Category: blaze media

One of Florida’s most well-known sheriffs is sounding the alarm that as more police officers and sheriff’s deputies are given federal immigration powers to arrest illegal aliens, the federal government will quickly run out of capacity.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told members of the State Board of Immigration Enforcement that part of the problem is while county jails have space for illegal immigrants, they are only supposed to hold them for up to 48 hours. If it is longer than two days, Judd said the national detention standard becomes “onerous” and state officials have “been at loggerheads” with ICE, according to NBC Miami.

‘When we put the pedal to the metal and get up to the speed limit, there is no way on God’s green earth they can handle this capacity.’

“We asked simply for a waiver that we could house these folks according to the Florida model jail standards. After all, if it’s good enough for those that are innocent until proven guilty, and they’re United States citizens, certainly those housing rules should be sufficient for those that are in this country illegally,” Judd continued.

While Florida has helped increase holding capacity for detainees with Alligator Alcatraz in the Everglades, it is “a drop in the bucket.”

RELATED: Alligator Alcatraz is a warning to illegal immigrants in the US: Leave now or end up here

Alligator Alcatraz is a warning to illegal immigrants in the US: Leave now or end up here Julio Rosas/Blaze Media

“The speed we’re operating at is like cruising down the road at 20 miles an hour. When we put the pedal to the metal and get up to the speed limit, there is no way on God’s green earth they can handle this capacity,” Judd added.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) made it clear he wants Florida to house people who are set to be deported quickly and not hold people for months at a time: “At the end of the day, the ability to house and process these illegals is the responsibility of the federal government. … I don’t think that’s what our role is. Our role is to assist with deportation.”

Judd said local police being able to arrest illegal aliens during their daily patrols will be “like shooting fish in a barrel” due to the large number of people not authorized to be in the United States who reside in Florida.

With participation in the 287(g) program being mandatory for law enforcement agencies in Florida, the SBIE said both the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and Capitol Police are recent additions to the program.

— (@)

The vast funds the Department of Homeland Security received in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to carry out mass deportations is supposed to help address the detention space shortage.

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​Politics 

The January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment regarding imagined Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election set the stage for years of Russian-collusion smears, two congressional impeachments, multiple arrests, and a costly years-long investigation. It also helped further sour the relationship between the world’s top two nuclear powers.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard published on Wednesday an eye-opening House Intelligence Committee majority staff report, which confirms the ICA was a work of fiction drawn up by the Obama administration with the aim of kneecapping the democratically elected Republican president — a fiction that Democrats like Sen. Adam Schiff (Calif.) and their friends in the liberal media were more than happy to treat as gospel truth.

Gabbard told reporters during Wednesday’s White House press briefing that she has referred the documents to the Department of Justice and FBI so that they can “investigate the criminal implications.”

RELATED: Explosive declassified report: Russia DID have secret dirt on the 2016 election — but it wasn’t about Trump

Gabbard noted that the newly declassified report “exposes how the Obama Administration manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election.”

“In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people, working with their partners in the media to promote the lie, in order to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump, essentially enacting a years-long coup against him,” the director added.

Gabbard certainly did not oversell the damning nature of the report and its findings.

After comparing the ICA analytic tradecraft against well-established intelligence community standards, spending over 2,300 hours reviewing the ICA and its source reports, and conducting numerous interviews, congressional investigators concluded that the Obama administration’s assessment:

Misrepresented reports that vociferous Trump critic and then-CIA Director John Brennan had ordered the publication of “as reliable, without mentioning their significant underlying flaws”;”Ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged — and in some cases undermined — judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump”;Violated analytic standards when citing British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier — a political opposition research report paid for in part by the Clinton campaign that Brennan included in the ICA despite high-level credibility concerns and internal opposition;Propped the narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump win on “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence” from a “substandard report” that CIA officers initially omitted but were ordered by Brennan to include despite protest;Failed to consider alternative explanations of Putin’s intentions indicated by intelligence that was actually reliable; Was written by five CIA analysts handpicked by Brennan; andWas rushed out by Brennan “in order to publish two weeks before President-elect Trump was sworn in.”

The disparity between the raw intelligence available to the Obama administration at the time and what was ultimately presented in the ICA is jarring.

For instance, the 2017 assessment stated: “As early as February 2016, a Russian political expert possessed a plan that recommended engagement with [Trump’s] team because of the prospects for improved U.S.-Russian relations, according to reporting from [redacted] government service.”

‘Critical information that undermined source credibility and veracity of key reporting was omitted from both the ICA text and the subsequent briefings.’

The ICA failed to mention that this supposed plan “was just an email with no date, no identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification.”

The relevant raw intelligence came with this context warning: “The CIA can neither independently vouch for [redacted] vetting or validation of the ultimate source nor the ultimate source’s access to the reported information. The document contains no classification. The document did not carry a specific date or identify the originator.”

— (@)

The Obama administration was evidently so desperate to paint Trump as Putin’s man that they apparently neglected to mention that:

A longtime Putin confidant told a sensitive contact both that he did not care who won the election and that “Russia was strategically placed to outmaneuver either one”; Reliable evidenced showed key Putin advisers saw significant downsides to a Trump presidency; and Russia withheld compromising material about failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with the possible intent to exploit it once she was in office.

“Significant reports cited in support of judgments of Putin’s intentions were not quoted accurately, were not quoted in context, or were selectively quoted to omit evidence that undermined ICA major judgments,” the report said. “Moreover, critical information that undermined source credibility and veracity of key reporting was omitted from both the ICA text and the subsequent briefings of the document to the President-elect, the U.S. Congress, and the White House staff.”

RELATED: From Obama to CNN: How the liberal media helped facilitate the ‘treasonous conspiracy’ about Russian collusion

Congressional investigators found some of the apparent lies of omission and flat-out lies in the ICA particularly egregious.

The report noted that in the case of the Steele dossier, the ICA “claimed the source ‘collected this information on behalf of private clients’ while failing to note those clients — the DNC and the Clinton campaign — were Candidate Trump’s political opponents, information known to the FBI at the time.”

In addition to this intentional omission “based on analysis of the testimony of Steele’s FBI handler, Fusion GPS officials, and media exposures of the relationship,” the ICA “also excluded that the political messaging firm that hired the dossier author, Fusion GPS, was also working on behalf of Russian interests to uncover information that was shared with the Kremlin, raising serious counterintelligence concerns over possible Russian influence on the dossier,” the report said.

‘To this day, our country is more polarized than ever before, and the Russia hoax played a role in that.’

In early December 2016, the FBI’s director of counterintelligence and the DNI’s national intelligence officer for Russia briefed Congress on Putin’s supposed leak operations but made no mention of the foreign leader aspiring to elect Trump. However, Obama weighed in on Dec. 6, 2016, reportedly ordering a rewrite of the intelligence community’s assessments.

A month later, Obama’s underlings allegedly came up with a product Democrats would exploit nearly a decade.

Had Trump not retaken the White House, such findings may have never come to light, which might explain the fanatic support for Kamala Harris expressed by some of those implicated in the documents.

Gabbard, who underscored during the White House press conference the leading role former President Barack Obama took in this alleged “treasonous conspiracy,” emphasized on X that “the Russia Hoax was a lie that was knowingly created by the Obama Administration to undermine the legitimacy and power of the duly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump.”

Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.), who is the current chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in response to the report, “The Russia hoax will go down as one of the most troublesome events in U.S. history.”

“A President of the United States was falsely accused, and a nation had to endure lies fabricated by rogue personnel within their own Intelligence Community,” continued Crawford. “To this day, our country is more polarized than ever before, and the Russia hoax played a role in that.”

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​Tulsi gabbard, Gabbard, Dni, Director of national intelligence, Intelligence, Donald trump, Barack obama, Hillary clinton, Clinton, 2016 election, Russian collusion, Russia gate, Russia, Russia hoax, Hoax, Coup, Treason, Brennan, Cia, Deep state, Politics 

Hunter Biden isn’t known for his superior self control, and he made sure to cement that legacy during an interview with Andrew Callaghan on the YouTube show “Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan,” where he took aim at George Clooney and those against illegal immigration.

“George Clooney is not a f**king actor,” he told Callaghan. “He’s a brand.”

He went on to say “f**k you” to the non-present Clooney and said the actor is “great friends with Barack Obama.”

“What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his life to the service of this country and decide you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full-page ad in the f**king New York Times,” Biden continued angrily.

“They’re all going to insert their judgement over a man who has figured out, unlike anybody else, how to get elected to the United States Senate over seven times, how to pass more legislation than any president in history,” he added.

“That wasn’t a good thing,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered,” though she and her panel aren’t Clooney’s biggest fans either.

“Remember when the illegals came in, and George Clooney’s like, ‘What’s wrong with you? We should all take them in,’” BlazeTV contributor Jaco Booyens says. “He’s got a hedge in L.A. A 40-foot hedge with an armed guard at the gate. Like how many migrants are living behind this hedge?”

But Clooney isn’t the only one who’s drawn Biden’s ire.

“Am I going to be like all these Democrats say, ‘You have to talk about and realize that people are really upset about illegal immigration?’” Biden asked, before spiraling into another F-bomb-peppered rant.

“F**k you. How do you think your hotel room gets cleaned? How do you think you got food on your f**king table? Who do you think washes your dishes? Who do you think does your f**king garden?” he said.

“These people are so racist and so wrapped up in their slave labor,” Gonzales says, adding, “They can’t even comprehend how terrible they sound.”

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

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

​Video, Free, Video phone, Upload, Sharing, Camera phone, Youtube.com, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Sara gonzales, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Jaco booyens, Hunter biden, Hunter biden interview, George clooney, Joe biden, Hunter biden rant 

A newly declassified report may have blown the lid off of Democrats’ claims that Russia aimed to help President Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

‘Obama officials did not mention this when trying to make it look like Putin’s goal was helping Trump.’

An oversight report from the House Intelligence Committee, released by DNI Tulsi Gabbard Wednesday, revealed that Russian President Vladimir Putin knew the Democratic National Committee was concerned about Hillary Clinton’s health during her 2016 campaign.

RELATED: Russiagate unraveled: Glenn Beck recaps scandal in light of smoking gun documents

Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

The September 2020 report stated that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service “possessed DNC communications that Clinton was suffering from ‘intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.’ Clinton was placed on a daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’ and while afraid of losing, she remained ‘obsessed with a thirst for power.'”

It noted that then-President Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders “found the state of Secretary Clinton’s health to be ‘extraordinarily alarming’ and felt it could have [a] ‘serious negative impact’ on her election prospects.”

Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck wrote in a post on X, “Tulsi Gabbard just released a document that reveals the Russians DID have dirt on a 2016 presidential campaign. But it wasn’t Trump’s. It was Hillary Clinton’s. I wonder if this is what the FBI was looking for when they raided Mar-a-Lago?”

RELATED: Declassified report: Obama’s FBI failed to search key evidence in Clinton email probe

Photo by GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

“If Putin really wanted Trump to win, why wouldn’t he put this out?” Beck questioned. “Russia probably thought Clinton was going to win, which would be good for them because they had all this dirt on her.”

“But instead of being truthful with us, President Obama ordered the Intelligence Community to make it look like Trump’s a Russian puppet. This was a planned and coordinated coup,” Beck added.

Sarah Bedford, an investigations editor for the Washington Examiner, reached a similar conclusion.

“Russia had hacked info suggesting Hillary Clinton was in a mental & physical health crisis but did not leak it. Obama officials did not mention this when trying to make it look like Putin’s goal was helping Trump. If that were true, Putin would’ve leaked the most damaging stuff,” Bedford wrote.

