In a viral social media video, teacher Darius Williams described breaking down in class after discovering that some of his high school seniors could not complete an exercise requiring them to fill in just four missing words.

“These kids are leaving high school and going to college, hopefully, and they couldn’t fill in four words. Four words. I literally broke down in the middle of class. This is only day two, and I have seniors who simply cannot read and seniors who cannot write,” the teacher, Darius Williams, said in a reel on Instagram.

“They can reason. They have the ability to defend their reasoning if it’s talking to their homeboy, but applying that to a written text, two paragraphs, and they couldn’t do it,” he added.

BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock is disturbed, but not surprised.

“High school seniors could not fill in four words,” Whitlock says. “Not calculus, not philosophy, four words. A grown man wept on camera because the next generation cannot read. That is not a school story. That is a funeral for the mind.”

Whitlock points out that “enslaved black men and women once risked the whip, the auction block, and death for the ability to read.”

“Literacy was contraband. Freedom. A free mind started with a page you were not supposed to touch,” he says.

What slaves understood back then is something “this generation pretends not to know.”

“The man who controls your access to words controls your access to God, to law, to contracts, to your own name on a document,” Whitlock says.

“Now, too many black Americans treat reading like optional equipment. Something you outsource to a phone, a caption, a clip, or a machine that summarizes so you never sweat through a hard paragraph,” he says. “That is not progress. That is a people walking backward into dependence and calling it culture.”

“We used to bleed for the page. Now we scroll past it and get offended when a teacher cries about the wreckage,” he adds.

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​Jason whitlock, Literacy, Black, Culture, Slavery, High school, Students, Blazetv show 

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) triumphantly shared the results of a poll released last week showing that she enjoyed a 50%-39% lead over Councilwoman Nithya Raman (D) ahead of the Nov. 3 mayoral runoff.

Bass tweeted an image of herself beside a graphic of the poll results and wrote, “Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let’s do this, LA!”

‘The mayor’s campaign promoted a fake poll without properly vetting the source.’

Unfortunately for the Democrat, the poll — said to have been based on a survey of 560 L.A. voters between July 30 and Aug. 5 — was entirely fake, reported the Los Angeles Times.

The outfit behind the poll, which calls itself Median Strategies, announced on its website that it has “concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls. All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data.”

“Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification,” added the bogus pollster.

The fake pollster went the distance with its so-called “social experiment” in the Bass race, providing some additional fake details and even analysis.

It claimed, for instance, that of the 16% of respondents who previously voted for Spencer Pratt, over 85% were planning to vote for Bass in the general election, reported the Times.

RELATED: Socialist who hates America loses in Wisconsin after voter data mishap

Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times/Getty Image

Median Strategies noted, “Faced with a choice between the incumbent and a Democratic Socialists of America-aligned challenger, most Pratt voters appear to be treating Bass as the more familiar, more moderate option rather than sitting out the race.”

An archived version of the outfit’s now-scrubbed website provides further evidence of the fakers’ commitment to the ruse.

Under the heading “How We Poll,” Median Strategies said its releases are “built on a documented sampling frame, a mixed-mode interview process, and a transparent weighting scheme. We publish our methodology alongside every release so you can evaluate our numbers the same way we do.”

Unlike Bass, Pratt wasn’t fooled, writing on Friday in response to the California Post’s reporting on the fake results, “LOL you think my voters are going to vote for the crying carpetbagger in charge of homelessness who ‘found’ 40K votes on Skid Row 7 days after the election?”

Blaze News has reached out to the California Post for comment.

The Bass campaign has demanded that consequence be visited upon those who so badly bruised their egos.

“This poll was reported on by a news outlet,” a spokesperson for the Bass campaign told the Times. “Any bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

A spokesman for Raman’s campaign criticized Bass for pushing the fake poll, telling KTLA-TV, “The mayor’s campaign promoted a fake poll without properly vetting the source.”

“It is the latest example of an administration that too often struggles to get the basics right — from posting about a pothole repair before the pothole was fixed to repeatedly giving Boyle Heights residents a Lineage cleanup deadline that the company now disputes,” continued Raman’s campaign. “Angelenos deserve a mayor who gets the facts right, communicates clearly, and does the work before announcing the result.”

According to the Politics & Poll Tracker, one of the many accounts on X that shared but has since deleted fake polling from the outfit, Median Strategies had also released fake survey results regarding other races.

For example, Median Strategies allegedly released a poll in the Nevada governor’s race showing that Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo was leading Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford (D) 51%-46%. Recent polling from apparently legitimate outfits have Lombardo leading Ford by at least seven percentage points.

