The Democratic establishment is replete with leftists who have in recent years supported, among other things, men in women’s sports, the genital mutilation of children, unchecked abortion, radical wealth redistribution initiatives, racial reparations, open border policies, DEI, and climate alarmism.

Despite the party’s relative extremism, there is an appetite among Democratic voters to drive the party further to the left as evidenced in the recent primary successes enjoyed in Colorado, New York, and Pennsylvania by Zohran Mamdani-styled Democratic Socialists of America candidates.

‘STOP pooping in the punch bowl.’

DSA candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, for example, is a Muslim convert who hates cops, Israel, and the border, and co-founded a group that called for the “total eradication of Western civilization.”

Establishment Democrats’ efforts to downplay the threat of their party’s capture by Chevalier and her fellow travelers have not only been frustrated at the polls but on cable news, where DSA national co-chair Megan Romer proudly admitted her group’s aims for America.

Speaking to Romer on Sunday, just days ahead of the 2026 Democratic Socialist Summit in Chicago, Fox News’ Shannon Bream referenced remarks the radical made at the DSA convention last year.

“Power only cedes itself to a greater degree of power,” Romer told her comrades, reported the Daily Economy. “We win by making conditions so intolerable for the ruling class that they would rather give in to our demands than continue to live with the disturbance we cause, until we are able to fully seize power ourselves.”

When asked whether these remarks were aimed at the Democratic Party, Romer said, “It’s aimed from the working class to the ruling class — so the two-party duopoly, the two corporate parties, it’s aimed at both of them.”

RELATED: The socialists are coming for the Senate

Romer confirmed that establishment Democrats should be worried because “they have not been delivering, and our candidates are and have been.”

While the DSA might pose a problem for the Democratic Party, the DSA’s ascendancy could also mean trouble for the republic. After all, Romer confirmed to Bream that the DSA seeks to:

eliminate the U.S. Senate;replace the presidency and the U.S. Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary handpicked and overseen by Congress;abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement;abolish U.S. borders and grant amnesty to all illegal aliens presently residing in the country;defund the Department of War;abolish prisons; andseize public control of most large corporations.

Going through this list of some of the DSA’s plans for America, Romer emphasized that “the Senate is an anachronistic institution” and complained that it is “part of the system that was made to make sure that the people didn’t have too much of a say.”

Pressed on whether there would be any immigration enforcement in the absence of ICE, Romer pushed the utopian notion that there would be no need given a recalibration of American foreign policy.

“The open borders is part of a longer-term international plan that involves us stopping destabilizing countries,” said Romer. “Most people who are coming to this country are coming as economic refugees, and we destabilized their country. We did that.”

“If we can get to the place where the U.S. is not destabilizing countries in order to mine them for resources, there will be significantly less migration,” added the socialist.

Finally, when asked what the DSA plans to do with criminals — particularly rapists, murderers, and other dangerous individuals — when America’s prisons are abolished, Romer kicked the can down the yellow brick road, stating, “When we get rid of this need for crimes of poverty to exist, when we get rid of that destabilizing force that creates so many people who are living in desperate situations and doing desperate things, that brings those numbers down to very small numbers, and then we can collectively decide what we do with those people.”

“I suspect it won’t look like the prison system as we know it today,” added Romer.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat set for retirement, said of democratic socialists, “I think the tent for the Democratic Party can accommodate diversity.”

However, former Obama adviser Van Jones is among the Democrats beginning to freak out over the influx of “extremists” into the Democratic tent.

“I’m tired of being told that, to be a progressive, I now must swear allegiance to crazy ideas,” Jones wrote earlier this month.

Jones noted that DSA-types are “trying to sneak backwards proposals into our party, hoping mainstream Democrats are too frustrated with MAGA and the Democratic Party establishment to notice. But we see you. Yes, we want our Democratic Party to be a big tent. But we don’t need ‘party poopers.[‘] So STOP pooping in the punch bowl — and telling us the turds are ice cubes.”

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​Democratic party, Democratic socialists, Zohran mamdani, Politics 

There’s a striking parallel between ESPN’s latest round of layoffs and the dystopian world of the film “The Purge” — and BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock knows why.