— (@)

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​News, Glenn beck, Tulsi gabbard, Russia, Putin, Vladimir putin, Donald trump, Trump, Barack obama, Obama, Hillary clinton, Clinton, Democratic national committee, Dnc, Sarah bedford, Russia hoax, Politics 

For over 15 years, the government has operated on limited scientific research and legal findings to justify its climate action agenda. Now, the Trump administration is seriously considering scrapping the crux of these Obama-era climate change regulations.

The Trump administration is reconsidering the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” a 2009 rule based on the results of the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court case. The endangerment finding mandates the EPA to curb climate change caused by greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, last amended in 1990.

‘Under the enlightened leadership of President Trump and Administrator Zeldin, the time for fresh thought has finally arrived.’

On his first day in office, President Trump signed Executive Order 14154, called “Unleashing American Energy,” which mandated that the EPA and the Office of Management and Budget review the endangerment finding and related environmental regulations.

RELATED: EV mandate killed in ‘biggest day of deregulation in American history’

Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin explained the goal of Trump’s executive orders: “By overhauling massive rules on the endangerment finding, we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.”

Now, a page on the OMB website lists an “economically significant” proposed rule titled the “Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Reconsideration Rule.” No other details about this proposed rule are available at this time because it still needs to be finalized and announced to the public. The rule was received by the OMB from the EPA on June 30.

The decision to reconsider the endangerment finding has caused a stir among climate change groups. David Doniger, a senior attorney at the advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Post, “They’re trying to completely defang the Clean Air Act by saying, ‘Well, this stuff’s just not dangerous.’ That claim is just mind-bogglingly contrary to the evidence.”

Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, told the Washington Post, “It’s long since past the time for an administration to review this. Ultimately, Congress should have a say when it’s all said and done.”

Several of the leaders involved in this reconsideration have signaled their support for the Trump administration’s order in the past.

In a March press release, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Jeff Clark said, “Since 2009, I’ve consistently argued that the endangerment finding required a consideration of downstream costs imposed on both mobile sources like cars and stationary sources like factories. Under the enlightened leadership of President Trump and Administrator Zeldin, the time for fresh thought has finally arrived.”

“EPA’s regulation of the climate affects the entire national economy — jobs, wages, and family budgets. It’s long overdue to look at the impacts on our people of the underlying Obama endangerment finding,” said White House OMB Director Russ Vought in the press release.

“The 2009 endangerment finding has had an enormously negative impact on the lives of the American people. For more than 15 years, the U.S. government used the finding to pursue an onslaught of costly regulations — raising prices and reducing reliability and choice on everything from vehicles to electricity and more. It’s past time the United States ensures the basis for issuing environmental regulations follows the science and betters human lives,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said.

The endangerment finding will be reconsidered by the Office of Management and Budget before an official announcement to the public.

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​Politics, Epa, Omb, Lee zeldin, Russ vought, Climate action, Unleashing american energy, Endangerment finding 

The wife of the man who created a mobile app to warn illegal aliens of federal immigration raids is complaining after she was fired from her job at the Department of Justice seemingly due to the project.

Carolyn Feinstein, who worked at the DOJ’s Office of the U.S. Trustee in Austin, told the Daily Beast the firing was “retribution” for the app’s creation.

“This was retribution. I was fired because of the actions, or activism, of my husband,” Feinstein said. “It is insulting to me because I dedicated myself and my career to serving the people of the United States, and now the DOJ is claiming I was attempting to harm some of them. And that’s not true.”

The agency also alleged that illegal aliens use the app ‘to evade capture while endangering the lives of ICE officers.’

The app gained nationwide attention after CNN reported on her husband, Joshua Aaron, and the app. Users can upload pictures of an ICE operation to the app, and it will send out an alert to other users within a 5-mile radius. While Aaron contends the app was designed simply as a warning system so illegal aliens can stay away from the area, there are safety concerns for federal agents as they face a staggering 830% increase in assaults so far this year with no sign of slowing down.

Far-left activists are already using their social media platforms to alert their followers of federal agents conducting operations, where their vehicles are, and which hotels agents are using.

RELATED: ICE lambastes CNN for hyping up new app aimed at targeting federal agents

Photo by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement via Getty Images

Users on X first made the connection of Feinstein being married to Aaron and having a job at the DOJ.

Border czar Tom Homan was made aware of the findings and said during a Newsmax interview that the Trump administration would be looking into it. Feinstein told the Daily Beast she was fired within 24 hours of Homan’s interview.

Feinstein said the purpose of the app has been misconstrued and the termination letter was “not only incorrect, but offensive” because it used the term “illegal alien.”

“My service to the people of the United States was unbiased,” she continued. “Each one of them landed on the same level for me. I didn’t play favorites; I didn’t have a disservice to any person within the United States because of who they are, what they look like, or where they work.”

The DOJ did note that Feinstein does have interests in the company that holds the IP for the anti-ICE app, even while she claims she had no involvement in the project. The agency also alleged that illegal aliens use the app “to evade capture while endangering the lives of ICE officers,” according to the Daily Beast.

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​Politics 

When it comes to recent public revelations about U.S. Rep. Cory Mills’ personal life, finances, military record, and work history, the Republican Florida congressman tends to brand things as lies that are, in fact, true.

Mills — the Florida congressman who has been the subject of numerous Blaze News articles about the veracity of his statements on his military service, employment by a security contractor, and even his 2014 marriage at a Virginia mosque — has been busy lately on social media branding people as liars who have stated facts.

‘He is either extremely confused, astonishingly ignorant, or breathtakingly dishonest.’

As social media debates continue on Mills’ rocky relationship with the truth, Blaze News presents a handy top 10 list of Mills’ controversies.

When asked to provide comment for this article, Mills’ spokeswoman, Jillian Anderson, provided a two-word reply: “All gossip.”

1: Marriage by radical Islamic cleric

On July 12 on social media, Mills told a reader that reports that he was married at a Virginia mosque by a radical Islamic cleric are “false” and “misleading.” This was a 180-degree reversal of what Mills acknowledged to Blaze News in a May 7 article, “GOP Rep. Cory Mills explains why he was married by a radical Islamic cleric.”

Mills told Blaze News that while he was married at the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, he knew nothing of the mosque’s history or of Sheikh Mohammed Al-Hanooti’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood or his reputation as a prolific fundraiser for the terror group Hamas.

According to the Commonwealth of Virginia marriage register, Mills was married to Rana Al Saadi on June 8, 2014. The imam who performed the religious ceremony was Al-Hanooti, who listed his address as Dar Al-Hijrah, 3159 Row St., Falls Church.

Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center Blaze News

Al-Hanooti is perhaps best known as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation Hamas financing trial and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot. Al-Hanooti served as the imam at Dar Al-Hijrah from 1995 to 1999. In a 1998 khutbah, or sermon, Al-Hanooti said, “Allah will rain his curse on the Americans and the British,” and, “The curse of Allah will become true on the Jews.”

The Dar Al-Hijrah mosque has ties to some of the most infamous terrorists, including 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour, who attended the mosque in early 2001, and Anwar al-Awlaki, a prominent al-Qaeda propagandist and terror leader. Al-Awlaki was linked to the radicalization of individuals including Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter who killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 in November 2009, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — the Underwear Bomber — who tried to detonate explosives hidden in his skivvies on a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day 2009.

2: Muslim, Catholic, or Protestant?

Mills has said he did not convert to Islam, although the mosque where he married Rana Al Saadi in 2014 had rules forbidding a non-Muslim man from marrying a Muslim woman. Five of Mills’ associates who spoke to Blaze News said Mills told them that he had converted to Islam.

Robert Spencer, founder of the Jihad Watch website and a foremost expert on radical Islam, told Blaze News he sees no way Al-Hanooti would have performed a wedding with a non-Muslim groom and a Muslim bride.

“Al-Hanooti had multiple ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. … Any imam who had their approval, and who approved of the Brotherhood, had to be well versed in Sharia and loyal to its provisions,” Spencer said. “Sharia stipulates that a Muslim woman may not marry a Christian or any other non-Muslim man. This is based on the Qur’an. … Thus it is virtually certain that Al-Hanooti, as a knowledgeable and believing imam, required Mills to convert to Islam before he married Rana Al Saadi.”

In its guide on the religious affiliation of members of the 119th Congress, Pew Research lists Mills’ religious faith as “Protestant unspecified.”

Host Michael Voris of Church Militant described Cory Mills as a “committed Catholic patriot” in a March 2022 interview.Church Militant via Wayback Machine

The Floridian wrote that Mills was a “devout Catholic” in an August 2022 article on the Seventh District Republican primary for Congress: “Al Saadi, who worked for the Trump administration in Iraq gathering intelligence, is a ‘believer in God’ and attends Mass with … Mills, who is a devout Catholic.”

“Mills himself has a rosary tattooed on his left arm and recently spoke with conservative Catholic news site Church Militant in March about his run for Congress,” the Floridian article continued.

In March 2022, Mills appeared on the Church Militant network for an interview with Michael Voris, who praised Mills as a “committed Catholic patriot.” Voris said Mills is a new breed that represents a break with the sordid past of fake Catholic politicians who shill for abortion and so-called same-sex marriage in the halls of D.C. power, then show up for Mass on Sunday.

‘At the end of the day, I’m going to have to answer to the Almighty.’

Voris said the former type of Catholic politician was a “wicked, rotten-to-the-core” person who was “self-serving, self-absorbed,” and “power hungry.”

“And they’ve been the bane of American politics for more than half a century. And they have been the driving force behind the destruction of the nation,” Voris added.

Mills acknowledged that he will answer to God for using his skills for good.

“At the end of the day, I’m going to have to answer to the Almighty, and he’s going to ask me what did I do with the skill set, the capabilities, the opportunities, the things that he had blessed me with,” Mills told Voris. “What have I done with those skills, or as we call, our talents? And I have to answer to him and say that I did everything that I could with the talents or the skills that he had provided me, the blessings he had given me.”

Spencer said Mills’ triple identity is especially problematic for Muslims.

“If all three claims are true, then he is either extremely confused, astonishingly ignorant, or breathtakingly dishonest,” Spencer told Blaze News. “He can’t be all three at once, as they’re mutually exclusive.”

“If he is claiming to be a Christian and a Muslim and his Muslim associates find out, he will find them less than welcoming,” Spencer said. “They might give him a break once since he is a convert, but they’ll talk with him and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

3: Single and lonely?

Cory Mills said he was single, alone, and lonely. Looking back, it was an odd, uncomfortable conversation starter during an Oct. 3 Mercury One helicopter relief flight helping victims of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina.

On the helicopter were seven people, including Mills, Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck, and BlazeTV anchor Jill Savage. They had just finished discussing an exhausting day touring the hurricane damage, delivering relief supplies, and flying rescue sorties. Then came the personal discussion.

RELATED: Going rogue? FBI agent gathered information from private citizens questioning Rep. Cory Mills’ record

“Cory was talking a lot on the flight back,” Savage recalled. “He spoke about the founding of our country, rattling off talking points about one constitutional amendment after another. Then he began speaking about his personal life.”

“No one asked him about this on the very first day we met him,” Savage said. “He said he was ‘completely single, there’s absolutely no one in my life,’ and was ‘very lonely.’”

At that very time, Mills was married to (he says separated from) Rana Al Saadi and also in a long-term romantic relationship with 27-year-old Iranian-American activist Sarah Raviani, the founder of Iranians for Trump. Raviani’s name became public in February 2025, when she called police to Mills’ ritzy D.C. penthouse to report domestic violence.

