A newly released mug shot reveals the bloodied face of a Florida man who allegedly challenged a police officer to a fight inside a hospital.

Ronald Jeffery Johnson, a 51-year-old man from Fort Lauderdale, reportedly was involved in an incident at the Broward Health Medical Center on Aug. 29.

‘I physically subdued his intentional, aggressive, and violent behavior towards me, and he was taken into custody.’

According to the arrest report obtained by the New York Post, Johnson allegedly was yelling at medical staff in the emergency department when an off-duty police officer in full uniform was notified of the alleged disturbance.

“I observed the defendant yelling at medical staff from the opposite side of the registration desk, causing a breach of peace in the waiting room and creating fear in the surrounding patients,” the officer wrote in the arrest report.

Once Johnson saw the cop, he allegedly confronted the officer.

“I want to fight you,” Johnson reportedly yelled to the cop before charging toward the officer.

“A physical altercation between me and the defendant ensued, where he initially grabbed me in an attempt to fight me and resisted me from controlling him,” the arrest report stated.

WPLG-TV reported that police said Johnson grabbed the officer and resisted efforts to restrain him.

The officer wrote in the report, “I physically subdued his intentional, aggressive, and violent behavior towards me, and he was taken into custody.”

The arrest report said the officer suffered a cut on his left hand during the alleged confrontation that required multiple stitches.

After receiving medical treatment at the hospital, Johnson was arrested and transported to the Broward Sheriff’s Office Main Jail.

According to jail records, Johnson was charged with aggravated battery on an officer, resisting an officer with violence, assault on an officer, and disorderly conduct.

Records show Johnson was being detained on an $8,500 bond.

Johnson garnered notoriety online for his mug shot, which showed him propped up; his face was severely swollen and bloodied, and he had a black eye.

RELATED: Florida man faces felonies after furious feud with neighbor erupts into alleged fecal attack, fistfight, and scooter threat

(WARNING: Graphic image)

Image source: Broward County (Fla.) Sheriff’s Office

WPLG reported that Johnson was wanted in Georgia in connection with a terroristic threats case.

Johnson reportedly was arrested in 2023 on a terroristic threats charge after he allegedly threatened to attack an individual with a boat paddle at a park in Cave Spring, Georgia.

The threat allegedly occurred in front of the victim’s 8-year-old child, which led to a cruelty to children charge.

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

​Aggravated battery, Assault, Florida, Georgia, Mugshot, Physical attack, Crime 

The text from my friend contained one of the stranger questions I have ever received from a family planning a funeral: “Do you know ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’?”

I stared at my phone, a bit wild-eyed. My first instinct was to reply, “Why do you ask?” Instead, I simply wrote, “Yes.”

In that sanctuary, the music served something greater than itself.

His mother had died after a long battle with Parkinson’s. The song was one of her favorites, and the family had sung it with her for years. They hoped I could play it during a slideshow at her memorial service.

I have been a pianist longer than I have been a caregiver, which is saying something. Over the years, families have invited me to play at hundreds of funerals, and I never take that invitation lightly.

As a preacher’s kid, I began as cheap labor for my father’s church: Sunday services, weddings, funerals. I did it all. I no longer play weddings unless enormous amounts of money or extraordinary affection are involved. There is simply too much drama. Funerals are different. If possible, I still play them.

A grieving family does not need entertainment or musical pomp. They need someone willing to serve the moment. Music should give grief room to breathe while gently lifting people’s eyes, even if only an inch.

That assignment becomes considerably more demanding when the requested song is “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

I could have treated it as a novelty, played the familiar tune, collected a few smiles, and moved on. But this family was not asking for a joke. They were asking me to honor their mother.

A funeral is one of the few remaining places in American life where we must confront the difference between entertainment and reverence. Our culture can turn nearly anything into content, spectacle, or argument. A family’s grief deserves better.

My father had died not long before this service. He was a pastor who understood ceremony. He did not confuse reverence with stiffness or ceremony with showmanship. He knew some moments deserve the very best we can bring to them. His lessons sat close as I worked on the arrangement.

RELATED: The oldest cure for doomscrolling in one lyric

CorbalanStudio / Getty Images

Before moving to Montana, I lived and played in Nashville. Nashville taught me polish. Montana reminded me of intimacy. In a small rural sanctuary, every note sits close to the people who need it.

I did not try to make “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” sacred. The song was not sacred. The moment was.

A family’s love was sacred. A life well lived was sacred. So was the faith that endured years of Parkinson’s and the long goodbye that accompanied it.

I arranged the piece more slowly than usual, but not sorrowfully; tenderly, but not timidly. I added a few chords no one expects to hear in “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” My wife calls them my “non-sanctified chords.”

When I played it for her at home, she wiped her eyes. “You played it so respectfully,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

I called one of the daughters and asked for the exact length of the slideshow. Then I shaped the arrangement to fit it.

At the service, the pastor introduced the slideshow: “It is set to one of her favorite songs, ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,’ played by Peter Rosenberger.”

