Iran and the United States have riddled their fragile ceasefire with missiles in the 14th week of the war.

President Donald Trump confirmed on Tuesday that the U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopter downed while patrolling the Strait of Hormuz on Monday had been shot down by Iranian forces. While the uninjured pilots were rescued, the president stressed that “the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack.”

‘US forces remain vigilant, lethal, and ready.’

Hours later, U.S. Central Command announced that it had begun launching “self-defense strikes,” which it characterized as a “proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression.”

Early Wednesday, Trump noted on Truth Social that “they’ve taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”

The president clarified later in the day that more American strikes were forthcoming.

“We hit them hard yesterday. We’re going to hit them again hard today, in case you miss it, in case you don’t turn on your television set, and we’ll see what happens with the deal,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

On Wednesday evening, CENTCOM launched another series of “self-defense” strikes, stating afterward that it had targeted “Iranian military surveillance capabilities, communication systems, and air defense sites across Iran.”

RELATED: US Apache helicopter crashes near Strait of Hormuz on 100th day of Iran war; Trump says end in sight

Ford Williams/U.S. Navy/Getty Images

Iranian media claimed, however, that among the structures damaged in the American strikes was a pair of water tanks in the south of the country with a combined capacity of 2.5 million liters — tanks said to have supplied water to tens of thousands of civilians. When asked by the New York Times about reports of damage to water facilities, CENTCOM declined to comment.

“U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy assets fired precision munitions on Iranian targets that posed a threat to U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters,” CENTCOM said in a statement. “The strikes are in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression. U.S. forces remain vigilant, lethal, and ready.”

According to Trey Yingst, an Israel-based Fox News reporter, Trump said that the U.S. fired at least 49 Tomahawk missiles into Iran and executed bombings via fighter jets, hitting targets as close as 40 miles outside Tehran. Trump also reportedly said that if the Iranians don’t sign the peace agreement, “we’ll bomb the s**t out of them.”

Iranian state media reported on Thursday that in retaliation for the American strikes, “18 important targets belonging to the U.S. military in the region were successfully hit during two operational waves following the recent aggression against Iranian territorial integrity.”

The Iranians maintain that their attacks constitute self-defense “as recognized under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations.”

According to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the targets were located “at the Al-Salem and Ahmad al-Jaber air bases, as well as the Sheikh Isa air base.”

Citing an unnamed military official, Jordanian state media reported that 20 missiles had been intercepted and neutralized by the country’s air defense systems, adding there had been no human casualties or material damage.

Iranian drones and “hostile aerial targets” were reportedly intercepted over Bahrain and Kuwait.

While Iranian media also claimed that the Strait of Hormuz had been completely closed in response to the American strikes, CENTCOM stated on Wednesday evening that “commercial ships are continuing to transit in and out of the Strait of Hormuz.”

Trump emphasized on Wednesday that “the UNITED STATES of AMERICA CONTROLS the Strait of Hormuz — NOT Iran.”

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​Iran, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Middle east, War, Israel, Donald trump, Tehran, Bombing, Centcom, Military, Conflict, Strait of hormuz, Politics 

Many AI systems now produce fully documented reports with citations, making the apparatus of scholarship available without the slow friction through which scholarship is ordinarily built. From the university to the lab, the repercussions are quickly being felt. As researchers benefit from these shortcuts at scale, what is being lost?

OpenAI’s Deep Research spends five to 30 minutes searching the internet, filing results into a structured synthesis, and delivering a report complete with footnotes. Google’s equivalent may use 80 search queries for a typical task, running asynchronously in the background while the user attends to something else. Anthropic describes a multi-agent architecture in which a lead agent spawns parallel subagents to explore separate branches of a question; this setup outperformed a single-agent arrangement by 90.2% on an internal evaluation. Perplexity logged 21 search queries and 193,947 reasoning tokens to answer a single prompt. The systems find facts and compress them into a format a human can skim in four minutes.

What the system decides gets to count as knowledge.

The dream behind all this is older than the microprocessor. Vannevar Bush, in 1945, called for a new relationship between the thinking person and the sum of human knowledge. Douglas Engelbart later imagined a human-artifact system designed to improve problem-solving by restructuring symbols, processes, and collaboration. What is striking about the current systems, by contrast, is how thoroughly they have dissolved the researcher into the background. Bush and Engelbart mostly imagined tools that strengthened the researcher’s own agency. What we have now is a delegated researcher, one that disappears and returns with a finished report. The human researcher merely issues the prompt.