“In the movie ‘The Purge,’ the ruling class gives you one night a year, 12 hours, where all crime, including murder, is legal. They sell it to you as catharsis, healing, a release valve, so the country stays calm the other 364 days,” Whitlock explains on “Fearless.”

“It’s a lie. The purge was never about healing. It was about money. The elites quietly eliminating the people they decided were too expensive to keep and dressing it up as something noble so nobody asked the real question,” he continues, adding, “This week ESPN began its purge.”

Of those “purged” were Ryan Clark, Cam Newton, and many other veteran anchors.

“The network wants you to believe it’s just business, restructuring, budget cuts. Don’t buy the catharsis story. There’s a body they’re protecting. It’s worth billions,” he says, “It’s called the Super Bowl.”

And while some are blaming “racism” for the firings, Whitlock points out that plenty of white broadcasters have been cut.

“The purge doesn’t kill by color. It kills by cost. It eliminates whoever’s become too expensive, too much liability for the future the elites are building. That’s what you’re watching. Not a racial purge, an economic one,” he says.

“Clark and Newton weren’t cut for their skin, they were cut because they carried the most risk to the thing ESPN is trying to save,” he explains, noting that they were “loud, divisive,” and “expensive in every way that matters when you’re about to host the biggest broadcast in America.”

And the writing was on the wall when ESPN hosted the most recent Super Bowl featuring Bad Bunny as the halftime performer.

“Last year’s Super Bowl leaned into Bad Bunny at halftime. Divisive, political, and a huge slice of the country. The traditional patriotic core of the football audience felt like the game was no longer being made for them,” Whitlock says.

“The NFL’s whole flirtation with the Jay-Z era, the constant catering to an audience that was never the football base. It cost them. The ratings told the story, and everyone inside the building read it,” he continues.

“What do you do? You purge. You clean out everyone who represents the era that started the bleeding. Not for their color, for their cost to the number you have to protect,” he adds.

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​Bad bunny, Espn, Jason whitlock, Jay z, Ruling class, Super bowl, Blazetv show 

The number of lawyers being reprimanded for AI usage has skyrocketed over the past year.

Those getting caught fudging their work aren’t from law offices born out of a garage either; they’re from some of the biggest legal teams in the country.

‘AI can be a useful tool, but it cannot replace the lawyer’s duty.’

Blaze News previously reported on a 2025 case from Mississippi where both sides of the aisle were caught using artificial intelligence when they submitted nonexistent citations in support of their case. The judge reprimanded both parties and canceled the trial.

Things have only gotten worse, as the number of cases involving hallucinated citations has since gone from hundreds to thousands. These cases have been tracked by a researcher named Damien Charlotin, who reports around 1,800 cases worldwide have been stymied by AI usage, more than 1,200 of which are in the United States.

Proponents of AI can’t blame this on mom and pop legal shops either. A significant number of high profile legal teams have been caught up in the craze, including the Department of Justice.

A DOJ lawyer in Michigan faced a grilling from a judge just last week over citing a nonexistent appeals court case.

“It seems this citation was likely produced by generative artificial intelligence,” Chief Judge Hala Y. Jarbou wrote, per Bloomberg.

Months earlier, a former DOJ lawyer in North Carolina submitted false quotes and erroneous citations, with the judge stating that the attorney “cannot avoid the consequences of his failure to account” for the hallucinations.

RELATED: Even if you don’t choose to use AI, you’re probably interacting with it

David Zorrakino/Europa Press/Getty Images

Sullivan & Cromwell, a nearly 150-year-old Wall Street law firm, apologized to a federal judge in April over hallucinated citations. Shockingly, the legal team admitted to three dozen errors, a number of which were reportedly fake passages from real cases. The firm also claimed some of the errors were clerical, the New York Times reported.

Even the AI creators are not immune to the citations, or rather, double-checking their work.

In May, a lawyer for Anthropic told a judge in a music copyright lawsuit in California that her team had used an incorrect citation that was hallucinated by AI.

The attorney reportedly used Anthropic’s own chatbot, Claude, to create a citation from a real academic journal. However, the result was a fake title with fake authors, Reuters reported.

The law firm, Latham & Watkins, described it as an “an embarrassing and unintentional mistake.”

RELATED: Livid judge cancels trial and busts lawyers for faking briefs with AI — on both sides

JEFFERSON SIEGEL/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

Attorney Crawford Appleby at Wisner Baum told Blaze News in a statement that AI hallucinations are becoming one of the biggest risks facing the modern U.S. legal system.