Metropolitan Police Department officers responded to the address on Maryland Avenue for a “report of an assault.” According to the incident report, the assault involved the use of hands and feet to force Raviani from Mills’ residence. Raviani recanted her complaint, and no charges were ever filed. Mills denied there was any sort of physical altercation.

RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: ‘FEMA is here’: Military and FEMA officials share relief efforts in Western North Carolina with Blaze News

Rep. Cory Mills (white cap) meets with Adam Smith and Glenn Beck on a Mercury One tour of hurricane-ravaged North Carolina on Oct. 3, 2024.Adam Smith via Instagram

Savage said she was in D.C. when the assault story broke. It made her think back to Mills’ statements on the helicopter that he was “completely single” and had no one in his life. Raviani told police that Mills was her “significant other” going back more than a year. It became clear that the story he told on the October helicopter ride was false.

“That is one very big, bold-faced lie,” Savage said on the May 15 episode of “The Mandate” on BlazeTV. Savage disclosed that Mills had asked her on a date and she agreed, but no date ever took place.

Savage said she has since heard from women who were also approached by Mills with the same “I’m very lonely” speech, which prompted the anchor to realize it was serendipity that her Mills date never materialized.

“It was,” she said, “actually a blessing in disguise.”

4: Non-Rangers don’t lead the way

Some of the men who worked with Mills at military contractor DynCorp took great umbrage to Mills claiming he had been an elite Army Ranger during his time in service. Mills listed his imaginary Ranger service on an application for a shift leader job at DynCorp. He also made the claim verbally, according to several men who worked with him. But his official service record does not include time with the Rangers.

The 75th Ranger Regiment is the U.S. Army’s elite special operations force, made up of some of the best soldiers in the world. According to the Army, the Rangers “conduct large-scale Joint Forcible Entry Operations and execute surgical Special Operations Raids around the globe in high-risk, uncertain, and politically sensitive areas.”

Rangers and former Rangers don’t take kindly to pretenders.

Jesse Parks, Mills’ supervisor during the last of his time with DynCorp, said he witnessed a Ranger veteran and fellow DynCorp employee chase Mills down to give him a verbal lashing. “He flat stopped Cory in the street, and he says, ‘If I hear one more time that you have said you were a Ranger, I’m gonna beat your ass within an inch of your life and send you home on a medical flight.’”

Cory Mills (left) pictured with former members of the 75th Ranger Regiment, an elite special-operations group that Mills never belonged to.Photo courtesy of Scott Kempkins

It was just such an issue that prompted the State Department to require its contractors to certify the service records, training, and awards of all employees. Mills was warned time and again to turn in proof of his specialties and training. For months, he failed to do so.

“I found Cory and I told him flat out, ‘Cory, if I don’t have your bio and your supporting documentation in my hand by 1900 hours [7 p.m.] today, you have to go get on an airplane tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. and leave,’” Parks said.

Parks said after issuing the order, “That was the last I saw Cory, because he piled up all of his DynCorp s**t and his State Department serialized items, weapons, this, that, and the other, on his bed, and he walked out the gate. Nobody ever saw him again.”

Mills said the stories are “fabricated nonsense.” Mills said he requested early release so he could return to the United States with his girlfriend, who was leaving about the same time.

“I’m sorry, but I didn’t go walk around and knock on everyone’s door to go, ‘Hey, by the way, guys, I ended up getting a contract release for two days,’” Mills said. “I saw, like, a week or two weeks earlier than my contract was set to expire, because I wanted to go home with a nice girlfriend.”

5: Not blown up twice overseas

Mills has long claimed that he was the victim of roadside bombs in Iraq. Although these claims have been called out publicly as fabrications, Mills’ official congressional biography still claims he was “struck twice” with explosive devices while overseas.

In one incident, Mills was in an armored vehicle motorcade on March 15, 2006. Blaze News confirmed that Mills was present at this scene. However, photographic evidence and sources have called into question his story and the seriousness of his alleged injuries.

A Mills campaign video makes the claim that he was wounded twice while deployed. The two roadside incidents occurred after Mills left the Army.Mills for Florida

Mills told Blaze News he suffered a concussion when the Suburban SUV in which he was riding was damaged by an IED. “I ended up hitting my head,” he said. “Was it some severe maiming wound? No. I’ve got the actual document that shows where I was hit.”

As evidence, Mills pointed to a certificate of appreciation he received from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as proof of his brave actions.

“I had a concussion. So a concussion isn’t being wounded? Knocking your head off an actual armored vehicle door and having to go get treated and have three days down, that’s not being wounded, right? So what is your definition? Do I need to lose an arm? Do I need to be shot in shrapnel? Just tell me. Tell me what your definition of wounded is. Because apparently, [traumatic brain injury] is not an external wound.”

Blaze News pressed him on his claim that he suffered from a traumatic brain injury. Mills responded: “No, I actually just got reviewed by the PA and the doctor there, and they basically told me to monitor myself for the next 24 hours.”

Kern said blank templates of this certificate of appreciation were all over the place at the time. “There were like 35 guys that got that same thing,” he said.

Cory Mills (middle) and Scott Kempkins (right) worked for DynCorp in Iraq doing security missions. Courtesy of Scott Kempkins

In the second incident, on April 19, 2006, Mills’ motorcade was hit by a roadside bomb as it made its way toward the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity. According to a summary report obtained by Blaze News, the two lead vehicles in the convoy had turned right toward the Ministry of Electricity, when the follower Humvee was struck by an array of explosively formed penetrators with five or six linked devices.

The roadside bomb array was triggered by an insurgent on a nearby rooftop using a wire that ran from his perch along a roadside wall and to the device.

Mills’ vehicle was 50 yards away from the one that sustained bomb damage, and his colleagues said he was never wounded.

Blood left on Cory Mills’ pants after a mission wasn’t his; it was spilled by a sergeant in his convoy, colleagues said.Photo courtesy of Scott Kempkins

Mills points to a photograph showing him with a large blood stain on his right pant leg after the mission. One of Mills’ colleagues who was wounded in the attack said that blood did not belong to Mills.

“Cory was was absolutely not wounded,” said Scott Kempkins, who suffered injuries from the bomb.

“I got hit in the shoulder, the neck, and the leg,” Kempkins said. “And then the guy in the turret took a little bit of shrapnel to the side of his face. That was it. Cory’s vehicle was already around the corner and about 50 yards down the street. It would have been impossible for him to be wounded.”

6: No military sniper school

Mills has touted his experience as a sniper on network news after the near-assassination of President Trump by Thomas Crooks on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Mills did complete a sniper course to become a designated defense marksman for contractor DynCorp, but his comrades in arms told Blaze News he never qualified for that course because he was not a graduate of an accredited military sniper school. That became apparent when the DynCorp snipers went to the shooting range to re-qualify.

“He was supposed to have been this, this super duper military trained sniper and, all this s**t, and they [DynCorp] sent him to their sniper school,” Parks said. “He got through it, but he really struggled. It was like he was learning it for the first time, as one of them told me. If he was some hot s**t sniper from the Army, it should have been a breeze.”

“We would look over, and Cory would be doing s**t like on ballistic calculators, you know, like apps,” Kern said. “Everyone’s sitting there going, ‘Dude, it literally takes you longer to put the information in than it should take you to do this in your head.’”

Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) is featured on the website of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. “I like long range and precision fire shooting,” Mills said. National Shooting Sports Foundation

“So everyone was picking up on stuff like that. ‘Cory, what the f**k do you mean? What, you’re asking what grain bullet we’re using? Dude, we only use match ammo. It’s 168 grain. It’s the same s**t you’ve been shooting in the military as a sniper.’”

Kern added: “I’ve trained with SS snipers. I’ve trained with SEAL snipers. I’ve trained with law enforcement, L.A. County SWAT guys. I know and I understand that we all have different training, and I understand that the formulas are different.”

‘I know facts are unusual and unfamiliar thing for you.’

“But the stuff that [Mills] was saying … I remember thinking, ‘What are we doing? Is this out of a movie?’ Snipers have a verbiage … sniper observer monologue. … This guy doesn’t know s**t about being a sniper.”

The National Shooting Sports Foundation includes a photo on its website of Mills firing at a rifle range. The feature quotes Mills: “I like long range and precision fire shooting.”

7: The master’s degree that wasn’t

Mills has touted three college degrees in various online biographies. Included on that list is a master’s degree in international relations and conflict management. On Mills’ LinkedIn page under education, it states: “American Military University, Master’s degree Candidate, International Relations and Conflict Resolution, 2013-2020.”

The political website Conservapedia and the Florida Politics website both said Mills earned a master’s degree.

According to the private for-profit school based in Charles Town, West Virginia, Mills did not earn a master’s degree from AMU. Stacy Robinson, registrar service specialist at the American Public University System, the parent organization of AMU, said, “He did not confer a master’s degree from AMU.”

Mills did earn a bachelor’s degree in sports and health science from AMU on Aug. 15, 2010, according to Robinson.

8: Misleading photos with Trump, Wiles

On April 26, Mills’ Instagram account posted a series of photographs related to his recent trip to Syria. Included in that image carousel were photos of Mills alongside President Donald Trump and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The captions implied the photos were related to the trip to Syria. The photos were shared to Mills’ Instagram account, and he was listed as a collaborator on the post.

Blaze News learned, however, the images were not from Syria — or even from 2025. They were taken during a campaign trip to Iowa in the summer of 2023.

RELATED: Rep. Mills’ risky road trip through Syria raises eyebrows

Photos shared on Cory Mills’ Instagram account in April 2025 implied that they were related to his trip to Syria to meet with President Ahmed Al-Sharaa.Cory Mills/Instagram

“Some moments in life are more than memories. They are turning points,” Tarek Naemo of the Syrian American Alliance for Peace and Prosperity wrote in one caption, below a photo of Mills sitting with Trump and Wiles in an aircraft. “Traveling to Syria was a reminder that even in the hardest places, hope can rise.”

Mills visited Syria on April 18 with U.S. Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.), a trip sponsored by SAAPP. Mills had a private 90-minute meeting with Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa and Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani. According to journalist Roger Sollenberger, Mills asked for a private meeting with Al-Sharaa that Congressman Stutzman did not attend.

9: Spiritual advisers?

In describing himself as a Christian, Mills often cites the Word of Faith Family Church in Altamonte Springs, Florida, as his spiritual home. He speaks of Pastors Steve and Cheryl Ingram as spiritual advisers.

However, Blaze Media learned that Mills has attended worship services at Word of Faith only two times since he launched his congressional campaign in 2021 at the home of the Ingrams.

Cory Mills appeared often in photos with Cheryl and Steve Ingram, pastors at the Word of Faith Family Church in Altamonte Springs, Fla.Cheryl Ingram/Instagram

Blaze learned that Cheryl Ingram posts photographs on social media anytime someone in the public eye comes to services at the church. According to archives of her social media, the last time Mills appeared for worship was in February 2024.

Mills has appeared at public events and political rallies and has been photographed with the Ingrams. He launched his congressional campaign from their living room in 2021. Sources inside the church told Blaze News the Ingrams are not Mills’ spiritual advisers.

10: Your rent is late

Rep. Cory Mills pays nearly $21,000 a month for a D.C. luxury penthouse in a swanky building that overlooks the Tidal Basin, the Wharf, and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.

At least, he’s supposed to pay that much in rent.

But according to an eviction lawsuit filed in D.C. Superior Court, Mills slipped $85,000 in arrears by not paying rent from March to July. That was after he was served notice in January that the building management company intended to sue over the more than $18,000 he apparently owed at that time.

