The father of Thomas Crooks has revealed chilling details about his life before he tried to assassinate President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The revelations by Matthew Crooks were reported in FBI interview summaries and other documents exclusively reviewed by the New York Post. They were from the congressional investigation into the shooting.

‘Thomas did not like the welfare state and was against the “woke” ideology but never really espoused the Republican ideology.’

The father said that he never really had any strong father-son bond with Thomas, who was stoic and hard to read.

“When Thomas was born he did not scream, and he was always quiet from that point on,” said the father.

Crooks said his son had a troubled childhood but that he was very intelligent. Thomas damaged school property in elementary school out of boredom, and his parents thought he had ADHD or had fallen in with a bad group of friends in middle school.

His father said he even “pushed” Thomas in hopes of prompting some kind of emotional response, and Thomas did begin to cry.

He became even quieter in high school and had trouble speaking with his teachers, according to Matthew Crooks. His son also started talking to himself, a habit that “became more noticeable over the years.”

Thomas was able to score a 1400 on the SAT without studying, according to the father, and then scored a near perfect 1500 on a second try.

Thomas denied being gay many times over the years, as his parents noted that he didn’t seem to have an interest in girls.

Matthew Crooks said his son developed a great interest in guns and asked if he needed to pass a background check to purchase his father’s Glock. He asked if he could have his grandfather’s guns but did not appear to care about hunting as a sport.

Although Thomas Crooks was a terrible marksman at first, his father says his son got far better after several years of practice. He showed off his range targets to his father, explaining that “he wanted to see how far he could shoot with rudimentary sights.”

In fact, Matthew Crooks admitted he handed Thomas a Panther A-15 rifle the morning of the shooting, believing that his son was going to the shooting range, according to the Post, citing federal records.

RELATED: Journalist at Trump assassination attempt says he got PTSD — from Trump supporters

Matthew Crooks said Thomas was registered as a Republican, but the father believed he did so only because of his father’s Republican registration. His son had a general interest in politics but was not terribly passionate about the topic.

“Thomas called himself a Republican. Thomas did not like the welfare state and was against the ‘woke’ ideology but never really espoused the Republican ideology,” Matthew Crooks said.

He said his son was shocked at the events of Jan. 6 and did not think the 2020 election had been rigged. Thomas donated $15 to a progressive Democratic group in 2021.

Thomas Crooks liked rap and country music, said Matthew, who sometimes found his son dancing alone in his room.

Thomas “never showed any signs indicating something was wrong,” Matthew said to investigators.

Thomas did begin buying things on Amazon, including “parts, tools, and items to increase the capacity of his rifle,” eventually adopting the pseudonym “Bob Dole” for his delivery address to thwart potential hackers, his dad said.

The family is “racking” their brains trying to understand why Thomas tried to kill the president.

Trump was shot in the ear on July 13, 2024, and three rally attendees were shot behind him, one of whom died. Crooks was almost immediately shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper.

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​Thomas crooks, Butler pennsylvania, Assassination attempt, Politics, Donald trump 

Mobile-based contactless payment services are 15 years old, starting with Google Wallet in 2011 (which later became Google Pay), followed by Apple Pay in 2014. Many stores slowly rolled out support over years of foot-dragging, while large chains like Walmart tried to push their own payment solution. However, after nearly two decades of hemming and hawing, the retail giant is finally caving in. Here’s what you need to know before the next time you try to buy something at Walmart with Apple Pay or Google Pay.

While Google was the first to bring contactless payments to mobile, the industry took notice when Apple introduced its own solution to the market. Built around the wildly successful iPhone and Apple Watch, Apple Pay quickly picked up steam. Today, it accounts for 50% of in-store transactions in the United States, while Google Pay only covers 17%. Globally, that makes up a difference of $9.5 trillion spent through Apple’s ecosystem versus $5.2 trillion on Google’s platform.

The rollout has already begun at select locations.