“AI can be a useful tool, but it cannot replace the lawyer’s duty of candor, competence, and independent judgment,” Appleby said.

The United States is leading the charge in AI hallucinations, with Australia, Canada, and the U.K. the next biggest offenders, but trailing behind by more than 1,000 cases.

The most common types of hallucinations happen in the form of fabricated case law (~1,500), followed by creating false quotes (~500). Misrepresentations of case law also happen quite often (~750), while sometimes AI can provide outdated advice (30+) or cite laws that have been repealed (15+).

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​Artificial intelligence, Case law, Department of justice, Ai hallucinations, Tech 

A recent national poll from RMS Research has some very good news for supporters of President Donald Trump.

In a poll conducted between July 13 and Tuesday, the president’s net approval rating increased to the highest level he’s had since spring despite the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran and some inflation woes.

That lead might not be enough for Democrats to win control of both houses of Congress given the structural advantage Republicans have.

Trump hit 46% approval with only 52% of respondents saying they disapprove of the president’s job, for a net rating of -6.

RMS Research data reveals this rating is the highest for Trump since late April and early May, when his net rating sunk to -17.

The results mirrored those reported by a Morning Consult poll released July 6, which also concluded his net approval rating had climbed to its highest since April. Improvements among Republicans and independents led to the increase.

Republicans in general also “gained trust across the board,” Morning Consult said, while Democrats’ “issue edge narrowed on everything.”

However, despite the increase, Republicans continue to lag behind Democrats on the generic ballot. Democrats have 45% support in the generic ballot while Republicans have only 42%, per Morning Consult.

That lead might not be enough for Democrats to win control of both houses of Congress given the structural advantage Republicans have through redistricting in several states, according to recent analysis from CNN political analyst Harry Enten.

RELATED: Democrats face CRUSHING math problem trying to take over the Senate, CNN’s Harry Enten says

Republicans made gains on many issues that the poll asked voters to consider. Democrats stalled, despite having a lead.

The generic ballot is seen as a bellwether for the midterm elections.

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​Democrats, Donald trump, Polling, Republicans, Politics 

I recently came across a short article in which the female half of an early-30s DINK (dual-income, no kids) couple in Charlotte, North Carolina, outlined their finances.

They make a combined income of about $380,000 per year. They have no debts other than a $450,000 mortgage, which they expect to pay off in the next seven years. They’ve accumulated $1.1 million in savings, to which they add about $8,000 each month. Other than gym memberships and an occasional dinner out, they rarely splurge.

‘People can’t have kids if they can’t afford a house,’ they say. Really? Are renters rendered sterile? I was unaware.

Baby bust

“I love our life together,” she says. The only thing missing? Children. They definitely want them, but have chosen to wait until they “feel more financially secure.”

You read that right. An otherwise financially literate couple thinks $380,000 per year is not enough to have kids.

Prudence is one thing; this is more like paralysis. And it’s fairly widespread in 2026, as evidenced by a decline in both birth rates and general happiness.

How did the standards for a good life balloon so far beyond our ancestors’ wildest imaginings? How did people come to believe they cannot start a family without things their grandparents never possessed? And how did this historically anomalous idea come to seem perfectly reasonable?

Feature creep

There is no single explanation, but our inflated expectations seem to track alongside what is sometimes called “feature creep.” This happens when manufacturers continually add conveniences that, in theory, improve a product but eventually raise the baseline — and the price — to a once-unheard-of level.

My sister recently bought a new car. It is amazing. It can do all sorts of things, and despite not being a luxury model, it was quite expensive. She told the salesman, an old-car enthusiast, that she wished she could simply buy a basic car without all the bells and whistles. He agreed.

That is feature creep. The floor has risen so high that heated steering wheels, assisted driving, and iPads embedded in the dashboard are becoming standard equipment. The same thing has happened to houses and apartments, which are now expected to have renovated kitchens, new bathrooms, smart lights, smart thermostats, and every other costly convenience.

Lease on life

As our products have become more elaborate, so have our expectations for what constitutes a good life — and for what having children requires.

People have grown accustomed to so much comfort that they have lost the ability to adapt as their parents and grandparents routinely did in the not-so-distant past.

