because the city’s progressive mayor and her city council cry crocodile tears for the “unsheltered” community and refuse to hire enough police to crack down on open prostitution and drug crime.

My town, Montpelier, is barely holding on. The 19th-century Victorian Main Street is still there, but its charm is becoming blurrier and harder to see through the accumulation of graffiti, rutted streets, and open homeless encampments and drug dens in the alleys.

Whenever one writes an article like this, the most common reaction is, “Why don’t you just move, then?” My response: “Why don’t you stand and fight for the town you love?”

​Blue states, Burlington, Civil society, Communists, Covid, Homeless encampments, Lifestyle, Vermont, Woke, Intervention 

In the immediate wake of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination on Sept. 10, 2025, depraved leftists celebrated in classrooms, in town squares, online, and elsewhere.

Some of those who publicly relished the news of the young father’s murder were publicly shamed, received reprimands, or even lost their jobs.

‘I am very pleased.’

One such radical managed to turn her encounter with accountability into a major payday.

On Sept. 12, 2025, Tamar Shirinian, a Lebanese-born LGBT obsessive then working as an assistant anthropology professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, wrote in a Facebook comment about Kirk’s assassination, “The world is better off without him in it,” WVLT-TV reported.

“Even those who are claiming to be sad for his wife and kids … like, his kids are better off living in a world without a disgusting psychopath like him,” Shirinian apparently continued, “and his wife, well, she’s a sick f**k for marrying him so I don’t care about her feelings.”

The radical’s comment soon went viral, prompting a response by the university.

University of Tennessee Chancellor Donde Plowman notified the radical in a Sept. 15 letter that she was being placed on administrative leave pending termination proceedings, stressing that “violence on a university campus wounds the heart of our academic mission, and no statement endorsing a campus shooting can be acceptable to an institution.”

RELATED: Montreal shooter’s alleged manifesto calls for far-left communist totalitarianism, ‘revolutionary terror’

Trent Nelson/the Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images

“By celebrating violence and murder in your social media posts, you have violated the university’s expectations for the people teaching our students,” Plowman continued. “Your decision to post incendiary comments publicly at a time of heightened anxiety reveals that you do not have the competencies necessary to be an effective instructor.”

Plowman highlighted in a subsequent letter dated Sept. 16 the policies the radical had violated warranting her termination.

In her six-page response, Shirinian blamed her nasty comment on Charlie Kirk, claiming that she made the post after seeing one of the murdered man’s quips that had made her “quite emotional” and put her “in a state of grief.” After displacing blame, she proceeded to attack the dead man for several pages.

After attributing 11 other comments to Kirk that “disgusted” her, the foreign-born radical painted herself as the real victim, identifying hate mail messages she supposedly received and complaining about the backlash over her remarks.

Plowman wasn’t buying what Shirinian was selling and saw to the radical’s termination on Feb. 11, just weeks after Shirinian asked the UT Board of Trustees in a letter to reinstate her.

In the termination letter, Plowman wrote, “Your words celebrated a gruesome murder, which horrifically took place on a college campus similar to our own, and then went on to callously demean the grief and loss felt by the widow and young children of the victim while also mocking any grief felt by others who sympathized with the surviving family.”

“The antagonizing tenor of your words makes you a target for potential retributive violence that could put our students and faculty in harm’s way, as well as irreparably damage the public’s trust in our University,” Plowman continued. “I have a responsibility to minimize any such risks.”

Months earlier, however, Shirinian — who was apparently making around $92,000 a year as of January — sued the university, once again pushing her victim narrative and denigrating Charlie Kirk.

In addition to spending roughly nine pages complaining about various things Kirk said before he was murdered, the Oct. 29 lawsuit accused the university of violating Shirinian’s First Amendment rights by “retaliating against her as a professor in a public university for expressing political speech in a purely personal capacity.”

The case was supposed to go to trial In January 2027, but the university blinked.

The university has reached a $1.9 million settlement with Shirinian — a settlement which WBIR-TV reported was approved in a meeting of the UT Board of Trustees Audit and Compliance Committee on Monday.