It wasn’t always that way, though. In the earlier days of contactless payments, the market was more like the Wild West with various companies jockeying for control. Some stores even launched their own payment services to compete.

Walmart Pay ruined the party

Walmart released Walmart Pay in 2015 as a direct in-store alternative to Apple and Google. The key selling point, at least for Walmart, was that its payment service worked with a QR code system. That meant any customer could use any phone to scan the code at the register to connect to their Walmart account and submit a payment.

RELATED: A YouTube stunt proved this Apple Pay exploit can drain your bank account in seconds. Here’s the fix.

NanoStockk/Getty Images

Unfortunately, the process was clunkier than Apple Pay and Google Pay, which only required users to hover their devices over payment terminals and authenticate with a fingerprint or FaceID. Walmart Pay also gave the retail giant the power to monitor customers’ purchases and link them to their accounts — a stark difference to Apple Pay and Google Pay that hide identifying customer information and transaction data from merchants.

In other words, Walmart Pay gave the company insight into customers’ shopping habits that it couldn’t get from other platforms … until now.

Contactless payments are coming to Walmart

After all these years of waiting, Walmart announced that it is finally giving customers the choice to use other contactless payment options. As a result, customers will soon be allowed to complete purchases with Apple Pay and Google Pay at the register in Walmart stores and Sam’s Clubs nationwide.

The rollout has already begun at select locations, and all stores will have access to these services by the end of 2026. After that, Walmart and Sam’s Club fuel stations will gain contactless support by mid-2027. This change also means that customers should have the option to use contactless payment credit cards and debit cards with EMV chips, as well.

How to make sure your phone is set up for contactless payments

Now that you can buy things with your phone at Walmart, you’ll want to make sure your device is set up before you walk into the store.

To add a card to Apple Pay, open the Wallet app on iPhone, select the plus symbol in the top right corner, and choose “Debit or Credit Card.” From there, you can place your iPhone against the card to add it automatically through the EMV chip, or type in the card details by hand. Once the card is added, you may have to verify the information with your bank or credit union through the bank’s official app or via a text or phone call. Do this, and you’re all set to use Apple Pay.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Apple Pay

On Android, open the Wallet app and tap the plus button at the bottom. On the next screen, select “Payment card,” then “new credit or debit,” and let the app take a photo of your card to add the details. You can also write them in manually, if you prefer. Verify the information with your bank or credit union, and you’re all set to use Google Pay.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Google Pay

In the end, contactless payments on iPhone and Android are more convenient and secure than tapping your credit card at the register or trusting an alternative payment solution, like Walmart Pay.

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​Shopping, Walmart, Apple, Google, Ios, Android, Tech 

For decades, the government led a crusade against carbon dioxide, treating the byproduct of human breath as a pollutant causing global warming and climate change. Luckily, cooler heads have finally prevailed as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency aims to pull back carbon emission restrictions for the sake of the American people, power plants, and the economy.

The Clean Air Act has been around since the 1970s. The original version specifically targeted vehicle emissions, namely carbon monoxide, which is harmful to humans in concentrated quantities.

’Even if you got rid of all GHG emissions tomorrow, it would have no meaningful climate impact.’

However, in recent decades, the bill morphed to cover a broader range of “pollutants,” including human breath in the form of carbon dioxide, cow flatulence that produces methane, and other supposed “greenhouse gases.”

Yet one of the more egregious restrictions came directly from the Biden administration, which used the Inflation Reduction Act to attack fossil fuels because of the carbon dioxide emitted during the burning process.

This distinction helped the Biden administration further vilify the fossil fuels industry and secure $369 billion in funding to cut carbon emissions and bankroll clean energy initiatives.

RELATED: New peer-reviewed study points out the obvious: Carbon emissions are feeding plants and greening the planet

Visions of America/Joseph Sohm/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

That is all about to change.

On Monday, the EPA officially removed some of the power-plant carbon emissions restrictions put in place by the Biden administration in 2024 and proposed repealing the others.

