A former Texas teacher was arrested and charged with tampering with evidence and furnishing alcohol to minors, following a year-long investigation into alleged inappropriate relationships with students.

The Brazoria County Sheriff’s Office last week announced that it launched a “lengthy and intensive” investigation a year ago — on Aug. 28, 2025 — after receiving information regarding “allegations of inappropriate relationships between an Angleton High School teacher, identified as Holly Schroedter Adams, and students.”

Adams reportedly invited students to her home to perform chores, and she allegedly admitted to speaking with three members of the school baseball team on Snapchat.

Police said they conducted several interviews with “both current and former students” and examined “evidence related to the allegations.”

The sheriff’s office secured indictments from a grand jury tied to the ongoing investigation.

Adams, 41, was arrested Tuesday and booked into the Brazoria County Detention Center.

Adams was charged with one count of third-degree tampering with physical evidence and two counts of purchasing/furnishing alcohol to a minor, a Class A misdemeanor.

Texas law states that a conviction of tampering with physical evidence is punishable by a prison sentence of two to 10 years, along with a fine of up to $10,000.

A Class A misdemeanor carries a penalty of up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $4,000.

Brazoria County jail records show that the purchasing/furnishing alcohol to a minor charges were filed on July 1, 2025. Meanwhile, records said the tampering with physical evidence charges were filed on Aug. 30, 2025.

Adams has not been charged with having a physical relationship with a student.

Adams was released on a $26,000 bond the same day she was arrested, according to jail records.

RELATED: Married teacher shows cops where in classroom she allegedly had sex with student — offered to leave husband for him

KTRK-TV reported that sheriff’s deputies “served a warrant at Adams’ home and seized four cell phones, 11 nude photos, and a photo book of nude photos.”

A student informed school staff that Adams was having an inappropriate relationship with a former student, according to the warrant obtained by KTRK.

An unnamed student told school officials that an alleged victim initiated a FaceTime call to him from a bedroom inside Adams’ home during the summer, and the bed was covered in nude photos of the teacher, according to the warrant.

The warrant added that the student also stated that the alleged victim shared a photograph showing himself and Adams cuddling on a sofa.

Fox News said Adams reportedly invited students to her home to perform chores, and she allegedly admitted to speaking with three members of the school baseball team on Snapchat.

According to local newspaper the Facts, the felony indictment accuses Adams of destroying a Snapchat account in August 2025 while she knew an investigation was under way and intended to keep investigators from using it as evidence.

A spokesperson for the Angleton Independent School District confirmed to Fox News that Adams no longer works for the school district.

Neither the Brazoria County Sheriff’s Office nor the Angleton Independent School District immediately responded to Blaze News‘ requests for comment.

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​Teacher arrested, Texas, Tampering with evidence, Providing alcohol to minors, Brazoria county sheriff’s office, Arrest, Crime 

A reasonable viewer could spend the opening minutes of “The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin” wondering whether he clicked on the wrong show.

Daily Wire promised an Arthurian epic, yet here are the doomed inhabitants of Atlantis, bull dancers, pagan priests, and a princess named Charis fleeing a civilization about to sink beneath the sea. Camelot is nowhere in sight; neither is Arthur.

Christianity belongs to the world of ‘Pendragon’ as naturally as its mud, blood, and steel.

That bewilderment contains the key to the series and its considerable ambition. “The Pendragon Cycle” is not another retelling of the sword in the stone. Instead, it attempts to dramatize what had to happen before Arthur could arrive: the transformation of a pagan world into one capable of producing the Christian king of legend.

Passion project

“The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin,” a seven-episode series that premiered earlier this year exclusively on DailyWire+ and arrives on Prime Video in the U.S. today, was created by Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing and draws principally from “Taliesin” and “Merlin,” the first two novels in Stephen R. Lawhead’s sprawling “Pendragon Cycle.” Boreing has dreamed of bringing Lawhead’s books to the screen for nearly three decades, and it shows. Nobody could accuse “Pendragon” of cutting corners.

Consider Atlantis. Rather than have its inhabitants speak English with exotic accents, the production hired classical scholar and Daily Wire contributor Spencer Klavan to invent an Atlantean language, complete with grammar, vocabulary, and a fanciful linguistic genealogy reaching back before the Fall.

