Category: blaze media

A 15-year-old Florida male is being charged as an adult after officials said he fatally shot a 16-year-old male last month.

Jacori Antonio Redding was charged with manslaughter with a weapon, for which he received no bond, Friday’s arrest affidavit said. He also was charged with possession of a firearm on school property, for which he received a $10,000 bond, as well as possession of a firearm by a minor, for which he received a $1,000 bond, the affidavit also said.

‘I’m angry that something as small as bumping into someone in the halls of a high school can result in a shooting death.’

A judge issued an order for Redding to be transferred from the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice to the custody of the Orange County Jail, according to the affidavit. Redding was booked into jail Friday, according to jail records.

The affidavit also said Redding is to be charged as an adult on the listed charges by the Orange County State Attorney’s Office.

It all erupted Oct. 9, police said — after a bump in a high school hallway.

Witnesses said that earlier in the day, Redding bumped into 16-year-old Pinien Dalmacy at Oak Ridge High School in Orlando, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.

Dalmacy told Redding to apologize, officials said, and Redding would not. So the two sophomores agreed to fight after school at Vogt-Meloon Park on West Oak Ridge Road, officials said.

The sheriff’s office said deputies responded to a shooting on the basketball court at the park and found Dalmacy, who was shot twice.

Monique H. Worrell, state attorney of the Ninth Judicial Circuit, said Redding killed Dalmacy using a gun, court documents said.

The sheriff’s office said Redding ran back to the high school after the shooting, and a deputy who coordinated with school officials secured Redding in the school cafeteria. Officials said the gun was found in his bag, Redding was arrested, and a juvenile custody order was obtained for manslaughter with a firearm and possession of a firearm on school property.

Below is a video report dated Oct. 10, the day after the fatal shooting:

RELATED: Blaze News original: ‘Austin Metcalf got exactly what he deserved — point blank, period’: Karmelo Anthony defenders go viral

WFTV-TV’s video report added that it wasn’t Redding’s first time in a courtroom and that he already was facing a trial for grand theft auto.

“My heart aches for Pinien’s family, who are grieving this unimaginable loss,” Sheriff John Mina said. “And I’m angry that something as small as bumping into someone in the halls of a high school can result in a shooting death.”

The sheriff’s office said, “Detectives know there were witnesses to this shooting and that there may be video out there that could be helpful to the investigation. We are asking anyone with that kind of information to contact ocsoinfo@ocsofl.com.”

Redding on Tuesday pleaded not guilty, court records indicate. Redding’s in-jail arraignment is scheduled for Nov. 10; his hearing is scheduled for Nov. 12, court records say.

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​Juvenile, Tried as an adult, Fatal shooting, School hallway bump, Refused to apologize, After-school fight, Manslaughter charge, Florida, Orange county sheriff’s office, High school, Crime 

Vice President JD Vance is cutting through the noise and reminding Republicans not to overreact to the Democrats’ latest winning streak in local and state elections.

To onlookers, it might seem like Democrats have regained their footing. New York City elected its first openly socialist mayor, California is poised to redistrict the state in a manner that gives Democrats an even greater electoral advantage, and fantasizing about murdering political opponents no longer disqualifies a person from holding the highest law enforcement office in Virginia. In short, Democrats won every election they were hoping to win on November 4.

‘The infighting is so stupid.’

In the wake of these electoral losses, Vance gave Republican voters a reality check.

“I think it’s idiotic to overreact to a couple of elections in blue states, but a few thoughts,” Vance said in a Wednesday post on X.

RELATED: Progressive wins VA race despite admitted indifference to ‘sexually explicit material’ in schools

Photo by ADAM GRAY/AFP via Getty Images

Vance noted that one of Republicans’ challenges is voter enthusiasm. Voter turnout has historically been difficult for local elections, even more so among Republicans. Because of this, Vance emphasized the importance of energizing the base and engaging voters in future elections.

“[Scott] Pressler, TPUSA, and a bunch of others have been working hard to register voters,” Vance said. “I said it in 2022, and I’ve said it repeatedly since: our coalition is ‘low propensity’ and that means we have to do better at turning out voters than we have in the past.”

Affordability was at the forefront of all successful campaigns this cycle. As Vance noted, cost of living will be a defining issue for all future elections, and it’s one Republicans need to stay focused on both on the campaign trail and in office.

“We need to focus on the home front,” Vance said. “The president has done a lot that has already paid off in lower interest rates and lower inflation, but we inherited a disaster from Joe Biden and Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

RELATED: Zohran Mamdani becomes first openly socialist mayor of New York City

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

“We’re going to keep on working to make a decent life affordable in this country, and that’s the metric by which we’ll ultimately be judged in 2026 and beyond.”

Above all, Vance encouraged the MAGA movement to tune out distracting “infighting” and focus on the movement.

“The infighting is so stupid,” Vance said. “I care about my fellow citizens — particularly young Americans — being able to afford a decent life, I care about immigration and sovereignty, and I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home.”

“If you care about those things too, let’s work together.”

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​Jd vance, Donald trump, Republican party, Democrat party, Zohran mamdani, Election night, 2024 election, Scott pressler, Turning point usa, Tpusa, Charlie kirk, Joe biden, White house, Trump administration, Affortability, Cost of living, Abigail spanberger, Mikie sherrill, Jay jones, Politics 

‘Tis the season for disputations and theses nailed on doors. Reform movements simmer for years, then a single act draws a bright red line. Last week, one of our most influential platforms chose to give one of the right’s most infamous fiends a mainstream showcase. For many, though, Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes didn’t just cross a line. It obliterated it. Now we have a choice: Either take Fuentes seriously or seriously reconsider anyone who does.

I criticized Carlson’s interview with Fuentes on my show last week. The next day, I defended Tucker’s larger legacy against calls to “cancel” him. After taking a few more days to watch, think, and pray, here’s a fuller accounting — organized as a thread of theses, but shaped into a single argument.

Because if we’re going to have a debate, then let’s have a real one.

How we got here

Fatherlessness in the home and timidity in the pulpit have produced a generation of young men who never learned how to shoulder responsibility — preserve, provide, protect — or to wield authority with Christ-like meekness — power under control.

Anger among young men, especially young white men, over the wreckage handed to them is justified. The right now faces a generational reckoning over decades of failure. Attempts by older leaders to bottle that reckoning will only push exasperated men toward Fuentes and his imitators.

We can keep this coalition together if we hold fast to truth, reject bigotry, and refuse to platform malevolence.

On Nick Fuentes

Fuentes is a malignant satanic force. He speaks the language of slander and accusation. Unless he repents, he offers nothing we need. We can address the real grievances of young men without creating our own Louis Farrakhan.

Mainstreaming Fuentes would splinter our already fraught coalition, poison donors and advertisers, and make us politically impotent.

On Tucker Carlson

Fuentes gained so much oxygen and wreaked so much internal havoc because Carlson chose to do a largely softball interview that amplified him. Tucker owns that choice. If you worry about distractions from the mission, take it up with the person who booked the guest. He could have been talking about Arctic Frost. He chose Nick Fuentes instead.

The tone contrasted sharply with Tucker’s tough interview of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) over Israel. Extending more empathy to Fuentes than to Cruz sends the wrong moral signal and understandably raised suspicions about Tucker’s recent editorial choices.

Also true: Over the last seven years, no one on our side has produced a more important body of work than Tucker Carlson.

On the rules of engagement

A generational reckoning will color outside the lines. Don’t cancel people willing to go there. The last generation’s political strategy failed often enough that we should err on the side of hard reassessment.

But disagreement — even sharp disagreement — is not “cancel culture.” If you want to replace a narrative, expect scrutiny. That’s a reckoning, not a psyop.

On the Heritage Foundation

Kevin Roberts is one of the finest salt-of-the-earth patriots I know, and Heritage under his leadership has fought real anti-Semitism. Reasonable people can critique Heritage’s handling of this moment, but the institution must equip itself for the fights in front of us, not yesterday’s battles. Some in and around Heritage want to rewind the clock to 2005 and used this episode to try.

On the Jewish reaction

Conservative Jewish friends have reasons to feel skittish given history’s lessons. I will oppose anti-Semitism and the mainstreaming of Fuentes and his copycats down to the last molecule.

On who this is really about

I’m not worried about Israel’s ultimate fate. If modern Israel plays a prophetic role, God will protect and preserve it. If not, God will judge it.

No, I’m worried about us — our souls and our movement. No culture descends into “it’s the Jooooos” and comes back stronger.