EPA spokesman Mike Bastasch told Blaze News:

Repealing the costly and ineffective Biden-Harris carbon pollution standards will save Americans up to $310 billion. The power sector will save billions of dollars in compliance costs, and Americans will save billions of dollars more by not having to fund tax credits for CO2 sequestration. The Trump EPA is committed to protecting human health and the environment while also driving economic growth, lowering energy costs, and improving standards of living.

EPA is also proposing to rescind all remaining GHG emissions requirements for power plants, which have imposed unnecessary requirements and drained the power sector’s resources, while producing virtually no benefit. …

The reality is that even if you got rid of all GHG emissions tomorrow, it would have no meaningful climate impact. This fact is confirmed by the same models used by the Obama administration. EPA estimates that the supplemental proposal would save $370 million in costs.

Ultimately, the benefits of the repeal are threefold: Energy companies no longer have to abide by costly climate edicts of past administrations. American citizens save money on taxes. Finally, the people gain much-needed relief from climate change hysteria, thanks to models that suggest continued greenhouse gas remediation would have an insignificant impact on climate trends around the globe.

This move is just one of many that indicate climate change hysteria is coming to an end. Late last year, Bill Gates admitted that climate change wouldn’t end the world after all. The Antarctic has also gained ice while melting in the Arctic has slowed, despite doomer claims that the latter would be “ice-free” by 2020.

Some “experts” have even claimed that reduced emissions are the problem.

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​Carbon emissions, Epa, News, Politics 

It’s impossible to miss election season. Signs show up in neighbors’ yards, the mountains of fliers pile up in the mail, and your email inbox fills up with political messages asking for donations or a vote. In the past, you could easily file these emails into the spam folder and rarely hear from the sender again, but not this year.

Google’s new verified sender program for Gmail lets politicians skip your spam filter and go straight to your inbox, whether you like it or not. Luckily, there are still ways to get rid of them.

The program ensures you can’t escape political advertisements.

Google recently unveiled its Gmail Verified Sender Program set to launch on September 8. Once it rolls out, verified senders, including politicians, can bypass any previous filters that would’ve sent them to your spam or junk folder. Instead, they’ll go straight into your inbox where they’re most likely to reach you.

Sounds like a nightmare, right?

According to Google, this system “helps eligible, verified political committees in the United States reliably deliver policy-compliant and non-abusive messages to personal Gmail accounts on an ongoing basis.” In reality, the program ensures you can’t escape political advertisements, at least not with the usual methods.

Politicians have to follow the rules

If there’s any saving grace, it’s that Google has some ground rules for any politician who wishes to use the new program. Politicians have to:

Refrain from sending anything that resembles spam, including unsolicited or repetitive emails. Theoretically, if you didn’t sign up for a political mailer, you shouldn’t be subjected to these messages in the first place.Meet all of Google’s mass email guidelines, which include proper domain authentication and message formatting. All emails must also include an “unsubscribe” button for CAN-SPAM compliance.Follow Gmail’s anti-abuse policy, which means they can’t attempt to commit fraud, promote illicit activities, engage in harassment, or other unsavory behaviors.

Furthermore, if more than 0.3% of respondents label an incoming email as spam across any rolling 14-day period, Google may suspend the politician’s email operations for seven days or terminate his or her email program entirely.

RELATED: Google is finally letting you change the most important thing about your Gmail account. Here’s how.

