James Talarico masqueraded as a moderate at a town hall in Fort Worth on Wednesday, suggesting that he supports border security and capitalism and doesn’t want to scrap Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

While it remains to be seen whether Texas voters will buy what the Democratic Senate candidate was selling on stage, the hosts of the event may end up paying a steep price regardless of the outcome of the election.

‘At least pretend like you aren’t overtly trying to rip me off.’

Conservative host Steven Crowder’s company LWC Assets IP, LLC, filed a lawsuit against CNN and Jubilee on Monday, alleging that the media companies deliberately exploited Crowder’s “Change My Mind” trademark “to advance the political objectives of James Talarico’s Senate campaign and profit off the goodwill and viewership of ‘Louder with Crowder.'”

“When you run out of original ideas, you can’t just directly rip one off from the people you’ve attempted to silence for a decade,” Crowder said in a statement to Blaze News.

Crowder has used “Change My Mind” in his programming since October 2017, when he first set up a table outdoors and challenged passersby to change his mind about the Second Amendment.

In the time since, his company has not only registered “Change My Mind” as a trademark — a trademark that remains active — but published over 80 “Change My Mind” videos using the same format.

The lawsuit alleges that in an effort to aid Talarico in attracting “support from Republicans and conservatives despite his extreme Democratic political position,” CNN and Jubilee “sought to associate Mr. Talarico with symbols, messaging, and formats carrying established credibility among conservative audiences.”

Talarico’s campaign did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.

RELATED: Talarico slithered around the truth at his town hall. Here’s the gaslighting he tried to pull.

According to the plaintiffs, CNN and Jubilee had participants engage in one-on-one conversations regarding divisive topics “in a format intentionally modeled after LWC’s well-known ‘Change My Mind’ series.”

The lawsuit notes further that the hosts of the town hall did not merely reference the trademark but “appropriated the Mark itself, together with the precise format and branding for which LWC is known.”

During the town hall, “CHANGE MY MIND” appeared on screen behind Talarico as he debated attendees about various topics, including abortion — an issue about which he claimed the “Bible is silent” — and the national debt.

CNN also repeatedly referred to the debate segment as “Change My Mind” throughout the evening — repetition that prompted Crowder to tweet on Thursday, “C’mon. At least pretend like you aren’t overtly trying to rip me off.”

Lawyers for Crowder’s company alleged that the defendants “sought to create the false impression that LWC approved of, endorsed, sponsored, or were otherwise associated with Mr. Talarico’s campaign and political messaging,” and in so doing, threatened the goodwill the company has developed with its recognizable trademark.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division, specifically accuses CNN and Jubilee of trademark infringement, trademark counterfeit, and trademark dilution, and asks for an injunction against the media companies’ continued use of the trademark, damages, a “reasonable royalty” for the use of the trademark, and a disgorgement of the media companies’ profits in connection with their use of the trademark.

Blaze News did not receive comment from either Jubilee or CNN.

The lawsuit comes just days after Crowder vowed on X that “Change My Mind and its hundreds of millions of plays will not be used to help James Talarico ruin Texas.”

Texas Senate polls 2026: Talarico vs. Paxton.pollwatch.theblaze.com

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Cnn, Jubilee, Steven crowder, Trademark, Lawsuit, Politics 

You open your browser, go to Google, search the name of some company, poke around on the website, click through a drop-down menu, and scroll and scroll and scroll until finally you find a phone number.

OK, good.

Ten minutes proving we’re human to a website. Twenty-seven minutes on hold. Forty-five minutes correcting a bill.

You dial and wait. There’s no ring; the voice comes on almost immediately. You don’t need to press eight for Spanish, so you wait a little longer. The menu resets, and you listen intently. Finally, you hear the directions for billing, so you press seven. Some more audio menus are read through, a few more buttons are pressed, and then finally you hear: “Please wait for the next available representative.”

Ah, finally. You’re there.

Not quite.

Till human voices wake us

The same automated robo-voice comes back and lets you know the estimated wait time is 27 minutes. So you put the phone on speaker and try to make yourself busy.

