A Wisconsin man allegedly stabbed his father in the neck after asking him for a hug, then chased him when he tried to flee, police said.

The Racine Police Department said in a statement that officers responded to a report of a stabbing at a residence around 1 a.m. on Aug. 12.

‘As they went to hug, Joseph quickly presented a knife and stabbed [the victim] in the neck.’

Citing the arrest affidavit, Law&Crime reported that officers found a man with a stab wound who was “covered in blood and holding pressure on his neck.”

The man told police that his son, Joseph Michael Niemiec, stabbed him and then fled.

The father claimed to officers that he heard a noise coming from the back door, which he believed could be an intruder, but realized it was his son.

According to the arrest affidavit, Niemiec asked his father if they could talk because he was having a “rough go at life” and had attempted suicide several times and didn’t know what to do.

Police said Niemiec stepped away to use the bathroom, and when he came back, he asked his dad for a hug.

“As they went to hug, Joseph quickly presented a knife and stabbed [the victim] in the neck,” the affidavit said, according to Law&Crime.

The father said he “felt a punch to his throat and immediately placed his hand over it as he stumbled backwards.”

Law&Crime reported, “Niemiec allegedly came at his dad a second time, but the victim disarmed him and pushed him away. The victim ran away with his son in pursuit, cops said.”

According to the outlet, the father ran to a neighbor’s house, where he called 911.

Meanwhile, his son allegedly fled in a Chevrolet Malibu.

RELATED: Fatally stabbed elderly man found with his heart cut out; victim’s daughter charged with murder

Approximately 10 hours after the alleged stabbing, troopers with the Nebraska State Patrol spotted the Chevrolet Malibu on Interstate 80, roughly 650 miles from the crime scene.

Niemiec was arrested and hit with a charge of attempted first-degree intentional homicide, WITI-TV reported.

Jail records show that Niemiec was booked into the Hall County Jail, where he was being held pending extradition proceedings.

WITI added that the extradition hearing is scheduled for Sept. 15 in Nebraska.

Niemiec appears to be smirking in his mug shot.

The Racine Police Department said the father was treated at Froedtert Hospital and is expected to make a full recovery.

Tracy Kiesler, a neighbor, told WITI: “Oh my gosh, this is right down the road. What the heck is going on? So close to home, it makes you wonder what was going on that someone would do that.”

Kiesler added that the suspect only being 18 years old is “sad and scary.”

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​Nebraska, Wisconsin, Stabbing, Crime 

There is something almost touching about the astonishment with which American universities are discovering that racial discrimination is illegal.

The Justice Department announced Monday that it is investigating the College of William & Mary over scholarships and student benefits that allegedly discriminate according to race. The Civil Rights Division says it is examining whether those programs violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination by recipients of federal funding.

Universities spent years teaching America that racial discrimination could cure racial discrimination. They may now receive an expensive lesson in return.

One might have supposed that this was not a particularly difficult statute for universities to understand. These are, after all, institutions populated by people who pride themselves on detecting racism in places where ordinary mortals see friendship and community.

And yet when discrimination appears in their own programs, their racial acuity suddenly fails them. Universities have spent years building programs around concepts such as “whiteness,” “decolonizing,” privilege, and equity. The problem is not that administrators forgot the Civil Rights Act. It is that many convinced themselves they had discovered a morally superior exception to its basic rule.

The old civil-rights principle was admirably simple: Do not discriminate on the basis of race.

The newer DEI principle often works differently: Unequal treatment may be justified if it is meant to correct an earlier inequality.

The distinction is the whole game.

Under the older understanding, the injustice consisted in treating an individual differently because of his race. If a university told an applicant, “You cannot have this opportunity because you are black,” we knew what to call it. If it told another applicant, “You cannot have this opportunity because you are white,” we also knew what to call it.

The genius of DEI was to make the second sentence sound morally different from the first.

This required an impressive amount of academic labor. Entire vocabularies were constructed to explain why unequal treatment could become virtuous when practiced by the right institutions, against the right groups, for the right reasons. We learned about privilege, power, positionality, systemic racism, dominant identities, marginalized identities, intersectionality, and the rest of the lexicon.