On what should unite us

As Charlie Kirk said, “Islam is not compatible with Western civilization.” People who fixate more on Jews and Israel than on the threat from political Islam reveal their priorities.

Criticizing Israeli policy does not equal anti-Semitism; I criticized Israeli COVID policy at the time. We may even need more policy criticism to sustain the Arab realignment President Trump helped forge. Your prophetic view of Israel is irrelevant. Without a Jewish state, Islam would focus all its energy on Christendom — as it did for the first 1,300 years of its existence. From a foreign-policy standpoint, a Jewish state functions as a strategic buffer between Islam and the West.

On false choices and narratives

October 7 followed the neoconservative script: Israel granted more “agency” to the so-called Palestinians as a proto-two-state solution. The Palestinians then elevated Hamas, the architects of October 7, right on Israel’s doorstep. Some on our side now demand more of the same and unknowingly converge with the neocons they denounce.

People who were dead wrong about the risks of striking Iran earlier this year should come clean, as Vice President JD Vance said recently. Their silence exposes them.

Yes, some of the Tucker-Fuentes noise is a pre-emptive proxy fight over the 2028 presidential election, given Tucker’s friendship with Vance. We cannot afford to let 2028 maneuvering fracture the coalition before the midterms. Lose the midterms and much of the Trump agenda stalls and 2028 gets much harder.

It’s too early for primary shenanigans.

On the fallout

If Tucker had dropped that interview a year from now, Democrats would have used it as a midterm wrecking ball. They’d spend untold sums to make Fuentes the face of the right. It would devastate us.

RELATED: Zohran Mamdani becomes first openly socialist mayor of New York City

Photo by Angela Weiss/Getty Images

On the future

None of this feels random. After Charlie Kirk’s martyrdom, the dam broke. I can attest he worked to keep Fuentes and the Groypers on the margins. A month before he died, he invited me into a one-on-one Signal chat to build a strategy to keep malignant forces from gaining a foothold in our movement. He believed God would never bless their darkness and that it would destroy us spiritually and politically.

Now we see: our apostolic leader murdered, Democrats embracing Islamist politics through Zohran Mamdani, and a sudden internal split over Fuentes. Consider it a spiritual counterattack to the revival seeds we saw at Charlie’s memorial.

Pat Buchanan had insights. Bill Buckley had insights. Both had blind spots. Trump, perhaps unintentionally, kept the best of Buchanan’s realism without the worst. We can keep this coalition together if we do the same: Hold fast to truth, reject bigotry, and refuse to platform malevolence.

Come, let us reason together.

​Nick fuentes, Tucker carlson, Gop, Midterm elections, Opinion & analysis, Israel, Anti-semitism 

New York City voters have done what experts across the country have warned will be their doom and elected a Democratic Socialist. Former Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore is among those who sounded the alarm, and he now warns there will be a mass migration out of New York in retaliation.

On Moore’s website, which champions “voting with your feet,” visitors can track “where the moving vans are going to and from and also how much money they’re taking with them.”

“New York has lost two and a half million people. … Half of those people came from New York City,” Moore tells Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck on “The Glenn Beck Program.” “So if they elect a socialist and they raise the taxes again … the rich, they’re not going to be there any longer.”

“One million is probably a long shot, but I think you’re going to see a lot of wealth move out of New York,” he says.

“If they raise these taxes again, you’d pay 17% income tax in New York City. Who’s going to do that? By the way, that’s on top of the, you know, 40% federal tax. So people will move,” he adds.

Moore uses the example of Ken Griffin, the billionaire behind Citadel.

“He was the single biggest charitable giving in the city of Chicago. He gave to the Art Institute, he gave to the homeless shelters, he gave to the food kitchens and the museums and so on. I mean, he was by far the biggest donor to all of the charities,” Moore explains.

“Well, finally they kept raising taxes in Chicago. And as you probably know, he moved out of Chicago and he moved to Palm Beach, Florida. And so then the interesting part of the story is it put a $50 million hole in the Illinois budget. One person,” he continues.

“And so my point is, you chase the ‘evil’ rich out of your city and your state, and you pay a high price for that in terms of the employ,” Moore tells Glenn. “By the way, he took several thousand jobs with him.”

“The rich aren’t rich because they’re stupid,” he adds.

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​Free, Sharing, Video phone, Upload, Video, Camera phone, Youtube.com, The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcast, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Economy, New york city, Zohran mamdani win, Nyc socialist mayor, Socialism, Communism, Mass exodus, Mass migration, New york city doomed 

Pet owners are demolishing the Associated Press after the outlet published a video suggesting that pets make climate change worse.

The video, posted to social media, said that pets worsen climate change by needing food with high meat content. The video also recommended that people seeking to own a pet avoid breeders and instead adopt pets without owners.

‘From the people who brought you “you will all eat bugs,” comes “sacrifice your pets for climate change.”‘

“Pets have a pretty sizable climate impact. But not all carbon…pawprints…are created equal. So if you’re looking to get a pet, which ones emit the least?” read the post from AP.

“And if you’ve already got one, how do you make sure it has the smallest foot (or paw) print?” it added. “There are some options.”

The video quickly garnered over 2.3 million views, many from angry pet owners and others who told the AP where it could stuff the suggestions.

“None of this matters in the slightest. It’s all silliness. The countries that worry about it will become poor, the ones that don’t will not,” responded Charles Cooke of National Review.

“We at the AP have decided life isn’t unpleasant enough. Here’s another way you can make it worse,” replied writer Jon Gabriel.

“If I tried for forty years…better yet if God made me immortal and I spent eternity…an entire eternity with no other mission…I would not be able to care less about my pet’s carbon footprint,” responded influencer Chance McClain.

“You have to be mentally deficient to base the choice of your next pet on whatever this article has to say,” said showrunner Joseph Mallozzi.

“Whenever you think you are depressed and useless, just remember there is someone at AP that researched and approved this article,” read another reply.

“From the people who brought you ‘you will all eat bugs,’ comes ‘sacrifice your pets for climate change,'” responded writer Drew Holden.

RELATED: Trump declares victory on ‘climate change hoax’ after Bill Gates issues concession memo

Others were more curt in their responses.

“I have a proposal for you on this: Go f**k yourself,” read one popular reply.

In a memo released in October, billionaire Bill Gates appeared to concede that the effort to thwart climate change directly was failing. He said that world governments should instead dedicate their efforts toward mitigating the negative effects of climate change on at-risk populations.

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​Associated press, Pet-owners, Online backlash, Climate change, Politics 

Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency. Blockchain. A decade ago, most Americans hadn’t heard those words. Even now, many don’t fully grasp what they mean. Some still dismiss Bitcoin as an internet fad — yet with one coin worth roughly $119,000, the joke is wearing thin.

The real story isn’t the price. It’s what Bitcoin represents: freedom, trust, and control over your own money. Those are conservative principles — and conservatives should embrace them.

Honest money for a dishonest age

In Denton County, Texans understand independence. We work hard, save what we can, and expect our money to keep its value. But Washington keeps printing dollars to solve political problems, and every new round of “stimulus” steals a little more of what Americans earn. That’s a big reason groceries, gas, and housing cost so much more today.

At its heart, Bitcoin isn’t about tech or speculation. It’s about trust — and keeping financial power in the hands of citizens instead of bureaucrats and corporations.

Bitcoin doesn’t play that game. Its supply is capped at 21 million coins forever. No bureaucrat or central banker can “stimulate” the economy by diluting your savings. It’s steady, transparent, and immune to the inflationary habits of modern government.

That’s not radical — it’s a return to honest value. Early Texans traded cattle, crops, and tools, and a handshake sealed the deal. Bitcoin is a digital version of that same trust: value backed by proof of work, not political decree.

Freedom in your own hands

Bitcoin is, at its core, a conservative idea. It rewards effort, limits government control, and protects personal liberty. You can own every rifle and round of ammunition in the world, but if the government freezes your bank account, you’re stuck. With Bitcoin, you control your money. Nobody can seize it.

The network itself is decentralized — millions of computers around the globe share the ledger. No single government, company, or regulator can shut it down. If one node fails, the others keep the system alive. It’s built to endure.

Lessons for a digital age

That model should guide how we build other technologies. Take artificial intelligence. Meta just poured $14 billion into one massive data center — a single point of failure. One cyberattack or natural disaster could wipe it out. America should follow Bitcoin’s example: distribute computing power, build smaller centers across the country, and bring skilled jobs to local communities like ours.