According to a lawsuit filed in DC Superior Court, Cory Mills owes more than $85,000 in back rent on a penthouse suite in this exclusive waterfront property.Top photo by Rebeka Zeljko/Blaze News; bottom photo Bozzuto Management Company via X.com

When journalist Sollenberger posted the eviction details on social media, Mills attacked him as a “biased hack” and offered the excuse that he tried to pay the rent online but kept getting technical error messages.

“I know facts are unusual and unfamiliar thing [sic] for you, but here’s just the past two months where you can see I’m repeatedly asking for payment links and again, as I tried with management today, it failed to process,” Mills wrote on July 14.

A spokesman for Bozzuto Management Company, which manages Mills’ building on Maryland Avenue Southwest, told Blaze News that once eviction proceedings begin, online payment portals are disabled for the renter. Otherwise, a tenant could make a small partial payment and the eviction clock would reset.

According to Sollenberger’s reporting, Mills has paid more than $15,000 in late fees since he began renting the D.C. penthouse in June 2023. That’s approximately $850 per month “for the privilege of paying rent late every month,” Sollenberger wrote on X on July 14.

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President Donald Trump ruffled feathers in February when he characterized Volodymyr Zelenskyy — the Ukrainian leader who suspended elections, dissolved rival parties, sanctioned a political opponent on suspicion of “high treason,” consolidated Ukraine’s media outlets, banned a Christian denomination, and remains president despite his term officially ending in May 2024 — as a “dictator without elections” who wants to “keep the ‘gravy train’ going.”

Zelenskyy has faced continued criticism in the months since over his apparent efforts to appropriate and remain in power, including from the mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, whose authority and responsibilities the Ukrainian president has effectively neutralized by appointing a rival military administration in the capital.

Klitschko, furious over the “raids, interrogations, and threats of fabricated criminal cases” apparently undermining his city council, told the Times (U.K.) in May, “This is a purge of democratic principles and institutions under the guise of war.”

“I said once that it smells of authoritarianism in our country,” continued the mayor. “Now it stinks.”

Zelenskyy gave his critics further cause for suspicion and sparked mass protests on Tuesday by ratifying legislation that will give the country’s prosecutor general — Zelenskyy’s appointee — powers over Ukraine’s National Anticorruption Bureau, thereby affording the president the ability to torpedo investigations into his administration.

Ukrainska Pravda indicated that the legislation drew protest from numerous members of parliament, which has not had elections since 2019, and stressed that the shakeup “means the destruction of the independence of anti-corruption bodies.”

RELATED: Dictator, thief, puppet: Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s 3 strikes revealed

Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Daria Kaleniuk, a co-founder of the nongovernmental Anticorruption Action Center who helped establish the NABU following Ukraine’s 2014 regime change, told the Wall Street Journal, “What’s happening is the demolition of the anticorruption infrastructure in Ukraine.”

Olena Tregub, executive director of the Independent Defense Anti-Corruption Commission, suggested on LinkedIn that “weakening NABU and [the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office] is a dangerous mistake.”

“It threatens to derail Ukraine’s EU aspirations, fuels political polarization, and could erode public trust in the president who once promised to make the fight against corruption a cornerstone of his leadership,” wrote Tregub. “Independent anti-corruption institutions are not simply a box to check for European integration. They are essential for building a democratic, transparent, and truly European Ukraine.”

Zelenskyy said in a video statement on Tuesday that “the anti-corruption infrastructure will work, only without Russian influence — it needs to be cleared of that.”

“Criminal proceedings must not drag on for years without lawful verdicts. And those who work against Ukraine must not feel comfortable or immune to the inevitability of punishment,” Zelenskyy added in a separate statement concerning his meeting with top Ukrainian law enforcement and anti-corruption agencies.

RELATED: Trump confirms he’s sending Patriot missiles to Ukraine — but with one major caveat

Andrew Kravchenko/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Zelenskyy signed the bill the day after the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, which operates ultimately under the authority of Zelenskyy, launched a series of raids on NABU offices largely on the basis of allegations that agency officials were cooperating with Russia.

The SBU claimed in a statement on Monday that while acting under the procedural guidance of the office of Zelenskyy’s prosecutor general, it “exposed the agent penetration of [Russia’s Federal Security Service] into the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.”

‘This decision endangers not only the functioning of anticorruption institutions but also Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations.’

NABU indicated that as of Monday evening, the SBU, the State Bureau of Investigation, and the Prosecutor General’s Office had executed at least 70 raids in relation to the anti-corruption bureau’s employees.

“In most cases, the grounds cited for these actions are the alleged involvement of certain individuals in traffic accidents,” said NABU. “However, some employees are being accused of possible connections with the aggressor state. These are unrelated matters.”

The anti-corruption bureau indicated that the raids took place while its director, Semen Kryvonos, was on an official visit to the United Kingdom.

Kryvonos suggested that the law effectively handing over NABU to Zelenskyy was pushed by officials who were actively being investigated by the bureau, reported the Wall Street Journal.

“This pressure campaign is a direct response to the effectiveness of our investigations, including those targeting high-ranking officials and members of Parliament,” said Kryvonos. “This decision endangers not only the functioning of anticorruption institutions but also Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations.”

“The president of the European Commission was in contact with President Zelenskyy about these latest developments,” a European Commission spokesperson told Politico. “President von der Leyen conveyed her strong concerns about the consequences of the amendments, and she requested the Ukrainian government for explanations.”

The European Commission spokesperson added, “The respect for the rule of law and the fight against corruption are core elements of the European Union. As a candidate country, Ukraine is expected to uphold these standards fully. There cannot be a compromise.”

In 2012, Ernst & Young ranked Ukraine in the top three of the most corrupt countries in its 12th Global Fraud Survey. Transparency International rated it the most corrupt country in Europe after Russia and ranked it 130th among 180 countries in its 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index.

The country has, however, showed some signs of improvement, such that it now ranks 105th on the Corruption Perceptions Index, with a score of 35. By way of comparison, America’s score is 65, with 100 signaling perfection.

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​Zelenskyy, Ukraine, Kyiv, Corruption, Europe, Dictator, Donald trump, Volodymyr, Zelensky, European union, Eu, European commission, Corrupt, Politics 

The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee has announced monumental changes ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Inside its Athlete Safety Policy guidance, the USOPC quietly declared it would adhere to one of President Donald Trump’s earliest executive orders from February.

In fact, while the guidance was issued in June, according to the New York Post, the committee updated its eligibility rules on Monday to add one of the most consequential changes in American sports history.

‘It’s hard to applaud an organization for merely following the law.’

In the added text, the committee said it is “committed to protecting opportunities for athletes participating in sport.”

The policy continued, saying the “USOPC will continue to collaborate with various stakeholders with oversight responsibilities … to ensure that women have a fair and safe competition environment consistent with Executive Order 14201.”

While the new policy is not blatantly clear, the executive order that it purports to align with most certainly is.

RELATED: New Olympic president strikes huge blow to transgender athletes ahead of 2028 games in LA

Executive Order 14201, Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports, has been used for months to justify the protection of women’s sports and spaces by barring males from participating in “all-female athletic opportunities” or entering “all-female locker rooms.”

Schools have continued to defy natural law, but the executive order has laid the ground work to allow the Department of Education to open investigations and apply punishments to offending institutions.

Since news of the USOPC rule change broke, women’s sports activists and organizations have reacted positively to the news but have remained cautious in the amount of praise they give.

“It’s hard to applaud an organization for merely following the law, but nonetheless, this is a win,” NCAA champion swimmer Riley Gaines wrote on X.

The Independent Council on Women’s Sports added, “We thank the Trump administration and the USOPC for taking this important step to preserve fairness and integrity in women’s sports.”

Speaking to Blaze News, former gymnast and national women’s champion Jennifer Sey said there are still steps that need to be taken to ensure fairness at the upcoming Olympics.

RELATED: ‘She’s never had to compete against a man’: Female athletes respond to Simone Biles’ pro-trans rant

“The USOPC has essentially agreed to comply with federal law. It seems unnecessary to applaud an organization for that, but here we are,” Sey told Blaze News.

Sey noted that while she was “thrilled” that the Trump administration made the organization do the right thing, the policy lacks specific details.

“The next step must be to confirm they will test for sex to ensure compliance.”

The former athlete said that a lot of people have been asking her what the new rules mean for the Olympics as a whole: “This is different than an outright Olympic ban in that it is only for the U.S., U.S. Olympic teams and competitors in the U.S. Olympic movement.”

Sey continued, “Next, we need the [International Olympic Committee] to establish the same rules to ensure that women’s sports in the Olympic Games are protected and for women only.”

Hope is high for the IOC though, as newly appointed president Kirsty Coventry said in late June that she intends to “protect the female category, first and foremost.”

Coventry added, “But we need to do that with a scientific approach and with the inclusion of the international federations who have already done a lot of work in this area.”

For now, those who have worked hard to ensure fairness in women’s sports seem dissatisfied with the vague wording the aforementioned organizations have used. Real change cannot come soon enough, with hundreds of women having already lost competitions to men, with more happening all the time.

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​Fearless, Olympics, Transgender, Women’s sports, Woke, Female athletes, Sports 

Two recent developments in the sports world from over the weekend are eerily representative of the two choices American culture faces as a nation — and BlazeTV host Steve Deace hopes we choose the right one.

“They do speak broadly to where we are as a culture, and in many respects, represent the two worldviews that are literally battling for soul and dominion of America as we speak,” Deace says on the “Steve Deace Show.”

The first development is of golf pro Scottie Scheffler, who after winning the 153rd Open at Royal Portrush in the United Kingdom, said at a press conference, “My faith and my family is what’s most important to me,” noting they are his “greatest priorities.”

“Those come first for me,” he said. “Golf is third in that order.”

Immediately following his win, his toddler was seen stumbling across the golf course toward him, creating the perfect image of father and son when they reached each other.

Nike took advantage of the moment, using the photo with the tagline, “You’ve already won.”

Meanwhile, across the world on an Indianapolis WNBA court for the league’s All-Star game, the players all wore shirts that read, “Pay us what you owe us.”

“A league there is no market for, has never been a market for. That’s why it’s generated no profit. It’s been a subsidy from the beginning. It was subsidized specifically as a political construct. That’s why it was created. It is literally DEI incarnate,” Deace says.

“And you contrast that with Scottie Scheffler, married with a kid, no prolonged adolescence,” he continues, adding, “These are the worldviews that are at stake right now in the West, and only one of them is going to prevail.”

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve’s take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Camera phone, Sharing, Video phone, Upload, Video, Free, Youtube.com, The steve deace show, Steve deace, Steve deace show, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Scottie scheffler, Wnba, Caitlin clark, Angel reese, Pay us what you owe us, Feminism 

The new BBC documentary “Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis” could not have come at a more appropriate time. The number of knife-related deaths in Britain among ages 13 to 19 has increased dramatically over the last decade, from 56% to 83%.

Reports of such senseless violence have become commonplace.

Highlighting rising knife crime in Somerset, Bedfordshire, and Sussex — which are whiter and more rural — implies a trend without comparing absolute rates.

In early January, 14-year-old Kelyan Bokassa was killed on a London bus after two machete-wielding attackers — themselves both teens — stabbed him 27 times. Weeks later, 12-year-old Leo Ross was stabbed to death in Birmingham while walking home from school; his alleged assailant was 15. In June, three teenagers were charged with the stabbing death of 14-year-old Ibrahima Seck in Manchester.

Actor Elba, who himself grew up in crime-ravaged East London, launched a campaign to eradicate knife violence in early 2024. Now comes this documentary, which follows the “Thor” star around the country as he talks to people behind the grim statistics.

