The White House and Congress promise that data centers will not cost consumers a dime. That is like a husband pledging not to beat his wife as his fist draws blood.

The politicians who spent a year gaslighting the public about data centers’ power use now acknowledge the problem and promise to cover grid upgrades. But even as they propose legislation and tout a nonbinding industry pledge, data centers are already costing consumers. It is impossible for them not to.

The growing number and size of planned hyper-scale facilities will push electricity costs even higher.

This week, the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act (H.R. 9340) by a 417-3 vote. The bill establishes a federal standard that state regulators must consider but need not adopt. It would require large-load customers to cover the “full, incremental cost” of new or accelerated grid upgrades — not a full share of the existing system’s embedded fixed costs. That limitation helps explain the industry’s support.

If adopted and enforced, the standard could protect ratepayers. But utilities and data center companies already bury infrastructure costs among a region’s general power needs. A serious proposal would resemble Oklahoma’s House Bill 3724, which stalled in committee this year. It requires a high-demand facility to fund all infrastructure upgrades and bars utilities from allocating any cost of serving it to other retail ratepayers. That language closes the loopholes Congress leaves open.

The costs are not theoretical. Monitoring Analytics, PJM’s independent market monitor, estimated that data center load accounted for $9.3 billion, or 63%, of the increase in revenues from the 2025/2026 capacity auction. It also found that data center load in the next two auctions increased customers’ bills by $13.8 billion. The monitor warns that the near-term impact will be even larger unless PJM addresses the problem.

PJM operates the nation’s largest competitive wholesale electricity market, serving about 67 million people across 13 states and the District of Columbia. Its data center costs reach far beyond the communities hosting the facilities.

A Union of Concerned Scientists report identified $4.4 billion in transmission projects approved in 2024 across seven PJM states. Utility filings do not separate data center connection costs from transmission costs spread among all customers. In practice, those costs are folded into higher electricity rates.

The effects of Virginia’s data center boom are acutely felt in Maryland and West Virginia. Maryland’s Office of People’s Counsel says data centers — mostly outside the state — caused about $9.3 billion of a $12.5 billion capacity-cost increase in one estimate. PJM’s capacity price jumped from $28.92 per megawatt-day for 2024-2025 to $269.92 for 2025-2026 — more than 800% — and has since reached about $333.

RELATED: Big AI broke the internet. Now it wants everyone else to fix it.

Joe Lamberti/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The growing number and size of planned hyper-scale facilities will push electricity costs even higher. It is far from clear that their products can justify trillions of dollars in capital spending while covering the full cost of their power. If the economics depend on shifting costs to the public, the industry’s pledge is worthless.

The bill and pledge also ignore the use of eminent domain to take property or easements for transmission lines serving data centers. NextEra Energy estimates its portion of the 500-kilovolt Mid-Atlantic Resiliency Link will cost $960 million. The project would cross parts of four states on its way to Northern Virginia’s data center corridor. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis estimates that West Virginia ratepayers could pay more than $570 million over the line’s 40-year life.

Meanwhile, hyper-scalers enjoy favorable federal tax treatment and lavish state and local abatements. Corporate income-tax receipts fell 25% during the first 11 months of fiscal year 2026, partly because the 2025 reconciliation law expanded deductions for business investment. Those provisions were not written exclusively for AI, but this capital-intensive industry is well positioned to use them. The boom is not purely a market phenomenon. Government favors are helping fuel it.

The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that you caused it. Until industry leaders and their allies in Washington confront the real cost of centralized AI, their promises about protecting consumers deserve no credibility.

​Data centers, Eminent domain, Legislation, Opinion & analysis, Artificial intelligence, Congress, Big tech 

On July 13, 2024, President Donald J. Trump narrowly escaped an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Since then, the threats and attacks on conservative activists, media personalities, and Trump himself have only escalated.

There have been three other incidents in which armed gunmen have gotten close to the president or his properties. In September 2024, Ryan Routh hid in the bushes outside the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach with the intent to shoot the president. In February 2026, an armed man was shot and killed after crossing a security perimeter at Mar-a-Lago. And in April, a gunman opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

‘I’ll kill you also Donald Trump.’