RELATED: ‘Lipstick on a pig’: How printing cash is destroying America — and crypto could be next

dem10 via iStock/Getty Images

Bitcoin also saves money. Send $1,000 through a credit card processor and you’ll lose $40 in fees. Send it through Bitcoin and it costs about four cents. That difference matters to small businesses, churches, and local campaigns. Political donations in Bitcoin should be legal nationwide — transparent, secure, and independent of the big banks that profit from the current system.

A return to honest value

At its heart, Bitcoin isn’t about tech or speculation. It’s about trust — and keeping financial power in the hands of citizens instead of bureaucrats and corporations.

Here in Denton County, we understand that kind of freedom. It’s the same spirit that settled Texas: work hard, hold what’s yours, and keep government out of your pockets.

Bitcoin isn’t the future of money. It’s the return of honest money — and conservatives should lead the charge to make it America’s next great success story.

​Opinion & analysis, Bitcoin, Federal reserve, Money, Inflation, Dollar, Artificial intelligence, Speculation, Trust, Conservative 

A Minnesota state representative who once confessed to her own apparently unlawful entry into the United States won the St. Paul mayoral race on Tuesday.

It was later revealed that Her’s ‘uncle’ was actually not a familial relative but a family friend.

Rep. Kaohly Vang Her (DFL) secured an over-two-point victory over incumbent Mayor Melvin Carter (DFL). The election results were determined in the second ranked-choice voting round, with Her receiving fewer than 2,000 votes more than her opponent.

“My family came here as refugees,” Her said during her victory speech on Tuesday evening. “Never in their wildest dreams would I be standing here today accepting the position of mayor. I want to thank Mayor Melvin Carter for his many years of service to our city. I started my political career working for him, and I will always be grateful for that opportunity.”

On the state House floor in June, Her, who was born in Laos, made a startling confession while advocating for public health care for illegal immigrants. She claimed that her father, who worked at the U.S. consulate, brought her family to America by falsifying immigration paperwork.

Her’s uncle had worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development and, because of that work, was immediately eligible to come to the U.S. at the end of the Vietnam War, she stated at the time.

RELATED: ‘I am illegal’: Democratic lawmaker’s brazen confession of family fraud implodes after failed backtrack

Saint Paul Mayor Melvin Carter. Photo by Christopher Mark Juhn/Anadolu via Getty Images

Her’s immediate family did not qualify for the same expedited process. However, Her’s father claimed on federal documents that Her’s maternal grandmother was his mother to circumvent their ineligibility, she explained to state lawmakers.

“My father, as the one processing the paperwork, put my grandmother down as his mother,” Her stated.

RELATED: Minneapolis mayoral race enters second round of ranked-choice vote counting

Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

“And so, I am illegal in this country,” she continued. “My parents are illegal here in this country.”

It was later revealed that Her’s “uncle” was actually not a familial relative but a family friend. She claimed that her family would have been eligible to come to the U.S. anyway and that the falsified records only sped up the process.

Since immigrating to the U.S., Her has become a U.S. citizen.

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​News, Minnesota, St. paul minnesota, St paul minnesota, St paul, St. paul, Kaohly vang her, Melvin carter, Illegal immigration, Immigration, Illegal immigration crisis, Immigration crisis, Politics 

Blaze News investigative reporters Steve Baker and Joseph Hanneman have spent years working to identify the masked individual who placed pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5, 2021.

Baker, whom the Biden FBI arrested over his January 6 reporting, revealed to Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck on Wednesday that they have finally locked in on a suspect. What’s more, Baker hinted that the suspect’s imminent identification will implicate and shame at least one federal agency.

‘It is monstrous.’

Baker told Beck, “When I pulled this thread, I was so shocked by what I saw, I immediately took it to a source in one of the most important, highest-level investigative federal agencies in the country. I immediately took it to our sources there, and I said, ‘You have to see this.'”

“After they looked at it for about two hours, the response that I got back was, ‘Holy F,'” continued Baker. “And then the follow-up response was, ‘She’s one of us!'”

— (@)

When pressed by Beck about his confidence level in the suspect ID, Baker said, “I will tell you that from gait analysis — that’s the analysis of the hoodied bomber … compared to the gait analysis of this individual in private life and at work — that the actual software hit at a 94% accuracy.”

“Human analysis from the experts in intelligence is much higher,” continued Baker. “They looked at it and went, ‘My God, that’s it. We got it.'”

RELATED: Analysis: FBI’s Jan. 6 pipe bomb update omits key evidence, withholds video

FBI

Forensic gait analysis — the scientific study of patterns in an individual’s style of movement in walking or running — is regarded as one of the most sophisticated approaches to identifying an individual from CCTV footage or video recordings and as especially valuable in the absence of other biometric identifiers.

The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Magazine noted in 2023 that gait analysis, which has been used to help secure criminal convictions throughout the Anglosphere for decades, “can be compelling, corroborating evidence,” especially since “criminals cannot hide their gait.”

Baker indicated that he left some “breadcrumbs” in recent reports.

Hanneman and Baker reported last week, for instance, that the 8.5-minute video about the Jan. 6 pipe bombs released by the FBI in October contained footage edited to exclude showing a U.S. Capitol Police SUV pull up directly across the street from where the suspect stood at 8:15 p.m. on January 5, 2021.

In addition to raising suspicion about the selective edit, the investigative duo claimed that the FBI also deliberately chose not to publicly acknowledge the theory that the pipe bombs were part of a poorly timed training exercise.

Baker told Beck on Wednesday that while the FBI and the Metropolitan Police Department are offering a $500,000 reward for evidence that leads to an arrest in the case, he didn’t take the new evidence implicating the yet-to-be named suspect to the agencies “because we believe that they were actively engaged in the cover-up.”

Baker indicated that there are national security-related briefings under way, and Beck said that the suspect’s name will be released after the relevant agencies have “battened down the hatches.”

Beck said, “This is one of the biggest stories — I think it is the biggest scandal of my lifetime, maybe in the last 100 years. It is monstrous.”

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​Steve baker, Glenn beck, National security, Politics, Tulsi gabbard, Pipe bomb, Jan. 6, January 6, Jan 6, Fbi, Bureau, Nsa 

Coca-Cola has responded to criticism over its AI-generated commercials with even more AI-generated art.

Following backlash for its AI-generated 2024 “Holidays Are Coming” ad, the company says that this year consumers should react more positively, as AI generation is “going forward.”

‘Real hard work writing some prompts for AI.’

For 2025, Coke has not only doubled down with its commercial, but tripled down amid criticism. The recent ad, created with Real Magic AI, depicts hosts of anthropomorphized squirrels, rabbits, dogs, and the brand’s traditional polar bears. While the ad showed significant improvements since last year, it still has the usual AI follies of non-spinning wheels on Coca-Cola trucks and overdrawn hairlines that could still fool the naked eye.

However, Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s head of generative AI, says not to believe the haters.

“Last year people criticized the craftsmanship. But this year the craftsmanship is 10 times better,” Thakar said, per Hollywood Reporter. “There will be people who criticize — we cannot keep everyone 100% happy.”

Thakar added, “But if the majority of consumers see it in a positive way, it’s worth going forward.”

One place Coke was certain to receive positive reinforcement was from its own team, which it showcased in a behind-the-scenes video praising its own hard work on the ad.

RELATED: AI can fake a face — but not a soul

The commentary video praised five of Coke’s AI specialists for parsing through 70,000 video clips in just 30 days to create the ad. Production used programs like OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo 3, and Luma AI.

“It really feels like this work is, you know, actively shaping how storytelling is evolving. It shows Coca-Cola really reimagining the creative workflow, especially in this AI era,” a female voiceover said.

“They landed on this super expressive hyperrealism, really cinematic scenes,” a male voiceover added.

The video poured praise over Coca-Cola’s team, which wrote prompts into AI programs about generating a “hyperrealistic panda animation,” for example, scouring through generated videos. Refinements and filters were then shown as further examples of the hard work.

“Post-production is the new pre-production. Advanced reasoning models let artists plan and solve them early and making scenes feel real before production locks in,” the female voiceover continued. “Combining human creativity with AI to turbocharge expression and imagination, giving creatives more freedom, speed, and control than ever before.”

Viewers did not respond with the same positivity, though, even accusing the voiceovers of being AI themselves.

RELATED: How H-1B hires broke USAA’s bond with veterans

“Real hard work writing some prompts for AI,” a viewer wrote.

“They’re acting like this is something they should be proud of,” another said.

One viewer called the idea of an “AI voiceover praising this ad compared to the actual human comments who dislike it” the beginning of a dystopian world.