John Compton, the chair of the board, suggested that continuing litigation would eat up valuable time, attention, and resources that would be better invested in advancing the university’s mission.

While the radical gets a big payday, she will not have her faculty position restored.

Robb Bigelow, Shirinian’s attorney, said the agreement was a “mutually acceptable resolution.”

“We think it recognizes the seriousness of the issues presented while avoiding the time, expense, and stress of continued litigation. We wish the University, its students, faculty, and staff nothing but success going forward,” Bigelow said.

“I am very pleased with the outcome,” Shirinian told WBIR.

The settlement must now be approved by the full UT Board of Trustees and the state, including Governor Bill Lee (R).

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​Charlie kirk, University of tennessee, Lawsuit, Politics, First amendment 

A 36-year-old mother was charged with manslaughter after her 18-month-old son died in April after choking on unpopped popcorn kernels at her Long Island apartment.

Prosecutors believe Olivia Bithorn was drinking vodka in the bathroom of her unit in Merrick after giving the bag of kernels to her son, Luke Russell Jr., and his 3-year-old sister.

‘Everyone in her life had basically written her off except her husband, who was … trying to make sure she had a place to live and was staying sober.’

The little girl alerted the mother after the boy became unresponsive.

“Her son was blue and cold to the touch,” said Nassau District Attorney Anne Donnelly, who appeared to get emotional at the details.

“They estimate, allegedly, he was dead for over an hour before 911 was called,” she added.

Donnelly said Bithorn was getting sick in the bathroom because she drank too much alcohol. An empty bottle of Tito’s vodka was found at the apartment.

“It’s an accident if you leave the room for a few minutes … but it’s criminal if you actually give your child these kernels to eat and not be present if something happens,” she added.

Prosecutors said Bithorn had a long history of alcohol abuse and put her children at risk because of her drinking problem. She cycled in and out of rehab programs for years, crashed a car, and even disappeared for three days at one point.

She had separated from her husband of three years while battling alcoholism.

“Everyone in her life had basically written her off except her husband, who was trying to, even though they’re separated, trying to make sure she had a place to live and was staying sober,” Donnelly added.

RELATED: Homeless man makes ‘horrific’ discovery near dumpster at Los Angeles parking lot, police say

Her estranged husband was in court but declined to comment as he left.

Merrick is a small hamlet of about 22,000 residents on the south shore of Long Island.

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​Alcoholism, Baby death, Choking, Long island, Manslaughter, Mother, Crime 

There are moments when an entire ideology reveals itself to the American public — not in a faculty seminar, not in a university land acknowledgment, not in a mandatory “inclusive excellence” module administered by a deputy assistant associate vice provost of DEI, but on a basketball court.

Caitlin Clark being struck in the throat by Alyssa Thomas was one of those moments.

DEI, whether it appears as decolonizing, social justice, critical race theory, BLM activism, or ‘inclusive excellence,’ is not a path to justice. It is a catechism of resentment.

The WNBA later decided the incident was a “non-basketball act,” a useful clarification for those of us who had not noticed that punching a player in the throat is not among the standard fundamentals of the game. Dribbling, passing, shooting, rebounding — yes. Throat strikes — apparently, no.

The referees, however, seemed to be conducting an advanced seminar in nonintervention. They saw nothing. Or more precisely, they saw what everyone else saw and did not think it required interruption.

The WNBA reviewed the play and assessed Thomas a Flagrant Foul 2 with a one-game suspension. Fever guard Sophie Cunningham has publicly said Clark is being targeted and that the league and refs are not protecting her. Meanwhile, Clark’s presence has coincided with major WNBA attendance and ratings growth.

This is where the Caitlin Clark story becomes larger than basketball.

For years, America’s universities have devoted themselves to replacing character formation with grievance formation. Students are taught, with all the solemnity of medieval theologians but none of the metaphysical seriousness, that the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed, privileged and marginalized, white and non-white.

Every inequality of outcome receives the same explanation: whiteness. Every frustration becomes resentment. Every failure gets assigned a villain.

This curriculum does not produce justice. It produces vice.

