A Texas woman accused of sex trafficking women for her former financier boss has temporarily lost her teacher certification, according to a new report.

As Blaze News noted in September, a former famed Wall Street financier with money ties to George Soros is accused of torturing women at a secret BDSM sex “dungeon,” according to authorities.

‘During many of these encounters, Rubin brutalized women’s bodies, causing them to fear for their safety and/or resulting in significant pain and injuries.’

On Sept. 26, FBI agents arrested 70-year-old Howard Rubin at his home in Fairfield, Connecticut. On the same day, FBI agents also arrested Rubin’s alleged personal assistant — 46-year-old Jennifer Powers — at her home in Southlake, Texas.

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York said in a statement released in September, “A 10-count indictment was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging retired New York-based financier, Howard Rubin, also known as ‘Howie’ and ‘H,’ along with his personal assistant, Jennifer Powers, with sex trafficking and transporting women in interstate commerce for sex acts with Rubin.”

Rubin — a former high-profile money manager at Salomon Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch — was also charged with bank fraud in “connection with misrepresentations made to a bank in the course of financing Powers’ mortgage for the Texas home of Powers and her husband.”

If convicted of sex trafficking, Rubin and Powers each face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment and a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years behind bars. Rubin and Powers face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison if convicted of transporting women to engage in commercial sex acts. Rubin faces a maximum prison sentence of 30 years if he’s convicted of bank fraud.

Rubin and Powers have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Federal officials said Powers became Rubin’s personal assistant around 2011 and “managed the logistical aspects of their commercial sex operation.”

Federal prosecutors said the alleged sexual abuse crimes occurred between 2009 and 2019 when Rubin and Powers “recruited multiple women to travel to New York City to engage in commercial sex acts with Rubin involving bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadomasochism, referred to as ‘BDSM’ sex, and some of the women were trafficked.”

According to the Associated Press, Rubin “lured dozens of women, including former Playboy models, to be sexually and physically assaulted during encounters in his Central Park penthouse in a soundproofed room described in court papers as ‘The Dungeon.'”

Federal authorities said the purported sexual encounters happened at luxury hotels and at Rubin’s two-bedroom penthouse apartment in midtown Manhattan, where one of the bedrooms was converted into “what they referred to as a sex ‘dungeon’ that was painted red, soundproofed, and furnished with BDSM equipment and devices, including a device to shock or electrocute the women.”

The federal prosecutor’s office stated in the news release, “During many of these encounters, Rubin brutalized women’s bodies, causing them to fear for their safety and/or resulting in significant pain and injuries.”

Federal officials said Rubin and Powers also forced the women to sign nondisclosure agreements, which would “require the women to assume the risk of the hazards and injury of the BDSM encounters with Rubin, prohibit the disclosure of information about the BDSM sex with Rubin, and require the payment of damages in the event of a breach.”

RELATED: Shocking texts allegedly reveal sinister plan by teacher and her boyfriend to groom, sex traffic her student

Special agent Harry Chavis said Powers was quite involved in the alleged sexual abuse, and it was “not a one-man show.”

Chavis stated, “While Rubin dehumanized these women with abhorrent sexual acts, Powers is alleged to have run the day-to-day operations of the enterprise and got paid generously for her efforts.”

The Dallas Morning News, citing online records from the Texas Education Agency, reported Friday that Powers temporarily lost her state teacher certification. The paper added that Powers worked as a long-term substitute teacher for Old Union Elementary in Southlake.

A TEA spokesperson added to the Morning News that the State Board of Educator Certification is required to temporarily suspend a teacher’s certification or permit following an arrest. The paper added that in such cases, a hearing on the temporary suspension “must take place within about two months of the final outcome of the legal case.”

CBS News in September reported that the Carroll Independent School District confirmed Powers had been a substitute teacher but was dismissed.

Cameron Bryan — president of the board of trustees for the Carroll Independent School District — said the district followed all TEA hiring requirements, including fingerprint-based criminal background checks.

An attorney for Powers did not immediately respond to the Morning News’ request for comment.

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Former football coach John Beam was known for giving players who most coaches wouldn’t gamble on a chance after being featured in the Netflix series “Last Chance U” — which focuses on junior college athletes attempting to turn their lives around.

Now, Beam, 66, has been tragically shot and killed on the Laney College campus where he worked in Oakland, California.

The suspect is believed by police to have known and targeted Beam.

“That was the second shooting this week in Oakland on a college campus, by the way, and very unfortunate,” BlazeTV contributor Jason Brown, also known as Coach JB, tells BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock on “Fearless.”

“I did get calls by buddies of mine that are up there, that are in that conference, and what I was told is very disturbing and unfortunate … I haven’t seen the final report so it’ll all be allegedly at this point, but I heard it was a targeting situation where they walked into his office,” he explains.