Then a gunman assassinated Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk during an appearance at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025.

In addition to these active threats and shootings, the Department of Justice has opened prosecutions in dozens of cases of individuals making online threats against politicians, including nearly 20 for threats against President Trump, since January 2025.

Those online threats against conservatives continue. Just this week, Jerusalem News Syndicate first made public the case of a Kansas man alleged to have made specific death threats against President Trump and conservative podcaster and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro.

Kansas Highway Patrol arrested Korby Aaren Strube, a 29-year-old resident of Horton, Kansas, last week, according to a Brown County sheriff’s employee with knowledge of the situation. He was taken into custody on a warrant from Palm Beach County, Florida. The warrant was for alleged threats Strube made against Shapiro, a resident of Palm Beach County, according to a probable cause affidavit reviewed by Blaze News.

RELATED: FAA contractor charged for allegedly threatening to ‘kill you — Donald John Trump’

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

The affidavit describes an investigation into the matter that began on August 4 after a security firm that provides protection to Shapiro alerted the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office to a series of threats posted on X on August 1 by a user named “Kory” with the handle @Ksqcrzk. X has since suspended the account.

The affidavit goes on to quote the since-deleted alleged posts, which included threats like, “I’m going to kill ben [redacted] and he’s not going to be a-live.” In other alleged posts, the user cited anti-Semitism as the reason the user wanted to kill Shapiro and gave a countdown that culminated on the feast of Yom Kippur.

The threats against Shapiro also included threats against President Trump and former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama. According to the affidavit, the poster wrote, “I’m still killing [redacted] and I don’t expect to get away with that … I’ll kill you also Donald Trump.”

During the course of the investigation, the affidavit claims, a forensic analysis of the digital trail for the posts — including information gained from X Corp., Google, and Starlink through a series of requests and warrants — tied the accounts to Strube.

The affidavit also describes the first meeting law enforcement had with Strube in Kansas, when a Brown County undersheriff and Secret Service special agent went to Strube’s residence in connection with the alleged threats made against the president.

The affidavit states that a consensual interview with Strube took place at the dining room table of his residence with his parents present. It further claims that during this interview, Strube admitted to posting the threats against Trump and the Obamas.

The defendant also claimed during that interview that his accounts had been hacked, the affidavit says.

RELATED: Tyler Robinson finally headed for murder trial nearly a year after Charlie Kirk was assassinated

Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images

In addition to Shapiro, Trump, and the Obamas, the affidavit claims another account allegedly controlled by Strube continued the countdown toward Yom Kippur with threats against other unnamed individuals. X has also suspended that account.

When contacted by Blaze News with the allegations in the affidavit, a Secret Service spokesman said, “We are aware of the threats made in this case but do not comment on matters of protective intelligence.”

“It’s no secret that threats against Ben have increased over the past several years, requiring security to be ramped up,” a spokesman for the Daily Wire told Blaze News. “It’s an unfortunate reality of the current state of American politics. We are grateful for everyone involved in keeping Ben safe and ensuring justice is served.”

Inquiries to the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office, Brown County Sheriff’s Office, and the Kansas Highway Patrol to determine whether Strube has been extradited to Florida have not been answered as of publication of this article.

The White House and Department of Justice have not responded to requests for comment.

Blaze News attempted to reach the defendant via two email addresses outlined in the affidavit, but no response has been received.

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​Assassination attempt, Barack obama, Ben shapiro, Donald trump, Michelle obama, Politics 

Freedom of speech is still the law of the land in the United States, but on college campuses, that is apparently up for interpretation.

Look no further than the University of California and its sprawling system of 10 campuses across the state. One set of policies and standards governs all of its campuses, and with it comes a ban on “misgendering” and adhering to biological reality.

‘UC’s policy goes too far in restricting protected speech.’

Under UC’s “Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment” policy — which is available in four different languages — sexual harassment is described as including conduct like “acts of verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility based on gender, gender identity, gender expression, sex- or gender-stereotyping, or sexual orientation.”