This is usually the point when someone brings up the housing market.

“People can’t have kids if they can’t afford a house,” they say.

Really? Are renters rendered sterile? I was unaware.

The Root family must have slipped through the cracks, because we have had children while renting and somehow survived. I am obviously sympathetic to the problem of exorbitant housing costs, but I am not going to pretend that home ownership is a prerequisite for having children.

My parents had me while living in an apartment. My father’s parents had their first child in an old Army tent pitched behind the farmhouse where they were staying for the summer. And that is only the 20th century. The farther back you go, the tougher it gets.

RELATED: You will never be ‘ready’

Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

Doom patrol

The belief that renters cannot even contemplate starting a family is closely related to a couple earning $380,000 a year feeling too financially insecure to have children. Both are also distantly related to the depressive claims of online doom-mongers that life is harder than ever, when it so obviously is not.

No one starves in the United States today. It has been a very long time since that was a normal possibility. We have become so thoroughly removed from true want that we have forgotten what the word means.

After the extraordinary material abundance of the 20th century, it is perhaps unsurprising that millions of people developed unreasonable—and ultimately unsatisfiable—expectations for what they need before they can live well or bring children into the world.

The remarkable thing is that they sincerely believe it. Deep down, they really do feel that what they have is not enough, despite having more than their grandparents could have imagined.

Those DINKs in Charlotte really do believe that an income of $380,000 a year is not enough to start a family.

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

​Lifestyle, Money, Finances, Dinks, Savings, Marriage, Children, Mortgage, The root of the matter 

The Smithsonian Museum is using taxpayer dollars to rewrite history to include race, privilege, and oppression — and Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) is fighting back.

During a series of congressional hearings, Gill handily dismantled their woke version of America with a strategy so simple it’s devastating: asking basic questions.

“Is it important to be polite?” Gill asked the director of the museum, Dr. Anthea Hartig.

“Yes, sir,” she responded.

“It’s also interesting because the same mass action toolkit that your organization has been promoting references politeness as a defining characteristic of white supremacy culture. Ma’am, are you a white supremacist?” Gill asked, to which she replied that she was not.

“Can you help me square why your organization says that being polite is part of being a white supremacist?”

“I’m not exactly familiar,” she replied.

BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is impressed, telling Gill that his “line of questioning” in these committee hearings has been “incredible.”

And he’s asking these questions for good reason, telling Gonzales that the American people’s taxpayer dollars are being “used to undermine our country, undermine our values, and slander the very American people who are paying for all of this nonsense.”

Nonsense that includes depicting Mickey Mouse as “racist” — which Gill also questioned Hartig on.

While Hartig replied that Mickey Mouse is not racist, he had the receipts.

“According to the Smithsonian Institution, one of your exhibits referenced Mickey Mouse as representing quote ‘vestiges of long-standing traditions of blackface minstrelsy.’ Would you describe that as racist?” Gill asked.

Hartig responded that Mickey Mouse is not rooted in racism, but rather “minstrelsy.”

“I have to ask you, how much personal pleasure do you get out of being able to put these people on the hot seat and make them squirm like that?” Gonzales asks Gill.

“The best part about this,” he responds, “is that so many of these leftists have never had to defend anything that they believe.”

“They have so much institutional power that they can … sit at the Smithsonian Institution and tell the world that black is white and up is down and nobody calls them on it,” he adds.

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​Brandon gill, Congressional hearings, Racism, Sara gonzales, Smithsonian museum, Mickey mouse, White supremacy, Blazetv show 

I live in Loudoun County, Virginia, about a mile from the largest concentration of data centers on earth, which has given the online discourse around them a vaguely odd character.

At worst, they are large concrete squares that are indistinguishable from any other industrial park, except that they produce less noise or pollution. My utility bill is ordinary, if slightly below the national average, and my roads are as nice as any in the country. But to hear online activists talk, my community should be on the verge of running out of water.

We have been taught to be more afraid of the side effects than excited about the potential.

Loudoun County hosts roughly 200 operating data centers; Northern Virginia’s cluster draws some 4,140 megawatts, more than double Beijing’s, the world’s second-largest market.

Since the data centers began being built in the late 1990s, Loudoun County has been able to spend lavishly on infrastructure and public schools, all while cutting its real property tax rate. In fact, the county calculates that every dollar of services it provides the industry returns some $26 in taxes.