Finally, after nearly half an hour, a human voice comes on the other end. She has an accent you can’t quite place and can barely understand. In the background is the din of other voices chattering away. She’s in some room somewhere with 14 other customer service representatives talking to 14 other annoyed customers.

She asks for your name, birth date, address, Social Security number, and phone number. You give her all of it, and now, finally, after 35 minutes, she asks what she can help you with.

You explain the problem. She repeats herself when you ask because you can’t understand what she said. After another 10 minutes of back-and-forth, she informs you that she cannot remove the charge because the plan auto-renewed more than three days ago. If you wanted to change plans, you needed to do so within three days of renewal.

She offers to help you change the plan for next month, but you can do that yourself on the website. You’re sick of being on the phone. Forty-five minutes of your life are gone, and you have nothing to show for it.

This is stolen time.

Thick as thieves

Our time is stolen by chatbots, outsourced call centers, and robo-voices in never-ending audio labyrinths that loop us through the same menus again and again. It is stolen by our garbage collection service, our internet service provider, our health insurance company that ran the wrong code for a procedure that should have been covered, leaving us to spend 90 minutes on Tuesday trying to get the bill fixed.

It usually goes unremarked upon. We know we’re annoyed while it’s happening, but rarely do we scale out the fuzzy numbers and consider how much of our lives we spend fixing the mistakes of companies we already pay.

No, it wasn’t always like this. I am not old, but I am old enough to remember when you didn’t routinely end up on the phone “talking to” a machine with no obvious gateway to a real human being. I remember my mother on the phone litigating charges, but it wasn’t that often. Yes, people had to mail more things before the internet. But it’s not that hard to write a check or lick a stamp.

The problem of stolen time comes partly from advanced technological systems that are supposed to make our lives easier and often don’t. But it isn’t just about technology. It’s also about the collapse of competency and accountability.

RELATED: Never AI. Always reality. Only film: The 6-word promise that’s building a worldwide community.

Nick Turco/Instagram.com/film20archive

Footing the bill

A company cuts costs by outsourcing customer service. It automates another department. It builds a system so enormous that normal customers cease to be people and become account numbers. Then when the system screws up, the company doesn’t pay for the mistake.

You do.

Not necessarily in money. In time.

You spend the morning on hold. You repeat your account number to three different people. You explain the same problem four times. You fight with a chatbot that keeps insisting it has answered a question it clearly has not understood.

The company saves money. You lose an hour.

And that hour has to come from somewhere. It comes from the work you need to do, the family you want to see, the friend you meant to call, or the half-hour when you simply wanted to sit somewhere quietly and do nothing.

We don’t notice all of this stolen time adding up because it disappears in small increments and the thieves are so numerous. Ten minutes proving we’re human to a website. Twenty-seven minutes on hold. Forty-five minutes correcting a bill. An hour trying to cancel something that took 30 seconds to sign up for.

So we accept it as an inextricable part of modern life.

It isn’t. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

Time is finite. We only get so much of it. And I don’t particularly want to spend mine listening to hold music because some giant company decided employing enough people to answer the telephone was an unnecessary expense.

It’s stolen time.

I want mine back.

​Chatbots, Corporate america, Customer service, Google, Stolen time, Call centers, Lifestyle, The root of the matter 

A Democratic prosecutor in Virginia is facing criticism after making a simple procedural mistake that allowed an illegal alien criminal to avoid charges.

Naim Arrak was facing up to 40 years in prison and a fine of $500,000 before Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano botched the case.

‘These injustices aren’t just theoretical. There are real victims who are denied justice, and there are new victims because these perpetrators get back on the streets.’

Descano appears to have missed a deadline set by the judge related to witness exclusions in the case.

Because the prosecutor’s office missed the deadline, the charges will have to be dropped against Arrak.

And it’s not the first time.

“There was one prominent case where the incompetence of this office cost justice to an 11-year-old boy who was being sexually assaulted by a man, and the result of aggravated sexual battery was reduced to assault and battery, a misdemeanor, and that man not only got out of prison, he went on to abduct a woman in Prince William County only a few months ago,” said Sean Kennedy with Virginians for Safe Communities to WJLA-TV.