In its FAQ section of the same document, “intentional and repeated use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s gender identity (i.e., misgendering)” is also considered harassment. The policy even extends its harassment definition to include the use of a person’s “dead name,” which in many cases means one’s legal name.

So long as the conduct is “unwelcome,” students or faculty who violate the policy are subject to discipline, including dismissal, aka expulsion.

Fortunately, a federal judge has stepped in and entered a preliminary injunction that bars UC from enforcing its policy for the time being, following a lawsuit from Defending Education.

In court documents, the Central District of California Southern Division’s decision included an example of what UC considers to be harassment.

The school said that harassment based on gender identity includes “when a transgender man is intentionally and repeatedly called by his dead name (i.e., refers to a name that a transgender person was given at birth but that they no longer use), or intentionally and repeatedly referred to by ‘Miss’ or ‘Ms.,’ by a professor in an intentionally mocking manner.”

RELATED: CALIFORNIA IDLE: Iconic reality show ditches Hollywood after 24 seasons

Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing/Getty Images

The court also made its decision based on precedent, citing two recent cases that establish “UC’s policy goes too far in restricting protected speech.”

In Bates v. Pakseresht, the court noted that adoptive parents being forced into “affirming” a child’s sexual orientation and gender identity (including preferred pronouns) “quite clearly restrict[ed] and compel[led] speech based on both content and viewpoint.”

Furthermore, in Defending Education v. Olentangy, the court explained, a school district was prevented from enforcing a similar policy against Defending Education’s members.

The court documents from the latest Defending Education lawsuit also pointed to training that “UC students must also complete,” described as sexual violence and harassment, anti-discrimination, prevention, and education training, or SHAPE.

The lawsuit said the training formerly included the following scenario as an example of a hostile environment:

My name is Mona, and I am transgender. My classmate Jane continues to call me James, which was my name before I transitioned. Jane refers to me as a man and complains when I use the restroom. I asked her to stop, but she does not. I feel very disrespected and want this to stop.

The lawsuit notes, however, that “UC declares that this example is no longer included in the SHAPE training.”

RELATED: Campus free speech is alive — barely

Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

To the court, all of this evidence was sufficient enough to grant the injunction.

Nicole Neily, president and founder of Defending Education, told Blaze News in a statement that her organization is grateful for the district court’s decision against “the University of California system’s coercive speech policy against our members.”

Neily also called it “unconstitutional” for public universities to compel student speech.

“We will continue to defend this principle in California and other schools across the country as needed,” she added.

UC did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

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​University of california, Transgenderism, Defending education, Freedom of speech, Politics 

I quite like to sit down. Sometimes you will find me folded into an armchair with a bowl of cereal, reading about Mongol savages, convinced this is the absolute pinnacle of human civilization.

The medical establishment considers this exact activity a suicidal ritual akin to swallowing rat poison. Somewhere around 2010, academic researchers decided that resting your gluteal muscles against a soft cushion carries the same lethality as huffing two packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes before breakfast.

The true goal of the anti-sitting crusade, I suggest, is to eliminate guilt-free leisure.

Chair scare

The “sitting is the new smoking” campaign remains one of the most absurd public health exaggerations of the modern era. Tobacco smoke deposits thousands of chemical compounds directly into pulmonary tissue. It paralyzes cilia and mutates cellular structures until tumors bloom like bad weeds.

Chair usage, by contrast, involves resting your skeleton on furniture so your knee joints don’t turn into sawdust. Equating a plush sofa to a habit that systematically destroys internal organs requires a complete detachment from objective reality.

Wellness brand PR teams latched onto this ridiculous metaphor with ruthless efficiency. Fear sells foam rollers. It sells treadmill desks and squatty potties. The human brain panics when it thinks a routine daily comfort threatens to shut it down completely. And panic prevents us from seeing things clearly.