A teachable moment

Elba interviews victims, offenders, and trauma doctors. Along the way, he meets politicians and senior police officers in an attempt to devise a new, more interventionist approach to law and order — a way to stop these young men from resorting to knives in the first place.

It’s apparently also important to Elba to clear up certain stereotypes associated with stabbings. A pivotal moment in the documentary comes when the actor seeks out the sister of Harold Pitman, a white 16-year-old who was stabbed to death in London last New Year’s Eve.

Here, Elba can’t help but turn the meeting into a teachable moment, gently reminding Tayla Pitman that the majority of knife-crime perpetrators are white. “When Harry was killed,” Tayla confirms, “[people said] ‘I bet it was a black person,’ and it wasn’t — it was another white boy.”

Those surprised by the race of Harry’s killer were doubtless also flummoxed by the recent harrowing Netflix series “Adolescence,” which chooses to address this topical issue via the real-time arrest and interrogation of a fictional 13-year-old white killer.

“Adolescence” neatly sidesteps the issue of race altogether by making the killer’s victim a female classmate, also white. The violence here stems from “toxic masculinity” and influencers like Andrew Tate, among other 2025 boogeymen.

RELATED: Netflix sounds an alarm with painful ‘Adolescence’

‘Adolescence’ co-creator and star, Stephen Graham. John Nacion/Getty Images

Misleading statistics

The Guardian’s review of “Our Knife Crime Crisis” approvingly repeats a statistic cited in the documentary: “The film immediately tackles common misconceptions around knife crime as a problem within black and brown urban communities, when in fact 69% of perpetrators are white, and it is spreading fastest in Somerset, Bedfordshire, and Sussex.”

But where does this statistic come from? A cursory search turns up no clear source. Dig a little deeper, and the closest match appears to be nationwide conviction data for knife possession — not overall knife crime. In that context, around 69% of those convicted are white.

Moreover, highlighting rising knife crime in Somerset, Bedfordshire, and Sussex — which are whiter and more rural — implies a trend without comparing absolute rates.

Urban centers like London, Birmingham, and Manchester still have higher overall knife-crime numbers. The regions named may have seen percentage increases, but from much lower baselines.

An uncomfortable truth

More pertinent statistics come from the London Assembly: “Despite making up only 13% of London’s total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London’s knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators, and 53% of knife crime perpetrators.” Moreover, the Times finds that the majority of these victims and perpetrators are under the age of 24.

Anyone who, like Elba, sincerely wishes to understand this issue, must first face an uncomfortable truth: Black teenagers are considerably overrepresented in knife-crime statistics.

That mentioning this truth in public is discouraged, to say the least, impedes any practical attempts to prevent knife crime.

Failure to police

Take the example of stop and search, which is generally seen as a highly effective method of removing weapons from the streets. London Mayor Sadiq Khan opposes the use of this operational strategy, claiming baseless charges of “structural racism” and racial profiling. As a result, the use of stop and search in the capital has decreased by 44% since 2022.

New data published in January reveals the arrest rate has dropped in part due to a dramatic reduction in the use of stop and search. Between 2018 and 2023, the number of under-18s arrested for knife offenses fell by 33%, yet offenses rose. The London Metropolitan Police conducted 118,688 searches in the year ending January 2025, roughly a quarter fewer than the previous year. Almost half of them involved black youths under the age of 24.

Given Khan’s belief in the inherent “institutional racism” of his city’s police force, it’s hardly surprising that he would do nothing to reverse the capital’s decline in law enforcement manpower.

Since 2008, the number of police stations serving the capital has decreased from 160 to 36, a 75% reduction. This is despite policing a city of about nine million people. This is expected to drop even further — to 32 (one per London Borough). Meanwhile, budget cuts have led to two-thirds of police stations closing in England since 2010.

With one station for every quarter of a million residents, it’s reasonable to assume that crime has increased. According to the Office for National Statistics, the police recorded 14,577 knife offenses in 2023, a 20% rise from the previous year. With officers constantly burdened with trivial work like recording offensive language as non-crime hate incidents, it is no surprise that knife crime — and all crime — goes unsolved.

Knives out

If policing is off the table, what’s left?

Elba has a suggestion: Design kitchen knives to have dull points. Such a “solution” is in keeping with the Labour government’s approach.

A little more than a year ago, the U.K. witnessed its most shocking knife crime yet. Seventeen-year-old Axel Rudakubana, a second-generation Rwandan immigrant, entered a children’s Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport and began stabbing. By the time he was subdued, he had brutally slaughtered three girls: Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine.

News of the killings sparked furious protests around the country, fueled by erroneous online reports that Rudakubana was an illegal immigrant and a Muslim. The media was quick to denounce this “misinformation” as the sole culprit of the unrest, while failing to acknowledge the simmering tension built up by decades of unchecked immigration and failed assimilation.

In response to all this, the U.K. government announced a crackdown on knife sales — including a ban on doorstep sales and an age verification for online purchases. It’s part of Labour’s vow to “halve knife crime over the next decade.”

RELATED: Protests and violent rioting continue to erupt across the UK over gruesome stabbing attack on girls at dance studio

Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Token gestures

Here, it’s perhaps worth stating the obvious: A knife has edges, and people die just as well from being slashed as from being stabbed. During the early 1900s, razors were the weapon of choice for many “razor gangs” throughout Britain. Besides, anything with a point can be used to kill someone. A sharpened stick, fork, corkscrew, or screwdriver can end a life.

A ban will do nothing. Newly manufactured safety knives will not only be ineffective, but no one will buy them, reducing the blade’s aesthetic appeal and function for the law-abiding majority. None of these suggestions will stop the use of weapons on our streets.

While politicians and celebrities make token gestures, teenage boys continue to die in record numbers. We must not fall victim to rose-tinted utopianism, which says we can remedy this problem with more youth clubs and pool tables. If we want to prevent young people from killing each other, we must first increase stop and search and fight the activist ideology that sees the police as a proxy for racialized state oppression.

Drill killers

Then, you must wage a genuine culture war: Go after the drill rappers. I am not advocating for the suspension of civil liberties, but anyone familiar with the genre will recognize that much of this music celebrates particular killings. Mdot, Hypo, and Showkey were all rappers killed between 2016 and 2022. Zone 2, another drill group, mentioned the killing of Sidique Kamara, a.k.a Incognito, in the song “No Censor.”

Many of these murders are related to gang feuds, as they fight over territory related to drug distribution. As such, intervention starts at home. A strong father figure frequently serves as a role model, guiding a young son through his formative years. According to data, 43% of black African children in the U.K. and 63% of children of black Caribbean heritage in the U.K. are raised by single parents. As one reformed gang member told the Daily Telegraph, “I remember a member of a gang once saying to me, ‘If you are not going to raise your children, we will raise them for you.’”

Linguistic pedants have previously chastised me for using the term “epidemic” to characterize the issue of knife crime. It’s not a disease, I’m told. I would argue that young people killing others at record levels for petty squabbles, unpaid drug debts, and arbitrary boundaries on a map IS a disease.

Our cultural elites’ allegiance to these progressive nostrums is dangerous. They will be ineffective. Just like Elba’s suggestion, it’s missing the point.

​Idris elba, Culture, Drill rappers, London, Uk, Sadiq khan, Police, Knife crime, Netflix, Adolescence, Axel rudakubana, Letter from the uk 

The absurdity is so staggering it reads like satire. Microsoft, the tech giant entrusted with America’s most sensitive defense data, has been using Chinese engineers to maintain Pentagon computer systems.

These foreign contractors work directly on classified networks, handling everything from software updates to system maintenance for the Department of Defense.

The disclosure of the arrangement led Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to demand a list of all Department of Defense contractors and subcontractors using “Chinese personnel to provide maintenance or other services on DOD systems,” as Cybersecurity Dive reported. “While this arrangement technically meets the requirement that U.S. citizens handle sensitive data, digital escorts often do not have the technical training or expertise needed to catch malicious code or suspicious behavior.”

Faced with the specter of massive blowback, Microsoft announced it would halt the practice in a Friday news dump. “In response to concerns raised earlier this week about U.S.-supervised foreign engineers, Microsoft has made changes to our support for U.S. government customers to assure that no China-based engineering teams are providing technical assistance for DOD government cloud and related services,” Microsoft comms lead Frank X. Shaw posted on X.

Microsoft’s policies eliminated the need for hacking. Why breach systems when you can simply maintain them?

Welcome to the most spectacular security failure in American history, hiding in plain sight for nearly a decade.

Now, the rest of the country is left to pick up the pieces. These “digital escorts,” earning barely above minimum wage to babysit foreign programmers with access to military secrets, are supposed to monitor the Chinese engineers’ every keystroke, ensuring no sensitive data leaves the building or gets transmitted abroad.

Even with Chinese teams snipped out of the loop, Microsoft’s escort program represents corporate negligence elevated to high art. The company recruited former military personnel with minimal coding experience, paid them $18 an hour, and expected them to supervise sophisticated Chinese engineers manipulating Pentagon networks.

These “escorts” serve as human shields against espionage, except they lack the technical expertise to recognize an attack if it materialized on their screens. The escorts themselves acknowledge they’re flying blind while potential adversaries have their hands on the controls. They’re tasked with supervising engineers whose technical skills far exceed their own, creating a security theater that satisfies bureaucratic requirements while providing no actual protection.

Years in the making

China has spent decades perfecting the art of digital infiltration. Its state-sponsored hackers have penetrated everything from the Office of Personnel Management to senior government officials’ email accounts. In 2023, Chinese operatives downloaded 60,000 emails from the State Department alone. Yet, Microsoft’s response to this documented threat was to grant Chinese engineers even greater access to American defense systems, supervised by glorified security guards earning fast-food wages.

The logic is breathtaking in its stupidity.

China’s approach to data weaponization follows a predictable pattern. It steals intellectual property, harvests personal information, and infiltrates critical infrastructure with the patience of a civilization that thinks in centuries, not quarterly earnings reports. Every breach serves multiple purposes, from immediate intelligence gathering and long-term strategic positioning to the steady erosion of American technological advantage.

Consider how China could weaponize Pentagon data accessed through Microsoft’s escort charade. Military logistics become vulnerable to disruption. Personnel records provide targets for blackmail or recruitment. Communications patterns reveal operational planning. Financial systems become entry points for broader economic warfare.

The Chinese don’t need to steal nuclear launch codes when they can gradually map America’s entire defense infrastructure from the inside. More than just access, Microsoft’s escort program offers Beijing sustained, supervised observation of America’s most sensitive digital operations.

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

Photo by Ute Grabowsky/Photothek via Getty Images

China’s theft of American technology is well documented. The Chinese have stolen everything from military aircraft designs to semiconductor manufacturing processes. The FBI estimates Chinese economic espionage costs America hundreds of billions annually. Every major American corporation has faced Chinese cyber intrusions, including Big Tech firms like Google, consumer information giants like Equifax, and even huge hotel chains like Marriott.

Microsoft’s policies eliminated the need for hacking. Why breach systems when you can simply maintain them?

Slow and steady wins the war

The escort program reveals how many American corporations have abandoned national security considerations in pursuit of global profit margins. Microsoft needed foreign engineers to reduce costs and increase efficiency. The solution wasn’t to invest in American talent. It was to create an elaborate theater of security that satisfies government requirements while maintaining access to cheap foreign labor.