Shot in Hungary and Italy, “Pendragon” also makes splendid use of forests, mountains, rivers, and untamed country. The CGI impresses when called upon, but some of the show’s best special effects were provided by God. Nature is beautiful, immense, and frightening, as it ought to be in a story about men trying to build a civilization from the ruins of another.

Multifaceted Merlin

The largely unfamiliar cast helps. Tom Sharp carries Merlin through a formidable range — warrior, husband, broken exile, prophet, and bard — without turning him into a wizardly caricature. James Arden gives Taliesin a searching, otherworldly quality that makes his eventual conversion feel earned. Rose Reid anchors the strange Atlantean opening as Charis and, thanks to her people’s extraordinary longevity, provides a living connection to that vanished world.

Finney Cassidy makes an appealingly restrained Aurelius, a would-be king of the Britons, while Myles Clohessy supplies the martial force as his warrior brother Uther. Brett Cooper, probably the one face Daily Wire viewers will recognize immediately, disappears effortlessly into Ganieda, Merlin’s wife.

The history underneath all this is real enough. Roman rule in Britain effectively collapsed in the early fifth century, leaving a fractured country vulnerable to invasion and internal warfare. It is somewhere in this murky post-Roman world that the distant roots of the Arthur legend are generally thought to lie.

The legend itself came later and accumulated over centuries. Brittonic tales of a heroic Arthur were expanded and transformed by Geoffrey of Monmouth, French romance writers, and eventually Thomas Malory, gathering along the way Camelot, Lancelot, the Round Table, the Grail, and the explicitly Christian moral universe we now associate with King Arthur.

‘A new power at work’

Lawhead, who served as a producer on the television adaptation, works backward from that inheritance. He takes the myth and plants it in the soil of post-Roman Britain, imagining the people, conflicts, and spiritual transformations that might have prepared the ground for Arthur.

Christianity is crucial to that transformation, but Lawhead doesn’t have it simply sweep away the enchanted pagan world that preceded it. The bard remains a bard; prophecy, mystery, and supernatural power remain. What takes place is closer to a baptism of myth, in which the old stories and powers are not discarded so much as given a new orientation.

That begins with Taliesin and Charis, Merlin’s parents. Both inherit pagan worlds and find them spiritually inadequate. Taliesin encounters the Christian priest Dafyd; Charis has already watched the splendor and religion of Atlantis fail catastrophically.

The decisive contrast arrives when Morgian, Charis’ sister and a powerful pagan priestess, sacrifices a foal she and Taliesin had once saved, then offers herself to him and proposes that together they build a world more powerful than Atlantis. He refuses. “There is a new power at work in the world,” he tells her. “I’ve seen it. A God who does not ask us to sacrifice what we love, but who sacrifices what He loves for us.”

Charis eventually embraces Taliesin’s faith and is baptized. Their son therefore inherits the bardic and prophetic world of his father and the lost Atlantean world of his mother. Merlin’s struggle is not to acquire power — he already possesses plenty — but to discover what that power should serve.

His answer eventually becomes explicit: “Not by my power, Jesu, but thine.”

RELATED: Cry ‘God for England’

Nina Power

Christianity unsoftened

This is unapologetically Christian television, yet it rarely feels like a stereotypical “Christian movie.” Christianity belongs to the world of “Pendragon” as naturally as its mud, blood, and steel.

That allows the series to be dark without becoming decadent. There is war, lust, treachery, mutilation, and genuine evil. But unlike HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” “Pendragon” has little interest in treating sexual degradation or cruelty as proof of adult sophistication. Its Christian worldview actually permits it to be darker rather than lighter: The world is fallen and men do terrible things, which means courage, mercy, and sacrifice can also mean something.

That same idea shapes the series’ understanding of leadership. Uther is the more formidable warrior, but his brother Aurelius begins to reveal a different kind of strength. When warned against risking himself for people under Saxon attack, Aurelius replies, “I have only one thing to offer my people: everything.”

There, in miniature, is Lawhead’s conception of Christian kingship. The pagan conception of power sacrifices others. The Christian king sacrifices himself.

Trusting the material

Boreing and company don’t always make things easy for the viewer. Seven episodes carry a formidable load of characters, kingdoms, generations, and mythology, and the chronology occasionally doubles back on itself. This is a show that rewards close attention — you’re going to want to put your phone down. In an era of television designed for “second screening,” there’s something refreshingly demanding about that. “Pendragon” assumes its audience is willing to keep up.