Median Strategies also released a poll on the Wisconsin governor’s primary race showing the white-hating democratic socialist Francesca Hong with a 23-point lead over Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. Crowley won the Democratic nomination in a tight election last week.

Median Strategies alleged that no one involved with its faking polling operation “received compensation or financial benefit from the project, and the project was not funded, commissioned, or directed by any candidate, campaign, political party, PAC, media organization, or other outside entity.”

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​Karen bass, Spencer pratt, Nithya raman, Los angeles, Democrat, Fraud, Poll results, Politics 

For years, Washington has asked the same question about Mexico: Can we count on our southern neighbor as a serious security partner? Increasingly, the answer appears to be yes.

Much of the change runs through Omar García Harfuch, Mexico’s secretary of security and citizen protection. Under President Claudia Sheinbaum, Harfuch has emerged as one of the most important officials in Mexico — and perhaps the Mexican official who matters most to American security.

The United States does not need a subordinate in Mexico. It needs a capable neighbor that shares our interest in destroying the criminal organizations threatening both our countries.

Americans have good reason to pay attention.

The United States and Mexico share a 2,000-mile border and one of the world’s largest trading relationships. Yet security cooperation has too often failed to reflect how intertwined the two countries have become. Cartels built multinational criminal enterprises. Fentanyl poured north. American weapons and illicit money moved south. Mutual suspicion kept Washington and Mexico City from confronting those problems as effectively as they should have.

That appears to be changing.

Harfuch has built something Washington desperately needs: trust.

American law enforcement officials increasingly speak of Mexico as a partner. DEA Director Terry Cole has publicly discussed his communication with Harfuch. FBI Director Kash Patel has met with him as cooperation between the two countries has expanded. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has praised Mexico’s efforts against organized crime.

More important than the rhetoric are the results.

Mexico has transferred major cartel figures to American custody. Mexican security forces have expanded operations against organized crime. The Sheinbaum government has deployed forces to the border and worked more closely with American agencies on narcotics trafficking, intelligence, and cartel networks.

For Washington, Harfuch’s appeal is straightforward: He understands American concerns, and he acts on them.

That does not make him an American proxy. It makes him an effective Mexican official who recognizes a basic geopolitical reality: The United States and Mexico face many of the same enemies.

The cartel selling fentanyl in Dallas or Phoenix may also be extorting businesses and murdering civilians in Mexico. Neither country can defeat these organizations while treating the border as the end of its responsibility. Washington should keep pressing for measurable results against fentanyl production, cartel finances, and cross-border criminal networks.

Harfuch seems to understand that better than many of his predecessors.

Consider the recent dispute over American avocado inspections in Michoacán. Security concerns disrupted U.S. inspection operations in one of Mexico’s most important agricultural regions. Mexico responded by deploying more than 1,500 federal personnel while officials worked with Washington to restore operations.

Avocados may seem far removed from national security. They aren’t.

RELATED: Mamdani’s one-word border answer said it all

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Organized crime has penetrated legitimate industries across parts of Mexico, using extortion and violence to profit from ordinary commerce. When American inspectors cannot safely do their jobs, cartel violence becomes an American economic problem too.

The response illustrated the Harfuch approach: Identify the problem, work with the Americans, and deploy the resources necessary to address it.

Washington should encourage more of this, particularly on fentanyl.

The drug has devastated American communities and made Mexican cartel activity a domestic American security issue. Washington is right to demand aggressive Mexican action against the organizations producing and transporting it.

Mexico has legitimate concerns of its own. American firearms move south. Drug money crosses the border and flows through financial institutions. Cartels exploit weaknesses in both countries.

The answer is not another round of diplomatic finger-pointing. It is sustained cooperation among American and Mexican law enforcement, intelligence, and financial authorities.

That requires trusted people on both sides. Harfuch has increasingly become that person for Washington.

His rise is particularly significant because close security cooperation with the United States remains politically sensitive in Mexico. Elements of the Mexican left have long viewed such ties with suspicion. Harfuch has nevertheless shown that working with Washington does not require surrendering Mexican sovereignty.

In fact, the opposite is true.

RELATED: Rapists and child molesters arrested by ICE as deportations continue

Blake Fagan/AFP/Getty Images

A Mexican government capable of dismantling criminal organizations, protecting businesses, and imposing the rule of law across its territory is more sovereign, not less. Cartels that control territory and intimidate public officials pose a far greater threat to Mexican independence than intelligence cooperation with Washington ever could.

Sheinbaum deserves credit for recognizing that and empowering Harfuch. The Trump administration should recognize the opportunity as well.