Armed with enough Pentagon data, China can orchestrate punishments against America that would make traditional warfare obsolete. It can strike at materiel, manipulating military supply chains to create strategic shortages during international crises, or go the psyop route, orchestrating targeted disinformation campaigns to undermine military morale and public confidence. Or, of course, China can do it all, everything everywhere all at once.

But the lightest footprints are the hardest to detect or halt. Economic warfare becomes surgical when you understand your opponent’s financial systems intimately. China could time market manipulations to coincide with American military operations, creating domestic political pressure to abandon foreign commitments. It could identify and target American defense contractors, disrupting weapons production through coordinated cyber attacks.

The ultimate punishment wouldn’t be costly, chaotic destruction — it would be inexorable, predictable dependency. With enough of an upper hand, China can gradually position itself as indispensable to American digital infrastructure, creating a scenario where confronting Chinese aggression would be too economically catastrophic to consider.

China has spent a long time putting Taiwan in a position where creeping absorption, not military annexation, will draw the country forever into China’s embrace. Why not America next?

Institutional blindness

Until last week, barely anyone was familiar with Microsoft’s escort program. The Pentagon’s own IT agency seemed clueless about foreign access to its most sensitive systems.

This institutional blindness isn’t accidental — it’s the natural result of outsourcing national security to profit-driven corporations. Microsoft created the escort program not to protect America, but to win federal contracts while maintaining access to global labor markets. The company’s priority was scaling up operations, not securing them.

Microsoft’s misbegotten escort program represents everything wrong with American technology policy. We’ve prioritized corporate convenience over national security, cost savings over strategic thinking, and global integration over sovereign protection. The company has created a system where American military secrets are maintained by foreign engineers supervised by underqualified contractors earning poverty wages.

Soft power’s hard edge

The Chinese understand what we’ve forgotten: Information is power, and sustained access to information is ultimate power. They don’t need to destroy American systems when they can simply observe, learn, and gradually assume control over our digital infrastructure.

But this catastrophe isn’t irreversible. America could mandate that all defense-related cloud maintenance be performed exclusively by cleared American citizens. Yes, it would cost more. Yes, it would require massive investment in domestic technical training. Yes, it would slow Microsoft’s global scaling ambitions.

The alternative is surrendering our digital sovereignty to minimize corporate labor costs.

Congress could require complete transparency about foreign access to government systems. Defense contractors could be mandated to maintain American-only technical teams for classified work. The government could invest in rebuilding its own IT capabilities rather than outsourcing national security to profit-driven corporations.

These solutions exist. They require political will, financial commitment, and the radical notion that national security should take precedence over corporate profits. Microsoft’s escort program proves we’ve chosen the opposite path.

The revolution in warfare isn’t coming — it’s already here, disguised as customer service. We can either recognize this reality and act accordingly, or continue paying $18 an hour for the privilege of losing it.

​Pentagon, Microsoft, China, Hacking, Return 

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard dropped a bombshell last week when she suggested that intelligence was “manufactured and politicized” by the Obama administration in 2016, which she found through documents laid the groundwork for what would be the years-long Trump-Russia collusion probe.

Trump appeared to respond via an AI video posted to Truth Social of former president Barack Obama being arrested and thrown in jail.

In the video, Obama is seen declaring that “no one, especially the president, is above the law” before being handcuffed by law enforcement while Trump grins. The former president is then led away and shown in an orange jumpsuit in a federal prison.

“Of course, he’s responding to the documents that were dropped that show that Barack Obama was the creator of the Russia hoax,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”

“We’ve got the documents now to prove it,” she continues. However, she’s skeptical that anything will come of them.

“One of the things that I wish that he had not … done was say that he was going to lock up Hillary Clinton. That was one of his famous slogans in the 2016 election, ‘Lock her up,’” Gonzales says.

“And it makes you think, are you guys planning on going after these people? Because if not, I’m tired of hearing about it. I don’t want to see the tweets. I don’t want to see the Truth Social posts. I don’t want to see the AI videos,” she continues.

“I don’t want to see any of that unless you guys are planning on going for the jugular,” she adds.

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​Upload, Free, Camera phone, Video phone, Video, Sharing, Youtube.com, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Sara gonzales, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Obama, Barack obama, Russia hoax, Russia collusion, President donald trump, The trump administration, The obama administration 

For generations, homeownership has been a cornerstone of the American dream. It meant stability, responsibility, and the chance to pass wealth to the next generation. It gave people a stake in their communities.

But that dream is slipping away. And it’s not by accident.

If we want Americans to remain free and self-governing, they must be able to own their homes and their futures.

We are drifting into a rental society. Fewer families can afford to buy a home, while massive investment firms and corporate landlords are buying up the housing supply and turning America into a nation of tenants.

This is hardly the natural evolution of the market. Rather, it’s the result of decades of bad policy, turbocharged by emerging technology and justified by global elites who’ve decided that private property is both outdated and unsustainable.

The corporate land grab

The “renters’ revolution” emerged from bad policy. For years, local, state, and federal governments have made it more difficult and expensive to build homes. Zoning restrictions choke supply.

Environmental rules delay development. Add in the unintended consequences of government-backed mortgage schemes in the Bill Clinton era, which played a major role in the 2008 housing market crash, and you’ve got a system that makes homes less attainable, despite the stated intentions of the enacted policies.

Into that broken system stepped Wall Street. After the crash, investment giants like Blackstone began buying up foreclosed homes in bulk, turning millions of single-family homes into rental properties. Much of this trend is made possible by emerging technology.

Today, institutional investors use artificial intelligence and algorithmic tools to scan markets and make instant cash offers, often outbidding families looking to buy their first homes. Companies such as Invitation Homes own tens of thousands of properties, all of which are managed through centralized apps, automated lease terms, and data-driven pricing tools.

We are experiencing a market shift — from millions of individual owners to a few corporate landlords.

Ideological push against ownership

This shift is also being encouraged, explicitly and implicitly, by international organizations pushing a post-ownership future. The World Economic Forum’s “you’ll own nothing and be happy” slogan was presented as a prediction, not a policy.

But look closer, and you’ll see that many World Economic Forum and United Nations initiatives actively promote this shift. The U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals call for denser high-rise cities, a move away from single-family zoning, and new restrictions on suburban development, all in the name of “sustainability” and “equity.”

It’s a coordinated ideological push to replace ownership with access, property with subscriptions, and permanence with flexibility. And the consequences are already showing.

The price of being a permanent renter

When you don’t own your home, you don’t control it. You follow the rules set by someone else. That might mean no pets, no subleasing, and often no firearms on the premises.

As environmental, social, and governance scores, smart devices, and digital IDs creep into the rental landscape, we are fast approaching a future where landlords, driven by corporate and political incentives, can enforce ideological compliance under the guise of lease terms.

Renting means you’re always paying, never building. Homes have long been the foundation of middle-class wealth in America. When families are locked out of ownership, they’re locked out of that opportunity. The result is a cycle where equity flows upward to institutional investors while working families remain stuck on the hamster wheel.

RELATED: Property taxes are killing middle-class ownership nationwide

Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The “renters’ revolution” isn’t without psychological and cultural costs too. People who own their homes are more likely to put down roots, raise families, get involved in their communities, and feel a stake in the future of the country. Renters, especially when forced into that role, often feel transient and disempowered. That rootlessness is breeding disconnection and resentment.

The political fallout

These psychological costs have political consequences. Younger Americans, who increasingly see homeownership as unattainable, are also more likely to believe the system is rigged against them.

And who can blame them? They’re being told that capitalism failed them, when in reality, it’s crony capitalism, ESG corporatism, and global central planners who’ve rigged the game. But that distinction is often lost — or intentionally obscured. This increases the potential for them to turn to the siren song of socialism or further government action.

This is not just an economic problem. It’s a civic one. A society where most people don’t own anything is a society that’s easier to control, easier to manipulate, and easier to pacify. If we want Americans to remain free and self-governing, they must be able to own their homes and their futures.

We need lawmakers to investigate the concentration of housing in corporate hands. We need to roll back ESG-driven distortions in markets and rethink zoning rules that throttle supply. We should do more to promote first-time homeownership, rather than punishing it. And we must restore the idea that private property is not just an economic good — it’s a political necessity.

​Opinion & analysis, Housing, Rental housing only, Rentals, Renter nation, Blackstone, Invitation homes, Lease, Suburbs, Growth, Limits, United nations, Globalism, World economic forum, Wef, You will own nothing, Middle class, American dream 

President Donald Trump released a video highlighting his landmark accomplishments over the past six months — and the results speak for themselves. While the media fixates on negative polls and manufactured controversy, this period marks one of the most dramatic political turnarounds in recent memory. Now is the time to take stock of what conservatives have achieved — victories that once seemed unimaginable.

Reining in gender radicalism

Nowhere has the shift been more profound than in the fight against gender ideology. Just five years ago, opposing male athletes in women’s sports brought swift condemnation from corporate boards, activist groups, and political elites. Today, the momentum has flipped.

This is no time to coast. The next phase demands aggressive follow-through. Now it’s about willpower and execution.

Americans no longer feel compelled to nod along as ideologues insist that men can become women — or vice versa. This change didn’t happen because it polls well. It happened because we reclaimed a basic principle: truth.

The same country that once put a Supreme Court justice on the bench who couldn’t define “woman” now has a federal government unafraid to say, “That’s a chick.”

That shift marks a massive cultural victory. A few years ago, it felt impossible. Now, it reflects a growing national trend — a long-overdue return to reality in public life.

Securing the border

Border enforcement has taken a decisive turn. For years, Americans watched as federal officials failed to act, leaving the southern border wide open and allowing criminal networks to thrive. That era has ended.

Under President Trump, the government began doing what it should have done all along. Targeted enforcement raids have sent a clear signal: Illegal immigration won’t be ignored, and those here unlawfully face consequences. Self-deportation has increased. Illegal crossings have declined.

The policy works — and the message is unmistakable.

This marks more than just a policy shift. It’s a cultural and political turning point. Americans now recognize that a secure border isn’t just possible — it’s essential. National sovereignty is back on the table.

A resurgent economy

Trump’s economic agenda has delivered real results. When he returned to office, the nation was still stuck in the inertia of the post-COVID economy and the slow-growth legacy of the Obama-Biden years. That changed quickly.

Trump’s signature 2017 tax cuts, now made permanent, have sparked renewed business investment, job creation, and wage growth. These are the largest tax cuts in U.S. history — and they’re doing what they were designed to do: make American companies more competitive and American families more prosperous.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has broken the regulatory chokehold that once blocked vital infrastructure and energy projects. Nuclear plants are coming back online. American energy is rising — without relying on foreign regimes.

This pro-growth agenda doesn’t just create jobs. It revitalizes the core of the American economy: workers, builders, producers, and risk-takers. By slashing taxes, limiting government overreach, and putting American interests first, the Trump administration has reignited prosperity — and buried the stagnation of the past.

Peace through strength

Trump has reshaped American foreign policy with bold, decisive leadership. For decades, presidents vowed to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. None followed through. Trump did.

He launched targeted strikes, enforced crippling sanctions, and shattered the illusion that diplomacy alone would stop Iran’s ambitions. Critics warned of escalation. But Trump understood what past leaders refused to admit: Weakness invites aggression. Strength deters it.

His response proved the U.S. will defend its national interest — no matter the cost.

RELATED: Justice at last? Obama intel chiefs face fallout from Russia hoax

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Trump didn’t just contain Iran. He rewrote the rules of diplomacy in the Middle East. The Abraham Accords shattered decades of failed orthodoxy, establishing historic peace deals between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The foreign policy establishment said it couldn’t be done. Trump did it anyway.