A more cautious, commercially minded adaptation would get to the familiar beats immediately: the boy, the sword, Camelot, Guinevere, the Round Table. Boreing has enough faith in the material to let it breathe. He spends an entire season on Atlantis and Taliesin, the retreat of Rome, the making of Merlin, and the spiritual formation of the Britain Arthur will inherit. Only in the final moments do we reach the threshold of the Arthurian story most of us know.

There is plenty of story waiting on the other side. Lawhead’s central cycle has been complete for decades, with “Arthur,” “Pendragon,” and “Grail” still ahead of the television series. A second season has not yet been announced, though Boreing says a first draft has already been written and the cast is ready to return.

Most Arthurian stories begin with a Christian moral universe already in place. “The Pendragon Cycle” goes backward to imagine how that world came into being — how pagan myth might be gathered rather than discarded, how power might be subordinated to something higher than itself, and how a shattered country might become capable of producing a king.

​Britain, Camelot, Jeremy boreing, King arthur, Merlin, Stephen r lawhead, Prime video, Entertainment, Culture, Lifestyle, Review 

Matt Dunlap is running as a Democrat for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, claiming to have cut government waste and improved bureaucratic efficiency as Maine secretary of state and state auditor.

His track record tells a different story. After more than two decades in office, Dunlap leaves in his wake an illegal-alien armed robbery scandal, a federal voting lawsuit, a string of missed deadlines, and even flunked exams.

‘He’ll be held accountable for his failures at the ballot box in November.’

During his first tenure as secretary of state from 2004 to 2011, Dunlap’s subordinate Robert O’Connell helped an illegal alien acquire the identification necessary to buy a gun. That alien later used that gun to commit armed robbery.

Back in March 2006, O’Connell, then the Maine DMV’s director of licensing services, met with Irish native Niall Clarke at a Boston bar and discussed getting him a driver’s license in Maine. O’Connell personally expedited Clarke’s application.

The Irishman’s visa expired that April. In October 2006, Clarke used a gun purchased with his Maine ID to rob a Bangor Bank of America, making off with over $11,000 before being apprehended by police.

RELATED: Graham Platner’s replacement has history of violence, unearthed police report reveals

Brianna Soukup/Portland Portland Press Herald/Getty Images

Dunlap declined to discipline O’Connell after an investigation by Dunlap’s office later that year determined that O’Connell had not broken any laws or state policies.

“It probably would be the easy thing to put Bob under suspension, throw him under the bus, but the fact is we have to let the process work,” Dunlap said at the time.

Clarke was sentenced to nearly 10 years in prison and later deported.

That same year, Dunlap also ran afoul of the federal government. In July 2006, the Department of Justice sued the State of Maine and Dunlap for allegedly neglecting voter registration list maintenance and disability access upgrades for polling places.

Maine had already received $17 million from the federal government to aid in these tasks when the suit was filed. Dunlap blamed a truant vendor for the delay. Though both parties later agreed to resolve the issue via consent decree, the oversight raised concerns about Dunlap’s ability to manage public wealth.

The scandals didn’t stop there.

RELATED: When government breaks the law, can you even sue?

JASON REDMOND/AFP/Getty Images

In 2007, local news outlet WGME strolled onto the State Lottery Commission’s property and scooped up numerous discarded records, including citizens’ names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, and other sensitive data. There was enough material there for mass identity theft, according to the outlet.

Despite the alarming exposure of citizens’ private information, Dunlap said about the trashed documents, “I think that’s incredibly healthy,” arguing that 10 years earlier, people would have wondered, “What’s the big deal about Social Security numbers in the trash?”

The incident resulted in changes to state document disposal policy, such as mandatory shredding and contracted waste disposal.

Dunlap faced another lawsuit in 2009 after he failed to certify a people’s veto petition that aimed to repeal Democrat then-Governor John Baldacci’s sales tax expansion. Activist group Still Fed Up with Taxes sued after Dunlap’s office blew past the October 13 deadline for signature verification.

Dunlap ultimately relented, and the measure reached the June 2010 ballot. The measure passed, and a judge later ruled that Dunlap’s office had no authority to miss the deadline.

“[Dunlap] said his staff was overworked, neglecting to mention that, instead of checking off names, he’d spent a week of that crunch time at a conference in Kentucky,” the Portland Press Herald reported in 2012.

