As many journalists and concerned citizens continue to raise the alarm about the rampant H-1B fraud and abuse endemic to our system, the Department of Justice has started to deliver some results. This week, BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales proudly claimed another scalp for her role in exposing a company for discriminating against Americans.

Earlier this week, the Department of Justice announced that it had reached a settlement with New Jersey-based Compunnel Software Group Inc. for illegal hiring practices.

‘The DOJ has taken action against at least one of the companies I exposed.’

According to the settlement, Compunnel signaled its intent to hire employees based on citizenship status, specifically favoring H-1B visa holders or related temporary employment-based visa holders. One email sent to the “charging party” indicated that the company wanted “only” temporary visa holders for a particular position.

Gonzales, host of “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered” on BlazeTV, touted this settlement as a win after covering this story in February.

RELATED: Sara Gonzales’ H-1B fraud investigation uncovers the city behind most of the scamming — now CBS is praising it

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“The DOJ has taken action against at least one of the companies I exposed,” Gonzales said on X. “Compunnel Software Group, Inc now has to cough up $313,420 after some of its recruiters posted job advertisements for positions in the United States that were offered to H-1B workers ONLY.”

“For too long, these scammers have felt comfortable blatantly breaking the law in broad daylight and stealing American jobs. I commend the DOJ for this swift resolution, and I am hopeful there will be more action in the future. We must take our country back from those who have come here with the intention of defrauding us while taking advantage of our resources,” Gonzales told Blaze News.

Compunnel has agreed to pay $58,000 in back pay to the U.S. citizen who was discriminated against in the hiring process. It has also agreed to pay $255,420 in civil penalties to the U.S. Treasury.

“Employers cannot exclude U.S. workers from the labor force by discriminating against them based on their citizenship status. Employers must design recruitment, training, and compliance practices to ensure adherence to federal civil rights laws,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“It’s illegal to discourage U.S. workers from applying for American jobs,” she said.

This is the ninth settlement the DOJ has delivered since the revival of its Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative in 2025 to enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act.

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​Politics, H-1b, H-1b visas, H-1b workers, Compunnel software group, New jersey, Department of justice, Sara gonzales, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Harmeet dhillon, U.s. citizen, Doj, Protecting us workers initiative 

Viktor Orbán has served as Hungarian prime minister for 16 consecutive years, advancing an unapologetically Christian, nationalist, “migrant-free, pro-family” agenda that he told President Donald Trump in November had kept his country “a special island of difference in a liberal ocean in Europe.”

Hungary under Orbán’s leadership has, for instance, banned LGBT propaganda targeting children; banned homosexual couples from adopting kids; opposed Ukraine’s proposed admission to the European Union; refused to implement the EU’s radical migration policies; built a barrier to keep out border-jumpers; drove bums out of public spaces; fought political interference by big-pocketed leftists like George Soros; and implemented various pro-natalist measures including tax exemptions for mothers.

‘A leader who will fight to preserve those things while also building a better future.’

For the first time in over a decade, Orbán — praised by conservatives and maligned by liberals on both sides of the Atlantic and recently threatened by Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy — now faces the real possibility of an ouster in a country European parliamentarians like to pretend isn’t a democracy.

In Hungary’s national election on April 12, voters get to choose who will fill the 199 seats of the National Assembly and, by extension, whether to grant Orbán another term.

RELATED: The collapse of conservatism nobody wants to admit

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Politico’s aggregate of recent polling data shows the prime minister’s Fidesz party lagging considerably behind the Tisza party, 49% to 39%. Several polls suggest, however, that there remain a great many undecided voters going into the weekend.

Polymarket presently puts the odds of Tisza winning at 77%.

Peter Magyar, the centrist leader of Tisza, is a former Fidesz member and government official. His party’s manifesto reportedly advocates for a more pro-EU, pro-NATO approach and commits to expediting Hungary’s embrace of the euro as its official currency.

Trump implored Hungarians on Tuesday to continue supporting Orbán, noting on Truth Social, “Highly Respected Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, is a truly strong and powerful Leader, with a proven track record of delivering phenomenal results. He fights tirelessly for, and loves, his Great Country and People, just like I do for the United States of America.”

“Viktor works hard to Protect Hungary, Grow the Economy, Create Jobs, Promote Trade, Stop Illegal Immigration, and Ensure LAW AND ORDER! Relations between Hungary and the United States have reached new heights of cooperation and spectacular achievement under my Administration, thanks largely to Prime Minister Orbán,” continued the president.

“He is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Hungary — VIKTOR ORBÁN WILL NEVER LET THE GREAT PEOPLE OF HUNGARY DOWN.”

Vice President JD Vance similarly threw his weight behind Orbán, characterizing the prime minister during a rally in Budapest on Wednesday as a “leader who feels real pride in this place, in its history, in its culture, and in its way of life; a leader who will fight to preserve those things while also building a better future.”