Orbon Alija/Getty Images

How to keep political emails out of your inbox

Just because political emails can bypass your spam folder doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to keep them out of your inbox. In fact, Google’s rules alone show that there are still several things you can do to clear out the political clutter. Here are your options:

Hit the unsubscribe button: By law, all commercial emails and advertisements — including political messages — are required to include a simple-to-find unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email. Click on that, confirm your decision on the next page that pops up, and you should be opted out of future email chains.Get creative with Gmail labels: Google gave Gmail a neat little trick that lets you target emails with specific keywords, or that arrive from certain senders, and automatically throw them in the trash. To set up one of these filters, open Gmail in your web browser on a computer, click the Settings cog in the top right corner, then select “See all settings.” From here, go to “Filters and blocked addresses,” and create a new filter. Type in the information you want to target and select “Create filter.” On the checkboxes page, mark “Delete it.” Lastly, click the “Create filter” button, and you’re all set. No more political emails.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Gmail

Hit the spam button anyway: When a political email drops into your inbox, you reserve the right to relabel it as spam. While this may not keep the next email from that campaign from hitting your inbox again, your efforts can help suspend the account or even terminate it.Use a different email provider: When all else fails, you can always put your Gmail aside and use a different email provider that will let you block political messages from the start.

Election season is all about reaching as many voters on as many issues as possible, but that doesn’t mean you have to listen to it. Follow these steps and reclaim a bit of your sanity, at least for your email inbox.

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​Google, Tech, Gmail, Politics, Spam 

A knife-wielding male stabbed a mother and daughter in a random attack in Northern California, police said — but an arriving sheriff’s deputy put a stop to the threat with his gun.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office released a summary video Friday detailing what took place on the morning of July 15.

‘Kudos to the deputy that [saved] the innocent victims’ lives by eliminating the threat.’

The sheriff’s office said its communications center received a call around 6:30 a.m. stating that a transient adult male was causing a disturbance at a Starbucks at Elkhorn Boulevard and Diablo Drive in Sacramento.

Employees said the suspect was behind the store counter and armed with a “kitchen knife,” officials noted, adding that store employees hid in a back room while waiting for law enforcement to arrive.

But when deputies arrived on the scene, the suspect had already fled, officials said.

Minutes later, a deputy saw an individual matching the suspect’s description walking on Diablo Drive, officials said.

The suspect ran into an open garage of a residence in the 5700 block of Diablo Drive, and the suspect stabbed and cut a 63-year-old mother numerous times as she was getting into her vehicle, officials said.

Her 26-year-old daughter heard screams and saw the suspect on top of her mother, officials said, adding that the daughter pushed the suspect off her mother, saving her from further attack.

But the suspect then focused his attack on the daughter, who also was cut and stabbed numerous times, officials said.

RELATED: New bodycam video shows sheriff’s deputies fatally shooting knife-wielding male who authorities say stabbed deputy

Image source: Sacramento County (Calif.) Sheriff’s Office

The deputy who initially saw the suspect witnessed the suspect’s attacks in the garage, officials said, adding that the deputy fired his handgun toward the suspect, striking the suspect.

Additional deputies arrived and immediately began administering lifesaving measures to the suspect and both victims, officials said.

Fire personnel responded to the scene and pronounced the suspect dead, officials said.

Both victims were taken to a hospital, where they were listed in serious but stable condition, officials said.

RELATED: ‘Kill me!’ Unhinged male furious about revving engine at night pulls sword on investigating deputy. Then things get bloody.

The suspect has been identified as Faryeshyi Allahdin, officials said, adding that no deputies were injured during the incident.

Officials said investigators believe the attack was random, and the victims had no known connection to the suspect.

Commenters below the sheriff’s office video posted to Facebook had high praise for law enforcement:

“Kudos to the deputy that [saved] the innocent victims’ lives by eliminating the threat,” one commenter wrote.”Nice shot by the deputy & thank you for not hesitating so that the perpetrator could not do any fatal damage,” another user wrote. “This is a happy ending — no trial & further trauma to the victims needed & no revolving door on prison/jail for this guy who’d probably go on to terrorize more victims after being let out too soon.””Thank you for you courageous service, officer,” another commenter said. “And dang that daughter — kudos for jumping in to [help] her mom.””Police officers are heroes… no other way to say it,” another user declared.

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​Sacramento county sheriff’s office, Stabbing, Officer involved shooting, Fatal shooting, Crime 

If you own an LG smart TV, there’s something you need to know: It could be spying on you — even when it is turned off.