Dunlap tried to leave his secretary of state scandals behind him in 2021, switching gears to become state auditor. Dunlap admitted he was “utterly unqualified” for the state auditor role, just as he was when he ran for secretary of state in 2004, according to Bangor Daily News.

Dunlap later failed two accounting exams required for the auditor position and stepped down in October 2021. Then-state Senate President Troy Jackson — whom Democrats recently substituted for Graham Platner as their U.S. Senate candidate to run against longtime Sen. Susan Collins (R) — appointed Dunlap to the auditor role in November 2022 after he eventually passed his exams.

“Whether it’s failing to protect Mainers’ sensitive information, hold bad actors accountable, or simply do his job properly, incompetent radical Matt Dunlap proved to Mainers time and again that he is not a trustworthy steward of their tax dollars,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokeswoman Maureen O’Toole told Blaze News. “He’ll be held accountable for his failures at the ballot box in November.”

Dunlap did not respond to a request for comment. O’Connell and Clarke could not be reached for comment. Dunlap will square off against former Republican Maine Governor Paul LePage in November’s midterm elections.

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​Armed robbery, Department of justice, Identity theft, Illegal alien, Scandal, Politics 

American education has reached a point where the average high school graduate struggles to read a simple sentence or calculate a 15% tip without having a nervous breakdown. National assessment scores resemble a downward slope on an ill-fated ski trip, with reading proficiency sinking to levels that make basic literacy look like an endangered luxury. Math skills have declined to the point that fractions now strike terror into the hearts of 17-year-olds. The supposed greatest country in the world is systematically producing generations of young adults who can’t perform elementary calculations, yet somehow emerge with diplomas certifying their intellectual readiness for adulthood.

The sheer scale of this intellectual deflation, and dare I say fraud, was once confined to lower-tier institutions, but viruses have a nasty habit of spreading.

Attempts to police this behavior are truly comical.

Enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an institution that built its global reputation on turning human beings into relentless calculating machines. MIT shaped the computer age. It pioneered artificial intelligence and taught generations of engineers that suffering through grueling problem sets was the only true path to enlightenment. If any institution knew how to put technology in service of human ambition, it was this concrete citadel on the Charles River.

Those days, however, appear to be long gone.

Read it and weep

A recent, rather sobering institutional report from MIT reveals that the machines have officially outmaneuvered their creators. Artificial intelligence has breached the gates, and the faculty are left staring at the wreckage of their traditional curriculum. The bread and butter of elite higher education — take-home exams, late-night coding assignments, research essays, and endless problem sets — has been rendered obsolete in an instant. A possibly stoned student can now prompt a neural network from the comfort of a dorm bed, generate a flawless solution to a graduate-level physics problem, and return to sleep without exercising a single neuron.

This creates a deliciously absurd dynamic in the classroom. Professors spend their weekends running student submissions through detection software that regularly lies to them, trying to deduce whether a brilliant essay on quantum mechanics was penned by a future Nobel laureate or a 19-year-old with a smartphone and 15 minutes to spare. Study groups have vanished. The traditional struggle of learning — the painful, frustrating, essential process of making mistakes and fixing them — has been bypassed completely by a software script.

Attempts to police this behavior are truly comical. Universities that try to ban AI are essentially trying to battle a tsunami with an umbrella. The software improves every day, while the administrative committees tasked with combatting it meet once a month to discuss formatting guidelines for their strongly worded warning memos.

RELATED: This founder says he’s cracked the code on news that writes itself

mathisworks/Getty Images

The leaders at MIT recognize that pretending it’s still the year 2016 is a speed run to complete institutional irrelevance. Their proposed solution involves dismantling the entire system of passive evaluation.

Nuking the rules

Instead of assigning written homework that will inevitably be outsourced to a close friend named Claude, the university is leaning into high-stakes, face-to-face accountability. This is a sensible approach. In truth, it’s probably the only approach that makes sense.

This means the return of oral examinations, a format that historically reduced anxious undergraduates to tears and will now serve as the ultimate truth serum. If a student claims to have written a brilliant algorithm, he must sit in a room with an actual human being and explain how it works line by line. Homework is being replaced by mandatory physical laboratory work, real-time group problem-solving, and practical project defense. Education is forced to become physical, immediate, and painfully personal simply because digital submissions can no longer be trusted.