The compression is the key principle. Retrieval narrows the corpus. Ranking narrows retrieval. Subagents narrow branches. The final report narrows everything again into prose. What the system decides is worth compressing is what gets to count as knowledge. Anthropic’s description of its architecture notes that “the essence of search is compression.” The observation is an announcement of how the world will henceforth appear.

Mistakes are made

Consider the failure cases, which the companies document. OpenAI’s notes acknowledge that its system can hallucinate facts, make incorrect inferences, and struggle to distinguish authoritative information from rumors. Anthropic says its testers found early agents over-selecting SEO content farms over more authoritative, less search-optimized sources, requiring the addition of source-quality heuristics. Google warns about prompt injection from malicious webpages. WebGPT, the earliest major working prototype of the form, made the deepest point years before the current products existed: a capable system may eventually learn to cherry-pick persuasive sources rather than fairly represent the evidence. The system inadvertently hides its reliability problems.

The BrowseComp benchmark presents agents with 1,266 short-answer tasks whose solutions are hard to find but easy to verify. On that benchmark, OpenAI’s Deep Research reaches 51.5% accuracy versus 1.9% for GPT-4o with browsing. But the benchmark’s authors note that short answers are easy to grade, and it remains unclear how tightly this correlates with open-ended work in the actual world. Model Evaluation and Threat Research found that many pull requests passing automated software evaluations would still not be merged into real repositories. Machine-evaluable success and acceptable work are not the same thing.

RELATED: Disembodied human brains kept ‘alive’ for drug testing by controversial American startup

Matt Cardy/Getty Images

The deeper problem is knowledge that cannot be found by any search. Much that matters is not already in PDFs, public filings, or searchable webpages. It is tacit, local, and embedded in what scholars, laboratories, newsrooms, or courtrooms have internalized over years of practice.

Automatic AI research can summarize a method section, compare papers, draft a literature review, but it is less secure when what matters is the unsaid context, the understood constraint, the judgment that would embarrass its holder to have to articulate. Sakana AI’s AI Scientist-v2 submitted three fully AI-generated papers to an ICLR 2025 workshop, and one scored above the average acceptance threshold. Sakana also reported citation errors and reproducibility concerns and judged none of the submissions good enough for the main conference track. Synthesis is advancing faster than judgment. The system can generate the form of scientific inquiry without inheriting its discipline.

Automatic AI research depends on the open web while threatening the business models that keep parts of that web alive. CNN sued Perplexity on May 28, 2026, alleging unlawful distribution of copyrighted content. If research agents become the primary interface to knowledge, then questions of licensing, attribution, and compensation become reliability problems. A research tool that undermines the conditions of its own training data is not a stable arrangement.

The unintentional user

Pew’s 2025 survey found that only 16% of American workers said at least some of their work was currently done with AI. Workers who did use chatbots were more likely to say the tools helped them work faster than to say they improved quality. A separate Pew browsing study found that 58% of respondents encountered an AI-generated summary in Google search, but only 13% used an AI tool during the month. Automatic AI research is becoming ambient infrastructure before it becomes a universally adopted destination. People may increasingly receive AI-mediated research without thinking of themselves as users of anything in particular. The most consequential technologies often arrive this way.

What has been built is the industrialization of a specific layer of epistemic labor: searching, filtering, summarizing, and drafting, at scale. That changes what kind of thinker a user can become and what kind of web a publisher must survive in. What it is not, at least not yet, is a substitute for the full ecology of inquiry: the laboratory humiliation, the hallway argument, the reading that goes nowhere and then suddenly does. The system knows how to compress the world. We do not yet know what we are losing in the compression.

​Tech 

As their cultural icons fall, leftists cannot accept reality or responsibility. The reality is simple: The market for their increasingly radical beliefs is shrinking. The responsibility is theirs. They moved far away from the American public and then blamed the public for refusing to follow.

So the left does what it always does. It refuses to blame its fallen icons. It refuses to change its beliefs. Instead, it turns its icons into martyrs.

The left makes martyrs of the people and institutions falling from their pedestals. That is easier than admitting the left was wrong.

The latest martyr is Scott Pelley, a former correspondent for CBS’ “60 Minutes.” According to the Associated Press, Pelley accused one of his bosses of “murdering” the show and said “she has no qualifications for her job.” He then reportedly turned on others, saying, “You have slender qualifications for this job.”

Page Six’s Hollywood section put the episode more bluntly: “‘Poison Pelley’: Scott Pelley’s tirade against new ‘60 Minutes’ boss latest example of respected CBS journo’s ‘diva’ behavior.”

Pelley told the New York Times on Sunday that CBS News had lost its way.