According to a recent investigation by Gamers Nexus, LG smart TVs can allegedly continue communicating with external servers even when powered down.

“If you have an Apple TV set-top box, that’s not enough to protect your privacy if you have an LG TV,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray says on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”

“You must unplug the ethernet. And tell it to forget your Wi-Fi information completely,” he adds.

“These also use a technology referred to as automatic content recognition or ACR. So they’re not satisfied with knowing the name of the show or the channel you’re watching,” Gray says. “Instead, they want snapshots of the screen or audio bytes, which are then analyzed by external servers.”

“It also collects data from the users themselves. Get this,” he explains. “It uses microphones as a part of their setup. And it’s capable of recording and transcribing conversations. So then these are sent to LG ad solutions for marketing purposes.”

“But it gets worse. While the collection of usage data is one thing, the researcher uncovered many different areas where the tested TVs captured data that probed a little too deep into your private life,” he continues.

“That included plain-text transcripts of conversations that you’re conducting just in the room with the TV,” he adds, “whether it’s on or off.”

However, Gray points out that it’s not just your smart TV.

“We’ve got our TVs, our phones, our computers, our iPads, our cars, Flock camera, satellites, your refrigerator,” he says.

“It’s all monitoring us, and the problem is, we’re so comfortable with these devices now and we depend on them so much that frankly it’s hard not to think it’s just too late to do anything about it.”

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.

​Advertising, Privacy, Spying, Surveillance, Lg smart tv, Pat gray, Blazetv show 

Millions of overseas customers are using American-made AI companies, and they don’t even know it.

A new report released by Anthropic will likely throw a wrench into what is known about the AI race, pointing to the idea that the United States’ adversaries are not as technologically advanced as they purport to be.

‘Over 12.1 million exchanges observed.’

Anthropic explained in a lengthy report that Chinese companies and other international role players are seemingly reliant, to some degree, on the American company’s AI programs.

To that end, multiple Chinese AI companies were discovered to have been forwarding their own customers’ inquiries to Claude and relaying them back to users as if they were their own.

Moonshot AI, which uses the chatbot Kimi, was described as “silently” forwarding customer requests to Claude instead of processing them on its own.

“Moonshot then displayed Claude’s responses to users. These users thought they were using a Kimi model, but received responses from Claude instead,” Anthropic wrote.

Anthropic said that in just a 10-day period, Moonshot relayed almost 300,000 customer requests to the American company, mostly to the AI program Claude Opus. This was done through over 5,000 proxy accounts predominantly located in Singapore and Japan.

DeepSeek, another Chinese AI company, was reportedly caught relaying its inquiries to Anthropic’s Claude too, even when it was a company using its product.

Anthropic said one Chinese company was “almost certainly not made aware” that its data was being relayed to Claude when it used DeepSeek to analyze internal documents that included sensitive information and organizational structure.

RELATED: Hackers are trying to steal money from X users — don’t be one of them

Additionally, requests from an IT operator from a Russian government agency “associated with its Ministry of Defense” were relayed to Anthropic through DeepSeek, which allegedly exposed live credentials for a Russian government database.

Furthermore, a municipal Public Security Bureau in China used DeepSeek, which turned out to be Claude, to build a case management system. An engineer reportedly built a tool that compares a person’s movements against police records and used the national ID number of its citizens.

“Scale of distillation attacks attributable to DeepSeek over 14 days in July 2026: over 12.1 million exchanges observed,” Anthropic wrote.

Another Chinese tech company called Xiaomi was accused of “illicit distillation” — making 400,000 exchanges with Anthropic over the course of 20 days to siphon data to train its own AI models.

RELATED: OpenAI’s newest model is all techies want — but how uncontrollable is it?

CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images

Anthropic also revealed that three Iranian government-aligned accounts were using Claude to “set up influence operations campaigns.”