The broader mandate involves teaching students how to rigorously interrogate machine outputs rather than accepting them as divine revelation. Software tools routinely invent historical facts and fabricate mathematical proofs with supreme confidence. The modern skill lies not in generating text, but in catching the machine in a lie before it ruins a project.

Transform or die

Of course, this crisis isn’t confined to elite research labs in Cambridge. MIT is merely the canary in the coal mine, coughing up blood to warn the rest of the nation that oxygen is in short supply. Every community college, high school, and state university that relies on take-home assignments is headed in the exact same direction.

Whether you love AI or loathe it isn’t the point; it will keep embedding itself in more offices and laboratories across the nation. The choice facing the entire American education system couldn’t be any clearer: Completely redesign the rules to test actual human capability, or continue collecting tuition while handing out degrees to human proxies for automated text generators.

​Artificial intelligence, Tech 

Wisconsin police are investigating a 47-year-old man over human remains that were found in his basement along with a shrine to serial killer Ed Gein and nude photos of women.

The bizarre discovery was made after a Madison woman reported to police that Benjamin Larson was stalking her.

‘Benjamin Larson had these human remains on display amongst naked photos of unidentified women and with binders of women he had been stalking.’

The woman said Larson’s actions had caused her serious emotional distress and fear, which led to his arrest on a felony stalking charge.

Police said they found human remains and other disconcerting items when serving a search warrant at his rural home in Taycheedah.

Among those items are 10 binders labeled “Edward Gein Book,” which refers to the murderer who inspired the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movies. Other items related to serial killers John Wayne Gacy and the Zodiac Killer.

Police also found the following:

A mummy with a sign reading “Princess Taheb 1600” Skeletal remains in a glass casketHuman skulls displayedHorror movie memorability A life-size mannequin of the Jason Vorhees character from the “Friday the 13th” movies

Then they found a padlocked room and forced entry to find a bedroom inside. The bedroom had a lifelike silicon sex doll on the bed and a painting above the bed of a woman similar to the accuser’s likeness.

The complaint also said that various items related to the accuser were found, including an earring, a coin, and a pressed flower.

The woman said she had casually dated Larson for two months in 2013, later moved to Canada, and had been receiving letters, gifts, and emails from him over the years. She had not given him her new address.

One of the documents allegedly included statements of anger against the woman’s husband and child and recorded that Larson had watched them at their home while wearing black clothing and holding a machete.

“Benjamin Larson had these human remains on display amongst naked photos of unidentified women and with binders of women he had been stalking,” read the arrest warrant.”

Officials are working to identify the origin of the human remains.

“The forensic anthropologist’s initial physical examination determined that many of the remains are likely ancient Native American in origin; however, several of the skeletal remains require specialized forensic testing at a laboratory to determine their origin,” said the Fond du Lac County Sheriff’s Office.

RELATED: Man hacked off victim’s head with machete while his wife and child watched, police say

Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney expressed anger at the “shockingly low cash bail” ordered by a judge over the allegations he called “beyond disturbing.”

Larson was released after posting a $15,000 cash bail on Friday.

He is scheduled for arraignment on Sept. 11.

Larson has not been yet charged in relation to the alleged human remains.

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​Human remains, Serial killers, Stalking, Wisconsin, Crime 

As a crusty, curmudgeonly original CNN special assignment correspondent from the early 1980s, I have used these pages more than once to vent about the second-rate dingbats who have populated my old network over the past quarter-century.

You know them: cockwomble Chris Cuomo, blowhard Don Lemon, lumbering harpy Candy Crowley — a parade of television solemnity occasionally interrupted by journalism.

I spent enough of my career pulling leeches off myself in Nicaragua to admit I have an old-school correspondent’s prejudice against television interviews conducted in hermetically controlled studios.

But few CNN creatures trigger my counter-alimentation reflex faster than Brian Stelter, whose talent for institutional obsequiousness survived even the departure of his long-cashiered former boss, Jeff “Mother” Zucker.

Stelter was bounced during the Zucker debacle, then rehired in a fit of corporate dementia, and eventually returned to “Reliable Sources.” The title remains CNN’s best joke.

His latest exercise in reliability is a defense of NBC’s Kristen Welker after she characterized Donald Trump’s primary election endorsements as producing “mixed results.” The figures at issue were 100% of his endorsed Senate candidates winning and 98% of his other endorsed candidates winning. “Mixed” is doing some heroic work there.