It teaches envy and calls it “equity.” It teaches resentment and calls it “consciousness.” It teaches contempt for one’s neighbor and calls it “liberation.” It tells young people that the chief moral fact about another person is skin color, then professes shock when people begin treating one another accordingly.

Enter Caitlin Clark.

The WNBA has long existed less as a product of overwhelming public demand than as an institutional cause. It was the league America was instructed to support. Like many progressive projects, it was sustained not by market interest but by moral instruction: Watch this. Celebrate this. Subsidize this. Affirm this.

Then, something embarrassing happened.

RELATED: The latest violent attack on Caitlin Clark exposes the WNBA’s real problem

Erica Denhoff/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

A player arrived whom the public actually wanted to see.

Clark did not require an ideological sales pitch. She did not need a campus office to explain her importance. She did not need a seminar on representation and patriarchy. She could shoot from the logo. She could pass as if she had seen the play unfold three seconds before everyone else. She brought eyes to the league, filled arenas, moved merchandise, and made casual fans care.

That is precisely the problem.

The DEI imagination can handle excellence only when it can be absorbed into its preferred categories. If Clark’s success could be explained as “white privilege,” the story would be safe. But basketball is a cruelly empirical game. The ball either goes in or it does not. The pass either arrives or it does not. The defense either stops her or it does not. No diversity consultant can revise the box score.

Clark’s excellence is infuriating because it is visible. It is not a theory, a grant proposal, or a paragraph in a strategic plan. It is the fruit of natural ability disciplined by relentless work.

Even family support, private schooling, and access to good coaching do not manufacture Caitlin Clark. They may provide opportunity. They do not produce logo threes, court vision, and competitive fire. Many athletes have access to lessons. Few can do what Clark does.

That fact is intolerable to a culture that has taught itself to scoff at diligence, fortitude, self-control, patience, hope, faith, and love. The old virtues are too demanding because they require personal responsibility. DEI prefers a more comforting doctrine: Your failures are someone else’s fault, your anger is moral insight, and your neighbor’s success is evidence of systemic injustice.

We have seen this moral theater before.

After George Floyd died under the knee of Derek Chauvin, the image played endlessly across America. Universities made it the centerpiece of institutional repentance. Faculty meetings became revival services for Black Lives Matter. Professors who had never shown much interest in moral absolutes suddenly discovered original sin, provided it could be located in “whiteness” rather than in the human heart.

The radicals had their icon. They had their liturgy. They had their marches. They had their administrative decrees.

But what happens when the image does not serve the approved narrative? What happens when the visible act is not a white officer restraining a black man but a black WNBA player striking a white superstar in the throat?

Suddenly, the moral machinery becomes less efficient. The referees miss it. The league responds later. The commentators explain. The defenders contextualize. The public is asked not to notice too much.

But we do notice.

We notice that Clark is not merely guarded. She is battered. We notice that punishment often comes after public outrage rather than during the game. We notice that the league seems oddly embarrassed by the very player who has made it more relevant than ever. We notice that when excellence appears in the wrong demographic package, the apostles of equity become strangely tolerant of abuse.

RELATED: Caitlin Clark gets fist to the throat as WNBA primed to explode: ‘She’s a straight white basketball player’

Justin Casterline/Getty Images

This does not mean every foul against Clark is a racial incident. Basketball is physical. Stars get hit. Great players attract aggressive defense.

But the pattern surrounding Clark has become hard to ignore, and so has the ideological atmosphere in which it is interpreted. When a society is trained to see whiteness as a moral defect, it should not be surprised when white excellence is treated as something to be punished rather than admired.

DEI has trained institutions to cultivate suspicion, bitterness, and selective compassion based on skin color and sexuality. It has trained people to blame their problems on abstractions rather than repent of their vices. It has trained the public to redistribute honor and resentment according to race.

Its hope is not in virtue but in power, not in truth but in control, not in love of neighbor but in the forced rearrangement of social goods around resentment.