“He had an office that butts up against the street, the neighborhood there in Oakland, and it’s very, very far from the facilities. It’s very, very far from anything, and it’s real easy to go do something and not be seen and then just escape,” he continues.

A suspect has been taken into custody and a gun has been recovered.

The suspect, as Brown understands, “walked in his office, did whatever happened, and then just went right into the hood behind it.”

Whitlock is shocked, asking Brown how “dangerous is it being a junior college coach in California?”

“As dangerous as it can be, because at the end of the day, you don’t have security walking around like a D1 coach. You don’t have resources,” Brown says. “You’re out there in the hood, at churches, trying to get food at food banks for your players, if you really care for your guys like I did.”

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

To enjoy more fearless conversations at the crossroads of culture, faith, sports, and comedy with Jason Whitlock, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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Jack Dorsey is bringing the nostalgia back, just a few seconds at a time.

Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2007 and served as its inaugural CEO for a year until returning to the position for a six-year stint in its seemingly darkest years between 2015 and 2021.

Now, through his nonprofit called and Other Stuff, Dorsey is bringing one of the internet’s most beloved applications back from the dead.

‘Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things …’

“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” said Evan Henshaw-Plath, Dorsey’s pick to spearhead the revival. The New Zealander comes from Dorsey’s nonprofit team, where he is known as Rabble, and has outlined aspirations to bring the internet vibe back to its Web 2.0 time period — roughly 2004-2010 or thereabouts.

Dorsey and Henshaw-Plath are rebooting Vine, the six-second video app that predominantly served viewers short, user-generated comedy clips. The format is a clear inspiration for modern apps like TikTok and formats like YouTube’s Shorts and Instagram’s Reels.

Dorsey and company are focused on keeping the nostalgic feel, however, and unlike the other apps, will keep a six-second time limit while also taking a stance on content. What that means, according to Yahoo, is that the platform will reject AI-generated videos using special filters meant to prevent them from being posted.

RELATED: Social media matrix destroys free will; Dorsey admits ‘we are being programmed’

The new app, called diVine, will revive 10,000 archived Vine posts, after the new team was able to extract a “good percentage” of some of the most popular videos.

Former Vine users are able to claim their old videos, so long as they can prove access to previously connected social media accounts that were on their former Vine profiles. Alternatively, the users can request that their old videos be taken down.

“The reason I funded the nonprofit and Other Stuff is to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what’s possible in this new world,” Dorsey said, per Yahoo.

This will be done by “using permissionless protocols which can’t be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner,” he added.

Henshaw-Plath commented on returning to simpler internet times — as silly as it sounds — when a person’s content feed only consisted of accounts he follows, with real, user-generated content.

“Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it’s just your feed, and where you know that it’s a real person that recorded the video?” he asked.

RELATED: Twitter announces the demise of video-sharing app Vine, internet weeps (2016)

According to Tech Crunch, Vine was acquired by Twitter in 2012 for $30 million before eventually shutting down in 2016.

The app sparked careers for personalities like Logan Paul, Andrew “King Bach” Bachelor, and John Richard Whitfield, aka DC Young Fly. Bachelor and Whitfield captured the genre that was most popular on the platform: eccentric young performers who published unique comedy.

DiVine is currently in a beta stage and is available only to existing users of the messenger app Nostr.

X owner Elon Musk announced in August that he was trying acquire access to Vine’s archive so that users could post the videos on his platform.

“We recently found the Vine video archive (thought it had been deleted) and are working on restoring user access, so you can post them if you want,” Musk wrote.

However, it seems the billionaire may have been beaten to the punch by longtime rival Dorsey.

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Buckley Carlson, son of Tucker Carlson, works in Vice President JD Vance’s office as deputy press secretary. There appears to be a campaign underway to have him removed over the perceived sin of having Tucker Carlson as a blood relation.

Amid mounting pressure on the young man to disavow his father or at least denounce some of his father’s remarks, Vance and other conservatives have made abundantly clear that they will not throw Buckley Carlson to the wolves.

‘You don’t assign your hate for his Dad to him, and you don’t ask sons to disavow their fathers or mothers.’

Vance stressed in a multipart defense of his staffer on Sunday, “I have an extraordinary tolerance for disagreements and criticisms from the various people in our coalition. But I am a very loyal person, and I have zero tolerance for scumbags attacking my staff.”

“And yes, *everyone* who I’ve seen attack Buckley with lies is a scumbag,” added Vance.

While Laura Loomer and others have concern-mongered in recent months over the presence of a Carlson in the vice president’s office, Vance was responding to comments by Jennifer Sloan Rachmuth.

Rachmuth, a Republican operative and journalist who was arrested last year on a cyberstalking charge that was quickly dismissed, stated in a viral Saturday post on X that “racism and antisemitism is a Carlson family trait.”