The campaigns had stated goals to shape public opinion at home and abroad and were working on behalf of the Islamic Culture and Communications Organization under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and the Islamic Propaganda Office of Khorasan Razavi.

The work was a portion of a nine-part “international influence” portfolio and included a complete organizational plan for the funeral of Iran’s supreme leader.

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​Artificial intelligence, China, Iran, Russia, Anthropic, Claude, Tech 

Abdul El-Sayed has made no secret of whom he believes Democrats should represent.

Speaking to the United Auto Workers this summer, the newly minted Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan declared that it was “damn past time” for his party to be “firmly on the side of working people.”

The credentialed left wants the working class’ grievances but has little interest in its virtues.

El-Sayed is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America; he calls himself a capitalist. But the Bernie Sanders ally has emerged as one of the most prominent figures on the insurgent economic left, campaigning against corporate power and billionaires while promising an economy that works for working people.

His own path to the barricades was somewhat less proletarian. El-Sayed is a Rhodes Scholar with a medical degree from Columbia and a doctorate from Oxford. And these days he’s hardly an outlier.

Let’s do lunch box

Once upon a time, the phrase “working class” evoked a very specific image. A guy named Sal with calloused hands, a steel lunch box, and a bad back, punching a timecard at seven in the morning to make sure his children could buy decent shoes.

According to a fresh report from the Pew Research Center, 60% of Americans now say “working class” describes them well. That includes half of college graduates and, remarkably, half of upper-income Americans.

So who exactly counts as working class anymore?

Historically, the answer was more complicated than Sal and his lunch box. In the old Marxian sense, the proletariat consisted broadly of people who survived by selling their labor rather than living from property or capital. By that definition, an adjunct professor with three degrees and an anemic bank account may have a better claim to proletarian status than the plumber who owns his own company and employs three other plumbers.

But that isn’t what most Americans came to picture when they heard the words “working class.”

Over the course of the 20th century, the phrase acquired a cultural meaning as well as an economic one. It came to evoke factory workers, mechanics, tradesmen, construction crews, waitresses, truckers — people who worked with their hands, collected an hourly wage, or made a living without accumulating a wall full of credentials.

The educated precariat

Now the two meanings are colliding. The modern socialist left has revived something closer to the older economic definition. Its emerging constituency includes a peculiar new proletariat: highly educated Americans with plenty of credentials but not necessarily much money.

Nate Silver recently dug into the numbers behind the Democratic Socialists of America and found exactly this pattern. According to the DSA’s own 2021 membership survey, 80% of members age 25 and older had bachelor’s degrees, while 45% reported household incomes below $60,000.

Political analyst Ruy Teixeira calls them the “educated precariat.” They got the degrees, but the economic status supposedly waiting on the other side never quite materialized.

What survived was their sense of entitlement to tell other people how things should be run. The credentialed precariat may have lost the salary and corner office, but not the conviction that the people who went to college should be telling the people who didn’t what’s good for them.

And so they didn’t merely join the working class. They appointed themselves its representatives.

RELATED: America’s young are being recruited into socialism — one dance party at a time

Bettman/Michael Tullberg/Getty Images

Prole drift

Teixeira notes that non-college working-class Americans are conspicuously absent from DSA activism. Socialist candidates, he argues, tend to find their greatest strength in white professional-class areas rather than working-class black and Hispanic ones.

The credentialed left speaks constantly in the name of workers while increasingly inhabiting a different cultural universe from the blue-collar Americans it claims to represent. They took the old Marxian categories, ran them through a dry cleaner, and turned class struggle into a boutique political identity tailor-made for the credentialed precariat.

The people who know the most about class struggle increasingly seem to know the fewest actual people who change tires, hang drywall, drive trucks, or repair furnaces. Meanwhile, the guy who actually owns the steel lunch box is increasingly voting Republican.

Pew found that 67% of Republicans identify as working class, compared with 55% of Democrats. Even among upper-income Americans, 61% of Republicans call themselves working class, compared with just 38% of Democrats. Among college graduates, Republicans are also more likely than Democrats to claim the label.