When I noticed the glaring difference between this reality and the online discourse, I realized that this is a recurring pattern I have seen my entire life.

When I was growing up in the early 2000s, there was a set of beliefs in American society that were viewed as nonpolitical and weren’t debated by either side. They acted as an ideological background radiation of sorts. I like to call this the “Boomer Truth Regime,” after both the Baby Boomer generation and the boom time after World War II.

You can take the American 20th century as one huge emotional and moral arc. Starting in 1900 and continuing for the next 45 years, our country had its optimism for the future hammered out of it. It was in this era that Jim Crow intensified, the Depression battered the country, and we fought two world wars.

But beginning in the late 1940s, American society, and to a lesser extent the whole world, began a process of upward movement — and as a result acquired a feeling of almost inevitable, rapid, transformative salvation. Start with almost any evil, real or perceived, of that century — sexism, colonialism, segregation — and trace it forward, and you will find a satisfying narrative conclusion by 1999.

RELATED: The question of the AI age: How much humanism is too much?

Moor Studio/Getty Images

In “Zero to One,” Peter Thiel and Blake Masters called the resulting mood “indefinite optimism”: the belief that things simply get better without anyone having to decide how. And so we bundled all the changes of that era together and sanctified the whole package.

For decades, it has been taken for granted that basically all societal and cultural shifts in the second half of the 20th century were good — and that they existed as a single, inseparable package.

Among the sanctified conclusions was not only indefinite optimism for the future but also a deep fear of the dangers of new technology. In short, the Boomer Truth Regime permanently fused the word “machine” with the word “gun,” as they were in the world wars. This was largely a traumatic response to the misuses and abuses of the cornucopia of technology by tyrants during that era.

In the early 20th century, the world had at its fingertips an inventory of wonders such as nitrogen fixation, airplanes, automobiles, submarines, rockets — and every one of them was first used at scale for murder. So when our society looks at a new power, what we see is the face of the murderer.

We see Hiroshima, or the tank, or the B-2 bomber. It is this same reflex that has killed the construction of new nuclear or hydroelectric power, because we have been taught to be more afraid of the side effects than excited about the potential.

The Boomer Truth Regime decided that anything capable of doing huge things is, on its face, terrifying and must be vigorously opposed.

You can see the degree to which this belief is highly influential in America and other Western countries in the polling data around AI.

In Ipsos’ 2026 global survey, 83% of Chinese respondents and 79% of Indian respondents say AI products make them excited; in the United States, the figure is only 33%, compared with 29% in Britain. Or take, for example, that when asked whether AI’s benefits outweigh its drawbacks, 85% of Chinese respondents and 80% of Indians say yes, compared to only 38% of Americans.

RELATED: The terrifying scale of the data center land-grab

Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The Pew Research Center also finds that about half of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI, and only one in 10 is the reverse.

It is possible that the data centers in Loudoun County will begin to drive up costs. Virginia’s own legislative auditors project that data-center growth could add $14 to $37 a month to a typical residential bill by 2040 — but the size of the effect is nowhere near the emotional reaction you see in American society right now.

The same report found that data centers currently pay their full cost of service and have no history of cost-shifting to households.

For decades, doubting any piece of the Boomer Truth Regime package was the equivalent of a kid complaining about his bedtime. Dissidents could say whatever they wanted, in whatever register they wanted, precisely because there was no chance the thing they were calling for would ever be implemented.

Every critique of the Boomer Truth Regime was essentially powerless. But that era will soon end, as the generation raised in the 21st century inevitably takes over. It isn’t that younger generations stopped believing in pieces of the package, but that the idea of viewing it as a sanctified whole is dissolving.

And when the sanctity eventually falls away, everything will be re-examined at once — not just the parts you dislike. The whole package, from nuclear power to civil rights law, will be on the table in our lifetime. It is up to us to defend the parts we value and reject the parts we don’t.

One part I reject is the idea that we can no longer, and should no longer, do incredible things. AI is one such thing. It of course has dangers, but it also has almost incalculable potential — and I know which side I’m betting on.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

​Data centers, Loudoun county, Virginia, New technology, Boomers, Jim crow, America, Peter thiel, Zero to one, Hiroshima, Opinion & analysis, Artificial intelligence