RELATED: Trump’s Justice Department is shining a light on woke universities — finally

Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

The result was an ethical system of remarkable convenience. It condemned racial discrimination while supplying a vocabulary for practicing it.

The trick was accomplished by shifting the unit of moral judgment from the individual to the group.

Once people are sorted into historical categories of oppressor and oppressed, equal treatment begins to look suspicious. If Group A has enjoyed advantages and Group B has suffered disadvantages, treating individual members of A and B according to the same rules can be recast as perpetuating injustice. “Equity” then becomes a justification for unequal treatment today in the name of unequal treatment yesterday.

There is only one troublesome detail: The person standing before you today is an individual human being, not an installment payment on a historical debt.

A white 18-year-old applying for a scholarship did not write the Jim Crow laws. An Asian student applying to medical school did not build the transcontinental railroad with exploited labor. A black student is not the personal embodiment of several centuries of American suffering.

The civil rights tradition understood this. That is why the law speaks in the language of persons rather than assigning inherited moral credits and debits to racial castes.

The DEI worldview has spent years trying to reverse that achievement.

And now comes the awkward part.

The law is still there.

The Civil Rights Act does not contain an asterisk reading, “Discrimination permitted when performed in the service of social justice.” Title VI does not say recipients of federal money may discriminate according to race provided that a diversity consultant has explained why it is virtuous.

Last year, the Justice Department expressly warned recipients of federal funding that antidiscrimination laws apply regardless of whether discriminatory practices are packaged under the label of DEI. Now William & Mary is discovering what that warning means.

Nor is William & Mary alone. The Justice Department has been examining race-conscious practices across higher education. My own university, Arizona State, is under investigation. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions should already have alerted universities that the legal ground beneath racial preferences had shifted dramatically.

But something deeper than law is involved here. Universities are supposed to teach students how to reason. So let us try an elementary syllogism.

Racial discrimination is wrong. Denying someone a benefit because of his race is racial discrimination. Therefore, denying someone a benefit because of his race is wrong.

You don’t need a doctorate in critical theory to follow the argument. Indeed, a doctorate in critical theory may be an impediment.

RELATED: Warning: This college course may be bad for your brain

Andi Purnomo/Getty Images

The great moral achievement of the civil rights movement was not to rearrange the racial hierarchy so different people could enjoy their turn at discrimination. It was to attack the hierarchy itself. The principle was equality before the law — not equality before the law except when our preferred theory of historical oppression recommends otherwise.

There is a useful lesson here for universities accustomed to believing that noble intentions confer immunity from ordinary moral rules.

They do not.

You may call discrimination “equity.” You may put it in a strategic plan. You may hire a vice president to administer it. You may surround it with the soothing language of “belonging” and “inclusion.” You may even persuade yourself that treating students differently according to ancestry is the latest advance in American civil rights.

But eventually somebody will ask the embarrassingly primitive question: Did you treat this person differently because of his race?

If the answer is yes, all the fashionable vocabulary in the world cannot make the question go away.

Universities spent years teaching America that racial discrimination could cure racial discrimination. They may now receive an expensive lesson in return.

The Civil Rights Act never learned DEI.

And the next shoe may be even more expensive: lawsuits from students who say they were denied scholarships, admissions advantages, or other benefits because of race. Once universities concede that race determined access to an opportunity, the legal question becomes much harder to explain away with the language of equity.

​American universities, Critical theory, Federal funding, Justice department, Racial discrimination, Social justice, Racial preferences, Dei, Civil rights act, Arizona state university, Opinion & analysis 

I don’t recall when I applied to become a checker at a grocery store. In fact, I’m fairly certain I am a writer by trade and have never worked in a grocery store, honorable work though it may be.

And yet it seems most stores I wander into to make a purchase have enlisted me to check out my groceries.

Well, I QUIT this unsought job I’ve been shanghaied into.

The self-checkout machine has been around longer than you might think.