“So these injustices aren’t just theoretical. There are real victims who are denied justice, and there are new victims because these perpetrators get back on the streets,” he added.

Arrak was facing decades of prison time over charges related to an incident in 2025 where he fled from police and hit a fire hydrant, but he had a long criminal arrest history.

He had been arrested more than 30 times for more than 90 felony and misdemeanor charges in five counties. Some of the charges involved violent crimes that include abduction, assault of a woman, strangling, and malicious wounding.

Arrak was charged in the latest incident with unlawful possession of a firearm by an illegal immigrant.

RELATED: Outrage erupts over video of illegal alien’s arrest in DC — then the horrific charges against him are revealed

Although some of the charges were dropped, Arrak is scheduled for trial in January 2027 and remains in jail.

Descano has been criticized for his lenient criminal justice policies that allegedly allowed potentially dangerous suspects back onto the streets.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Charges dropped, Criminal justice, Illegal alien, Virginia, Crime 

A new study meant to reassure corporations about diversity, equity, and inclusion programs has delivered an awkward finding for DEI advocates: Keeping the programs produced no measurable financial advantage over abandoning them.

Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley compared S&P 500 companies that maintained DEI after President Trump’s January 2025 executive order with companies that scaled back their commitments. Firms that kept their programs performed about as well in stock returns and revenue as those that retreated.

Whether a company favors DEI or rejects it, executives cannot assume that a politically popular label will protect conduct that violates anti-discrimination law.

The authors and sympathetic news coverage emphasized the other half of that result: Companies could keep DEI without suffering a significant financial penalty. CBS News framed the finding that way, as did a subsequent Forbes analysis. But the conclusion cuts both ways. If companies paid no price for keeping DEI, they also paid no price for dropping it.

For investors, that raises a straightforward question: Where is the financial return from DEI?

The researchers found no statistically significant revenue or stock market advantage from maintaining the programs during the period they examined. Their paper reports an estimated effect on revenue close to zero. That does not prove every DEI initiative is worthless. It does mean this study offers no measurable payoff for the policies its authors defend.

DEI advocates have spent years insisting that diversity improves the bottom line. McKinsey’s influential reports linked leadership diversity with financial outperformance. But a 2024 reanalysis of its findings failed to reproduce statistically significant relationships using U.S. public-company data. A 2025 review found the broader empirical case considerably less certain than the confident corporate sales pitches suggest.

Companies that believe particular DEI practices improve performance should identify those practices and produce evidence that their gains are real and repeatable. The obligation to prove the promised return belongs to the people making the promise.

Even a demonstrated financial benefit would not settle whether a practice is ethical or lawful. The moral defense of DEI deserves scrutiny too. A corporate policy that uses race or sex to distribute opportunity may generate its own grievances, regardless of the language used to promote it.

Employment discrimination complaints have hardly disappeared. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 88,201 new charges in fiscal year 2025, roughly level with the previous year and substantially above 2021. Those figures alone cannot tell us how many complaints involved DEI. They do underscore why employers should examine the legal consequences of their hiring and promotion rules.

The Berkeley paper also reveals an unmistakable political perspective. It refers to the Trump administration as a “regime,” discusses what its authors regard as “democratic erosion,” and describes the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd collectively as “murders.” It suggests that organized corporate resistance can hinder the consolidation of executive power.

RELATED: Nikole Hannah-Jones learned the hard way what ruins schools

Paras Griffin/Getty Images

Those judgments do not, by themselves, invalidate the statistical analysis. They do help explain the argument the authors want their findings to support: Corporations should feel free to maintain DEI as an expression of political and moral commitment, even without a measurable financial gain.

But companies face risks beyond the market response measured in the study. Public controversy can damage a brand, and legal enforcement can carry a steep price.