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​Viktor orban, Orban, Hungary, Europe, Donald trump, Election, Nationalism, Conservative, Ukraine, Natcon, Politics 

A Florida commercial driver’s license crackdown has revealed huge safety issues within the industry.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement recently partnered with state and federal agencies to implement a four-day investigative task force called “Operation Highway Shield.”

‘We’ve got someone who is behind the wheel that is putting lives at risk, that has no regard for safety.’

FDLE Commissioner Mark Glass spoke to reporters on Thursday and revealed the staggering numbers of violations that were discovered when they inspected approximately 3,300 drivers.

From those drivers, authorities removed 176 from service, with 42 of them cited for federal immigration violations, while another 35 drivers were arrested for criminal charges.

“Some of the driver’s license that we would find wouldn’t even have a name on the CDL,” Glass told reporters. “Literally no name. … But you got a CDL, no first name, and it even says no name given; from other states, that is not from the state of Florida.”

At the same time, another 54 drivers were relieved of service over language deficiencies. According to Fox 35 Orlando, these deficiencies were tied to federal requirements outlined in President Trump’s executive order from April of last year, titled “Enforcing Commonsense Rules of the Road for America’s Truck Drivers.” The order requires proficiency in English.

“So you’re having people with no names, operating commercial motor vehicles, but different types of endorsement running up and down your highways,” Glass explained.

RELATED: End of the road: 200,000 foreign truckers could lose their CDLs as Trump’s rule takes effect

In one instance, officials said that in the Central Florida region of Sumter County, a truck driver was accused of swerving while on Interstate 4, which passes through Tampa and Orlando.

Authorities said the driver turned out to have limited English proficiency while also exceeding the legal blood alcohol level with a 0.27. In Florida, the legal blood alcohol level for typical drivers is 0.08%. For commercial drivers, however, it is 0.04%. This means the driver was nearly seven times over the legal limit.

“The larger picture of this is that we’ve got someone who is behind the wheel that is putting lives at risk, that has no regard for safety,” Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator Derek Barrs said.

Employers can also face consequences in these instances, too, Barrs warned.

RELATED: ‘Wild, Wild West’: Trump DOT moves to shut down 550+ ‘sham’ truck driver training schools after axing 6,500

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

More than 10 agencies participated in the operation, which is just a small part of the typical 100,000 inspections done in the state per year. Fox 51 Gainesville reported that about a quarter of those inspections typically result in vehicles being removed from the road due to mechanical issues and another 10% because of driver violations.

Florida currently has 23 vehicle inspection sites in the state and plans to add another near the Florida-Alabama border.

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​News, Florida, Trucking, Truck drivers, Immigration, Illegal immigration, Cdl, Commercial driver’s licenses, Politics 

Kenny Rogers had a theory. It fit neatly into a chorus. You have to know when to hold them, when to fold them, when to walk away.

Good advice in 1978; even better advice now.

Status means nothing once the cards are in the air.

Poker is everywhere. From small home gatherings to casino floors, mobile apps to livestreamed high-stakes tournaments, Americans are finding their way to the table in record numbers. But those of us who have played this game for years know something the newcomers are still discovering. Poker isn’t really about cards.

Humbling education

I first sat down at a poker table at the tender age of 18. I thought I was learning a card game. I was not. What followed was a long education in humility, one that cost me roughly $900 in unannounced tuition fees.

What makes poker genuinely beautiful is that it holds up a mirror. Every decision you make under pressure — every fold, every bluff, every moment you push your chips forward knowing the outcome is uncertain — reveals something about your character.

How do you handle loss? How do you behave when winning? Can you stay calm when the situation indicates full-blown panic? The table asks these questions relentlessly, and it doesn’t accept dishonest answers. Unlike your therapist, your mother, or literally anyone else in your life, the cards don’t care about your feelings.

Bad luck and bad play

The game also teaches patience in a culture increasingly allergic to it. You can play perfectly for hours and still lose. You can make every right decision and walk away empty-handed. Poker forces you to separate outcomes from process, a philosophical discipline that, once learned at the table, improves almost everything else in your life. I spent years confusing bad luck with bad play. Untangling those two things was worth more than any pot I ever won.

Then there’s the community. Poker draws an almost absurdly wide cross-section of humanity. Retirees, students, engineers, artists, alcoholics, virgins, insomniacs, dreamers, Dana White — all seated together, temporarily equal, governed by the same rules.

Status means nothing once the cards are in the air. I once watched a highly influential, considerably lubricated lawyer get systematically dismantled by a pimply first-year hotel management student, to the tune of $10,000. The lawyer probably had a penthouse and a driver, but that night the kid charged him more per hour than he charged his clients.