Trump, unsurprisingly, was not amused. He made some noises about the “fine people” of the FCC taking a look at NBC’s news division.

Stelter initially jumped on X to declare the mystery solved in Welker’s favor:

And here’s the weirdest thing of all: Trump wrote that @kwelkernbc “just stated that Donald Trump has ‘mixed results’ on his Endorsements of Candidates” — but she said no such thing on today’s @MeetThePress. Where’d the quote come from? It’s baffling.

Then came the update: He found it. Welker had said “mixed” during a pre-show live shot on NBC’s Washington, D.C., affiliate, WRC-TV. Stelter noted that six Trump-backed House and gubernatorial candidates had lost their August primaries.

So much for “baffling.” The quote existed. The only real question was whether “mixed results” fairly described a batting average that would make Ted Williams rise from the grave and demand an audit.

Welker is free to characterize the record however she likes. First Amendment and all that. But viewers are equally free to notice when a journalist selects the one formulation that makes overwhelming success sound like a coin toss.

And there is some history here that Stelter’s defense neglects.

Go back to the “Meet the Press” interview in which Welker tangled with Orange Man Bad and got herself nuked.

I spent enough of my career ducking bullets in Grenada, pulling leeches off myself in Nicaragua, and dodging security thugs in Suriname to admit I have an old-school correspondent’s prejudice against television interviews conducted in hermetically controlled studios.

Welker was perfectly coiffed, made up, lighted, and wired through an IFB while a control room full of producers stood ready to help. Fine. That is television. But the polished setup made what happened next considerably funnier.

RELATED: Trump exposed the cracks in our elections. The media proved his point.

Rob Newell/CameraSport/Getty Images

After Trump cut the interview short, the grand inquisitor suddenly became the supplicant: “Mr. President, let’s please …” Then came her complaint that she had traveled “all the way to Wisconsin” for the sit-down.

Trump later blasted Welker over the exchange. You do not need a degree in Freudian analysis to wonder whether being called stupid, cut off on camera, and reduced to pleading for a few more minutes might leave a residue.

“All the way” to Wisconsin! Did she walk there in the rain? Cross the Appalachians by mule? Ford Trimotor to Duluth, then Bactrian camel to Green Bay? Comcast has resources. Wisconsin is not Outer Mongolia.

NBC’s “best in the business” may well have no grudge at all. Perhaps “mixed results” simply struck her as the perfect phrase. But Stelter’s job, on a program called “Reliable Sources,” should be to examine that possibility rather than leap reflexively to the defense of a fellow establishment journalist.

Instead, he first declared Trump’s quotation baffling, then discovered it was real, then carried on as if the important fact were that six endorsed candidates had lost rather than that nearly all had won.

That is not media criticism so much as reputation management with a chyron.

So Brian the Obsequious rides again, defending the guild and ignoring the obvious context. As I said: So much for “Reliable Sources.”

​Journalism, Brian stelter, Cnn, Chris cuomo, Don lemon, Nbc, Reliable sources, Meet the press, Liberal media, Kristen welker, Opinion & analysis, Donald trump 

Mexico should be rich. It shares a 2,000-mile land border with the largest consumer market on earth, coastlines on two oceans, abundant natural resources, and a young workforce. Prosperity should have arrived decades ago.

The industrial boom did. Mexico is now America’s largest trading partner for the third consecutive year, selling the United States $534 billion in goods in 2025. It has become a major manufacturing power, and the nearshoring wave that followed the trade war with Beijing made it one of the world’s most sought-after industrial destinations.

‘We are not applying to be the world’s next sweatshop. We are applying to be America’s trusted factory floor.’

But too little of that prosperity reached the people doing the work. For decades, Mexico’s biggest export was not cars or electronics. It was Mexicans: More than 12 million now live abroad, most of them in the United States. A thriving country does not export its own children by accident.

Alejandro Martínez Araiza, national general secretary of the National Trade Union for Food and Commerce, Mexico’s oldest private-sector union, has an explanation economists rarely say out loud.

“Cheap labor was never an accident. It was the design,” Martínez Araiza told me. “Investment came for the low wage, and the system was built to guarantee the wage stayed low. Protection unions were the lock on the door. Corruption was the guard. The worker was never meant to prosper, because his poverty was the product being sold.”