He also forced NATO allies to pay their fair share — a long-overdue correction. For years, U.S. taxpayers carried the burden of Europe’s defense. Trump ended the freeloading and demanded real commitments.

Together, these achievements mark a dramatic departure from the weak, consensus-driven diplomacy of the Obama-Biden era. Trump hasn’t just restored credibility on the world stage. He’s proven that America leads best when it leads with resolve.

Just the beginning

These past six months have delivered a series of political and cultural victories many thought out of reach. A year ago, they seemed impossible. Today, they’re reality.

But this is no time to coast.

The next phase demands aggressive follow-through — especially on immigration. Trump must solidify the gains made on border security and ensure illegal immigration remains in retreat. The infrastructure exists. Now, it’s about willpower and execution.

Foreign policy also demands continued focus. The world remains volatile, and America needs a president who won’t hesitate to defend U.S. interests. Trump has shown he can meet that challenge. He must keep doing so — with clarity, strength, and resolve.

And then there’s spending. The left hasn’t let up. Democrats want more programs, more debt, more control. Trump’s tax cuts delivered real growth, but long-term stability means confronting the bloated federal bureaucracy and forcing Congress to spend less — not more.

The first half of 2025 brought a revolutionary shift. We reversed trends that once looked permanent. We reclaimed cultural and political ground that had been written off.

But none of it will last without vigilance. To secure lasting change, conservatives must stay engaged, focused, and relentless. The future won’t protect itself. We have to do it — now.

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​Opinion & analysis, Donald trump, First six months, Second trump administration, Accomplishments, Immigration and customs enforcement, Mass deportations, Transgender agenda, Men and women, Victories, Gender confusion, Self-deportation, Targeted enforcement, Tax cuts, Iran, Nuclear weapons, Nuclear program, Peace through strength, Abraham accords, Israel, Saudi arabia, Nato, National defense, National interest, Deep state, Administrative state, Bureaucracy 

Democrats long campaigned against President Donald Trump’s choice for U.S attorney in New Jersey, Alina Habba. On Tuesday, U.S. district court judges proved once again willing to give the president’s opponents what they want, swapping out the president’s choice for her subordinate.

The Justice Department has, however, cut that victory short.

How it started

Trump named Habba, his presidential counselor, as the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey on March 24. She was sworn in on March 28.

Trump noted on Truth Social at the time that Habba, who represented him in three trials in recent years, “will lead with the same diligence and conviction that has defined her career, and she will fight tirelessly to secure a Legal System that is both ‘Fair and Just’ for the wonderful people of New Jersey.”

The White House announced on July 1 that the president was nominating Habba for a full four-year term.

Democrats — New Jersey Sens. Cory Booker and Andy Kim in particular — condemned Habba’s appointment and campaigned against her Senate confirmation, which will come down to the wire this week.

RELATED: Democrats crown judges while crying about kings

Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Since interim U.S. attorneys are allowed to serve for only 120 days if not confirmed by the Senate or extended indefinitely by the district court for the district concerned, Habba needed winning votes both in the Senate Judiciary Committee, then on the Senate floor before the expiry of her term on Friday.

However, federal judges in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey — 15 out of the 17 of whom are Obama and Biden appointees — declined to appoint Habba on Tuesday without offering any explanation.

With days left until the expiration of Habba’s term, a panel of the blue state’s judges issued an order — signed by George W. Bush appointee Renée Marie Bumb, the chief judge for the district — appointing one of Habba’s subordinates, Desiree Leigh Grace, as the U.S. attorney for the district until the vacancy is filled.

‘When judges act like activists, they undermine confidence in our justice system.’

The order went out just days after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) demanded that the Democrat-appointed judges reject Habba. Jeffries made clear when making his demand that his animus against Habba had much to do with her indictment of LaMonica McIver, the Democratic congresswoman from New Jersey accused of assaulting a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.

How it’s going

The Trump DOJ blasted the judges’ move and responded with another personnel change.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who over the weekend emphasized that Habba “has the full confidence” of Trump and the DOJ, stated on Tuesday, “The district court judges in NJ are trying to force out [Habba] before her term expires at 11:59 p.m. Friday. Their rush reveals what this was always about: a left-wing agenda, not the rule of law.”

RELATED: DOJ reaches out to one major Epstein witness everyone’s been afraid to talk to

Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“When judges act like activists, they undermine confidence in our justice system,” continued Blanche. “Alina is President Trump’s choice to lead — and no partisan bench can override that.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday evening that Habba’s replacement, Grace, had been removed, noting that “this Department of Justice does not tolerate rogue judges — especially when they threaten the President’s core Article II powers.”

‘President Trump has full confidence in Alina Habba.’

Blanche suggested that the district judges in New Jersey colluded with Democratic senators but that their apparent plot “won’t work.”

“Pursuant to the president’s authority, we have removed that deputy, effective immediately,” said Blanche. “This backroom vote will not override the authority of the chief executive.”

Of course, Democrats were apoplectic about the Trump administration’s decision to fight fire with fire.

“Trump’s Department of Justice is once again criticizing a court that acted within its authority, continuing a pattern of publicly undermining judicial decisions and showing disregard for the rule of law and the separation of powers,” Booker and Kim complained in a joint statement. “The firing of a career public servant, lawfully appointed by the court, is another blatant attempt to intimidate anyone that doesn’t agree with them and undermine judicial independence.”

White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said in a statement to Blaze News, “President Trump has full confidence in Alina Habba, whose work as acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey has made the Garden State and the nation safer. The Trump administration looks forward to her final confirmation in the U.S. Senate and will work tirelessly to ensure the people of New Jersey are well represented.”

Blaze News has reached out to the DOJ for comment.

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​Alina habba, Habba, Pam bondi, Todd blanche, Department of justice, Doj, Justice department, Donald trump, New jersey, Cory booker, Andy kim, Democrat, Democrats, Leftism, Attorney, Politics 

More than 150 of President Trump’s nominees still await confirmation. Democrats refuse to budge. Without unanimous consent, the process would require over 4,000 hours of debate — time the Senate doesn’t have.

The clock is ticking. The chamber plans to adjourn Tuesday for recess.

Key vacancies leave major gaps across the federal government — and the Senate has no excuse.

Trump’s first term proved the importance of having the right people in place. Personnel is policy. Without confirmed appointees, the administration can’t fully execute its agenda.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) faces three options. He can pressure Democrats to relent and agree to fast-track confirmations. He can formally declare a recess, giving Trump the authority to make recess appointments that last through the end of his term. Or he can pursue a hybrid approach — squeezing Democrats procedurally while preparing the paperwork for immediate recess action.

But waiting is not an option. Every day of delay empowers the bureaucracy Trump came back to dismantle.

As of Tuesday morning, 138 traditional White House nominees remained stuck in Senate limbo. Another 16 privileged nominees — those eligible for expedited consideration — and several military promotions have also cleared committee but await floor votes.

These aren’t fringe appointments. Each has already undergone vetting, public hearings, and secured majority approval in respective committees. All that remains is a vote.

Yet, the Senate continues to stall.

Take just one example: Not a single U.S. attorney has been confirmed. The administration has begun referring cases to the Justice Department, but without Senate action, key prosecutors remain on hold. Five U.S. attorney nominees have cleared committee and now sit idle on the Senate calendar.

The delay extends to critical foreign policy and national security posts.

Ten weeks into Trump’s second term, the United States still has no ambassador to the European Union. The Vatican — central to diplomatic efforts in an increasingly unstable world — also lacks an American envoy.

The backlog includes the nominee for undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and the undersecretary of State for arms control and international security.

Also stuck: the assistant secretary of Labor for mine safety and health, six Defense Department nominees, nine military service nominees across the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and three undersecretaries and assistant secretaries at the State Department.

These vacancies leave major gaps across the federal government — and the Senate has no excuse.

The old confirmation process depended on unanimous consent to move nominees forward. That tradition began to erode when Democrats started blocking President George W. Bush’s picks. Republican resistance to President Obama accelerated the breakdown, and by Trump’s first term, the system had collapsed into gridlock.

To sidestep the dysfunction, Thune would need to file for cloture, wait two days, and then allow up to 30 hours of debate for top-level nominees — such as deputy secretaries and ambassadors — or two hours for lower-tier appointments like assistant secretaries.

That slow-motion slog won’t cut it. With more than 150 nominees pending and recess looming, the clock is already working against him.

Instead, Thune must flush Democrats out of their bunkers. President Trump has already urged him to delay or cancel recess. But polite requests won’t move the needle. Hardball will.

Thune should launch a confirmation marathon. Don’t put up five nominees — put up 50. On paper, that could mean 1,500 hours of debate. In practice, Democrats will eventually tire of the filibuster and cave. At some point, they’ll agree to unanimous consent just to end the ordeal.

The alternative? Let the president bypass them entirely with recess appointments.

Thune holds a powerful card: the threat of an official Senate recess.

While headlines routinely claim Congress is “in recess,” the Senate hasn’t entered a formal recess in decades. Here’s why that matters: Under the Constitution, once the Senate recesses for 10 days or more, the president gains the power to make “recess appointments.” That authority allows him to install nominees without Senate confirmation — for the remainder of the chamber’s term. In this case, that means until January 2027.

Senators don’t like giving up that power. To prevent it, someone usually shows up every three days to gavel in and declare the Senate “in session,” even if no real work gets done. But Thune can break that pattern. He just needs two things: House approval — which should be easy — and the support of 51 senators.

That second part will be more of a challenge. Republicans may need to cut a deal with someone like Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine moderate who rarely misses a vote and has little patience for procedural brinkmanship.

If Trump secures the recess and installs his nominees, they’ll serve for the next 18 months. Even if Republicans lose the majority in November, the Senate can return in 2026 and retroactively confirm those same appointees. Nominees who’ve already cleared committee won’t need to repeat that step — but they’ll still face the full gauntlet of Senate debate.

The move would restore function to a stalled government — and hand Trump the team he needs to finish the job.

National radio host Vince Coglianese spotlighted the plan on his Tuesday show. It’s clever — and entirely justified. But not everyone’s on board. Plenty of Senate veterans bristle at the idea of recess appointments, especially if it means Democrats might one day do the same. That discomfort doesn’t matter. At some point, this move needs to be on the table.

That time has come.

The Senate despises missing recess even more than it fears recess appointments. And to be fair, skipping the break isn’t just about junkets and downtime. Senators need time back home to campaign, connect with voters, and sell the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Republicans know they must define their record to hold the majority. Democrats know they must distort that record to win it back.

But logistical strain is real, too. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) may seem immortal, but he’s 91. He’s not the only aging lawmaker still clocking in. Call it a structural flaw in our system, but it’s one Thune and the White House legislative affairs team can’t ignore.

Still, excuses won’t do. The president won a national mandate. Senate Democrats have turned debate itself into a weapon to block Trump from building the government voters chose.

We’ve already seen what happens when Trump doesn’t have the right people in place. That mistake can’t be repeated. This fight may be messy, but it’s necessary — and winnable. Thune just needs to hold the line.

Blaze News: Business spending reaches near 30-year high under Trump: ‘It’s the real deal’

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​Opinion & analysis, Politics 

A shooting outside an Anchorage restaurant could have led to many needless deaths, but a good guy with a gun was able to put down the shooter before anyone else was killed, according to a bar owner.

Security video obtained by KTUU-TV shows the moment when a security guard quickly struck down a man who was shooting in a crowded sidewalk outside the Gaslight Lounge on Saturday evening.

The video shows a security guard reaching into the trunk of his car to retrieve his gun as another guard appears to confront Manogiamanu.