Consider Cracker Barrel’s 2025 rebranding backlash. Critics connected its logo redesign to broader complaints about the company’s “woke” direction. By mid-September, its shares had fallen nearly 16% since the August announcement, customer traffic had weakened, and the company had reversed course. A logo controversy is not a controlled test of DEI policy. It is a reminder that political and cultural backlash can have financial consequences.

The federal government has supplied a more direct warning. In April, IBM agreed to pay more than $17 million to resolve Justice Department allegations involving discriminatory employment practices and federal contracting. Deloitte settled for $21.5 million in August, and Accenture agreed to pay $25 million in September to resolve similar allegations. The settlements resolved government claims without findings of liability, but the costs were real.

The Justice Department also issued guidance outlining its view of unlawful discriminatory practices tied to federal funding. Whether a company favors DEI or rejects it, executives cannot assume that a politically popular label will protect conduct that violates anti-discrimination law.

The Berkeley study shows that companies maintaining DEI suffered no detectable financial penalty in the period examined. It also fails to establish a financial reward. Advocates who want shareholders, employees, and customers to support these programs still owe them a case grounded in performance, ethics, and law. That case cannot rest on assurances that DEI is harmless.

​California, Dei, Ethics, George floyd, Ibm, Justice department, Trump administration, University of california, Opinion & analysis, Berkeley 

From a young age, we ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. Firefighter, doctor, president, mechanic, astronaut, teacher, actor — the list goes on.

Dreams shift as children discover their gifts, what they enjoy, and where the two overlap. The kid who wanted to be a doctor might change his mind after finding out he can design spaceships and likes math better than anatomy.

What discoveries, studies, and breakthroughs are missing from academia simply because the men who would have made them were unfairly denied the opportunity?

Allowing people to follow their dreams has always been an American aspiration and part of what makes our country exceptional. Yet today, one group of Americans — young men — is at risk of being shut out from their dreams, largely through no fault of their own.

Mountains of evidence show that our education system and economy are increasingly leaving boys and men behind. This is a national crisis our political leaders must urgently acknowledge and address.

For Exhibit A, simply look at the last 50 years of wage trends. Although earnings for women have steadily increased, nearly doubling in the last half-century, men’s wages have remained largely stagnant. Indeed, while the inflation-adjusted median full-time wage for women has grown by $21,750 since 1976, it has increased for men by only $7,570.

But it gets worse. In August, 98% of U.S. job growth went to women according to government statistics. While female employment has grown by 870,000 since last year, male employment has contracted by 1.5 million. Roughly one-third of men are not participating in the labor force, including over half of young men ages 16-24.

The same trend is happening in college participation. In the mid-1990s, American men and women ages 25-34 were equally likely to have completed college, but the gap has ballooned since then. Today, about 47% of young women have a bachelor’s degree compared to 37% of young men. Women make up about 55% of U.S. undergraduate enrollment, while men account for 40% (with the remaining 5% being unknown or unreported).

Male education and workforce success directly impact family formation. Women are more likely to marry a man with a steady income, and men are more likely to want to work if they have something to work toward. But couples are told to wait until they have financial stability before having kids, a goal that is increasingly difficult to reach, leading them to have fewer children.

And while feminists may cheer the number of women in the 9-to-5 work world, it has not come without a cost. As many observers (including Elizabeth Warren before she entered politics) have pointed out, more mothers entering the workforce has made households increasingly reliant on both parents working to stay afloat, creating a “two-income trap.” It is financially unfeasible for many women to stay home with their children, even when they want to.

Many factors have led us to the current status quo. American industrial and trade policy over the last half-century has shipped many blue-collar jobs overseas while driving down wages for those who remain. Economic policy influenced by feminism has convinced many women to invest in careers rather than family. But we should not overlook another important driver of young men’s present disadvantage: the rapid proliferation of DEI across society.

RELATED: The global meritocracy myth sells Americans’ inheritance cheap

Blaze Media Illustration

Jacob Savage’s essay in Compact magazine last December highlighted the devastating impact of the DEI regime on young men. Fittingly titled “The Lost Generation,” Savage chronicled how Millennial and Gen Z men over the last 10 to 15 years have found themselves chained to the same job, or without one entirely, while less qualified but more “diverse” employees rise in the ranks. This practice has run rampant across numerous industries — entertainment, academia, the medical field — with untold casualties.