I had that thought once again recently, standing beneath the cold fluorescent lights of a large American retailer, attempting to make my purchase — avocados, paper towels, toothpaste, and a package of hamburger — from a machine that clearly regarded me as a criminal. It beeped red and sounded an alert as if a thief were attempting to steal the Mona Lisa. After what seemed like an eternity, a bored, obese woman with four-inch nails ambled over to look me up and down and punch numbers into the screen.

No, I thought. Your look of annoyance notwithstanding, no — I’m not a grocery store checker, and I have no clue how your machine works.

Last year, the day before Thanksgiving, I found myself in an unsurprisingly packed grocery store with only one lane open. I guessed the implication was that everyone with full carts needed to scan them themselves. I watched the cattle plod their way to automated slaughter. How long can we continue this way and remain Americans?

The machines never work. There’s a never-ending requirement for some person to come unlock them (because you didn’t scan the Coke correctly). Half the time, they don’t even provide bags to put your food in. Never mind if you make the mistake of trying to buy fruits or vegetables; you have to scroll through screens to find what you want to buy. Guess what: those organic apples? I’m scanning them as regular old Galas. Oh, is that not right? Maybe you should have someone working here then.

When did we decide that companies could just jettison their workforce and have their customers fill in the slack? Are we going to start waiting and bussing our own tables? Well, there’s actually an entire genre of “restaurants” doing just that. Maybe we can save money by performing our own surgeries? Actually, let’s not give them any ideas.

The rot runs deep

The self-checkout machine has been around longer than you might think. One of the earliest recognizable systems appeared in a Kroger outside Atlanta in 1986. The idea was simple enough. Barcode technology had already transformed the supermarket. If a machine could read the barcode, why did an employee have to hold the box of Cheerios over the scanner?

For retailers, the appeal was obvious. Of course, they never asked customers how they felt about this.

Grocery stores are enormous businesses built on small margins. Labor is expensive, and checkout labor is particularly irritating from a management perspective because demand comes in waves. A store might need a small army of cashiers at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon and only a handful two hours later. Hire enough people for the rush, and you are paying workers to stand around during slow periods. Staff for the slow periods, and customers abandon carts when the lines stretch halfway down the cereal aisle.

RELATED: A huge pagan statue just went up in Texas. Is this the Western civilization we should be cheering?

Darko Mlinarevic/Getty Images

Here’s the thing: That’s a faceless corporation’s problem. I want to avoid becoming a team member at Kroger just to buy my groceries. A normal checkout lane required a human being. Eight lanes required eight human beings. Human beings are expensive and troublesome creatures. They need wages. They take lunch. They get sick. They quit. Some even expect health insurance. So, as with almost every bit of technology in our lives, it made our lives worse by outsourcing it to ourselves. All those low-level jobs, I’m guessing, were very important to those employees sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed.

The human element

There was another function, harder to place on a corporate spreadsheet.

The cashier was a person.

For most people, that hardly mattered. The interaction might consist of nothing more than “How are you?” and “Have a good one.” But those tiny exchanges accumulated into something that once characterized ordinary American life. The butcher knew what cut you liked. The bartender remembered your drink. The hardware-store clerk knew which screw you needed. The grocery cashier asked about your kids.

Commerce involved people because life involved people.

The self-checkout machine represents a different vision. It is efficient, anonymous, and frictionless when everything works. The ideal transaction requires no conversation at all. Enter the store, locate the product, scan it, tap the screen, and leave. God forbid you have to talk to another human being. For years now, chains have known that error rates are high, shoplifting is up, and popularity is in the tank. Apparently, companies are considering scaling them back. Schadenfreude, I say. But will they ever go away? Or will the America we love disappear first?

Consider this, then, my two weeks’ notice. I refuse to scan my own products any more. From now on, even if it means I have to harass a manager to open a lane, I’m deciding to check out of doing unpaid labor. I choose the humans over the machines.

​Tech, Lifestyle 

I wanted a reckoning. I did not want Jason Arday dead.