Lost in the criticism of Coca-Cola’s shift to nonhuman artists is its continued refusal to mention Christmas. Despite depictions of Christmas trees, Christmas lights, and, of course, Santa Claus, the word Christmas is never displayed or uttered.

Both videos happily displayed all the Americana related to the holiday but were careful never to mention the forbidden words: Merry Christmas.

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​Ai, Coca cola, Christmas, War on christmas, Artificial intelligence, Coke, Tech 

Matt McChesney, a former University of Colorado star and Deion Sanders defender, has changed his tune on Coach Prime — and wants major changes to the coaching staff for the Buffaloes.

“I’m shocked that Pat Shurmur still has his job. I don’t see anybody else giving him another opportunity in college or the NFL. I’m stunned that he still has a job, especially with how quick Coach Prime in year one was to get rid of Coach Lewis at San Diego State,” McChesney tells BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock.

“I don’t see how we can look at the staff and say that they’re helping Coach Prime. And I don’t think Coach Prime is helping them necessarily. I think that when you put yourself in a situation where you’re surrounded by your friends, when it gets hard, are you going to fire them? And I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he continues.

“I think that the coaching staff needs to be extremely evaluated hard, and if they don’t make a bunch of changes, then they don’t want to get better because this is not acceptable,” he adds.

Whitlock agrees that there need to be changes, especially when it comes to their head coach and how they approach their next one.

“My concern, if I was a Colorado fan, would be, ‘Man, we went all-in on Deion. Will this administration, if Deion walks away or is fired, will this administration go all-in on the next coach?’” Whitlock says.

“Or will there be some hesitancy of, like, ‘Man, we just got burned. We owe Deion all this money.’ Any concern that there could be irrevocable or really serious damage done in the aftermath?” Whitlock asks.

“If Coach Prime were to walk away, selfishly, I hope if that were to happen, I hope that he would resign so they wouldn’t have to pay him. And that’s just, you know, that’s just the way it is,” McChesney says.

“Deion leaving without the money,” Whitlock laughs.

McChesney isn’t hopeful either.

“Usually, when nepotism and narcissism is involved at this level,” he says, “it’s really, really hard to get anybody to change doing anything.”

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The National Women’s Soccer League has entered crisis mode at the end of its season.

With the playoffs set to start, a recent opinion article sent shockwaves through the league because it mentions one simple issue: that men should not play in women’s sports.

‘That article does not speak for this team in this locker room.’

Elizabeth Eddy, a 34-year-old who plays for Angel City FC in Los Angeles, penned an article for the New York Post recently asking for the league to adopt gender testing in order to maintain an even playing field.

Eddy suggested one-time genetic testing through either blood sample or cheek swab, which would be kept confidential to protect player privacy.

The American’s level-headed essay even included the idea of “creating pathways for athletes traditionally excluded from competing at the highest level” in order to demonstrate “inclusion.”

Still, the vary notion of screening men out of the NWSL was met with heavy criticisms from Eddy’s teammates.

Angel City captain Sarah Gorden and vice captain Angelina Anderson held a press conference a few days later to publicly condemn Eddy’s comments, shockingly accusing her of racism and bigotry.

RELATED: JK Rowling says BBC ‘spit’ in women’s faces by naming soccer player who failed gender test as player of the year

Barbra Banda of Orlando Pride was removed from a Zambian roster over alleged elevated testosterone levels. Photo by Eakin Howard/NWSL via Getty Images

“That article does not speak for this team in this locker room,” Gorden stated vehemently. The captain said her teammates were “hurt,” “harmed,” and “disgusted” by some of the things that Eddy wrote.

Gorden went on to claim that Eddy’s essay had “undertones that come across as transphobic and racist as well,” but fell short of providing any quotes or specific details that fit her description.

However, Gorden did specify that she found it “inherently racist” for the article to feature a photo of Orlando Pride player Barbra Banda, claiming that it was likely because Banda looks different or is different.

However, Banda has been surrounded by controversy for years since being pulled from the 2022 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations.

As previously reported by Blaze News, Banda — along with teammate Racheal Kundananji — both allegedly had tested positive for impermissibly high levels of testosterone. An investigative report by the Telegraph stated that the players were removed from the Zambian women’s team because they did not want to take hormone suppressants, citing possible side effects.

Zambian officials told the outlet that Banda had abnormally high testosterone levels, and so did at least two other players, including Kundananji.

Banda has been praised through the controversy and was even named the BBC’s female footballer of the year in 2024. The award drew mass criticism, including from beloved writer J.K. Rowling, who called the award “more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women’s faces.”

RELATED: Blaze News investigates: Gender activism at the Olympics: How many transgender athletes are there?

Gorden added during the recent press conference that since she is a “mixed woman” with a black family, she was “devastated by the undertones” of Eddy’s article.

Anderson further cemented the team’s position and reinforced that Angel City was “founded upon inclusivity and love” for all.

The NWSL itself supported Banda’s recent selection to the FIFPRO World XI, which names the best female players in the world, annually.

The league said Banda is an “extraordinary talent” and that any “harassment or hateful attacks” have no place in the sport or its “communities.”

Kundananji was transferred to NWSL team Bay FC (San Francisco) in 2024. Banda missed a chunk of the 2025 season with a hip abductor injury.

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​Women’s sports, Fearless, Soccer, Women’s soccer, Transgenderism, Men in women’s sports, Nwsl, Sports 

The crushing defeats experienced on Tuesday by Republican candidates in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races as well as in the mayoral race in New York City are sure to be locally consequential as well as nationally telling.

After all, these elections provide insights into voter sentiment ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, in which Democrats will likely be able to flip five House seats, owing to the successful passage of the gerrymandering measure in California championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), Proposition 50.

It turns out that hostility toward President Donald Trump continues to animate a significant number of voters and that younger Americans, particularly young women, are receptive to radical candidates.

New York City

Socialist Zohran Mamdani took over 50% of the vote in the New York City mayoral race, beating Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa by 43.3 percentage points and disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo by nearly nine points.

It’s clear from CNN’s exit polls that Mamdani’s pinko populism resonated with a great many voters, particularly younger voters, in a city where the cost of living is widely regarded as a bigger issue than the correlated strain of illegal immigration and the problem of crime.

Mamdani campaigned on freezing the rent for all stabilized tenants; building more affordable housing; raising taxes on millionaires and corporations; raising the minimum wage; “expanding and protecting gender-affirming care citywide”; and frustrating the efforts of the Trump administration to enforce federal immigration law.

The majority of voters who said that the most important issues facing NYC were immigration and crime indicated that they voted for Cuomo. Meanwhile, 66% of the clear majority of voters who said the cost of living was the number-one issue ended up supporting Mamdani.

Mamdani also secured the support of:

65% of voters who disapprove of Trump as well as 8% who approve of him;33% of voters who expressed an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party and 65% of those with a favorable view;46% of white voters and 54% of non-white voters;69% of voters ages 44 and younger, including 84% of women under 30;75% of the irreligious vote, 33% of the Jewish vote, 33% of the Catholic vote, and 42% of votes by those identifying as Protestant or other types of Christian;82% of the non-straight vote;82% of the votes cast by people who have been in New York City for 10 years or less; and65% of first-time mayoral voters.

President Donald Trump was a factor in the majority of respondents’ votes in the Virginia, New Jersey, and California, according to CBS News’ exit polls. In the New York City mayoral race, however, only 40% of respondents said Trump was a factor when deciding for whom to vote.

RELATED: Democrat who sent death-wish texts wins top law enforcement office in Virginia

Photo (left): Alex Wong/Getty Images; Photo (right): Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

While Trump was not a factor across the board in the NYC mayoral election, 76% of the people who said he was ultimately cast ballots for Mamdani.

New Jersey

In the New Jersey gubernatorial election, Democrat Rep. Mikie Sherrill beat Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli 56.2% to 43.2%, dealing him a more crushing defeat than he experienced in the 2021 gubernatorial election when he lost to Gov. Phil Murphy (D) by just over three points.

Exit polls show that Sherrill performed particularly well with women, non-whites, and college graduates and benefited greatly from voters’ hostility toward the president and his administration.

The New Jersey Democrat apparently secured the support of:

77% of non-white voters and 47% of white voters;67% of voters ages 44 and under and 51% of voters 45 or older;94% of liberal voters, 62% of moderates, and 11% of alleged conservatives;62% of female voters and 81% of female voters under 30; and62% of voters with a college degree.

Voters who felt that the state’s economy was faring poorly under Democrat management were more likely to cast ballots for Ciattarelli. Seventy-seven percent of voters who figured things were good voted for Sherrill.

It’s clear that voter sentiment about federal politics leached into New Jersey’s gubernatorial election.