That diagnosis is relevant today because the old design now stands between North America and its goal of competing more effectively with China. Martínez Araiza is candid about the scale of the challenge: China still dwarfs Mexico in manufacturing output.

“Can Mexico replace China? In volume, never, and anyone who promises otherwise is selling you something,” Martínez Araiza said. “You do not defeat China by trying to be China. You defeat it by being the neighbor China can never be: next door, with shared interests, and rules you can actually verify. We are not applying to be the world’s next sweatshop. We are applying to be America’s trusted factory floor.”

That is why he treats labor enforcement as supply-chain security. A real factory with real workers, better wages, and an independent union able to walk the floor is harder to disguise as a front company. In his formulation, labor enforcement becomes a certificate of origin that paperwork alone cannot fake.

His proposals for the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement review follow from there: automatic consequences for violations, enforcement covering warehouses and logistics as well as factories, a regional wage floor of $7.25 an hour, and a verification alliance of democratic worker organizations across all three countries.

RELATED: Meet the man making Mexico useful again

Daniel Cardenas/Anadolu/Getty Images

Martínez Araiza is equally candid about Mexico’s vulnerability. More than 80% of Mexican exports go to the United States.

“China can survive a trade war with America. Mexico cannot, and I will not pretend otherwise,” he told me. “That is exactly why Mexico’s only rational strategy is a USMCA so credible and so enforceable that no one ever needs a trade war. Certainty is the cheapest stimulus that exists.”

Then comes the part Washington rarely considers. Mexico maintains trade agreements with about 50 countries. “Everyone talks about Mexico as somebody’s back door,” Martínez Araiza said. “I want the opposite: Mexico as America’s front door. Build it together in North America, and sell it to the world through our agreements. Close the back door. Open the front door. Made in North America, sold to the world.”

When work pays, people stay. “Pay a real wage, and Mexico’s biggest export goes back to being products, not people,” he says. Border security, in his telling, begins on the payroll.

American readers may be skeptical of a Mexican union leader offering trade advice. But the incentives line up. His program raises the cost of the labor arbitrage that moved American factories south while reducing one of the pressures that drives migration north. President Trump’s trade agenda seeks both outcomes.

Martínez Araiza proposes to pursue them with something the American taxpayer does not have to create: organized workers already inside the supply chain, using secret-ballot elections and replacing the old protection-union system workplace by workplace.

The design that kept Mexico poor is breaking. The question is whether North America can replace it with something that lets workers, manufacturers, and both countries prosper together.

“There is no fair trade on poverty wages,” Martínez Araiza said. “The best tariff is a good wage.”

​China, Investment, Mexico, North america, Opinion & analysis, Trade war, Usmca, Wages, Border security, Manufacturing, Alejandro martinez araiza, Donald trump, Tariffs, Economy 

Ontario officials are cracking down on American alcohol so aggressively that even a grocery store display of California wine sparked a government response after a citizen tipped off local media.

“We were alerted to this by a viewer who said a store in Kemptville had set up a full display in the front of the beer and wine section, prominently selling wine from California,” CTV News anchor Dylan Dyson reported.

“I saw the wine on display this morning, and within hours of contacting Loblaw, the dusty U.S. bottles were pulled from the shelves once again.

“When CTV News reached out to Loblaw, the parent company of the independent grocer chain, it said the wine was put on the shelves without the approval of the store owner,” he continued.

“And once identified, it was removed immediately,” he added.

“I don’t know why they would do it,” one resident told cameras in response to the store having American wine on their shelves.

Ontario’s minister of finance responded as well, saying, “We have been clear — US alcohol will remain off shelves. We expect all retailers, including this grocer, to follow the rules.”

According to the CTV News Ottawa report, the incident helped in “reigniting shoppers’ patriotism amid trade tensions with Donald Trump and the United States.”

“If these Canadians hate us so much, why not boycott all 30,000 American businesses that dominate your craphole country? You know why they won’t?” BlazeTV host Pat Gray asks.

“Because they can’t. They’re far too dependent on us to actually put their money where their inflated egos are,” he adds.

Gray notes that Canada is also dependent on the U.S. for protection.

“No more NORAD either. How about we just remove our protective shield from you guys?” he asks. “We’ll just let you figure out how to defend yourselves for a change.”

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