After decades at the piano, I had never received an introduction quite like that. Chuckles rolled through the sanctuary. I understood. Then the pictures began.

Childhood. Marriage. Ranch life. Children. Grandchildren.

As her life unfolded across the screen, the novelty disappeared. The room settled into stillness. A playful song associated with happy memories in her home began carrying the weight of a family’s love and loss.

I timed the final chord to the last photograph of her face. For a moment, no one moved. The chuckles had given way to misty eyes. That familiar little tune had slipped past everyone’s defenses and carried something deeper than anyone expected.

RELATED: Gratitude is not perspective. It is remembering mercy.

Everything bagel / Getty Images

Christians do not pretend that Parkinson’s is beautiful or that death is merely another happy chapter. Scripture calls death the last enemy. But it also declares that Christ has defeated it. For those in Christ, suffering does not receive the final word. Neither does Parkinson’s. Neither does the grave.

The song was not the gospel, and I did not pretend it was. But it carried the memory of a woman who had sung it through years of suffering. In that sanctuary, the music served something greater than itself.

My father’s death still weighed heavily on me as I played. Perhaps that helped me understand the assignment. Even amid our own grief, we can offer the best of what we have to someone walking through theirs.

Sometimes grief calls for a great hymn. Sometimes it calls for silence. And every now and then, it calls for “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

Because for those who belong to Christ, everything really is … satisfactual.

​Family, Funeral, Gospel, Grief, Parkinsons, Love, Montana, Marriage, Christians, Death, Opinion & analysis 

The story of Jonah and the whale is one of the most well-known stories in all of Scripture. But there’s a hidden historical detail the vast majority of people don’t know, says Lakepointe pastor and “Live Free with Josh Howerton” co-host Carlos Erazo.

In this episode, he shares a little-known fact about the pagan city of Nineveh that will change the way you think not only about the story of Jonah and the fish that swallowed him but also about God, who he says never wastes a single detail.

Most people, even many non-Christians, know the basics of Jonah’s story: He was an Israelite prophet whom God commanded to go to the wicked city of Nineveh and warn it of coming judgment, giving the pagans who lived there a chance to repent before God destroyed their city. Wanting judgment, not mercy, to fall upon the Ninevites, Jonah refused God’s command and fled on a ship.

God sent a violent storm, and the sailors, knowing Jonah was the cause of God’s wrath, threw him overboard, where he was swallowed by a giant fish. For three days, he remained in the beast’s belly until it spit him out on dry land. Repentant, Jonah went to Nineveh, where the people believed God, turned from their violence, and were spared from divine judgment.

“That’s basically the whole story. … It’s a short book,” says Erazo, “but there’s something more happening behind the scenes that a lot of people have no idea.”

He explains that Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire — a military superpower in Jonah’s day and Israel’s mortal enemy.

“If you know a little bit about the culture, Mesopotamia back in the day, it would be a polytheistic culture, which means that they would have a lot of different gods, little g pagan gods, that they would worship,” says Erazo.

One of those gods was named Oannes. Ancient art and writing describes him as a man-like being with a fish’s head and tail who comes out of the water to teach people divine wisdom.

Erazo displays a picture of an ancient stone relief of Oannes. He is depicted as a bearded man with a fish head and skin worn as a cloak.

“It looks like it’s a man with a fish on top, or you could say a man coming out of a fish,” he says.

“If you were a pagan fisherman at the time, and you’re kind of out there doing your thing at the coast … and all of a sudden you see this fish literally come out, and there’s this man coming out of the mouth of the fish, and he’s out there preaching repentance in the name of this deity, in the name of God, and all of a sudden people are listening to this,” he tells fellow pastor and co-host Paul Cunningham.

Erazo explains that there’s speculation that Jonah was received by the Ninevites because he initially appeared as Oannes coming out of the sea to share wisdom.

“But at some point, they would have realized, ‘Hey, actually this is not one of these little g gods. This is the real God revealing Himself, giving us wisdom and telling us that if we don’t repent, He will destroy us in judgment,”’ he notes.

This fascinating historical detail, says Erazo, is an example of how free will and God’s sovereignty beautifully co-exist.

“Jonah may have been running from God, but he was never outside of the sovereignty of God,” he says.

“God knew from the very beginning that Jonah was going to be swallowed by a fish, and he was going to spend three days and three nights inside the fish, which would be a prophetic sign for the Messiah,” he continues, highlighting how Jonah’s three days and three nights in the whale before emerging to save the Ninevites parallel Jesus’ time in the grave before His resurrection that would save humanity from eternal damnation.

“The whole process of him rebelling and running away from God and eventually repenting and obeying God, God knew He was going to use that testimony, that story, that experience, and eventually He was going to use all of that for the people to hear the gospel. … With God, no detail is ever wasted,” Erazo beams.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Join BlazeTV+ and start watching Josh today at blazetv.com/JOSH. Use promo code JOSH40 to get $40 off your subscription.

​Josh howerton, Bible, Christianity, Blazetv show 

Heading into midterm elections this fall, Washington is zeroed in on socialism, party loyalty, and political power, but Glenn Beck warns that the issue capable of overwhelming every political talking point is sitting at the bottom of voters’ grocery carts.