Making peace with uncertainty

What matters is how you think, how you adapt, and how gracefully you handle the inevitable bad beats life and the deck will deal you. The great philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that virtually all human misery stems from our inability to sit quietly alone in a room. Poker, perhaps paradoxically, is one of the few places where we willingly gather to do something deeply solitary together. Each player locked inside his own mind, reading the room, making peace with uncertainty — which is either profound or deeply sad, depending on the hour.

My relationship with the game has changed considerably. In my late teens and 20s, I played with a chip on my shoulder and a point to prove, often to no one in particular. I chased losses. I overplayed hands. I mistook aggression for aptitude. The table punished all of it, ruthlessly and repeatedly.

Hard thinking

Now, in my 30s, with family plans taking shape and weekends suddenly finite, I play differently. I’m not there to conquer or to recoup some imagined debt from the universe. I sit down to enjoy the experience itself — the reading of people, the management of information, the occasional perfectly timed bluff that folds a better hand. The financial stakes matter less. The fun matters more. The conversations, the banter, the occasional expletive-laden eruption from an otherwise placid soul — this is what it’s all about.

RELATED: Parents: Let your kids out to play

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There’s a version of the poker story that gets told too often — the cautionary tale about addiction, debt, and ruin. The man who had everything, then didn’t. Those stories are real, and they deserve to be told. But the dominant experience at most tables isn’t tragedy. It’s something much more profound: a room full of people, voluntarily uncomfortable, choosing to think hard about something difficult together. That’s rare. Most of modern life is engineered to protect us from difficulty, to remove any sense of friction, to offer the path of least resistance at every turn. Poker refuses all of that. It insists on facing reality.

Perhaps that’s why the boom makes sense. We are drowning in algorithmic slop, in content tailored to our preferences and platforms designed to keep us from ever feeling the nasty sting of being wrong. The poker table is one of the last places where the feedback is immediate, honest, and occasionally brutal. You were wrong. Here is proof. Now what?

The newcomers crowding the tables will discover soon enough what the rest of us already know. The cards are almost incidental. What the table actually deals is a portrait of yourself you didn’t commission and can’t dispute. There are many paths to self-knowledge. This one just happens to have a rake and a pimply kid who will take everything you have.

​Poker, Culture, Gambling, Men, First person, Lifestyle 

Vice President JD Vance, who with second lady Usha Vance is expecting the delivery of their fourth child in July, told pro-life advocates gathered for the 52nd annual March of Life last year, “I want more babies in the United States of America; I want more happy children in our country; and I want beautiful young men and young women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”

While an American baby boom might be in the cards, it certainly did not take place last year.

‘This is the choice that Americans now face, and the stakes could not be higher.’

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that U.S. fertility rates dropped to an all-time low in 2025.

There were an estimated 3,606,400 births last year — a 1% decline from 2024. A plurality of babies — just over 1.11 million — were born to mothers in the 30-34 age group, which conforms to the years-long trend of women increasingly delaying family generation until older ages or putting it off altogether.

The general fertility rate, which references the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime if she were to experience the age-specific fertility rates of a given year, was 53.1 births per 1,000 women ages 15-44. The rate has decreased by 23% since 2007, the year of the Great Recession.

Whereas the year-over-year decline in births per woman in the 15-44 cohort was 1%, the fertility rate for females ages 15-19 declined by 7% last year, dropping to 11.7 births per 1,000 females — another record low. The CDC notes that the fertility rate for teenagers has decreased by 72% since 2007 and 81% since 1991.

RELATED: 5 steps to reset your body’s clock to God’s natural design

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The total fertility rate averaged 3.7 births per woman in 1960; 2.12 births in 2007; 1.64 in 2020; and 1.6 in 2024. It fell again last year to 1.57, according to a Wall Street Journal calculation using the new CDC data.

This is particularly bad news for those keen to bequeath the nation to heritage Americans since the total fertility rate necessary for a population to maintain stability and replenish itself without requiring replacement by foreign nationals — what is referred to as replacement level fertility — is 2.1.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last year that a rate below replacement “is a national security threat to our country.”

Total fertility rates have plummeted across the first world. In the European Union, for example, the rate reportedly dropped from 2.62 in 1964 to 1.34 in 2024. The same year, the rate in Scotland dropped to 1.25 and to 1.41 in England and Wales.

Canada became one of the developed nations suffering “ultra-low fertility” in 2024, with a total fertility rate of 1.25 kids per woman. The Canadian government credited “increased educational levels, greater participation in the labor market, changing social norms, and the widespread use of contraception” for helping drive down the number.

The U.S. Congressional Budget Office projected in a report earlier this year that the fertility rate for foreign-born women in America this year will be substantially higher than the rate for native-born women, leading the home team 1.79 to 1.53.

The report noted further that:

on the basis of recent laws, policies, and demographic trends, CBO projects that the rate of population growth will generally slow over the next 30 years, from an average of 0.3% a year in the next decade to an average of 0.1% a year from 2037 to 2056. The total population is projected to stop growing in 2056 and remain roughly the same size as in the previous year.