Washington should remain demanding. Mexico still faces enormous problems with organized crime, corruption, and violence. Cooperation should not be confused with complacency. The United States should continue pressing for measurable results against fentanyl production, cartel finances, and cross-border criminal networks.

But American foreign policy also needs to recognize progress when it occurs.

For years, the U.S.-Mexico security relationship was defined by mistrust. Today there are signs of something different: two governments recognizing that they have more to gain by confronting shared threats together than by blaming each other for them.

The United States does not need a subordinate in Mexico. It needs a capable neighbor that shares our interest in destroying the criminal organizations threatening both countries.

In Omar García Harfuch, America may finally have found that partner.

​Border, Cartels, Mexico, Fentanyl, Omar garcia harfuch, Foreign policy, Southern border, Border wall, Trump administration, Claudia sheinbaum, Opinion & analysis 

A simple traffic stop led police to a massive trove of evidence that could implicate a 44-year-old man in the alleged murders of at least four women.

Eugene Horsch was pulled over in June by officers and found to be in possession of a fraudulent Drug Enforcement Agency identification, thousands of dollars’ worth of drugs, and two illegal guns.

One troubling piece of evidence found was a handwritten note about the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.

His passenger also had a fake identification bearing the name of Blair Tonzelli, a missing woman.

Police searched Horsch’s home on West Chew Avenue in the Olney section of Philadelphia and found evidence that two women reported missing had been at the home. They also found files showing the two women dead, according to police.

The bodies of the two missing women, Maribel Fresses and Gabrielle Amarando, have not been found.

Fresses had been missing since 2018, and Amarando had been missing since 2012.

Officers are sifting through the massive amount of evidence that includes 600,000 images, 70,000 videos, and more than 10,000 pages of writings, manuscripts, and drawings.

Investigators also found a fake identification for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an illegal gun, gun parts, five urns with possible human remains, “120 pieces of ballistic evidence,” and a marijuana growing operation.

Police are testing 20 containers of unknown substances seized from what they described as a basement laboratory.

“They’re going through that house with a fine-tooth comb, if you will. I mean, they’re going to be looking for the tiniest fragment of forensic evidence that can tie him to victims and missing persons,” said former FBI agent JJ Klaver to WGAL-TV.

The home was also the last known location of another missing woman named Amy McHale. She disappeared in 2016, and her family believes something happened to her at the house.

RELATED: Police find suitcases with human remains surrounded by vultures — teen suspect left unbelievable evidence

Another troubling piece of evidence found was a handwritten note about the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.

The man remains in custody as the search continues at the mysterious home in Olney.

Horsch’s father, Raymond Charles Horsch, had also lived at the home before he died in 2025.

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​Alleged murders, Federal bureau of investigation, Missing woman, Serial killer, Crime 

Seven days after the Benghazi attack, Barack Obama went on David Letterman’s “Late Show.”

The date was September 18, 2012. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were dead. The Obama administration was under mounting pressure to explain what had happened. The election was less than two months away, and the administration’s account — that the attack had grown out of a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islam video — was already under scrutiny.

We live in an age when everything is supposedly recorded forever. Yet political memory remains remarkably fragile.

So Obama went on Letterman. Naturally.

That was one of the more striking moments in A.J. Rice’s recent “Dangerous Laughter” conversation with Drew Thomas Allen, author of “Clinton Hoax, Obama Coup: The Declassified Story of the Trump-Russia Delusion.”

Allen’s larger argument is that the political and intelligence controversies that exploded around Donald Trump in 2016 did not begin with Trump. To understand Russiagate, he says, you have to work backward through the Obama years, Benghazi, Hillary Clinton, and the intelligence community.

But the Letterman story is where the story gets genuinely strange.

Allen says that while researching his book, he found references to Obama’s Letterman appearance in material connected to the Benghazi investigation. Finding the actual interview proved harder. According to the discussion, only a small portion of the September 18 appearance remains readily available online, while the section dealing with Obama’s explanation of Benghazi is the part that is difficult to locate.

Rice notes that plenty of Letterman interviews from the same period remain online. That makes the absence conspicuous.

The missing footage does not tell us who removed it, why it vanished, or whether anyone deliberately removed it at all. Television archives are messy. Rights change hands. Old clips disappear for mundane reasons. Rice and Allen themselves discussed trying to obtain a complete copy or transcript rather than treating the missing footage as evidence of a conspiracy theory.

That is exactly the right standard. But it leaves a remarkable question: Why is a presidential interview, important enough to surface in the Benghazi record, so difficult to watch today?