‘An antipathy for Trump also appeared to be a factor for a majority — 51% — of California voters.’

Whereas those who expressed satisfaction with the way things were going nationally — 88% — voted for Ciattarelli, 77% of those who were dissatisfied voted Democrat.

Of the 40% of voters who said that opposing Trump was a factor, 97% voted for Sherrill. The Democrat also secured 93% of the majority — 55% — who signaled disapproval for the president.

The majority of voters — 53% — indicated that the Trump administration has gone too far with its immigration crackdown, and 49% suggested the next governor should not cooperate with the administration.

Virginia

In the Virginia gubernatorial election, Democrat Abigail Spanberger beat Winsome Earle-Sears, the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, 57.5% to 42.3%.

Like Mamdani, Spanberger enjoyed a great deal of support from the youth and appeared to benefit not only from voters’ antipathy toward the Trump administration but from their financial desperation.

CNN exit polls show that Spanberger secured the support of:

65% of the female vote, including 81% of women under 30;92% of the black vote, 67% of the Hispanic vote, 79% of the Asian vote, and 47% of the white vote;63% of voters with a college degree;56% of voters who earn $50,000 or more and 62% of voters who make less; and82% of non-white voters and 47% of white voters.

A majority of voters indicated that federal cuts impacted their finances, and 69% of those affected said they cast ballots for Spanberger.

In a reverse of the trend in New Jersey, those respondents who said Virginia’s economy was faring well majoritively voted Republican, while most of the 39% of voters who said the economy was not doing well or doing poorly ended up supporting Spanberger.

When asked what the most important issue facing the state was, a plurality — 48% — cited the economy. Of that cohort, 63% voted Democrat.

As was the case in the other races, those angry or dissatisfied with the way things were going nationally tended to vote Democrat 80% of the time.

Of the 38% of voters who signaled that opposition to Trump was a factor in their electoral decision-making, 99% voted for Spanberger, and 58% of all respondents signaled disapproval of his presidency.

It appears that disapproval of the Democratic Party was no guarantee of a vote against Spanberger, as roughly one in five of those who hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party voted for her.

California

Antipathy for Trump also appeared to be a factor for a majority — 51% — of California voters, 98% of whom voted in favor of the gerrymandering measure, Proposition 50.

According to CNN’s exit polls, 64% of California voters disapprove of the job Trump is doing. Only 9% of the voters in that camp voted against Prop 50. Sixty-three percent of voters said the Trump administration’s immigration actions go too far, and 59% suggested Gov. Newsom shouldn’t cooperate with federal authorities.

Again, young women under 30 proved for Democrats a reliable cohort — 83% of women ages 18-29 supported the measure.

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​Exit polls, Mamdani, Spanberger, Sherill, Elections, Donald trump, Voting, New jersey, California, Virginia, Earle-sears, Politics 

On October 20, 2025, in a room scrubbed clean for statecraft, the leaders of the United States and Australia announced a pact. The numbers were large, commitments of $1 billion each, a pipeline worth $8.5 billion, and another $2.2 billion in letters of interest. The language was of strategic reassurance: “securing critical minerals,” “building an allied supply chain.” They spoke of a gallium plant in Western Australia, of the Nolans project in the Northern Territory.

What was stated only in the careful argot of diplomacy was the anxiety. The pact was not a gesture of optimism. It was a $10.7 billion hedge against a future held hostage. The objects of this anxiety are the rare-earth elements. They are the “vitamins” of modern technology, a group of 17 soft, silvery metals that, while not strictly rare, are rarely found in concentrations that make extraction anything but a geologic and chemical trial. We seldom see or think about them, yet they are the invisible underpinning of the contemporary world.

For all our talk of the virtual, our civilization runs on materials.

We carry them in our pockets, these bits of refined earth. Neodymium and praseodymium form the tiny, powerful magnets that make an electric vehicle motor turn and a wind turbine spin. Lanthanum and cerium provide the optical clarity for a camera lens. Europium and yttrium are the phosphors that make a smartphone screen vivid. They are virtually indispensable to the high-tech, high-speed, high-definition life we have constructed for ourselves. They are also indispensable to the machinery of modern defense: the precision-guided missiles, the jet engines, the radar systems.

There is a profound cultural dislocation at work here. We have come to believe in the immateriality of our age. We speak of the “cloud,” of data, of software, as if these things were weightless, existing only as light and logic. The rare-earth scramble is a reminder that the most ethereal digital experience is tethered to the physical crust of the Earth. The cloud has a body, and that body is dug from the ground, often with toxic solvents and radioactive tailings.

China has become the center of this industry, not by accident, but by design, and by a failure of Western imagination. Decades ago, Beijing designated rare earths as “protected and strategic minerals,” while the United States, under the sway of environmental regulation and market efficiencies, allowed its own production to atrophy. The Mountain Pass mine in California, once the world’s leader, went dark in 2002, while China embraced the dirty, complex, and unprofitable “downstream” work: the refining and processing of these rare earths.

The result is a near-monopoly.

RELATED: This city bought 300 Chinese electric buses — then found out China can turn them off at will

Photo by VCG / Contributor via Getty Images

By 2025, Chinese firms controlled perhaps 90% of global rare-earth refining and 93% of magnet manufacturing. And with control comes leverage. In 2010, a territorial dispute with Japan was punctuated by China’s abrupt halt of rare-earth exports, sending global prices into panic. By 2025, the mechanism was more refined: new export rules targeting high-performance magnets, rules that, when briefly tightened, shut down supply chains for automakers. This is the power to turn off the assembly line. This is the power to ground the jets.

We have seen this story before. We call rare earths “the new oil,” and in doing so, we betray a certain exhaustion. We are merely rerunning the script of the 20th century. The 1973 oil embargo revealed the strategic peril of relying on a single region for the nonnegotiable fuel of the economy. The current scramble, the U.S.-Australia pact, the Pentagon-funded reopening of Mountain Pass, the talk of “urban mining” to reclaim neodymium from old hard drives, is the same reflex. It is the belated, frantic effort to diversify, to stockpile, to rebuild what was lost, to avoid being held hostage.

The script is older even than oil. It is the story of the Bronze Age, defined by the desperate, sprawling trade networks required to secure tin. It is the story of the Iron Age, where mastery of a new metal conferred dominance. It is, as Plato observed in the Republic, the inevitable story of the “luxurious city.” A simple society, Socrates argued, a “city of pigs,” lives in peace. But the moment a society desires more (fine furniture, luxuries, or, for us, a high-speed data plan), it must expand. It “inevitably goes to war to secure resources.”

Our digital city is the luxurious city. We crave the wind turbine and the EV motor, what we call the “green” transition, but we find it relies on the same “rare green.” We crave the vivid screen and the smart missile. And so we are compelled to scour the globe, to make pacts, to engage in resource diplomacy.

This quest is not a move into a new technological future but a return to the oldest imperatives. It is the hard reminder that for all our talk of the virtual, our civilization runs on materials. The hunt for rare earths forces us to confront the weight of our lightness, to see the shadow that our digital lives cast upon the actual, finite earth. It is, and always has been, a scramble for the dirt.

​Rare earths, Tech, China, Minerals 

I do a lot of things for work. I take photos, I take videos, I write stories, I write columns, I write about style, and I write about life.

I also help guys dress better. Officially it’s called style advising, but down to brass tacks, it means me helping guys get clothes they are happy with. Helping them get rid of the junk that sits in their closet that they never wear and get into clothes that make them look, and feel, their best.

Exercising creative control in the physical space feels good in a way that’s deeper than exercising the same kind of creativity in the digital space.

It’s one of the most rewarding things I do. I know lots of guys dismiss the importance of clothes, but they do so at their peril. Our clothes really do have a huge impact on our psychological state. They can make us pretty unhappy or pretty happy.

Ready to wear

Does that make us “superficial”? No. It’s an acknowledgment of the fact that what we wear represents who we are to others —and to ourselves. If you aren’t happy with how you present yourself, you aren’t going to be happy with yourself. It’s that simple.

So I take personal satisfaction from watching a guy transform his wardrobe over the course of a year or two. What’s particularly satisfying is observing how his attitude toward clothing changes as he overhauls his closet.

The process usually starts with a pragmatic interest in not looking like a slob. Achieving a baseline presentability eliminates any negative attention slovenly dress attracts. From that point he may start to notice that looking a little more “put together” actually attracts positive attention. And once he starts to experience the fruits of dressing decently in public, he’s ready to start enjoying his clothes.