The CBO added that net immigration is expected “to become an increasingly important source of population growth, especially if the annual number of deaths begin to exceed the annual number of births as expected in 2030.”

Some analysts have attempted to put a positive spin on America’s dwindling fertility rate.

“Women now have better control over their reproductive lives, so there’s not as much unintended pregnancy as there used to be,” Alison Gemmill, an associate professor of epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health, told CNN. “Our timelines have shifted.”

According to data released last month by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, there were an estimated 1,126,000 clinician-provided abortions last year — nearly one-third the number of the reported live births.

In addition to exerting “better control” over their God-given procreative ability, Gemmill suggested that some would-be parents are rethinking having kids in light of concerns about so-called climate change, the economy, and raising a child in a supposedly “inequitable world.”

Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently told the New York Times, “There’s been a lot of doom and gloom about the birth rate, but the decline is also a success story.”

The Heritage Foundation has, alternatively, acknowledged this bleak trend as a crisis, noting in a January report, “American family life is truly at a crossroads. One path is marked by unwed childbearing, low rates of marriage, low fertility, low commitment, and easy divorce. This path is associated with the view that family formation (or its avoidance) is primarily about fulfilling adult desires and adult needs.”

“The other path elevates the family unit as an inherent good based on the commitment and sacrifice of husbands and wives for each other’s sake and for the sake of children that their union would welcome into the world. This path is associated with the view that all life is sacred and that sees the family as a source of fulfillment for adults because they direct their energies to the good of the family unit instead of to themselves alone,” continued the report. “Underlying this view is a deep sense of gratitude in knowing that human beings are here by God’s grace and that children are divine gifts.”

“This is the choice that Americans now face, and the stakes could not be higher,” the report added.

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​Society, Civilization, Baby, Crisis, Birth, Fertility, Fertility rate, United states, Replacement, Replacement theory, Natalism, Abortion, Life, Cdc, Politics 

Leftist radicals are throwing a temper tantrum now that a San Francisco-based coffee chain has decided to remove the LGBTQ+ Pride flag from its stores.

Philz Coffee began with a single store in the Bay Area in 2003 and has since expanded to 60 stores across California and Chicago. For some time, Philz cafes have notably displayed the Pride flag, implicitly lecturing about sexuality and gender to patrons who may simply want a cup of coffee or a pastry.

‘This is a change in how our stores look, not in who we are.’

But not for long.

On Wednesday, the company confirmed that all Philz stores will soon remove Pride and other flags and decor, claiming that doing so will create “a more consistent, inclusive experience.”

“Our long-standing support of the LGBTQIA+ community is unchanged. We are working toward creating a more consistent, inclusive experience across all our stores, including removing a variety of flags and other decor. This is a change in how our stores look, not in who we are,” said the statement from CEO Mahesh Sadarangani.

“Our allyship runs deeper than what is on our walls. It shows up in who we hire, how we treat one another, and in our annual Pride Month Unity celebration,” Sadarangani’s statement continued. “… Unity is fundamental to how we operate.”

RELATED: Unhinged 49-year-old female caught on video tossing coffee on McDonald’s worker enters her plea in court

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LGBTQ+ activists have not taken the news well.

“It would be a huge mistake because the gay population won’t stand for it,” one unidentified individual told KRON. “We will boycott this place if that’s the case.”

“What’s the experience that Philz Coffee is selling? What is it that makes them distinctive? And the focus on the flags, the focus on Pride, that really has been an important part of what Philz Coffee is all about,” Berkeley professor Ann Harrison said, according to KGO.

Customer Todd Varney called the decision “pretty rotten” and speculated that it may have come as the result of “big money at the top.”

SF Pride Executive Director Suzanne Ford seemed to suggest the decision was part of a larger ongoing “global” effort against “queer” people. “There’s also a real frustration that comes with being a queer person right now — feeling like you want to respond to every headline, but not always knowing where your energy and bandwidth are best spent,” Ford said. “… It may seem small, but removing a Pride flag sends a message, and for many in this neighborhood, it feels like another blow right at home.”

A Change.org petition indicated that Philz “team members and customers” no longer feel “supported” by the company. “The Pride flags within the stores hold deep meaning and value to both staff and visitors, symbolizing that these locations are safe and welcoming spaces for all individuals, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity,” it said.

Sadarangani became CEO in 2021 after private equity firm Freeman Spogli & Co. bought Philz from founders Phil Jaber and his son, Jacob Jaber. Freeman Spogli & Co. also own other chains such as Popeyes and El Pollo Loco, according to the New York Post.

It is unclear when the flags will be removed.

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​Philz, Philz coffee, San francisco, Lgbtq, Pride, Pride flag, Politics