Rice’s hypothesis is compelling: The interview has been “memory holed.”

RELATED: Task forces won’t cut it. Trump needs a truth commission.

EtiAmmos/Getty Images

The phrase comes from George Orwell’s “1984.” Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old records until yesterday’s reality conforms to today’s political narrative. The original disappears down the memory hole.

The metaphor works because political narratives harden into history with astonishing speed. A politician says something. Television repeats it, newspapers amplify it, commentators argue about it. Eventually, millions of people remember the story without remembering where the story came from.

Years later, the interpretation survives while the primary source becomes harder to find.

That’s the key to Allen’s argument, which treats Benghazi as an earlier chapter in a much longer political story. Obama was running for re-election on a record that included the killing of Osama bin Laden and the broader claim that his administration had confronted the terrorist threat. Then an American ambassador was killed in a terrorist attack weeks before Election Day.

That was plainly a political problem for the White House. What followed — the administration’s public explanation, the congressional investigations, and years of argument over what officials knew and when they knew it — became part of the larger history Allen wants readers to reconstruct.

His book moves from Benghazi through Clinton, the FBI, CIA, the Steele dossier, and ultimately Russiagate. A reader need not accept every conclusion to accept his basic challenge: Go back to the documents. Examine the original evidence. Do not mistake the version that became conventional wisdom for the record itself.

And that is where Letterman becomes more than a footnote.

Rice makes a larger point about comedy. Historically, the comedian played court jester: the figure permitted to mock the king, puncture pretension, and say what ordinary people could not. Aristophanes mocked politicians. Molière mocked the establishment. Comedy was supposed to make powerful people sweat.

Rice contends that Letterman had moved away from that role. In his telling, Obama was not entering a hostile room where a comic might spring an uncomfortable question. He was entering a friendly television environment where he could address a political crisis on favorable terrain.

That criticism can be overstated. Political comedy has always had sympathies and enemies. But the underlying standard is sound: If the comedian’s social function is to challenge power, the test should not change with the party holding it.

RELATED: Obama calls Benghazi attack a ‘wild conspiracy theory.’ Benghazi hero decimates him.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

And the timing is important. This was not a president chatting about his golf game. Obama appeared on a comedy program one week after an American ambassador and three other Americans had been killed, while his administration was under pressure to explain the attack and he was campaigning for another term.

Now the most politically relevant portion of that appearance is apparently the hardest part to find.

That should make historians, journalists, and ordinary citizens curious — not conspiratorial, curious.

We live in an age when everything is supposedly recorded forever. Yet political memory remains remarkably fragile. Archives move. Clips disappear. Context separates from quotation. Eventually, the easiest version of the story becomes the version everyone remembers.

That is the real reason the Letterman episode is worth pursuing. It does not prove Allen’s larger case. It does not prove deliberate suppression. It demonstrates why citizens should insist on access to the original evidence whenever possible.

If the full interview exists, produce it. If there is a transcript, publish it. If it truly has disappeared, somebody should find out why.

The memory hole is dangerous precisely because, once the source is gone, all that remains is somebody else’s version of what was on the other side.

​Barack obama, Benghazi, Christopher stevens, David letterman, Hillary clinton, Intelligence community, Osama bin laden, Russiagate, Steele dossier, White house, Opinion & analysis 

President Trump signed an executive order last week reducing the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 18 to 11 and urging states with school-entry requirements to update their laws accordingly.

That should be a starting point, not an end point.

More coercion will deepen skepticism, not cure it.

Alabama is already closer to that model than most states. Its school-entry requirements rely on a narrower set of core vaccines and do not force hepatitis B vaccination for every student. Other states should treat the president’s order as the floor for vaccine freedom, not the ceiling.

The most immediate step is obvious: States can reduce school-entry requirements to match the new federal recommendations. Better still, they should eliminate those mandates altogether or, at minimum, make it much easier for families to opt out.

Coercion has no place in parental medical decisions. Public schools exist to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. They should not condition access to a publicly funded classroom on a government-approved medical regimen.

Aligning state rules with the new federal baseline would be progress. But true parental authority requires going farther.

Forty-six states already allow religious exemptions from school vaccine requirements. Their broad existence also shows that states can preserve opt-outs without schools simply ceasing to function.

Religious exemptions should remain. But the principle should not end there.

Parents can have sincere nonreligious reasons for declining particular vaccines, whether because of personal medical history, concerns about a specific product, or objections to the schedule itself. Treating religious objections as legitimate while dismissing every other conscientious objection draws an arbitrary line.