Stolen valor

That helps explain why the left and right increasingly seem to be speaking different languages when they talk about class. The socialist left sees class primarily through economic insecurity and the relationship between labor and capital. The credentialed left wants the working class’ grievances but has little interest in its virtues. Exploitation, insecurity, and victimhood confer moral status. Self-reliance, toughness, family obligation, and the stubborn conviction that a man ought to solve his own problems do not fit nearly as comfortably into the progressive worldview.

On the right, those virtues have become inseparable from working-class identity. It means taking pride in earning your keep and putting family before corporate diversity initiatives. Above all, it means despising the condescension of credentialed bureaucrats.

An independent contractor running a two-man framing crew might clear six figures in a good year, yet he has zero in common with a university administrator making the exact same salary. One builds real structures that stand against the wind; the other drafts policy documents designed to justify their own redundant existence.

True working-class Americans — the blue-collar workers who actually do physical labor — deserve better than sharing an identity pool with credentialed cosplayers. A diesel mechanic working 12-hour shifts under a hoisted truck engine lives in a completely different galaxy from a brand strategist working remotely from a coffee shop while identifying as a member of the proletariat. A fundamental difference exists between working for a living and belonging to the working class.

The modern left spent decades treating the four-year degree as the ticket to a better life, only to turn around and loot the cultural prestige of the blue-collar lifestyle when those credentials failed to deliver what so many graduates expected. Conservatives don’t need to own factories to champion the working class. They simply honor the dignity of hard work and the common sense of people who fix things when they break.

The credentialed class can speak in the name of the working class all it wants. That doesn’t mean the working class asked it to.

​Bernie sanders, Class struggle, Democratic socialists, Democrats, Labor, Nate silver, Republicans, Blue collar, Lifestyle, Abdul el-sayed 

Sydney Sweeney’s latest ad has some of the world’s top female athletes crying foul.

The actress stripped down for a new campaign promoting sports prediction market Novig, strategically covering herself with footballs, boxing gloves, and other sporting equipment beneath the tagline “Just Sports.”

‘I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this.’

Poor sports

The joke didn’t land with everyone.

The 58-second ad is an obvious appeal to male sports bettors. Sweeney appears nude but covered throughout, delivering betting-related lines as sporting equipment conveniently keeps the commercial suitable for YouTube.

Female athletes have accused the campaign of sexualizing women’s sports and undermining the women who have spent their lives competing in them.

British athlete Lucy Davis was among those unimpressed. “I don’t know wtf Sydney Sweeney was doing, but it’s 2026,” she posted, per Variety. “Stop sexualizing women in sport.”

Remarks on Davis’ social media called her a “new age feminist” and noted she is no stranger to provocative images either.

NCAA gymnast Gracie Kramer was also mocked by readers after she said “Idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like,” alongside her highlight reel.

Both men and women took issue with Kramer’s remarks given her sexualized photos, with one comment on Instagram joking, “How dare you pose with a basketball when you’re not a professional basketball player.”

Sweeney appeared to call out the athletes for their hypocrisy soon thereafter.

RELATED: ‘DISGUSTING’: Megyn Kelly rips into ‘Euphoria’ clip with Sydney Sweeney

Body positive

On her Instagram story, Sweeney shared photos of former UFC champion Ronda Rousey, as well as tennis players Serena Williams and Caroline Wozniacki — in addition to male athletes — who have all posed nude for ESPN’s “Body” issue.

This was followed by Sweeney posting her own ad.

On the Novig website, Sweeney described the ad as “embracing a fun idea,” while noting she is an equity holder in the company.

“The concept is simple: cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports. The campaign brings that idea to life with confidence, humor, and a playful edge,” Sweeney’s statement added.