Three days before he was found dead at his London home last week, I published a column entertaining what I admitted was a mischievous theory: Maybe the disgraced Cambridge professor was not merely a fraud but a world-class trickster who understood liberal institutions well enough to play their racial and ideological anxieties for all they were worth.

Maybe the cruelty was not that somebody finally checked. Maybe the cruelty was that almost nobody checked sooner.

I hoped someday he would confess. I even had the title of the book I wanted him to write: “I Thought You’d Believe Me.”

I wanted that book. I did not want an obituary.

Graeme Wood, writing this week in the Atlantic, makes a persuasive case that my trickster theory was a tad too generous. Arday apparently did not respond to exposure with the wink of a con man finally caught. He insisted he was not a liar. Wood reaches for Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” and its livsløgn — the “life-lie,” a sustaining self-delusion that eventually becomes impossible to let go.

Maybe that’s closer to what happened. We’ll likely never know.

What we do know is that Arday lied. A lot. His public biography accumulated claims about academic appointments, fundraising, extraordinary athletic feats, and racist attacks that proved false, dubious, or impossible to verify. His scholarship contained extensive passages alleged to have been lifted from the work of less prominent academics. Cambridge ultimately opened investigations into his academic work and qualifications and, after his resignation, agreed to an independent inquiry into his appointment.

Enough of these lies!

That includes the lie now being told about the people who exposed them.

The fraud Ibram X. Kendi titled his response “The Media Lynched Jason Arday.” He says journalists have blood on their hands and treats Cambridge’s decision to investigate Arday as an abandonment of a prominent black scholar under racial attack. Wrong.

A lynching is not a metaphor for journalism you dislike. Reporting true and newsworthy facts does not become murder because the subject later dies.

What, exactly, should reporters have refused to investigate? The dissertation? The nonexistent appointments? The millions supposedly raised for charity? The 30 marathons in 35 days? The stories of racist attacks? The memoir?

RELATED: 5-star reviews for a fabulist memoir

Denise Baker/Getty Images

Precisely which question was forbidden?

Thousands gathered in Trafalgar Square on Monday to mourn Arday. The grief was real. So was the anger at the press and at Nathan Cofnas, the academic whose investigation of Arday’s work helped start the avalanche. Cofnas has controversial views about race. So what? If he found copied work, the relevant question is whether the work was copied. His politics cannot restore originality to somebody else’s prose.

This is how the evasion works: Stop talking about the evidence and start talking about the man who found it.

Now comes the possibility of “Arday’s Law.” A petition circulating in Britain actually proposes legislation limiting how many articles may be published about one individual within a given period, on the theory that excessive coverage causes mental anguish. It had garnered more than 3,500 verified signatures as of Wednesday.

The answer to too much journalism, apparently, is a government quota on journalism.

I sometimes fear Britain is lost. Thank God for the First Amendment!

This idea did not appear from nowhere. We have spent years teaching people that speech itself can constitute harm and that institutions therefore have a duty to build ever-safer spaces around anyone who might be harmed by it.

But no space is ever safe enough.

Once speech becomes violence, censorship becomes “care.” Eventually, as we’ve seen, the safe-space logic escapes the campus. A reporter asks too many questions. Too many newspapers publish the answers. Somebody suffers. Therefore, the state must decide when everybody has said enough. No thanks.

RELATED: No, the founders did not ‘tell you so’

Guy Smallman/Getty Images

That is not “liberalism.” Liberalism properly understood demands something harder: accepting that free speech can be intrusive, offensive, unfair, and occasionally cruel while recognizing that giving government power to decide when enough has been said is much worse.

If we want to talk about who failed Jason Arday, look first at the institutions that elevated him.

Graeme Wood’s harshest argument is also his most compelling. Arday was placed in a position for which the evidence increasingly suggests he was nowhere near prepared, while colleagues and institutions such as Cambridge, the BBC, and Simon and Schuster amplified an extraordinary biography instead of bothering to check it. Eventually somebody was going to notice.