In 1953, British epidemiologist Jerry Morris published a famous study comparing London bus drivers to bus conductors, noting drivers suffered more heart attacks. The medical industry extracted a single hysterical conclusion from that data, completely overlooking the fact that drivers dealt with heavy traffic and nasty fumes all day long. Yes, conductors moved more, but they also faced far fewer physical and psychological stressors.

Same old sit

This modern panic relies entirely on the illusion that our ancestors lived lives of continuous, unrelenting activity. My grandfather spent decades farming in Ireland, a vocation urban health gurus idealize as the gold standard of natural human movement. But after a long morning of plowing fields, he also sat in his rocking chair and didn’t move a muscle for hours on end. Medieval peasants sat on dirt floors for hours mending nets, weaving wool, and waiting out brutal European winters. The historical record is clear: Humans have always taken advantage of the opportunity to park their posteriors on the nearest stable surface.

In 1880, industrial factory workers put in 14-hour shifts standing on wooden planks. They suffered massive joint degradation and chronic physical exhaustion. Only the most deluded back then claimed standing was a magical fountain of youth. Rest was considered a hard-earned luxury that kept the body from breaking down prematurely. The modern obsession with perpetual motion recasts a basic act of recovery as a moral failing.

Panic peddlers act as if the human frame dissolves into liquid sludge the moment butt meets bench. They publish studies claiming that six hours of daily sedentary behavior will trigger a catastrophic metabolic meltdown while conveniently ignoring the bigger picture. A person who sits for a few hours at a time, eats actual vegetables, and lifts heavy objects three times a week possesses a very different cardiovascular profile than someone who inhales fried dough while playing video games for hours on end.

RELATED: ‘Trust the science’ or die: Is being MAHA hazardous to your health?

Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images

Rebranding rest

The proposed solutions to this imaginary crisis are far more punishing than the supposed ailment. Corporate wellness managers continue to install standing desks in offices, forcing countless poor souls to endure varicose veins and lower back pain. Standing perfectly still on a concrete floor for eight hours, day in and day out, doesn’t sound very appealing, and for good reason. It damages the lumbar spine and pools blood in the ankles.

Sellers of high-tech ergonomic gear profit handsomely from this artificially generated terror. They pitch thousand-dollar mesh office chairs guaranteed to align your vertebrae to micro-millimeter precision, as if a standard dining room chair is a torture device. Consultants charge massive hourly fees to adjust monitor heights by two inches, promising these micro-adjustments will save you from an early grave. It’s an elaborate commercial ecosystem built on top of a completely fabricated health crisis.

Fixing the physical stiffness of a long afternoon takes remarkably little effort. Walking to the kitchen to fetch water every 60 minutes gets your blood flowing and helps reset your circulation. Taking a 10-minute stroll around the block after dinner clears blood glucose far more effectively than standing like a statue in front of a screen for five straight hours. The body is remarkably resilient.

The true goal of the anti-sitting crusade, I suggest, is to eliminate guilt-free leisure. A society obsessed with relentless, measurable productivity views an unmoving human body as an economic failure.

Rest must be rebranded as a perilous path toward an early grave so people feel compelled to buy walking pads and smartwatches that alert local authorities whenever they come within 100 meters of a chair.

You are allowed to enjoy a book, finish a film, or eat a meal without calculating your immediate mortality risk. So please, sit down, stay still for an hour, or two, or three, and ignore the health prophets who profit from your panic.

​Lifestyle, Sitting is the new smoking, Health, Wellness, Culture, Standing desks, Make america healthy again 

Flock cameras are having a hard time identifying some objects and mistaking them for license plates.

But as the devices may be struggling to accomplish their most critical task, they seem to be identifying something else: people.

‘The detector cropped an American flag patch on the rider’s saddlebag as if it were a plate.’

Hackers recently ripped down a Flock license-plate reader camera that sat above a road, opened it up, and copied the data inside before giving the information to tech outlets.

What the data allegedly revealed is that software running on the device “explicitly detects people” as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles.

A joint report from Wired and 404 Media explained that through several weeks’ worth of logs, the Flock camera generated more than a million images.

Using a processor similar to that of a “midrange smartphone,” around 20 built-in apps on the camera’s processor handle a range of tasks like motion detection, taking pictures, uploading data, and receiving updates.