Police said they responded to the scene early Sunday morning and found three men with gunshots, one with life-threatening injuries. They later found a fourth person with non-life-threatening injuries. One of the men was identified as 23-year-old Leroy Manogiamanu.

John Pattee, the owner of the bar, explained to KTUU what happened when the shooting broke out at about 2:50 a.m.

“When we saw these guys coming, we radioed all our staff, all of our security staff,” he said. “[We] said, ‘Hey, these guys, something’s wrong with these guys.’ So we were on alert, and so we brought staff to the front.”

The video shows a security guard reaching into the trunk of his car to retrieve his gun as another guard appears to confront Manogiamanu. Moments later, Manogiamanu pulls a gun and begins shooting.

That guard was able to take out Manogiamanu from nearly point-blank range.

“He confronted the guy that was about to shoot other people,” Pattee said.

RELATED: 21-year-old congressional intern killed in triple shooting in Washington, DC

“There’s a small group of criminals that are victimizing my clientele and my staff and my business,” Pattee added. “In this particular instance … all of us feel like we’re as much of a victim as my two guys that got shot.”

Pattee said another guard was shot seven times, but astonishingly, no vital organs were shot, and the man was going to be released the next day. Another guard was shot in the hand and was released from the hospital.

The owner spoke to the man who shot down the shooting, and he said the guard told him he was proud of what he did because police told him he likely saved many lives.

KTUU also pointed out that the incident happened just across the street from a police headquarters.

The Alaska Police Department said they are investigating the incident as a homicide.

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​Anchorage shooting, Alaska shooting video, Leroy manogiamanu, Video shooting guard, Crime 

If someone is willing to endanger your child, what wouldn’t he or she be willing to do to you?

That’s why the Trump administration’s move to cut federal funds from so-called nonprofit hospitals that provide chemical and surgical — and highly profitable — “gender-affirming care” to minors is not only justified — it’s long overdue.

If nonprofit hospitals won’t even protect the children in their care, taxpayers should no longer be forced to subsidize them.

The new policy protects children, of course. But it also protects taxpayers and reins in massive, unaccountable hospital systems that cloak predatory behavior in the language of charity.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ recent rulemaking, led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., raises several urgent questions:

How long have taxpayers been funding these irreversible procedures?How much public money has been funneled into these programs?Which hospitals are responsible?And how transparent have hospitals been about it?

Until recently, America’s nonprofit hospitals — and their outsized role in America’s astronomically high health care costs — have largely escaped scrutiny from the legacy media. But the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which seeks to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, changed that. The attention was long overdue and well deserved.

Investigations revealed that many nonprofit hospitals:

Exploit the tax code and dodge transparency laws.Engage in phantom billing and ruthless collections.Divert funds earmarked for poor patients.Shower executives with salaries and benefits that would probably enrage the shareholders of otherwise “for-profit” public companies.

In other words, they act less like charities and more like corrupt corporations — with none of the accountability.

In addition, while resisting compliance with federal transparency laws, nonprofit hospitals have become some of the most successful land speculators in the country. It’s hardly a coincidence that these same nonprofits play an aggressive role in state, local, and national elections, directing enormous cash donations to candidates that will do their bidding. Charitable, indeed.

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Photo by Douglas Rissing via Getty Images

Take, for example, the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, which drew national attention after a pro-trans, same-sex married nurse turned whistleblower exposed how the hospital targeted children. Jamie Reed testified that the center:

Pressured families into life-altering decisions through bullying and misinformation.Consistently failed to meet even minimal mental health evaluation standards.Never disclosed that treatments would cause permanent infertility.In some cases, proceeded with interventions even after parents withdrew consent.

Her testimony was central to the Supreme Court’s recent decision affirming states’ rights to restrict “gender-affirming” surgeries based on age.

Or consider Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. There, whistleblowers exposed staff who pressured skeptical parents with the manipulative question, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”

Finally, at the Benioff Children’s Hospital at the University of California, San Francisco, things went a step further. It, too, was credibly accused of the same aggressive surgical-advocacy and anti-transparency practices of the aforementioned hospitals. But Benioff didn’t keep its indoctrination within its hospital walls. Hospital officials partnered with the local public school system to “educate” students about teen trans surgeries.

The “manual” Benioff distributed to public schools posed questions including, “What role can the school take in supporting mom and exploring medical options?” and “How many times is too many times to call mom about a student’s comments about depression and testosterone?” Internal emails later revealed staff asking how they could evaluate children’s mental health without involving parents at all.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They reveal a systemic pattern of deception, coercion, and radical ideology under the banner of “health care.”

Cutting federal funding to hospitals that promote this abuse is a critical first step. But it can’t be the last.

If nonprofit hospitals won’t even protect the children in their care, taxpayers should no longer be forced to subsidize them.

​Opinion & analysis 

Conservatives face a “use it or lose it” moment on immigration enforcement and deportations. They’ve never had a stronger case — or more support, even as public opinion flags — for aggressive removals. They have the rationale, the electoral mandate, and now the federal funding. If they fail to act, the left — and even Donald Trump, who’s already flirting with amnesty for non-criminal aliens — will seize the opportunity.

Their argument will go like this: “We tried your way. Mass deportation doesn’t work. Now we need a ‘legal pathway’ for those who haven’t committed serious crimes.” That’s the amnesty trap. To avoid it, conservatives must escalate interior enforcement — fast.

No more excuses. Immigration reform by reconciliation is possible — if the political will exists.

Illegal immigration remains a policy problem, not a funding problem. Throwing money at it won’t solve anything if the rules stay broken. Congress could pour $1 trillion into ICE operations, but if every removal gets litigated case by case, Trump’s second term will end before we even scratch the surface of Biden’s four-year importation binge.

Since February, ICE has averaged just 14,700 removals per month. That’s roughly 176,000 a year — or barely 700,000 over a full term. Even with increased arrests, that pace won’t clear the backlog of criminal aliens, let alone the 7.7 million undetained cases on ICE’s docket, the 8 to 10 million admitted under Biden, or the broader illegal population likely numbering in the tens of millions.

The system can’t even expel one known gang member — Kilmar Abrego Garcia — without months of delay. Instead of removing him, the Justice Department has been forced into court defending itself against claims that it “defied” a judge by taking too long to return him from El Salvador.

And that’s just one case. The Justice Department has also spent untold resources fighting Hamas supporter Mahmoud Khalil, who now walks free — and is suing the government for $22 million. Yes, Khalil held a green card. But that doesn’t give him a right to stay in the United States while openly supporting terrorism in violation of federal law.

Despite Supreme Court rulings aimed at narrowing judicial overreach, federal courts continue to block nearly every facet of immigration enforcement. Two weeks ago, a district judge in California effectively shut down most ICE operations in Los Angeles. The Ninth Circuit declined to reverse the order.

That leaves no doubt: Even with the Supreme Court on record and billions in new appropriations to support removals, the system remains broken. If the Trump administration keeps obeying these court orders, something must change — and fast.

Here’s the danger: If deportations continue at a glacial pace and Democrats reclaim the House in 2027, Trump may throw in the towel. He’ll say, “Even I couldn’t make it work,” and cut a deal for amnesty, justifying it as the only realistic path forward. In effect, he’ll codify the de facto amnesty already in place.

So what should we do?

Strip jurisdiction in budget reconciliation 2.0

With Senate leaders floating another reconciliation bill, Trump should make judicial reform the centerpiece. The content, the campaign, the messaging — all of it must focus on dismantling judicial roadblocks to immigration enforcement.

Republicans won’t unify around cutting meaningful spending beyond the deal struck in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. So Trump should spend every ounce of his remaining political capital on something transformational: ending judicial sabotage of deportations.

He should demand that all removal orders for noncitizens — or at least non-green card holders — become final, with no Article III court review. That change alone would defund millions of court cases and carry a direct budgetary effect. In the same bill, Congress should block federal courts from reviewing state-based immigration laws, leaving the final word to state judiciaries.

Trump must not let Senate leadership hide behind procedural excuses like the Byrd Rule. We’ve already seen how easily they override it when they want to. During the last reconciliation debate, Trump and Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) ignored the parliamentarian to push through their tax strategy.

To extend the 2017 tax cuts without scoring them as new spending, the GOP simply redefined “current policy” as “current law.” When Sen. Bernie Moreno (D-Ohio) presided over the chamber, he ruled the provision in order — without even consulting the parliamentarian, who would have almost certainly objected.

Trump should demand that same treatment now. No more excuses. Immigration reform by reconciliation is possible — if the political will exists.

Call in the Guard

Trump should also deploy the National Guard to support ICE and the Department of Homeland Security directly. Use them to build temporary detention facilities, assist in arrests, and provide operational security. If Antifa resumes its terror campaign, arrests will stall before they even reach the courtroom.

The Justice Department and FBI need to move aggressively to disrupt and prosecute the groups organizing these attacks. If left unchecked, they will shield the illegal population from enforcement and grind federal operations to a halt.

RELATED: What do you call 12 Antifa radicals in body armor?

Joko Yulianto via iStock/Getty Images

Establish a Homeland Security Reserve Corps

Former ICE official Dan Cadman has proposed forming a Homeland Security Reserve Corps composed of retired or former immigration enforcement officers. Trump should adopt the idea at once.

Rather than relying solely on new, untested agents — each bringing long-term benefit obligations — this reserve force would provide a cost-effective and experienced backup. Trained personnel could be rapidly deployed when enforcement surges, without the lag time of recruitment or training.

As Cadman put it, the reserve would cost less “to initiate and maintain … than will be spent trying to fill out the ranks with newly minted but untested officers.” State and local law enforcement also offer a deep bench of willing partners.

Send them back by ship

Once legal and street-level interference is neutralized, the next hurdle becomes logistics. Deportations by commercial air remain expensive and inefficient.

Trump should leverage maritime resources — ships over planes. Water transport moves more people at less cost, and the federal government already controls the tools. The Navy, Coast Guard, FEMA, and the Department of Transportation all have assets that can scale removals quickly. There’s no reason not to use them.

Target identity theft

Illegal aliens don’t just trespass borders — they break laws to stay employed. Identity fraud, document forgery, and fake Social Security numbers keep the jobs magnet humming.

Rather than flirt with amnesty, Trump should target this criminal network directly. He should order the Social Security Administration to resume sending no-match letters to employers when an employee’s name doesn’t align with the Social Security number on file.

These letters would compel businesses to terminate ineligible workers and refer them to ICE. The effect would be swift and far-reaching.

The truth? Both parties have long ignored this problem because major donors want cheap labor. But if document fraud laws were enforced consistently, the jobs magnet would shut off — and self-deportation would surge.

If Trump continues lauding these workers as “impossible to replace,” he risks creating moral and political inertia. That narrative will lower enforcement morale and momentum, fueling the next bipartisan push for amnesty.

One thing is certain: Trump won’t get another shot at this mandate. If he fails to deliver on his promise, the amnesty lobby will claim permanent victory — and entrench it. The consequences won’t be temporary. They’ll shape immigration policy for a generation. We should all consider — and fear — what comes afterward.

​Opinion & analysis, Mass deportations, Donald trump, Executive orders, Amnesty, Illegal immigration, Illegal aliens, Farms, Hotels, Restaurants, Hospitality, Illegal labor, Green cards, Immigration and customs enforcement, Department of homeland security, Justice department, Removal, Kilmar abrego garcia, Rogue judges, National injunction, Supreme court, Casa, Federal law, Mahmoud khalil, Terrorism, Ninth circuit, Budget reconciliation, Senate, Bernie moreno, John thune, Antifa, Fema, Coast guard, Department of transportation, Mandate