This means he’s comfortable and confident enough that he no longer sees dressing himself as a test to get “right,” but as an opportunity for personal expression and creativity. Clothes finally become what they’re meant to be: fun.

Or as a client deep into his own wardrobe revamp recently told me, “I’m just blown away by how fun this stuff can get.”

What a difference in attitude and mindset. A realization like that is generally a sign that a certain kind of psychological transformation has been completed.

RELATED: Corduroys: The perfect winter trousers

Making the man

I’m aware that the word “fun” may connote something shallow or frivolous — and in some respects clothing can be both. But the pleasure we derive from clothing also derives from its deeper meaning: the way it reinforces the eternal forms of man and woman, emphasizes our dignity as human beings made in the image of God, and reflects our culture, values, and even religious beliefs.

Remember the pastel cars of the 1950s? It’s hard to believe it, but there was a time when when cars weren’t only black, gray, or white. There was a time when cars were fun. Well, it’s the same thing with clothes. If you really look at the stuff the guys were wearing back in those old movies, they were actually having much more fun than the guy who wears dark jeans, a black T-shirt, and a gray hoodie in 2025. Coming to the final realization that clothes should be fun is actually a kind of returning to tradition.

Creative control

The thoughtfully designed, personal interior of your home feels more welcoming than an airport terminal. A carefully cultivated garden is more beautiful than an expanse of artificial turf. And a well-fitting and harmonious combination of shirt, jacket, and trousers is more flattering than a prison-like monochrome sweatsuit.

There’s also a peculiar psychological benefit to embracing clothes as a domain of fun. Exercising creative control in the physical space feels good in a way that’s deeper than exercising the same kind of creativity it in the digital space.

In our screen-dominant era, the experience of joyfully controlling your personal environment is humanizing and refreshing. It’s good to like how you look and know that you are the one responsible for it. It feels like we are actually doing something rather than just moving pixels around.

Of course, it goes without saying that not all fun is good fun. We know that’s true about all sorts of stuff in life. Many a bad decision sure was fun at the time. So it goes with the temporary thrill of donning stupid neon graphic T-shirts, grotesque Crocs, alien-green sweatpants printed with pizza motifs.

Many men today begin their style journey as overgrown children who have enjoyed this “bad” kind of fun for most of their lives: the dumb T-shirts and the stupid shoes. But then they decide to grow up, and after working through their wardrobe, they come to understand that these classic clothes are not just good for the soul or society. They are fun, and they are the right kind of fun, the kind of fun that edifies and enriches us.

​Men’s style, Menswear, Clothing, Lifestyle, Culture, The root of the matter 

Minneapolis is still counting votes in its ranked-choice mayoral race after no candidate received more than 50% of the votes in the first round.

‘Everybody, this city showed up once again. … We got what appears to be near record turnout. And I’ll tell you what — it looks damn good for us.’

Minneapolis residents cast their votes between incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey (D), who is seeking a third term, and over a dozen other candidates. Voters were allowed to rank up to three candidates.

Frey held a 10-point lead over state Sen. Omar Fateh (D), considered his top challenger, in voters’ first-choice results. Frey received approximately 61,000 votes, which accounted for only 42% of the total, not enough to declare him the winner.

The mayoral election will now proceed to a second round of counting to determine the winner. In each round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and their ballots are redistributed to the next-ranked candidates on voters’ ballots. This process continues until one candidate secures a majority of the votes.

The Minneapolis mayoral races have gone to at least a second round of tabulations since 2013. Frey won after six rounds in 2017 and after two rounds in 2021.

RELATED: Socialist surge: Minneapolis mayor left in the lurch after DFL Party endorses far-left challenger obsessed with race

State Sen. Omar Fateh, Rep. Ilhan Omar. Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Fateh, a Muslim Somali American and progressive Democrat who has been compared to New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, secured the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s endorsement in July, defeating Frey. However, that endorsement was rescinded a month later, citing “substantial failures in the Minneapolis Convention’s voting process.”

Fateh was endorsed by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who hoped to boost his campaign by joining him on the campaign trail.

“I am really excited to have her support,” Fateh said. “Minneapolis seems to be a tale of two cities: one for the wealthy and well-connected and one for everyone else.”

RELATED: The woke party’s favorite costume: Moderation

Jacob Frey. Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) endorsed Frey.

While it is still possible for Fateh to squeak out a victory over Frey, the current mayor holds a comfortable lead.

“Everybody, this city showed up once again. … We got what appears to be near record turnout. And I’ll tell you what — it looks damn good for us,” Frey stated at an election night party.

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​News, Minneapolis, Minneapolis mayoral race, Minnesota, Jacob frey, Omar fetah, Ilhan omar, Democratic-farmer-labor party, Dfl, Tim walz, Amy klobuchar, Politics 

On November 3, Dick Cheney, former U.S. vice president under George W. Bush, passed away at the age of 84 from complications of pneumonia, compounded by longstanding cardiac and vascular disease.

He is a man who leaves behind a most “complicated legacy,” says Glenn Beck.

In 1989 as the secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush, Cheney brought the mentality that “a nation that can’t defend itself isn’t going to remain free” to the military. He modernized, refined, and finalized former President Ronald Reagan’s defense revival, leading to a swift and surgical Gulf War victory, all while masterfully navigating post-Cold War budget cuts.

“For the first time in decades, Americans felt pride without apology when it came to our military,” says Glenn.

In 2001, Republican candidate George W. Bush chose Cheney as his running mate — a decision Glenn says secured his presidency, as Americans trusted that Cheney’s military experience and success would balance Bush’s inexperience in national security. On September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers collapsed while the president was occupied at an event in Florida, Cheney stepped up as the acting president.

“He was steady, emotionless, and firm. He didn’t tremble. He didn’t panic,” says Glenn, “and in those first few hours, America needed that.”

But then Cheney — a key architect of the Iraq War that ensued after 9/11 — started down a dark path. “[The war] just stretched on and on and on, and the mission became blurry. Freedom became a slogan instead of a strategy, and freedom started to take a different meaning here in America,” says Glenn.

Cheney was a pivotal force in the rapid passing of the Patriot Act — a set of policies that expanded federal surveillance, detention, and intelligence-gathering powers — as well as the formation of the Department of Homeland Security and the expansion of FISA surveillance powers.

“None of those things had anything to do with freedom,” says Glenn.

Then when the anthrax attacks started, it was Cheney who insisted the U.S. expand its defensive bioweapons research programs, culminating in Project BioShield, which allocated $5.6 billion to accelerating research, development, and procurement of countermeasures against biological threats.

“So it was Dick Cheney that urged men like Dr. Anthony Fauci to push research further, faster into what we now call gain of function,” says Glenn.

Looking back at the mixed bag of Cheney’s accomplishments, Glenn says his life “offers both a chance to give medals and lessons.”

He teaches us both “the virtue of strength and the peril of excess.”

“He was the iron for many years in America’s spine after decades of doubt. But he was also a reminder that iron rusts if it is left unexamined,” says Glenn.

“Dick Cheney was a conservative for a man of his time, but he lost one of the main principles, and that is: Conservatives believe in the rule of law and the Constitution. He’s a patriot, yes, but he’s also a warning to us. He helped America find its courage, but he also taught us how easily courage can drift into control.”

To hear more of Glenn’s commentary and analysis, watch the clip above.

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​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Dick cheney, Blazetv, Blaze media, Cheney 

Nebraska law enforcement officers said a 47-year-old woman early last week informed them that her 31-year-old boyfriend had strangled her five to six times that day and had been preventing her from contacting authorities and leaving his presence.

It turns out the alleged victim was able to finally get the attention of police — with the help of a Walmart employee.

Barnhouse didn’t let her leave for the previous two days, as she was trying to get her belongings from the camper and return home to Kansas, officials added.

Gage County Sheriff’s deputies around 5:45 p.m. Oct. 28 responded to the Diamond T Truck Stop Camper Row on US HWY 77 just north of Beatrice for an assault that had occurred earlier in the day, the sheriff’s office said.

RELATED: Male, 55, accused of grabbing 15-year-old by neck, throwing him to floor of In-and-Out Burger — and it’s all caught on video

Image source: Gage County (Neb.) Sheriff’s Office

Upon arrival, deputies made contact with the 47-year-old woman from Hutchinson, Kansas, who told deputies that her boyfriend — 31-year-old Justis Barnhouse — had strangled her five to six times that afternoon, officials said.

Barnhouse took the woman’s cell phone so she couldn’t contact police about the incident, officials said. Barnhouse didn’t let her leave for the previous two days, as she was trying to get her belongings from the camper and return home to Kansas, officials added.