The outlets say that the device’s code showed approximately 28-100 photos are taken when something moves into view, but the camera uses different exposures to capture the license and the expanded environment before scanning the image and cropping what it believes to be the pertinent information. The data is then sent to Flock through the local cell phone network.

The camera itself allegedly does not identify the plate number, vehicle, model, etc.; those tasks allegedly take place on Flock’s servers.

At the same time, the current software allegedly “explicitly detects people” and records where they appear in the image and how confident it is that it is a person.

RELATED: Flock doesn’t care if you’re innocent

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Wired’s analysis said that the camera’s logs had about 21 days of activity, during which it photographed more than 50,000 vehicles and generated 1.6 million images. This worked out to between 3,300 and 4,500 vehicles per day.

Problems arose with the camera’s inability to process its huge storage requests on-device, with the logs reportedly showing a massive 27,000 instances of “no space left on device” errors that show up when trying to save full-resolution images.

Tens of thousands of other related errors were noted as well, which came with crashes and reboots.

Perhaps disturbingly, the device’s code runs an operational check every two minutes to see if the camera is still running and logs the message “Who’s a good boy?!”

This was seen more than 12,000 times.

Other issues were reported with mistaken identification with bumper stickers, dealership frames, and other graphics that were recorded as license plates and cropped out of images for saving.

“In one video of a passing motorcycle, the detector cropped an American flag patch on the rider’s saddlebag as if it were a plate,” Wired wrote.

RELATED: Worse than Flock: Josh Hawley expands ‘unprecedented national surveillance’ investigation

Jean-François FORT/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images

As for the hackers/vandals/vigilantes, they answered as to why they didn’t simply destroy the camera: “Why just destroy them when we can reverse-engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?”

The hacker collective, which calls itself stegan0gram, also said it “liberated hardware in the field, disarmed them, and proceeded with reverse engineering of the cameras and associated solar equipment.”

Flock responded to the report by saying “the unauthorized removal and tampering of a Flock camera is illegal.”

“Flock takes security seriously and maintains a public Vulnerability Disclosure Policy for security researchers to report potential vulnerabilities directly to us. We received no report through that process, and based on the limited information provided, we do not have enough detail to assess the claims being made. If the individuals identified legitimate vulnerabilities, we encourage them to submit their technical findings through our vulnerability reporting process so our security team can review them and take any appropriate action,” the company added.

One hacker replied to this message by saying, “Being investigated is a legit concern and something we are trying to avoid. I’m sure our actions have attracted some attention as it is, but we are careful and try to keep a low profile.”

Flock did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Wired and 404 Media also noted they found no evidence of facial-recognition capabilities in the Flock camera software beyond what is included in the Android operation system.

According to DeFlock, there are currently more than 140,000 license plate readers in the United States; 81% are run by Flock, 5% by Motorola.

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​Flock, Android, Automated license plate recognition cameras, Tech 

We graduated from Davidson College in 1982 and 2025, respectively. Connie serves on the board of Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse, an alumni group that supports free inquiry and sponsors student organizations including Young Americans for Freedom and Turning Point USA. Hannah interned with DFTD during her senior year, where we met. Although she majored in biology, her work with DFTD and other campus groups led her to the Oversight Project in Washington, D.C.

Our experiences, separated by four decades, have produced the same concern: Higher education is failing to prepare too many students for demanding careers and responsible citizenship.

The answer is not to replace progressive indoctrination with conservative indoctrination. It is to restore the conditions under which education can do its job.

Connie began seeing the change in 2015. For nearly 40 years, her career has involved preparing, interviewing, and placing college graduates in their first jobs. She saw a growing share of seniors arrive less engaged and less prepared. By 2020, retention among some of her placements had fallen sharply. One employer told her that of five Davidson graduates it had hired, two had been fired within 18 months and a third was on probation. She also found fewer students eager to test themselves at the start of their careers.