“We have people who’ve been installed in these jobs who, through no fault of their own, have no experience in television,” he said. “They don’t know what they’re doing. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at ‘60 Minutes’ before, or at CBS News before. So that is my hope: a return to sanity.”

Pelley is right about one thing. CBS News has never had a “subtle political bias.” The bias has always been obvious and leftward, as AllSides’ media bias rating makes clear.

His elevation to martyr status joins a long and growing list.

Network news did not need Scott Pelley to damage itself. It was already doing that quite well. According to Gallup polling in 2025, only 28% of Americans had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in mass media. In February, Pew Research found that 57% of Americans had low confidence in journalists to act in the public’s best interest.

That helps explain why NBC News cut loose MSNBC, why MSNBC tried a major rebrand and cut salaries and staff, and why CNN underwent another major overhaul in 2025. These outlets did not suffer because America suddenly became too stupid to appreciate them. They suffered because Americans understood them too well.

Hollywood tells the same story. “Supergirl” is a super flop, another link in the industry’s chain of progressive pandering. It was short on plot and long on marketing budget. The marketing could not overcome the product. And if the force-feeding of ideology were not enough, the film’s star insulted the prospective audience before viewers had a chance to walk out.

“Supergirl” is symptomatic of Hollywood’s superhero genre and of the larger industry. Both now treat entertainment as beneath them. A movie is no longer a movie. It is a vehicle for indoctrinating supposedly backward Americans who can absorb the left coast’s “higher values” only through metaphor and spandex.

RELATED: ‘Supergirl’ Milly Alcock’s most fearsome foe? Christian dads

David Jon/Getty Images/Warner Bros. Pictures

Late-night television offers the same lesson through Stephen Colbert. Or rather, it did. Colbert is no longer on television and for good reason. He was not funny. His show was too expensive. Like Pelley, he repeatedly insulted his bosses. Now, the left lionizes him as a brave man who stood up to President Trump.

Colbert was to late night what “Supergirl” is to Hollywood: a symptom of a larger disease. What was true of him individually is true of late-night television generally. It became another forum for the left to talk to itself while demanding that the rest of America listen.

Print media is no better. The Washington Post is suffering the same fate as its brethren in film and television: declining readership, mounting financial losses, and staff cuts. As with TV, what can be said of the Post can be said of newspapers generally. Their audience shrank because their contempt grew.

In all these cases, the left has transformed icons into martyrs because it refuses to accept reality. In Pelley’s case, the reality is especially obvious. Publicly lashing out at your bosses is showboating stupidity. Everyone knows this. Everyone follows that basic rule except the left, which believes its heroes deserve a different standard.

In the other cases, the left refuses to accept the market’s verdict. Life does not operate as a charity or a government program. Charities can treat losses as proof of need. Governments can tax and borrow their way around failure. Markets are less sentimental. When audiences stop watching, buying, reading, or subscribing, the message is clear.

RELATED: Propagandist Stephen Colbert gets final jab from Trump on the way out

Kent NISHIMURA/AFP/Getty Images

The left hates that message because it hates markets. Markets reveal what people actually want. They do not care what cultural elites believe people should want.

That is why the left prefers government and bureaucracy. Regulation can soften market verdicts. Subsidies can delay them. Institutional capture can disguise them. But none of it can make Americans love products they have already rejected.

The left also refuses to accept responsibility for the collapse of its icons. America’s left has become more radical, and the rest of the country has not followed. To admit that would require admitting failure.

So the left makes martyrs of the people and institutions falling from their pedestals. That is easier than admitting the left was wrong. It is less painful than asking why so many Americans stopped listening.

But the answer is not hard to find. The icons fell because the public fell away.

​Scott pelley, Stephen colbert, Hollywood, Cbs news, Supergirl, Mainstream media, The left, Washington post, Opinion & analysis 

As America approaches its 250th birthday, patriots are gearing up for festivities and traditions, while many Democrats are fantasizing about living in another country.

In a new poll from Elon University conducted by YouGov between April 30 and May 4, 55% of Democratic respondents answered that there is another country they would rather live in than the United States.

Glenn Beck was disheartened by the data.

“If anyone on this continent ever had a right to say, … ‘This country is a fraud. These documents are a lie,’ … it was Martin Luther King and the people who lived at that time,” he says.

He recounts how in King’s day, “Black Americans [were] being beaten for trying to vote; children [had] fire hoses turned onto them; men [were] being lynched, and the murderers [were] walking free.”

But instead of listening to the voices in the Civil Rights Movement denouncing the American project as “rotten to the root,” King, Glenn says, “reached for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution … and he called them a promissory note.”