Caitlin Clark has become the face of DEI abuse because she exposes the lie. She shows that excellence is not reducible to privilege. She shows that work counts. She shows that talent must be disciplined. She shows that the public will still respond to greatness when it sees it.

And for that, she must be punished.

The throat strike was not merely a foul. It was a parable. It showed what resentment does when it cannot refute excellence. It tries to silence it, intimidate it, and make it pay for existing.

We should learn the lesson. DEI, whether it appears as decolonizing, social justice, critical race theory, BLM activism, or “inclusive excellence,” is not a path to justice. It is a catechism of resentment.

It does not teach us to love our neighbor. It teaches us to hate by skin color.

The answer is public rejection of DEI in all its forms.

​Caitlin clark, Critical race theory, Equity, Opinion & analysis, Sophie cunningham, Whiteness, Wnba, Black lives matter, Racism, Diversity equity inclusion, Lesbians, Derek chauvin, George floyd 

Last week, the Supreme Court voted for the federal government’s ability to remove protections for citizens of Haiti and Syria — and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) isn’t having it.

“We saw today the Supreme Court make a decision that is putting so many people’s lives in jeopardy. And I just came back from a rally with 1199 as I stood alongside a number of Haitian New Yorkers who are concerned about what this means for their status in our city,” Mamdani began in a video statement.

“And frankly, this city, the one that we love, is one that has been built by so many from so many different parts of the world. And that includes our Haitian brothers and sisters, our Syrian brothers and sisters. And we stand here ready to be in solidarity with all of those who are concerned by today’s decision,” he said.

“Now, what that means when it comes to our city is if you are worried about what this means for your status, if you’re worried about what this means for your family, I would encourage you to call our Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs hotline,” he added.

“Notice when the Supreme Court goes on their side, you absolutely must positively follow it. But if it doesn’t go their way, well, then they have all kinds of NGOs that come out of the woodwork to subvert,” Glenn comments.

“Is New York part of the United States or not? Because I’m fine with it. Cut it off … not one federal dollar goes to New York City. I am fine with that,” he continues.

Glenn points out that behind Mamdani is a flag, but it’s not the American flag.

“I just saw a rainbow flag behind him … so he’s got that flag,” Glenn says, explaining that the mayor is threatening “rebellion.”

And President Donald Trump appears to be taking notice.

“The Communists are finally making their move. I’ve been waiting and preparing for this for a long time,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

“I mean, that makes me happy,” Glenn adds.

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​Glenn beck, Zohran mamdani, Supreme court, New york city, Immigration, Haiti, Syria, Asylum, The glenn beck program 

The Alaska Supreme Court has delivered the final blow to Republicans’ efforts to keep a Senate challenger by the same name as incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) off the ballot.

In a short order handed down Monday, the court affirmed a ruling from a superior court that Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. must appear on the Aug. 18 primary ballot for U.S. Senate.

‘The only reason he is running is to deceive voters and manipulate Alaska’s election system.’

“The 6/26/2026 order of the superior court directing the Division to include appellee Sullivan as a candidate for United States Senator on the primary election ballot is AFFIRMED,” the order said.

The court remanded the matter to the Division of Elections to determine how J. Sullivan should be listed on the primary ballot.

“A full opinion will be issued at a later date,” concluded the order.

Nate Adams, a spokesperson for Sen. Sullivan, released a statement on the ruling: “We’re disappointed in the court’s decision, because, as the sham candidate Dan J. Sullivan’s lawyers made clear in their legal arguments, the only reason he is running is to deceive voters and manipulate Alaska’s election system.”

“However, we are encouraged by the fact that the Director of the Division of Elections will be able to use her expertise to differentiate between the Petersburg fraud and the incumbent — Senator Dan Sullivan — to the benefit of Alaska voters,” Adams added.

J. Sullivan’s campaign expressed approval of the decision in a statement, saying, “We are grateful for the Alaska Supreme Court’s careful and timely attention to this important expedited matter, and its decision to affirm Judge Matthews’ well-reasoned, thorough order vacating the Division’s unlawful decision to exclude me as a candidate. We expect that the Division will act in full compliance with existing Alaska ballot design law in its preparation of the ballots.”