At Davidson, a DFTD review of public voter registration records found that 3.17% of faculty were registered Republicans, compared with 46.03% registered Democrats. Party registration is not a complete measure of ideology, of course, but the imbalance is hard to dismiss. When one outlook dominates, students receive fewer opportunities to challenge assumptions and defend unpopular conclusions. Davidson is hardly alone. Connie also serves on the board of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, a national network of alumni groups confronting similar problems.

Open inquiry is vital because employers value people who can think critically, absorb disagreement, and defend a position under pressure. Hannah saw the opposite at Davidson. One professor offered to help students find abortion services but did not mention prenatal or parenting resources. Another dismissed the possibility that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan laboratory. Several of Hannah’s professors canceled class after Donald Trump won the 2024 election. Those episodes sent a clear message about which views were welcome.

Professors also control grades, giving students another reason to keep dissenting opinions to themselves. Conservative students learn to calculate the social and academic cost of speaking. Students who echo the campus consensus rarely face the same test.

RELATED: Campus free speech is alive — barely

Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Administrators shape the climate beyond the classroom. They approve speakers, recognize student groups, enforce conduct rules, and decide whether controversial events can proceed. Conservative groups at Davidson have repeatedly encountered restrictions that pushed events off campus, according to our work with DFTD. The point is not that every administrative decision is ideological. It is that vague rules and uneven enforcement teach students that permission matters more than argument.

DEI policy offers one example. President Trump’s January 2025 executive order directed federal agencies to end illegal race- and sex-based preferences and enforce civil rights law; it did not simply “ban DEI” in every college classroom.

The harder question is whether universities that formally changed policies continue embedding DEI concepts in curricula. In July 2025, the Oversight Project requested syllabi and course materials from more than 70 UNC-Chapel Hill classes. Faculty resisted the breadth of the request, and documents later surfaced through other channels. Months later, UNC System President Peter Hans adopted a systemwide policy treating syllabi as public records and requiring a searchable database.

Transparency will not settle every curriculum dispute, but it gives students, parents, and taxpayers a chance to see what public universities teach.

Anonymous bias-reporting systems raise a related concern. Maxient has said its platform receives about 7,000 reports a day across roughly 1,300 institutions, but that figure covers many kinds of campus cases — not 7,000 anonymous bias complaints. Bias portals are only one use. Even so, FIRE has documented hundreds of campus bias-response systems that invite reports about protected expression. Whatever administrators intend, systems that allow anonymous complaints about speech can make students hesitate before challenging campus orthodoxy.

Academic standards deserve scrutiny too. Davidson’s Class of 2025 profile shows that roughly three-quarters of seniors had GPAs at or above 3.5, the college’s threshold for cum laude. Harvard’s faculty has now voted to limit flat A grades to 20% of a course, plus four additional students, beginning in fall 2027. The policy came after flat As reached two-thirds of Harvard College grades. Elite institutions do not adopt measures like that unless grade compression has become impossible to ignore.

Meanwhile, national academic performance is moving the wrong way. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 35% of 12th-graders scored at or above Proficient in reading and 22% in math. Nearly half fell below Basic in math. Yet the National Center for Education Statistics projects colleges will award about 2.04 million bachelor’s degrees in 2025-26, roughly twice the 1989-90 total. More degrees are not a problem by themselves. The problem is expanding credentials while the preparation beneath them weakens.

RELATED: Want to think fearlessly like Charlie Kirk? Take the 28 free courses that shaped him.

Hillsdale College

Employers see the consequences. In a 2024 survey commissioned by Intelligent.com, 79% of companies that hired recent graduates said they had placed at least some underperforming hires on performance improvement plans, and 60% said they had fired at least some. The survey has limits, but the signal matches what Connie has heard from employers: Too many graduates need basic workplace habits taught after graduation.

Weak preparation, inflated grades, and narrow intellectual environments also leave many graduates in jobs that do not require their degrees. A 2024 report from the Strada Institute for the Future of Work and the Burning Glass Institute found that 52% of graduates were underemployed one year after college and 45% remained so a decade later. That is not evidence that college causes underemployment, and the figure varies greatly by major and internship experience. It is evidence that a diploma alone no longer guarantees a college-level start.