Maybe the cruelty was not that somebody finally checked. Maybe the cruelty was that almost nobody checked sooner.

After I learned that Arday had been found dead, I wrote one of my writers: Hubris met Nemesis. And the outcome was invariably the same.

That does not mean Arday got what he deserved. Quite the opposite. Nemesis in tragedy is not proportional justice. It is catastrophe. Recognition comes too late, the machinery is already moving, and the ending is worse than anyone wanted.

Arday’s family and friends deserve compassion. His kids especially. They lost someone they loved.

But compassion does not require one more lie.

Death does not authenticate a false claim. It does not make plagiarism original. And if Arday took his own life, suicide does not retroactively turn reporters into murderers.

The tragedy is terrible enough. Don’t lie about that, too.

​Antiracism, Free speech, Ibram x kendi, Jason arday, Opinion & analysis, Racism, Plagiarism, Media, Truth, Cambridge university, Fraud 

Two years ago, high school freshman Colt Gray shot up Apalachee High School in Georgia, killing two teachers and two students and wounding nine others. School resource officers quickly ended the rampage, and Gray was taken into custody before the death toll climbed higher. His father, Colin Gray, who bought him the gun, was later convicted of manslaughter and second-degree murder.

Colin Gray’s prosecution drew much of the attention because it was a rare case of a parent being held criminally responsible for a child’s violence. But Colt Gray’s own punishment deserves attention too: life imprisonment without parole.

Healing is harder when justice is denied.

Gray’s age, troubled home life, and prior experience of being bullied could have been invoked as reasons for leniency. Instead, the judge concluded that his crime and his motives justified the harshest sentence available for a juvenile offender.

That’s significant because justice is not merely a tool for rehabilitation or deterrence. It also concerns what is owed to victims and to the community after an irreparable wrong.

Gray murdered four innocent people without anything resembling a justification. I would have no moral objection to the death penalty in a case like this. Because he committed the murders as a minor, however, life without parole is the most severe punishment available.

Even that cannot restore what was taken. As the older brother of one victim put it: “The defendant’s family will still get to see their son, talk to him, and know he is breathing. … My mother (and) my father don’t get that privilege. The only way to visit Christian now is by standing over his grave.”

Aristotle defined justice in terms of giving each person what he is properly owed. Whatever one makes of that formulation, it captures something modern criminal-justice debates often neglect: Punishment is not only about what might improve the offender. It is also about recognizing the gravity of the offense.

A sentence cannot bring the dead back. But a legal system that treats grave crimes with proportionate seriousness tells victims, families, and the broader community that what happened to them was not trivial and will not be waved away.

RELATED: ‘Why do we have an FBI?’ Georgia school shooter was on FBI’s radar months before attack

Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

Justice should also force us to confront the nature of the crime. As I wrote at the time, Gray displayed warning signs before he ever brought a gun to school. The lesson is not that every troubled teenager should be treated as a future murderer. It is that threats, fixation on mass killers, access to weapons, and other concrete warning signs should be taken seriously before tragedy makes hindsight easy.

The strongest objection to a sentence like this is that even terrible offenders, especially young ones, may be capable of change. That is a serious argument. But mercy and rehabilitation do not erase agency, nor do they undo the harm already done.

In Gray’s case, the record described an obsession with school shooters and a desire for notoriety. He was obsessed with school shooters. His home life may have been chaotic and his parents may have failed him badly. None of that means he lacked the capacity to understand that murdering classmates and teachers was wrong.

Judge Nicholas Primm made the point directly, saying the shooting “wasn’t done out of fear or anger” but “for the infamy of it.” As such, he doesn’t deserve another chance at living a “normal life.”

Gray may someday understand the evil of what he did. He may repent. He may even become, within prison, a radically different person. But none of those possibilities can make four murdered people less dead or obligate society to restore to him the freedom he deliberately took from others. Explanations are not the same as excuses.

This is where some accounts of restorative justice become inadequate. Restoration may have a place in criminal justice, especially where offenders can make meaningful amends. Murder imposes a limit on that logic because the central harm cannot be repaired.