“This is the solution to our problems!” he exclaims.

In his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, King expressed genuine belief in America’s promise that all had a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but argued that black Americans had received a “bad check … marked ‘insufficient funds.’”

This hopeful yet demanding position Glenn calls “extraordinary.”

“He could have torn the note up; he could have said that promise is worthless. But he didn’t. He said he refused to believe that the bank of justice was bankrupt,” he declares. “He didn’t come to Washington to renounce the founding; he came to cash the check.”

This is what allowed King to change the world, Glenn says.

But many of today’s disgruntled Americans wouldn’t fit in with King. Unlike him, they don’t believe in the American project.

“King said, ‘The promise is real, so pay it.’ Today, they say, ‘The promise is fraudulent, so what’s the point of staying or living within the system?’” Glenn says.

The latter group, he says, is perpetuating a dangerous narrative: “If the documents are the disease, then there is no cure to be found inside the house. There’s no way out except the exit door or the match.”

To the 55% who long to leave the country, Glenn gives a sobering message: “Nearly every country on the menu you’d flee to has a lot more [soft despotism], not less.”

The “antidote,” he says, is neither flight nor destruction; it’s the Bill of Rights.

“That is the tool that Frederick Douglass picked up. That’s the tool that King picked up. When the majority had failed him, he didn’t appeal to a foreign flag; he appealed to the promise the majority had signed and broken — and he demanded America honor it,” Glenn passionately recounts.

“The Declaration is your check. … The Constitution is that check. The Bill of Rights is your enforcement clause. They are not the thing standing between you and a country worth loving. They are the only road to that country worth loving.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Americas 250th birthday, Martin luther king 

A Mexican prosecutor said authorities discovered the naked body of an Indiana woman abandoned in a ditch in the state of Chiapas over the weekend.

Maurica Lambert said 30-year-old Makala Pendley was raped and beaten to death, according to local authorities who informed the family of the woman’s death.

‘It just never would have crossed my mind that it would have been him. I’ve never gotten, like, that type of, like, feeling from him or anything.’

Lambert says her sister was over six months pregnant.

“It just still does not feel freaking real,” Lambert said to WXIN-TV. “It just doesn’t feel real at all.”

A local prosecutor said in an online broadcast that she had been dead between eight and 12 hours before her body was found in the ditch in a small village in the municipality of Zinacantán.

“The deceased woman’s death was caused by traumatic brain injury secondary to blunt force trauma,” the prosecutor said.

Pendley’s death led to a frantic search for her seven children. By Tuesday, Mexican officials said they had located the children and arrested the children’s father.

WXIN said it was unable to confirm the arrest with the local prosecutor, but other online reports also reported the arrest.

“I thought it was somebody else. I still feel like it’s someone else,” Lambert said. “It just never would have crossed my mind that it would have been him. I’ve never gotten, like, that type of, like, feeling from him or anything.”

Lambert said her sister had fled from Indianapolis to Mexico with the children and their father out of fear that the children would be taken away.

In February 2026, Pendley and the children were reported missing to Indianapolis authorities. Mexican officials reportedly found the children and returned them to Pendley.

The Mexican prosecutor said the children’s father previously had been detained for numerous crimes that included rape, assault, robbery, fraud, illegal possession of weapons, and intimidation to cause bodily harm.

Lambert admitted her sister had a “toxic, on-and-off relationship” with the father.

RELATED: 23-year-old stripper decapitated 55-year-old boyfriend and immediately fled to Mexico, police say

“We will seek the maximum sentence of 100 years for this perpetrator of femicide,” the local prosecutor said about the father of the children.

The prosecutor said the children were in good health and that authorities were working with the State Department to return them to the U.S.

Lambert confirmed the children were returning to Indianapolis along with the remains of their mother.

“She was a good mom,” she added. “As moms, you know, we have our bad days, you know what I mean? And she was a good mom, though. She put her kids before she put anything.”

Chiapas is the southernmost state of Mexico and includes a large indigenous population that maintains the Mayan language and culture. Indigenous activists accuse Mexican officials of discriminating against them.

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​Missing children, Mexico, Pregnant woman murdered, Femicide, Crime 

After decades of brutal race and gender politics from the left, conservatives began treating identity itself as toxic. That reaction is understandable after fighting a sinister ideology for years, but ignoring identity is not an option. Human beings need a firm sense of who they are and where they belong. Progressives exploited that impulse in twisted, artificial ways, but the impulse remains natural and healthy.