New York’s 13th Congressional District shows the civic stakes. In June, democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary. Chevalier attended Columbia and helped organize the pro-Palestinian movement on campus. She was involved in launching Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which seeks the “total eradication of Western civilization.”

Chevalier’s success cannot be blamed on the university alone, but campuses that teach students to regard their country primarily through oppression, grievance, and ideological conformity should not be surprised when some graduates carry those habits into politics.

This is why the problem is larger than a few offensive syllabi or one-sided classroom discussions. Colleges are supposed to prepare students to enter institutions they did not design, work alongside people who disagree with them, accept criticism, recover from failure, and distinguish argument from injury. Grade inflation, ideological conformity, administrative overprotection, and weak career preparation all work against those goals.

The answer is not to replace progressive indoctrination with conservative indoctrination. It is to restore the conditions under which education can do its job: serious academic standards, genuine intellectual diversity, transparent curricula, freedom to argue, and a campus culture that expects students to become adults.

Parents spend enormous sums on college, and students devote four formative years to earning their degrees. They deserve more than a credential and shelter from challenging ideas. They deserve an education that prepares them for work, citizenship, disagreement, responsibility, and life beyond the campus gates.

​Campus culture, College graduates, Education, Grade inflation, Higher education, Public universities, Western civilization, Intellectual conformity, Universities, Republicans, Democrats, Covid, Trump, Dei, Bias, Liberal faculty, Opinion & analysis 

Americans should pay close attention to a new artificial intelligence proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a democratic socialist, and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas).

Sanders and Casar recently announced plans to introduce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. Their proposal is designed to prevent the creation of artificial intelligence systems that become more intelligent than human beings or develop capabilities that could threaten humanity.

Overseeing frontier AI would be more difficult than running a railroad or postal network.

The dangers they identify deserve to be taken seriously. But their proposed solution would also place extraordinary power over one of the most consequential technologies in human history in the hands of the federal government.

According to a summary released by Sanders’ office, the proposal would permanently prohibit the development and deployment of artificial superintelligence, including systems that surpass human intelligence, threaten governments, or evade human control. It would also pause advanced AI development until a new federal regulator establishes safety rules and a process for reviewing models.

That is only the beginning. Sanders and Casar want to establish a new Cabinet-level agency responsible for regulating advanced artificial intelligence. The agency would monitor frontier AI systems throughout their development, oversee the removal of capabilities deemed dangerous, and supervise the destruction of prohibited artificial-superintelligence systems.

The proposal also contemplates severe penalties. People who violate or circumvent its restrictions could face up to 20 years in prison. Companies could face what Sanders’ office calls the “corporate death penalty.” The United States would also pursue international agreements, export controls, and allied coordination intended to prevent artificial superintelligence from being developed elsewhere.

Without a doubt, advanced AI could pose serious threats to human freedom and security. A system capable of evading human control, conducting sophisticated cyberattacks, helping develop biological weapons, or manipulating critical infrastructure would present risks unlike almost anything governments have confronted. Sanders’ office cites reported incidents involving advanced AI systems as evidence that the technology is becoming increasingly difficult to control.

The key question is whether giving Washington sweeping regulatory authority would solve more problems than it causes. The federal government does not exactly have an impeccable record managing complicated institutions.

RELATED: Anthropic entrusts its AI oversight to globalist cronies — prioritizing the world over you

Rudall30/Getty Images

The Postal Service reported a $9 billion net loss in fiscal year 2025. Amtrak, despite record ridership and revenue, reported a $598.4 million adjusted operating loss for the same fiscal year. The federal government had accumulated a $2 trillion deficit through the first 11 months of fiscal 2026.

Those comparisons do not prove that a federal AI regulator would fail. Running a railroad or postal network is obviously different from regulating artificial intelligence. If anything, overseeing frontier AI would be more difficult. But the government’s record raises a legitimate institutional question: How confident should Americans be that Washington can successfully oversee technology that even its developers acknowledge can be difficult to understand and control?

Another danger deserves even more attention: politicization.