“Is Tucker’s son Buckley, who serves as JD Vance’s top aide also a vile bigot?” Rachmuth asked, after claiming that Tucker Carlson’s brother idolized Nick Fuentes. “America deserves to know how deep the Carlson’s family ethnic and religious hatred runs.”

RELATED: Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and the war for the conservative soul

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Rachmuth, who previously suggested that Vance’s ties to the Carlson family are “indefensible,” hinted on Monday that this pressure campaign might have less to do with Vance’s staffer and more to do with the front-runner for the 2028 Republican nomination.

After accusing Tucker Carlson of being “America’s most prolific antisemite,” Rachmuth noted, “The vice president is close friends with Tucker and yet, he hasn’t weighed in on his targeting against Christians and Jews.”

Rachmuth noted further that “when senior aides like Carlson contribute to national policy discussions, clarity regarding his stance on equality and minority protections will maintain public trust in Vance’s policymaking.”

Rachmuth, Tucker Carlson, and the vice president’s office did not respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.

Vance did not mince words when responding to Rachmuth, writing, “Sloan Rachmuth is a ‘journalist’ who has decided to obsessively attack a staffer in his 20s because she doesn’t like the views of his father. Every time I see a public attack on Buckley it’s a complete lie. And yes, I notice ever [sic] person with an agenda who unfairly attacks a good guy who does a great job for me.”

“Sloan describes herself as a defender of ‘Judeo-Christian Values.’ Is it a ‘Judeo-Christian value’ to lie about someone you don’t know?” continued Vance. “Not in any church I ever spent time in!”

Republican Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana similarly defended Buckley Carlson, noting that the young man had worked for him for years and was “one of the smartest, most trustworthy and loyal staffers I’ve ever had.”

“These personal attacks are disgusting and don’t serve your cause well,” added Banks.

Some critics of Rachmuth’s attack characterized it as a spillover of venom intended for Tucker Carlson.

Normalcy advocate Robby Starbuck, for instance, noted, “Attacking Buckley is really messed up. Even if you don’t like Tucker, you don’t assign your hate for his Dad to him and you don’t ask sons to disavow their fathers or mothers. Come on.”

“They can’t bring down Tucker so they’re going after his son,” wrote conservative commentator Megyn Kelly.

Christina Pushaw, an aide to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), noted, “If us political staffers are accountable for everything our uncles might post online, we’re all in trouble,” adding in a separate post that it’s a “good thing blood-lines don’t predetermine our views, and good thing we live in America where we reject the concept of blood-guilt.”

Tucker Carlson has been the target of intense criticism in recent weeks over his interview with Nick Fuentes, a rightist provocateur who routinely attacks both Vance and Israel.

When asked about Tucker Carlson on Sunday, President Donald Trump said, “You can’t tell him who to interview and if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him — but if he wants to do it, get the word out. … People have to decide. Ultimately, people have to decide.”

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Concerned fathers of female athletes are taking matters into their own hands.

After two bills failed to pass through the Maine state legislature, parents are taking to the streets to collect signatures in hopes of getting their own set of rules passed.

‘We will effect change across the entire state all at once.’

The group of fathers, called Maine Girl Dads, is asking the general public of Maine to sign a petition for the initiative titled “An Act to Designate School Sports Participation and Facilities by Sex.”

The act would require schools in the state to designate “athletic teams and private facilities,” including bathrooms and locker rooms, on the basis of biological sex.

“This is important, as we will effect change across the entire state all at once, while providing a private right of action for enforcement, clarifying statutory cross-references, and ensuring severability,” the group wrote on its website.

The dads are hoping to garner the 68,000 signatures required to get the initiative on the ballot in the 2026 midterms next November.

Weathering a cold November day in the Northeast, the group recently held a signature drive that saw overwhelmingly positive results.

RELATED: Maine Democrat says transgender athletes make women better

“We collected over 53K signatures! In just one day, we’re over halfway to our goal of 100K,” the group recently wrote on X. “When this gets on the 2026 ballot, we win and girls’ sports are protected. Let’s keep going, Maine!”

WMTW-TV caught up with Steven Scharf, one of the men taking roadside signatures over the weekend, to see what the reactions were like from the general public.

“Everybody who’s stopped by has been very eager to sign and can’t understand why this is not just automatic and why this needs to go through a process of being voted on, and why the state legislature has not passed this as is,” Scharf told the outlet.

Sending the question of banning boys from girls’ sports directly to the voter circumvents the state. Not only has Maine defied President Trump’s early February executive order on this matter, but the state Senate has shot down two different bills that would have achieved the same end.

RELATED: Liberal state gives ridiculous reason to justify refusal to ban men from women’s sports

Two bills passed the Maine House, which has a virtual split between Democrats (74) and Republicans (73), with three independents. However, neither passed in the state Senate, which is composed of 20 Democrats, 14 Republicans, and one independent.