However, officials said that when the woman and Barnhouse went to the Walmart in Beatrice, she got the attention of a Walmart employee and asked the worker to follow her to the restroom.

The sheriff’s office said that allowed the woman to give the employee details about the strangulation — and the employee notified law enforcement.

When deputies arrived at the Diamond T Truck Stop Camper Row, officials said Barnhouse was there — and deputies arrested Barnhouse for assault by strangulation as well as third-degree domestic assault with two priors.

Barnhouse was lodged at the Gage County Detention Center on his charges, officials said. Jail records indicate Barnhouse was still behind bars Wednesday morning.

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​Crime thwarted, Walmart, Walmart employee, Nebraska, Assault by strangulation charge, Beatrice, Gage county sheriff’s office, Crime 

America’s legal immigration system is clearly broken, and there’s a Trojan horse hiding in plain sight: the visa system — which allows migrants to overstay their visas regardless of whether or not they pose a danger to society.

And the stories of these dangerous migrants continue to pile up.

In late October, a foreign graduate student allegedly stabbed two teens with a fork and slapped a passenger on a Chicago flight to Germany, which resulted in the flight diverting to Boston.

Praneeth Kumar Usiripalli, 28, was arrested upon landing and charged with one count of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to do bodily harm.

“He just stood up and started randomly stabbing two 17-year-olds. One of them was sleeping, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I woke up to this random Indian guy stabbing me in the head with a metal fork,’” BlazeTV Sara Gonzales explains.

“He stabbed another teen in the back of the head,” she adds.

“But the guy came to the United States legally on a student visa, and then he overstayed. … It’s legal at first, until it’s not, and then he becomes a dangerous criminal and dangerous to our country,” she says. “This isn’t the first example of similar attacks.”

In Boulder, Colorado, an Egyptian man who came into the country on a visa in 2023 also overstayed and chose to continue residing in the U.S. as a criminal. Then on June 1 this year, he attacked pro-Israeli protesters with Molotov cocktails.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, threw Molotov cocktails while yelling “Free Palestine” at protesters. He injured five protesters, and one passed away from her injuries.

“He came in and he overstayed until he decided to just be a total nutjob criminal,” Gonzales comments, disgusted.

In 2021, another Egyptian man in the U.S. on a student visa stabbed a Jewish rabbi eight times outside a Jewish day school in Boston. The rabbi survived his wounds, and the attack has been labeled as a hate crime.

Khaled Awad, 24, was charged with assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon and assault and battery on a police officer.

“I wonder why it was a rabbi that he chose,” Gonzales remarks sarcastically, before continuing down the long list of violent criminals who overstayed their visas.

“I could just keep going, but I think that you get the point,” she says.

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​Free, Sharing, Video phone, Upload, Video, Camera phone, Youtube.com, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Sara gonzales, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Illegal immigration, Overstayed visa, Visa, Immigration crisis, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, President donald trump, Illegal immigrants, Violent illegal immigrants 

Cory Bowman, Vice President JD Vance’s 36-year-old half-brother, decided to run for mayor of Cincinnati after watching President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. He told Politico earlier this year, “I was just really inspired, because I look up to my brother not just as a political model but as a role model.”

Bowman’s stated goal was to address the city’s “deteriorating infrastructure, unsafe streets, and misallocated funds.”

‘Government can’t fix everything.’

Evidently the residents of Cincinnati, who haven’t had a Republican mayor since 1971, weren’t ready for change.

According to the unofficial totals from the Hamilton County Board of Elections, the Democrat incumbent, Mayor Aftab Pureval, beat Bowman by over 55 percentage points — 78.21% to 21.76%. Bowman qualified for the general election after securing only 13% of the vote in the May primary.

“Pray for our leadership,” Bowman said after losing the race. “We have to pray for our city. We want them to win because — I’ve said this since the beginning of the campaign — we cannot copy and paste national politics when it comes to these city elections. We cannot just divide ourselves more and more when it comes to these cities. We want our cities to succeed.”

Although Bowman made abundantly clear that he is proud of his family, particularly his older half-brother, he focused his messaging during the campaign on the needs of the city. Pureval, on the other hand, appeared keen to make the election a referendum on the Trump administration, stating during the Oct. 9 mayoral debate that Bowman “represents MAGA” and “you either support the Trump agenda or you don’t.”

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Photographer: Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“You can’t run for mayor and not be concerned with the federal employees who are getting fired, not be concerned with the racializing of our own public safety challenges here in our community,” said the Democrat mayor, who underscored in May that Cincinnati is a sanctuary city and should remain “a global destination for top-tier talent.”

Despite previously smearing his opponent and Bowman’s supporters as “MAGA extremists,” Pureval — who first assumed office in January 2022 — indicated in his victory speech that Bowman was “very classy” in how he handled the defeat and signaled an interest in possible collaboration down the road.

Bowman was one of several Republicans who experienced humiliating defeats on Tuesday.

Winsome Earle-Sears, Virginia’s Republican lieutenant governor, lost her state’s gubernatorial election by double digits to Democrat radical Abigail Spanberger; Republican strategist John Reid lost the election for Virginia’s lieutenant governor to Democrat Virginia state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi; and Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli lost the New Jersey gubernatorial race to Democrat candidate Rep. Mikie Sherrill.

Bowman wrapped up his concession speech with a Christian message, stating, “Government can’t fix everything, but you know what can fix everything is our relationship with Jesus Christ. And that’s why I want to encourage anybody watching, as well, if you’ve never given your heart to Jesus, if you’ve never even considered it, try it.”

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​Cory bowman, Jd vance, Aftab pureval, Ohio, Cincinnati, Democrat, Landslide, Election, Elections, Voting, Politics 

It was with great interest that I read Matthew Gasda’s latest essay, on the state of men in 2025, “Masculinity at the End of History.”

Gasda has a lot of things to say that are germane to my new book, “The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity” (out December 16), not least of all whether America — and indeed the Western world as a whole — exhibits what could be called a “crisis of masculinity” in the first place.

We have reams of data showing what can only be described as a civilizational decline in testosterone levels, a decline that may have no parallel in history.

There are plenty of observers — writers, social scientists, journalists, politicians, celebrity psychologists — who think so.

A crisis in need of a crisis

Gasda disagrees. In fact, he believes the absence of a crisis is precisely what’s ailing America’s young men. Men need crises in order to be men. Without crises, their mettle isn’t tested, they have no higher aspirations to direct themselves toward, and so they fall into a listless state, an aimless state, a kind of suspended adolescence.

Porn. Pot. Video games. Social media. Processed food. Logging on and dropping out. We all know what it looks like.

“Masculinity is desperate for a crisis,” Gasda writes in the opening paragraphs of his essay.

It is docile, unsure, and formless. At most, it is at the germinal phase of crisis, lacking a catalytic agent to propel it to its full-blown state, which at least can be registered and reckoned with. After all, crisis implies that something is happening, that something is at stake. The uncatalyzed proto-crisis, or the noncrisis, of American masculinity is repressed, unexpressed, yet omnipresent.

It’s a typical literary switcheroo — Gasda is a playwright, after all — but he’s not wrong. Nor is he the first to say that what men really need is a crisis — read: something extraordinary — to give full form to their potential.

Declaring ‘war’

Back in 1910, the pragmatist philosopher William James, brother of the novelist Henry, wrote an essay called “The Moral Equivalent of War.” A committed socialist and pacifist, James nevertheless regretted the march of progress and with it the (apparent) decline of war, because he recognized war’s power to form young men and inculcate in them the highest possible virtues. War teaches men to subordinate themselves and their needs to those of the collective, to pursue a higher goal, and, if need be, to give their lives for it. War teaches men courage, service, self-sacrifice, stoicism, and patriotism, and all of these things are necessary for a properly functioning nation in peace.

But war is also a terrible, terrible thing — and it was rapidly becoming much worse, though just how much worse James could not have foreseen. What we need, James argues, is a “moral equivalent” of war, a substitute that could teach men the same lessons without the enormous destructive cost.

James’ proposal is quite clever: Rather than a war against each other, we need a war with nature. Young men should be enlisted into a national struggle to conquer and tame nature and to revolutionize the means of production. Send boys off to build railroads and skyscrapers and ships, and they’ll return as men, ready to lead families and the nation.

Manufacturing manhood

This isn’t too different, actually, from what Gasda advocates in his new essay, when he says a national project in which all or many men could participate might be a great spur to masculine revival.