RELATED: Jordan Salinas: Another ‘good guy with a gun’ ruins the gun control lobby’s narrative

Jason Armond/Getty Images; Facebook/JordanSalinas

The same caution applies beyond this case. It is a mistake to assume that every young violent offender is beyond redemption. It is equally mistaken to assume that redemption, if it occurs, necessarily entitles an offender to release. Recidivism among released prisoners is a real problem, though rates vary substantially by offense, age, and time horizon. The point is not that mercy is impossible. It is that mercy must be ordered to justice, not substituted for it.

By holding offenders accountable, courts can give victims and their families something no therapy program can supply on its own: a public judgment that the crime was real, grave, and deserving of punishment.

Assuming Gray’s punishment sticks, the Apalachee High School community will still have a long road ahead. Students and faculty can honor those they lost, support one another, and take warning signs more seriously in the future. None of that requires pretending punishment itself is healing. But healing is harder when justice is denied.

In this case, justice prevailed.

​Death penalty, School shooting, Criminal justice, Colt gray, Apalachee high school shooting, Mental health, Justice, Nicholas pimm, Restorative justice, Opinion & analysis 

For more than a year, Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) has survived one revelation after another.

Questions about his marriage. Questions about his military record. Questions about the stories he told about being wounded in Iraq. Allegations involving the abuse and blackmail of women. Questions surrounding his businesses and finances. A House Ethics Committee investigation.

Was the story Cory Mills told about Cory Mills true?

Through all of it, the Florida congressman remained defiant.

Stories were dismissed as attacks while reporters were accused of spreading falsehoods. When Blaze News began asking questions about his marriage and religious history, Mills became combative and raised the prospect of litigation. When we later assembled 10 of the most significant contradictions in his public record, his spokeswoman offered a two-word response: “All gossip.”

On Tuesday night, the voters of Florida’s 7th Congressional District rendered a different verdict.

Mills lost the Republican primary to former television anchor Ryan Elijah, who took roughly 47% of the vote to Mills’ 34%. A two-term Republican congressman who once appeared to have a promising future in the party will now leave Congress in humiliating fashion.

The result cannot be credited to any single news organization or investigation. Mills faced scrutiny from law enforcement, congressional investigators, political opponents, local and national journalists, and ultimately members of his own party.

But long before his political support collapsed, Blaze News had begun asking a simple question: Was the story Cory Mills told about Cory Mills true?

What followed became one of the most extensive investigations Blaze News has ever undertaken.

Our reporters interviewed former soldiers and military contractors who had served alongside Mills. We tracked down records. We spoke with former girlfriends, business associates, political figures, and people who had known Mills before he entered Congress. We confronted Mills directly with what we found and gave him repeated opportunities to explain himself.

Again and again, the answers produced more questions.

Here is what we reported.

The marriage certificate

The investigation began after a February 2025 domestic disturbance call involving Mills, which drew attention to a fact that surprised even some people around him: Mills was still legally married and going through a divorce.

That led Blaze News to a 2014 Virginia marriage record. We obtained and verified the certificate. It showed that Mills and Rana Al Saadi had been married by Mohammed Al-Hanooti, a radical Islamic cleric who had been identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas financing case and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot.

Mills confirmed the marriage to Blaze News in an interview. He denied converting to Islam and said he had not known about Al-Hanooti’s background. However, the questions did not end there. Five former associates subsequently told Blaze News that Mills had told them he converted to Islam. Mills continued to deny that account.

The story also opened another avenue of inquiry: Mills and Al Saadi had gone into the international arms business together after their marriage, eventually building the company PACEM into a substantial defense interest. That raised questions about Mills’ relationship with the company after he entered Congress and about his financial disclosures, matters already attracting scrutiny from congressional ethics investigators.

RELATED: GOP Rep. Cory Mills explains why he was married by a radical Islamic cleric

Getty Images

The soldiers who remembered a different Cory Mills

Mills had built much of his political identity around his military and defense contracting experience. He presented himself as a battle-tested veteran and private military operative. His campaign told voters that he had been “WOUNDED TWICE WHILE DEPLOYED.” He repeatedly described himself as having been “blown up twice” in Iraq.