States should therefore expand personal and philosophical exemptions as well. Families should not have to choose between access to public education and surrendering authority over their children’s medical decisions.

Idaho has already gone farther. Its Medical Freedom Act prohibits schools from imposing medical intervention mandates, including vaccine requirements, as a condition of attendance. Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo is pushing in the same direction, seeking to eliminate school vaccine mandates entirely in the Sunshine State.

Other lawmakers should study those models. The core principle is straightforward: Attending a government school should not require surrendering parental authority over a child’s body.

The burden of vaccine mandates also falls unevenly.

Affluent parents who object can more easily homeschool or move a child to a private school with different policies. Working families often have fewer options. They may be forced to comply, navigate exemption processes that demand time and paperwork they do not have, or keep a child out of the classroom.

RELATED: Fauci is yesterday’s fight. Medical freedom is today’s.

Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg/Getty Images

That creates a two-tier system in which families with the fewest resources have the least room to exercise meaningful choice.

Reducing mandates or broadening opt-outs would expand educational freedom precisely for the families who are most constrained by the current system.

None of this prevents families from vaccinating their children. Parents who want the full schedule remain free to choose it. The question is whether the state should force that choice on everyone else as the price of attending school.

Public trust in health institutions fell sharply after COVID. Rebuilding that trust will require transparent information, honest risk communication, and genuine freedom to say no. More coercion will deepen skepticism, not cure it.

President Trump’s executive order gives states a practical starting point.

Legislatures should use it: Reduce school-entry vaccine mandates to the new federal baseline, expand opt-outs beyond religious grounds, or eliminate the mandates entirely.

Parents, not bureaucrats, should decide what goes into their children’s bodies. States that move first can expand educational freedom while beginning the harder work of rebuilding public confidence through voluntary cooperation rather than compulsion.

​Childhood vaccines, Executive order, President trump, Public schools, Religious exemptions, Big pharma, Medical freedom act, Covid, Opinion & analysis 

When former Texas Children’s Hospital nurse Vanessa Sivadge witnessed her employer illegally use state funding to provide minors with transition procedures, she blew the whistle — and was fired for it.

“I was a nurse working in that multi-speciality clinic where … gender patients were being seen on a weekly basis. So I had a firsthand view of what was going on, knew that the hospital was lying to the public,” Sivadge tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey.

Despite first coming forward anonymously, she explains that “it was not anonymous to the Biden DOJ” because they sent two FBI agents to her home in July 2023.

“That encounter radically altered the trajectory of my life. It was something I’ll never forget. Very intimidating. A lot of threats made against me because of my views on transgender medicine and how children were being harmed,” she explains, adding that “Texas taxpayers were being billed fraudulently for gender hormones.”

“And people might not remember that at this time it was also illegal, not just the Medicaid fraud, but it was illegal for hospitals to be operating in this way. Not actual operations as in surgery but giving these, as you said, sex-rejecting hormones to children,” Stuckey chimes in.

“Texas had prohibited that. So they were not only committing Medicaid fraud,” she adds.

“Yeah, so the pattern very briefly was the hospital used fake names on the medical record. They used the patient’s preferred name, not their actual given name at birth. The hospital falsified medical records. They put the patient’s preferred gender identity on the medical record instead of their biological sex,” Sivadge explains.

“Then, they misdiagnosed patients intentionally who were going through the gender clinic, misdiagnosed them for the purpose of obtaining reimbursement for the hormones they were prescribing,” she continues.

While Sivadge initially remained anonymous, she publicly came forward with her story in June 2024.

“You can imagine, my life changed overnight. I blew the whistle. One day I was a nurse, the next day the hospital had put me on leave. The story made national news when the video of the FBI was posted, and it was viewed millions of times in just a couple days,” she explains.

When firing her, the hospital claimed that she had “accessed records inappropriately.”

“Of course, the very same records that proved that they were committing fraud,” she adds.

Now, after two years of litigation that began over the fraud under the Biden DOJ, the hospital’s settlement with her and the Justice Department was finalized last week — and her name has been cleared.

“A couple of months ago, in May, it was initially announced that a $10 million settlement had been reached, including the establishment of America’s first detransition clinic, the firing of five physicians that had … been a party to these procedures,” Sivadge tells Stuckey.

“So for the first time I was able to reveal that I was … the whistleblower that forced Texas Children’s Hospital, that compelled them to pay $10 million back to the government because the government was defrauded,” she adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Biden doj, Medicaid fraud, Puberty blockers, Whistleblower, Texas childrens hospital, Vanessa sivadge, Allie beth stuckey, Blazetv show