Under the Sanders-Casar proposal, a Cabinet-level agency would determine which advanced AI systems may proceed, establish safety rules, review models, monitor their capabilities, require developers to remove features deemed dangerous, and supervise the destruction of systems that cross the government’s line.

Those are immense powers. Government officials could use them to limit lawful activity, favor politically connected companies, or advance particular ideological causes and special interests.

Artificial intelligence will increasingly shape how Americans receive information, communicate, work, conduct research, educate their children, and participate in the economy. A regulatory structure powerful enough to determine which advanced AI models may exist could therefore exercise tremendous influence over American life.

There is also a serious federalism debate that should not be overlooked. Congress possesses substantial constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce, while states retain broad traditional regulatory powers. AI regulation could therefore involve authority at both levels of government rather than belonging exclusively to either one.

A state-centered model offers an important structural advantage: It disperses power.

States can adopt different approaches, experiment with different safety standards, and correct mistakes without necessarily imposing the consequences of those mistakes on the entire country. Regulatory capture can occur in state governments, too, but capturing one state regulator is different from capturing a single federal agency controlling advanced AI nationwide.

RELATED: Silicon Valley is building a god in its own image

Gremlin/Getty Images

Supporters of federal regulation can reasonably respond that a patchwork of 50 state systems would create serious compliance problems for technology that routinely crosses state boundaries. A national regulator could also impose consistent rules on developers whose products operate throughout the country.

That is a serious argument. But so is the danger of allowing one centralized authority to micromanage breakthroughs in AI. A mistake, political abuse, or act of regulatory capture at the federal level could affect the entire country at once.

The proposal has been announced but not yet formally introduced, so its precise statutory language remains unknown. Based on the summary released by Sanders’ office, however, it would create a Cabinet agency capable of stopping AI development, ordering systems destroyed, imposing potentially existential penalties on companies, and sending people to prison for decades.

Before Congress considers such an extraordinary framework, Americans should decide how much authority any single government agency should possess over the development of artificial intelligence — and what safeguards would prevent that authority from being abused.

​Agency, Americans, Artificial intelligence, Cyberattacks, Deficit, Federal government, Politicization, Postal service, Sanders, Technology, Washington, Infrastructure, Ai, Opinion & analysis 

On September 13 at a campaign rally at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico was asked who his favorite drag queen was.

The radical progressive immediately answered “Alyssa Edwards” — a “RuPaul’s Drag Race” alum and Texas dance-studio owner who has publicly described himself as “a drag performer that works with children.”

Pat Gray, BlazeTV host of “Pat Gray Unleashed,” is repulsed — not only because Talarico is a drag-, transgender-, and abortion-supporting Democrat, but because as of right now, he’s polling even with or slightly ahead of Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in a state that has long been a red stronghold.

“The drag queen fan James Talarico now has a Polymarket odds of winning at 56%,” says co-host Keith Malinak.

“He’s up three on Ken Paxton. This is a guy who can immediately name his favorite Texas drag queen!” exclaims Pat in disgust.

But it’s not just an affinity for drag queens that creeps Pat out. It’s also Talarico’s long record of odd public comments — including comparing the world to a kindergarten class.

In a 2020 video recorded as a state representative for high school graduates in his district, Talarico asked: “What if we ran our world like we run a kindergarten classroom? Because at the end of the day, aren’t we all just really big kindergarteners?”

“No. No we’re not,” says Pat bluntly.

“But that’s how Democrats look at us — as little children that need shepherding and need control,” adds Malinak.

“This guy is maybe the most bizarre candidate we’ve ever seen in a major race … and he’s three points ahead in Texas. I can’t, I just can’t,” sighs Pat.

Jeffy, however, isn’t as worried. “I don’t believe Texas is going to vote for him in the general election.”

To hear more of the panel’s commentary and analysis, watch the episode above.

Want more from Pat Gray?

To enjoy more of Pat’s biting analysis and signature wit as he restores common sense to a senseless world, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Pat gray, James talarico, Texas senate race, Drag queens, Blazetv show