Several former colleagues disputed important portions of Mills’ account, including descriptions of his military qualifications and what happened during two roadside-bomb incidents in Iraq.

That is how investigative journalism is supposed to work.

Scott Kempkins, who was actually wounded in one of the attacks Mills referred to, told Blaze News that Mills could not have been wounded in that explosion because Mills’ vehicle was already about 50 yards away. Chase Nash, who was riding in Mills’ vehicle, likewise told Blaze News: “Cory was not wounded.”

That distinction would become enormously important.

RELATED: Stolen valor? Veterans dispute Cory Mills’ record: ‘He fooled a lot of us’

Anadolu/Contributor/Getty Images

Mills blows up his own ‘wounded twice’ story

Eventually, Mills himself provided perhaps the most damaging evidence against one of his signature biographical claims. His 2022 campaign advertisement had declared in enormous letters that Mills was “WOUNDED TWICE WHILE DEPLOYED.”

Blaze News pressed him on both incidents.

Mills said that during the first explosion, he hit his head inside an armored vehicle. He described suffering a concussion and being evaluated before returning to work roughly three days later. When Blaze News asked whether he had actually suffered a traumatic brain injury, Mills said he had been examined and was told to monitor himself.

Then came the second explosion. Mills acknowledged that he wasn’t inside the vehicle that was struck.

Blaze News asked the obvious question: Was he wounded?

“No, I wasn’t wounded on that,” Mills answered.

It was an extraordinary admission because Mills wasn’t contradicting some hostile characterization invented by a political opponent. He seemed to contradict the words in his own campaign advertisement.

The allegations from Miss United States

Then the investigation took a much darker turn.

Lindsey Langston, then the reigning Miss United States and a Republican official in Florida, told Blaze News in July 2025 that she had been romantically involved with Mills. After the relationship ended, Langston accused Mills of threatening to distribute intimate videos of her to men she might date.

Her allegations resulted in an investigation by the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office, with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement also becoming involved. A Florida judge even eventually granted Langston a restraining order against Mills.

Langston also made allegations about Mills’ finances. She described people arriving at the home they shared with what she characterized as bags of cash and another incident involving money after a dinner.

RELATED: Miss United States accuses Rep. Cory Mills of sextortion, accepting ‘money bags’

Photos courtesy of Lake City Reporter

The political walls come down

With the 2026 midterms on the horizon, Mills appeared capable of surviving all of it. He was a Republican incumbent in a red district. He had built a national profile, and President Donald Trump endorsed him earlier this year. But political support began to disappear as the controversies accumulated.

Mills entered the primary under an active House Ethics Committee investigation, while prominent Florida Republicans, like Anna Paulina Luna, began abandoning him and backing his opponent. Trump, despite his earlier endorsement, conspicuously omitted Mills when he issued a new slate of Florida endorsements shortly before the Republican primary.

Then came Tuesday.

Our readers deserved better. So did Mills’ constituents.

Ryan Elijah defeated him decisively. It would be easy for a newsroom to take a victory lap after an election result like that. That would miss the point. Journalists do not get to remove members of Congress. Our job was never to defeat Cory Mills.

Our job was to find out whether what he told voters was true.

That required months of work that was often considerably less glamorous than the final headlines. Our reporters tracked down people who had worked with Mills decades earlier. We compared recollections against records. We went back to sources. And when evidence contradicted something we had been told, they kept digging.

A congressman who had constructed much of his political appeal around an extraordinary personal biography increasingly found that biography subjected to ordinary scrutiny.

Mills had every opportunity to answer. Sometimes his explanations became part of our stories. Sometimes he denied the allegations, and his representatives attacked the reporting. And sometimes, as with the claim that he had been wounded twice, his answers created problems larger than the original question.

That is how investigative journalism is supposed to work.