As the United States confronts mass immigration, the question “What is an American?” has become unavoidable on the right once again. It is a question about identity. For the first time in decades, conservatives must navigate one of the most important parts of human life.

Defining American identity will be difficult, but it begins with friction. Borders must be closed and illegal aliens deported. That part is nonnegotiable.

Identity feels dangerous because it is dangerous. From the beginning of time, identity has been something men kill and die for. People can fight over voluntary commitments, but identity largely consists of things we did not choose. We do not choose where we are born or to whom. We do not choose to be a brother, sister, son, or daughter. Even religion, though it requires voluntary practice, is usually inherited before it is chosen.

Identity is what you cannot leave behind, often because you never chose it in the first place.

That is why identity produces existential conflict. Its involuntary nature means people cannot simply opt out when the pressure rises. If someone wants to kill everyone who likes the movie “Jaws,” you can stop being a fan. If someone wants to kill everyone born English, you cannot stop being English. You have no option but to fight.

This explains why the post-World War II consensus tried to suppress as many thick identities as possible. If people lack strong attachments to heritage, tradition, nation, or religion, they are less likely to treat those attachments as matters of life and death. The impulse is understandable. No sane person wants another war of religion or world war fought over nationalism.

But the shift carries a cost. Without the boundaries of nation and religion, we drift toward open-borders globalism, which is deeply unhealthy.

A nation without identity has no coherent sense of the public good. The man whose family has lived in America since the founding has different priorities from a newly arrived immigrant hoping to move his extended family here. The Christian who wants his faith reflected in his ancestral nation has conflicting interests with the Muslim who wants his new home to implement Sharia law.

The state cannot remain neutral between these visions. It must decide which identity takes priority and which public good it will pursue. Neutrality is a lie. Identity is inescapable.

RELATED: Two-tier Britain finally has its George Floyd moment

Blaze Media Illustration

As America tries to unwind the open-borders disaster liberalism produced, the need for concrete identity becomes obvious. Illegal immigration is a massive problem, but legal immigration has also been destructive. If being American means more than obtaining paperwork, uncomfortable lines must be drawn. Identities are inherently exclusive. Some people are in, and some people are out.

That feels dangerous because it is. But we no longer have the luxury of avoidance. Turning a blind eye to these questions created the mess. We will not escape it by doing the same thing again.

Modern people like rigid categories, but identity has always had strong centers with some flexibility at the margins. A traditional biological family is the best outcome and should be preferred above alternatives, but an adopted child can still become part of a family. People know what a woman is, but progressives exploit overly rigid definitions to destroy the category. If you say a woman is someone who can bear children, they immediately point to a sterile female and ask whether she is still a woman.

The rigid category becomes the tool of deconstruction.

Identity should be understood not merely as a scientific fact or a voluntary choice, but as a situated-ness that draws us toward particular ends. Americans are born with inalienable rights, but also particular duties. Our identities as Americans, Christians, sons, brothers, or fathers should cost us something. They are not merely about rights, choices, and freedoms. They are also about limits.

There are things you cannot be when you are a father, a Christian, or an American. These categories are flexible, but they are not fluid.

Our globalist order hates borders and limits because they create friction for economies of scale. McDonald’s wants to sell the same hamburger to everyone the same way. If it must accommodate Hindus or Catholics, or close Sunday in America and Saturday in Israel, efficiency and profitability suffer. Uniformity maximizes scale. That is why governments, corporations, and NGOs work to homogenize every population on earth.

But identity should create friction. People need borders and limits. Only when we know who we are and who we are not can we chart a beneficial course for our nation.

RELATED: The collapse of conservatism nobody wants to admit

Blaze Media Illustration

Defining American identity will be difficult, but it begins with friction. Borders must be closed and illegal aliens deported. That part is nonnegotiable. Legal immigration should be radically limited, or ended altogether, until we work through this crisis. Every tribe has had a path for outsiders to join, but the cost should be steep. If someone is granted the gracious opportunity to become American, it should require real sacrifice.

The Bible gives us a model in Ruth, who abandons her homeland and pledges, “Your people will be my people, and your God my God.” She does not cling to her former identity. She leaves her former people, her former gods, and marries into the tribe.

Becoming part of the Hebrew people involved friction. It came at great cost. That is how you know it was worth it.

To be American is to be distinct and set apart. If anyone is to have the privilege of joining that identity, it should be difficult. Only through sacrifice can a stranger prove worthy of our great nation.

​American, Assimilation, Borders, Family, Globalism, Identity, Immigration, Nationalism, Naturalization, Opinion & analysis, Religion, Tribe, United states