RELATED: OnlyFans models are offended by Sydney Sweeney mocking their degeneracy on her TV show

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

Tut-tutting Titmus

Additional Sweeney detractors included Aussie Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus, who said she was “infuriated” by Sweeney’s ad.

“I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this,” Titmus said, per the Guardian. “Not only is it a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft, but every woman who enjoys sports for what it really is — teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity. How do we live in a world where monetising a woman’s body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing?”

Moreover, British sprinter Amy Hunt said, “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” in a post-race interview with BBC Sport.

She was immediately criticized for apparent hypocrisy on her social media photos, as well.

Likewise, Australian water polo player Tilly Kearns wrote on a post: “I absolutely fking hate Sydney Sweeney’s new sports ad,” Kearns said, before getting similar treatment as the other Sweeney critics on her own revealing post.

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​Sydney sweeney, Woke, Feminist, Entertainment 

A statutory review committee in the Netherlands has issued a lengthy statement defending the “termination of life” of a 1-year-old child.

The incident of euthanasia occurred late last year and involved a child described as “nearly two years old.”

This second group also claimed that ‘there was no continuous unbearable suffering’ and that ‘reasonable alternative solutions existed.’

The New York Times reported on the incident in June, though specifics regarding the case were then scant. At the time, Minister of Health Sophie Hermans merely acknowledged that a case for euthanizing a child between 1 and 12 had been sent to a committee for review the previous year and that a “termination of life” had followed.

The horrifying, heartbreaking details have since been released by a group called the Review Committee for Late Termination of Pregnancy and Termination of Life in Newborns and Children Aged 1 to 12 Years.

According to the committee, the child was born prematurely and had severe epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and brain damage as well as other debilitating conditions.

Citing the physician who treated and ultimately euthanized the child, the committee said the child endured regular seizures, a sleep disorder, side effects from medication, difficulty swallowing and breathing, and increased risk of infection.

Based on the physician’s assessment, the committee claimed that “the likelihood of death at a very young age due to complications was considered very high.”

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The committee repeatedly argued that the euthanizing physician did everything by the book in accordance with the 2024 statute change permitting the euthanization of children between 1 and 12 in limited circumstances. According to the committee, the parents requested the termination of life for their child and their position on the matter remained “consistent.”

The committee also said doctors “outside the region” were consulted for a second opinion. This second group of doctors concurred that the child was suffering and that the child’s situation was “irreversible” and that “there was no realistic chance of improvement.”

However, this second group also claimed that “there was no continuous unbearable suffering” and that “reasonable alternative solutions existed,” such as other medications and palliative care. According to the committee, the doctor indicated that he attempted the interventions the second group recommended but that the child’s condition only worsened.

The doctor then consulted yet another “outside” doctor, who agreed that ending the child’s life was the only way to alleviate the suffering.

Citing the physician, the committee seemed confident in the predicted future of the child and implied that the child would be a burden to care for:

“The child was severely multiply (intellectually and motorically) disabled, and the prognosis was that the child would remain dependent on care for life for all activities of daily living.””The child suffered from conditions with a limited life expectancy, without any prospect of improvement in quality of life.””The suffering was determined by the permanent, severe brain damage with no prospect of any reasonable degree of development and the eventual permanent lack of any possibility of self-reliance.”

In a section titled “execution,” the committee recounted the death of the child. “At the parents’ request, the doctor chose a method in which the child was gently put to sleep,” the statement said. Then after falling into “a very deep state of sedation,” the child died.

The committee acknowledged that the child could not and therefore did not consent to the euthanasia.

“In view of all the above facts, circumstances, and considerations, the committee is of the opinion that the physician acted with due care,” the committee determined.

Eduard Verhagen, a professor of pediatric palliative care at UMCG in Groningen, supports the committee’s conclusion: “It is good that the committee reached such a well-considered judgment. Many physicians and parents will benefit from this in the future.”

The case will still be reviewed by the Public Prosecution Service.

H/T: LifeNews.com

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​Euthanasia, Netherlands, Politics