What film masterpieces did we miss by passing over a promising writer for a more diverse candidate? What medical breakthroughs did we forgo to reach a quota? What discoveries, studies, and breakthroughs are missing from academia simply because the men who would have made them were unfairly denied the opportunity?

Fortunately, DEI has been in retreat lately, thanks in large part to the Trump administration’s crackdown. DEI has also declined in popularity in the workforce, though it still boasts majority support amid widespread ignorance about its true consequences. Even so, DEI remains a powerful force that could regain greater influence if political conditions become more favorable.

Meanwhile, young men continue to suffer. A recent Institute for Family Studies survey found that about half of men ages 18-29 now see the American dream as out of reach. Many have retreated into destructive pastimes such as pornography and gambling, while suicide rates have risen to record highs. The statistics are grim in every direction.

So where does this leave us?

Our young men are still dreaming as they did when they were little boys, but they are being forced to acknowledge that hard work may not be enough to achieve those dreams. In America especially — the country founded on the ability to get ahead and create something spectacular — this is a reality we should not tolerate.

The situation young men face is an issue lawmakers can no longer afford to ignore. We need an economy where men’s skills and contributions are valued and appropriately compensated. We also need to make it possible for a family to raise children on one income. There is no easy fix for these problems. It will necessarily involve a myriad of approaches, from fully eliminating DEI to bringing back blue-collar work and stabilizing our broken dollar, whose debasement undergirds so much of Americans’ current struggles.

To save the American dream from today’s threats, we must tackle this challenge. We owe it to the next generation of boys who still dare to dream.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.

​American dream, Boys, Dei, Economy, Education system, Gen z, Job growth, Marriage, Men, Millennials, Trump administration, Women, Wages, Opinion & analysis 

Social Security’s funding shortfall has started a serious debate among young workers and their elders, with younger workers frustrated that older Americans are asking them to pay higher taxes to protect the benefits they’ve been counting on.

A new poll highlights the divide — 89% of Americans over 65 support preserving current retirees’ benefits, even if it means raising taxes. Among adults ages 30 to 44, support falls to 57%.

“There’s a new poll about Social Security,” BlazeTV host Ron Simmons explains on “Relatable.” “U.S. Boomers, which I’m included, support tax hikes on young workers to keep current Social Security checks.”

“I can imagine that’s controversial because I know that when I was your age, if you’re younger listening to this, I would have been against increasing my taxes to take care of people that had already paid in,” he continues.

“But, you know, now that I’m a Boomer, let me tell you the way I look at it,” he adds.

“When I first started, you could get full benefits at age 65. Then they came along and changed it,” Simmons says.

“They increased the retirement age. And increasing the retirement age means that people my age and younger would pay more in for a longer period of time before we were able to get benefits,” he explains.

Simmons, who qualifies to get full benefits in the next couple of years, has paid up to $360,000 in Social Security.

“If that would have been invested at 5% interest, that would have been a value of about $900,000. So, my account, if it was like in a 401(k), would probably be sitting there with about $900,000 in it,” he explains.

“If I went out and bought an annuity, meaning an annuity is something that pays me every month until the day I die, then that annuity would be about $5,000 a month. Now, that’s less than what I’m going to get from Social Security based on the estimates that I’ve found on the website,” he continues.

“The problem is, that money wasn’t invested like it should be. What happens is, we all put money in Social Security, and then the government takes that money and does other things with it, and they leave an IOU that essentially is not earning us any interest,” he adds.

What Simmons believes should be done is give people the ability to “direct the investment of the amount that you put in there.”

“If it was invested in a balanced portfolio, a mixture of stocks and bonds, that’s going to grow at 8 or 9% a year,” he explains.

“And over your career, that’s going to create a huge account that, again, you could draw on, or they could even just buy you an annuity and pay you a certain amount every month,” he continues.

“That’s the issue,” he adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Social security, Taxes, Ron simmons, Boomers, Blazetv show