RELATED: Alaska court reinstates Senate candidate sharing incumbent’s name

A 69-year-old retired teacher, J. Sullivan reportedly registered as a Republican earlier this year and entered the race to oust Sen. Sullivan on May 29, just before the deadline for filing.

He has faced accusations from Sen. Sullivan of coordinating with Democrat operatives to sabotage the senator’s chances of re-election. Sen. Sullivan told CNN earlier this month that J. Sullivan’s candidacy was effectively a Democrat effort to “cheat” and confuse voters in order to increase Democrat challenger Mary Peltola’s odds of winning.

“Democrats recruited a guy by the name of Dan Sullivan. He is a liberal progressive. … He’s donated to Peltola,” Sen. Sullivan said.

He added, “His campaign logo, his letterhead, his website, all had my campaign logo that I’ve had for 13 years.”

In response to J. Sullivan’s candidacy, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Alaska Republican Party filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the state’s Division of Elections, respectively.

After Alaska Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (R) requested an investigation into J. Sullivan’s eligibility, Carol Beecher, the director of the Division of Elections, concluded that J. Sullivan had not filed a genuine “good-faith” candidacy and instead sought to confuse voters by placing two candidates with nearly identical names on the ballot.

J. Sullivan appealed the division’s decision to the Superior Court, where Judge Thomas Matthews affirmed that he met all the qualifying criteria set out by the Constitution and therefore Alaska could not impose an additional requirement on his candidacy. The court further concluded that J. Sullivan’s alleged motives or political affiliations did not bear on his constitutional eligibility to seek office.

The state appealed the decision to the Alaska Supreme Court, which again ruled in favor of J. Sullivan — officially solidifying his place on Alaska’s Aug. 18 nonpartisan primary ballot.

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​Dan sullivan, Us senate, Politics, Alaska 

An elderly Air Force veteran was assaulted, injured, and robbed after withdrawing cash from an ATM in Pearland, Texas, earlier this month — and cellphone video shows a juvenile taking the victim’s wallet.

A KHOU-TV video report shows the end of the June 19 attack outside a Walgreens, with the victim lying on the ground in a parking space in front of the store.

‘How scary!! I know where this was. I go there when I come into town. But …’

The 79-year-old veteran told the station he thought withdrawing cash from an ATM inside the store was safer. However, he added to KHOU that he suspects he was being watched.

The elderly victim told the station he was jumped as soon as he walked out of the store and that he’s thankful he suffered only minor injuries.

Pearland police on Tuesday confirmed that the suspect seen in a video the department took down from its Facebook page has been identified as a juvenile, and “the investigation is ongoing as officers work to take him into custody.”

Police added that the video was removed because the suspect is a juvenile.

Officers on June 19 responded to a robbery investigation at the Walgreens located in the 11600 block of Shadow Creek Parkway in Pearland, police said.

The investigation revealed that a 79-year-old man had just completed a cash withdrawal from a nearby ATM when he was returning to his vehicle, police said.

At that time, police said, an unidentified black male wearing a white shirt and black pants approached the man who had just withdrawn cash and assaulted him, causing bodily injury.

Police said the suspect stole the victim’s wallet and the cash he had just withdrawn.

Detectives soon identified and arrested two additional suspects involved in the robbery:

Donte Belle, 30, of Houston, was identified as the driver of the getaway vehicle, and he was charged with aggravated robbery, police said.Demondtra Moore, 23, of Houston, was identified as the alleged lookout, and he also was charged with aggravated robbery, police said.

The Special Investigations Unit of the Pearland Police Department’s Criminal Investigations Division is continuing to investigate this case, police said.

A handful of people commented on the KHOU video showing the end of the attack. The following are a few reactions:

“Throw those punks away,” one commenter said.”Damn, I wished that man was armed,” another user wrote.”How scary!! I know where this was. I go there when I come into town. But …,” another commenter exclaimed.

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​Aggravated robbery, Pearland, Texas, Atm, Walgreens, Elderly victim, Air force veteran, Suspects arrested, Juvenile suspect at large, Crime