Not by beginning with a verdict and searching for evidence to support it, but by refusing to stop asking questions because the subject is powerful, popular, politically useful, or on your own side.

Cory Mills is not a Democrat being investigated by a conservative news organization. He is a Republican congressman, a Trump-backed candidate, a fixture of conservative television, and a politician whose public positions often aligned with those of Blaze News’ audience.

None of that made the questions less important. It made them more important.

Our readers deserved better. So did Mills’ constituents. He was a rising star who reached the heights of political fame, power, and wealth in an extraordinarily short period of time. Unfortunately, it seems he never could escape his demons.

On Tuesday, those constituents got the final word.

Cory Mills spent years building a remarkable story about himself. Blaze News spent more than a year checking it. What was uncovered was a man with a serial allergy to the truth.

In the end, the truth proved harder to outrun than any political opponent.

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​Cory mills, House ethics committee, Miss united states, Politics 

When organizers began preparing for a Jesus March in Chicago, they were shocked to find a large Muslim demonstration already taking place at the same location.

“We’ve got Muslims conquering Chicago as well now. They haven’t conquered the entire country, just most of it,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray comments. “So it’s good to see that they’re infiltrating Chicago as well.”

In a video posted to Instagram, Christian Sean Feucht revealed what he stumbled upon when he went to get ready for the Jesus March.

“Can’t make this up, guys, I am standing in the exact place where we are doing a Jesus March in one hour. And look who’s here. A massive march, a massive Muslim march where right now they’re singing over Chicago, ‘Muhammad is the only one. May Allah be lifted up,’” Feucht said.

“They’re declaring that all Jews and all Christians would be removed from this city,” he explained.

“Our cities in our nation are being fought for in the spirit. I don’t know if you need any more example than this right here. We didn’t make this happen,” he continued. “We literally just walked up to the exact place where we’re doing a Jesus March today in Chicago. There’s a massive Muslim march where they have been declaring over the city.

“And you know what? The church in America is asleep. I’ve been saying it over the last week. This is a perfect example. The church in America is asleep. We need to wake up,” he added.

“Makes me want to vomit,” executive producer Keith Malinak says on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”

“Yeah, we should wake up here,” Gray adds.

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A viral video of a high school soccer player’s alleged attack on another player in South Dakota led to a police investigation.

The match between the Brookings High School Bobcats and Rapid City Central Cobblers spiraled into chaos after one player retaliated against another for a defensive play.

The viral video of the incident garnered over 18 million views on the X platform.

The game was being streamed online as the incident unfolded just before the end of the first half on Friday.

A Cobblers player shoves the Bobcats player out of bounds onto the ground and then kicks him in the back before raining punches down on the boy.

The recipient of the blows tries to shield his face as other players and adults run toward them to break up the beating.

A second later, another Bobcats player rushes in and starts punching as well.

The Cobblers player was issued a red card violation and ejected from the game. According to league rules, he will have to undergo sportsmanship training.

He might also face criminal charges.

Brookings Police Chief Michael Drake told KELO-TV that police were investigating the incident and would interview more than a hundred witnesses. They are also reviewing at numerous videos beyond the viral footage.

The viral video of the incident garnered over 18 million views on the X platform.

The Rapid City Area School District released a statement about the incident to Dakota News Now.

“Rapid City Area Schools is aware of an incident involving a player from Central High School’s soccer program and players from another South Dakota team during a soccer match,” read the statement.

“We expect all students to demonstrate respect, sportsmanship, and appropriate behavior at all times, both on and off the field,” the district added. “We do not condone behavior that does not meet these expectations. Appropriate actions will be taken in accordance with RCAS policies and procedures.”

RELATED: Viral video shows middle school officials barely react as 13-year-old is viciously beaten

The South Dakota High School Athletic Association also released a statement calling the incident “unacceptable” and said it was cooperating with school officials.

“In general, disciplinary actions beyond our general ejection policy are worked through more on the school side, and Rapid City Central is currently doing that within the framework of their own training rules and district policies,” the statement read. “They will keep us up to date on that work and we will support them in whatever is needed.”

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