If the objective of America in the years ahead is to reclaim global leadership in industrial production, that is, in the making of things in the real-world economy, as opposed to just in the realm of bits and pixels, then new avenues for masculine exertion, discipline, creativity, and camaraderie may arise from such a project.

There’s much to like in Gasda’s essay and much to agree with. He’s right about how the breakdown of communities and the loss of tradition have hindered the transmission of masculine ideals across the generations. He’s right about the need for rites of passage to confer status on men. Countless anthropological studies have shown the crucial role, in virtually every kind of society except our own, of tests of courage and fortitude at key moments in life, and psychologists have demonstrated how pain and trauma bond people together and provide a sense of shared identity.

He’s also right to argue that Americans must “historicize” masculinity. That is, they must understand its peculiar focus on strenuous exertion and relentless self-making in its particular historical context: a masculine ideal developed in conflict with a frontier, both the physical frontier of western expansion and the social and moral frontiers of a new national identity.

And he’s right, obviously, that we live in an age that’s fundamentally hostile to expressions of masculinity and that we can’t simply return to the past and past ideals, as so many simple-minded critics of the modern world, especially on social media, seem to believe.

That’s all to the good. But there are also serious problems.

No country for men

For one thing, it’s not clear just how much American men really could get behind a drive to, in Gasda’s words, “reclaim global leadership in industrial production.”

If America does return to industrial pre-eminence, most if not nearly all manufacturing is going to be high-tech and automated — hardly the kind of gigantic Soviet five-year plan that could simply swallow up millions of men and give them jobs in factories or even give them jobs at all.

It’s not just manufacturing that is on the verge of making human labor largely a thing of the past. Whole swaths of industry and even white-collar fields are undergoing the same revolutionary changes. Librarians and lawyers and proofreaders and doctors will be replaced by AI and large language models too.

The testosterone decline

A far graver problem, from my perspective, is that like the vast majority of the so-called “crisis of masculinity” literature that he derides, Gasda fails to take seriously, or even acknowledge, the biological changes that are throwing men’s masculinity into doubt — in particular, a headlong decline in testosterone, the master male hormone that’s responsible for making men men and not women.

Testosterone is not just responsible for sexual differentiation — for the physical characteristics that define boys, beginning in the womb and proceeding through infancy and the teenage years into adulthood — but it also governs male mood, motivation, libido, and even things like political attitudes.

Although we should be careful not to say testosterone determines political views, social psychology experiments reveal that a testosterone boost will make a man more likely to defend his position even when he’s outnumbered by people who disagree with him; it will make him more likely to continue fighting against a much stronger opponent; it will make him more accepting of hierarchy and inequality; it will make him more generous to his in-group — his own people — and more aggressive toward his out-group — potential enemies.

In short, testosterone and its effects are complex, but they work in ways that obviously tend toward behavior we associate with traditional masculinity. The less of it men have, the less masculine they become, as a basic rule.

Aggressively overlooked

Open a best-selling book like Richard Reeves’ “Of Boys and Men,” head to the index, and look for “testosterone,” and you’ll find a poverty of references. Reeves talks about testosterone for just a few pages, but only to dispel the notion that boys “are their hormones,” meaning boys aren’t doomed to be aggressive because they have more testosterone (pop science’s “aggression hormone”) than girls. That’s it. Apparently, biology just isn’t important when we’re talking about the serious problems with men today.

It’s a strange oversight. We have reams of data showing what can only be described as a civilizational decline in testosterone levels, a decline that may have no parallel in history. We know what this decline entails, and if we don’t, we really should try to find out.

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Compelling evidence

The first real herald of a civilizational decline in testosterone levels was the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, a gold-standard double-blind controlled study of men in the Boston area. The study took place over a period of around 20 years, from the end of the 1980s to the early 2000s. Men of all ages were selected at random and given a battery of tests at regular intervals. When the testosterone data was finally analyzed in 2007, it showed testosterone levels were declining year over year at a rate of about 1%.

That might not sound like much, but over a period of 20 years, that’s 20%, or one-fifth. On a longer timeline, say 50 years, that’s half of all testosterone — gone.

Researchers in other countries, including Finland and Israel, wanted to see whether the same trend was happening in their countries. In Finland, where male reproductive parameters are generally better than in the U.S., the researchers believed the Boston trend would not be replicated. Guess what? The trend was actually worse, and the researchers showed it was taking place over a much longer period of time. The results of the MMAS were replicated in Israel, too, and in other American studies.

Quantifying maleness

It’s hard to quantify exactly how many men have low testosterone, in large part because nobody agrees on exactly how little testosterone counts as low. Ask one doctor and he’ll give you one figure; another will tell you it’s half or double that amount.

Symptomology is generally the best way to go looking for low testosterone, and what we see, everywhere we turn, is men who look and behave like they have low testosterone.

In Japan today, there are millions of hikikomori, or extreme social recluses — young men who simply refuse to participate in society. They hide themselves away at home, often with their parents, and play video games, eat junk food, and just “rot,” to use a current term.

At least one expert believes there may be as many as 10 million hikikomori, in a nation of 120 million people — that’s one in 12 people. Unsurprisingly — to me at least — research has shown young Japanese men are at significantly greater risk of becoming hikikomori if they have low testosterone.

America has its hikikomori too, although they aren’t called that. Maybe as many as 6 million, by some estimates.

Some of them congregate in special subforums on the website Reddit, like r/lowT, where they discuss what it’s like to be a man with low testosterone: how they have no motivation, no libido, can’t sleep, can’t get an erection, are developing gynecomastia — man boobs — and are overweight and anxious all the time.

Many of these men also describe the miraculous effects of increasing their testosterone, more often than not through a doctor’s prescription of testosterone in gel or injectable form.

Spermageddon?

What’s even more worrying about this decline is that it’s part and parcel of a broader decline in reproductive health parameters among men.

This isn’t a surprise: If men’s testes aren’t functioning properly and producing enough testosterone, they’re unlikely to be producing enough of other important things either. Sperm counts and sperm quality — a measure of sperm’s ability to swim properly and do their job — are declining so rapidly that one expert, Professor Shanna Swan, is predicting a “spermageddon” scenario, in which humans are unable to reproduce by natural means.

Swan made this the subject of a 2021 book, “Count Down.” Simply by extrapolating the data for sperm-count decline, Swan has shown that by around 2050, the median man will have a sperm count of zero. One half of all men will produce no sperm at all, and the rest will produce so few that they might as well produce none, because they won’t be able to get a woman pregnant, try as they might.

What’s causing these changes? It’s lots of different things, a whole range of lifestyle factors — lack of exercise, smoking, bad diets, poor sleep, stress — but also widespread exposure to harmful chemicals known as “endocrine disruptors,” for their negative effects on the body’s hormonal (endocrine) system.

From low-T to trans

When I say endocrine disruptors are everywhere, I mean it: They’re in the food, the air, the water, the clothes we wear, our bedding and furniture, the deodorants and fragrances we put on our bodies, the little scented trees we put in our cars, anything that’s made from plastic.

A significant proportion of these harmful chemicals directly or indirectly mimic the effects of the hormone estrogen, interfering with the body’s crucial hormonal balance (more testosterone and less estrogen for men, the opposite for women). This is a nightmare for both sexes. As well as reducing testosterone and fertility in men, exposure to endocrine disruptors can lead to genital abnormalities, weight gain, and metabolic issues and even certain kinds of cancer.

New research has linked exposure to endocrine disruptors during gestation to transgenderism. French boys exposed to the chemical diethylstilbestrol, which used to be given to mothers at risk of miscarriage, had a massively increased risk — perhaps as much as a hundredfold — of undergoing gender transition later in life. On paper, it was always plausible that exposure to endocrine disruptors should be linked to gender dysphoria, but since transgenderism is such a toxic issue politically, there’s been little desire, until now, to pursue research into the link.

In a very real sense, then, not only have we created a society where masculinity is ridiculed, dragged through the mud, and denounced as retrograde, we’ve also created one where the biological constituents of masculinity, its very building blocks, are under direct attack at the same time. It’s a complicated problem, and it’s viciously circular. Biology and society exist in feedback loops, with negative effects reinforcing each other, deepening the spiraling decline.

While Gasda, like William James before him, may be right that men need a crisis to bring out the best in them, the very real danger today is that when one finally comes, men won’t have the energy or enthusiasm or desire to put down the controller, stand up, and answer its call. And if that really is the case, testosterone — the lack of it — will be to blame.

​Maha, Endocrine disruptors, Matthew gasda, Culture, Books, Lifestyle, Men’s health, Testosterone, Hormones, Low-t, Medicine, Make america healthy again