Proposal LD 1134 was rejected by the Senate on June 13, while LD 233 was rejected just days later on June 16.

If the Maine Girl Dads get their way and their proposal is passed, it would become effective on Jan. 1, 2027.

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Social media comments attributed to Thomas Matthew Crooks, the dead man who attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump last year, suggest that he may have been yet another shooter captive to gender ideology and other genres of sexual perversion.

Crooks fired eight shots at Trump during a campaign rally on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. While he managed to strike only the ear of the man whom Democrats characterized as a “clear and present danger,” the failed assassin killed heroic former fire chief Corey Comperatore and severely injured David Dutch and James Copenhaver, who were seated behind the president.

‘The threat wasn’t hidden.’

The FBI has long suggested that Crooks’ motives were unclear.

Days after former FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress that “a lot of the usual repositories of information have not yielded anything notable in terms of motive or ideology,” then-FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate revealed that hundreds of comments had been found on one social media account believed to be associated with the dead shooter in the 2019 to 2020 timeframe.

“There were over 700 comments posted from this account. Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes, espouse political violence, and are extreme in nature,” said Abbate.

Days after Tucker Carlson shared various screencaps of posts allegedly made by Crooks, the New York Post’s Miranda Devine suggested on Monday that Abbate neglected to inform Congress that a significant portion of Crooks’ online interactions from January to August 2020 signaled that “he did an ideological backflip and went from rabidly pro-Trump to rabidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again.”

RELATED: Groomed for violence? The dark world of furries and transgenderism in America’s classrooms

Blaze Media illustration

“The danger Crooks posed was visible for years in public online spaces,” a source who apparently uncovered the shooter’s hidden footprint told the New York Post. “His radicalization, violent rhetoric and obsession with political violence were all documented under his real name. The threat wasn’t hidden.”

After reviewing Crooks’ interactions across various platforms and pages including YouTube, Snapchat, Discord, GooglePlay, and Quora, the source concluded that the official narrative claiming that Crooks operated alone without a clear motive or ideology was bogus.

The shooter “was not simply some unknowable lone actor,” said the source. “He left a digital trail of violent threats, extremist ideology and admiration for mass violence. He spoke openly of political assassination, posted under his real name, and was even flagged by other users who mentioned law enforcement in their replies. Despite this, his account remained active for more than five years — and was only removed the day after the shooting.”

In 2019, Crooks allegedly made a number of pro-Trump, anti-Democrat remarks online, suggesting, for instance, that the president was “the literal definition of Patriotism” and stating, “MURDER THE DEMOCRATS.”

In early 2020, Crooks apparently changed his tune and began deriding Trump and his supporters, defending draconian COVID-19 lockdowns, and lambasting Republicans over voter-fraud concerns, while in some instances being cheered on by an apparent member of a Norwegian neo-Nazi group.

Crooks allegedly suggested in a Feb. 26, 2020, post that Trump supporters were too “brainwashed to realize how dumb you are” and accused Trump of being a “racist” in a separate post the same day.

‘This is a five alarm fire.’

Within months of his political about-face, Crooks was reportedly advocating for “terrorism style attacks” and political assassinations. At some point, Crooks also reportedly began associating with furries online.

According to the Post, Crooks reportedly began referring to himself using “they/them” pronouns on DeviantArt, an “online social network for artists and art enthusiasts” that teems with “furry” imagery depicting sexualized and anthropomorphized animals.

RELATED: Trans-identifying teen agrees to plead guilty to plotting Valentine’s Day massacre at high school

A demonstrator holding an image of Crooks. Photo by Jim Vondruska/Getty Images.

The histories of two DeviantArt accounts linked to Crooks’ primary email address indicate he possibly had a furry fetish, obsessing over cartoon characters with male anatomies and female heads.

Trump’s failed assassin would hardly be the first radical in recent years who was immersed in trans and/or furry subcultures.

Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin was reportedly not only in a homosexual relationship with a transvestite, who on at least one occasion dressed up in a furry outfit, but was himself possibly active on a furry fetish website.

An engraving on a bullet casing linked to Kirk’s assassination made reference to gay furries.

There was also the:

trans-identifying man who shot up a Catholic church full of children in Minneapolis on Aug. 27, killing two children and injuring 30;male-identifying woman who planned to shoot up an elementary school and a high school in Maryland in April 2024 but was stopped in time by police — then later convicted;trans-identifying teen who stalked the halls of a school in Perry, Iowa, on Jan. 4, 2024, ultimately murdering a child and an adult and wounding several others; and thetrans-identifying woman who stormed into a Presbyterian school in Nashville on March 27, 2023, murdering three children and three adults.

Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said of the news of Crooks’ possible trans-identification and furry fetish, “This is beyond correlation, this is a five alarm fire.”

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