“Pew just asked voters in July what they would most want to hear about, and it was prices,” he says. “People ask which party they trust on the economy, and it’s 37 to 36 so it’s a coin flip.”

“People are tired, and they want normal,” he concludes.

But the nation being exhausted and desperate for relief is a scary place to be, Glenn warns. What this Pew data reveals, he argues, is that tired people don’t carefully pick a philosophy or ideology; they pick whichever path sounds more promising — even if it leads off a cliff.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn goes back to 1920 to show what a worn-out country actually does with its vote.

“We’ve been here before. 1920, this country was wrung out in a way that makes us look coddled right now — a war, then a flu that killed more than the war, strikes, bombs in the mail, riots, prices that were eating a paycheck alive, socialism and progressivism gone wild,” Glenn recalls.

Ohio newspaperman Warren Harding campaigned on one word: “normalcy.” The message resonated so deeply with the public that he won in a huge landslide. But in that same election, roughly one million people still voted for socialist Eugene Debs, who at the time was in federal prison and couldn’t even campaign.

Glenn draws one conclusion: Exhaustion ≠ moderation.

“I think that’s what we keep getting wrong. A tired country does not move to the center. It just moves away, and it moves away in any direction that’s open,” he says.

He fears that the 2026 midterms will mirror the 2020 and 2024 elections, where people voted based on their overwhelming desire for “rest” instead of which candidate had the soundest philosophy.

“A man doing math in a grocery store … is not being propagandized, OK? He’s doing math, and his arithmetic is right,” says Glenn, “and no microphone, no propaganda beats arithmetic — not mine, not a cable news network’s, not the president’s, nobody.”

“You can be entirely right about the direction of the country and still lose to a receipt from the grocery store, and I think that’s what’s happening,” he warns.

But many of the Democratic midterm candidates are “Marxists,” Glenn points out, and while voting for them may scratch the normalcy itch, there’s nothing normal about Marxism.

Normal, he explains, isn’t really something we can vote for. Only “programs” can be voted for — and that applies to both sides of the political aisle.

Glenn reminds that Harding’s promise of normalcy may have won over voters, but “his administration became synonymous for corruption.”

“Any man who promises you that he’s going to take you back to that place [of normalcy] is selling you something, and he’s selling you something he doesn’t have,” he says.

There’s only one standard for measuring if what a candidate is offering is truly “normal,” says Glenn, and that’s the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Glenn beck, 2026 midterms, Socialism, Marxism, Blazetv show 

“Convert or get hurt.” Three words, one warning. If you’re a new arrival at a British prison and unlucky enough to land in the wrong wing, they might be the first thing anyone says to you. A terrifying ultimatum delivered by men who know that they can do as they want and suffer no consequences for their actions, no matter how savage they may be.

Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, recently detailed the Islamification of British prisons. His report described Islamist prisoners operating as “self-styled ’emirs,'” running private empires built on intimidation and plenty of beatings.

Every single year, tens of thousands of American prisoners convert to Islam.

Usman Khan, who murdered two young Cambridge graduates at Fishmongers’ Hall in a 2019 terror attack, spent years before that pressuring other inmates to convert. Sudesh Amman, who stabbed two people in Streatham days after his 2020 release, did the same thing behind bars. Along with recruiting and converting, both men taught other Muslim thugs the most effective methods to spread extremism and ensure compliance.

Coerced conversion

Hall’s review also found evidence of systematic “recruitment” of non-Muslims. New arrivals who didn’t identify as Muslim were denied protection from the dominant faction on their wing. In prisons across the U.K., Islam has taken on clear gang characteristics. It operates through forced initiations, protection rackets, and severe punishment. There are designated lookouts enforcing control over prison wings, while prisoners are pressured to join gang-run prayer groups simply to stay safe.

The numbers are alarming. Muslims make up 18% of the prison population in England and Wales, compared with 6.5% of the general population. But the most revealing stat is that one in five Muslim prisoners is white, a figure utterly detached from everyday Britain. It’s clear that white inmates are systematically targeted and pressured into converting, much like how Muslim rape gangs have targeted white girls across the U.K. for decades.

The mainstream narrative about the rise of Islam behind bars rests on a particularly absurd modern myth. We’re repeatedly told that Islam is exclusively a religion of peace. Believing this requires ignoring vast swaths of foundational texts. The Quran contains explicit directives authorizing warfare, conquest, and the violent subjugation of nonbelievers. Examples include Surah 9:5, which commands the slaughter of non-Muslims wherever they are found, and Surah 9:29, which calls for war against infidels until they acquiesce and pay tribute to Allah. To claim that a faith rooted largely in the need for violence contains no theological blueprint for violence is utterly ridiculous.

RELATED: To raise Christian children who become Christian adults, one simple habit matters most

Eric Thayer/Getty Images

‘Cut-and-paste Islam’

Equally ridiculous is the assumption that the Islamification of prisons is a uniquely British problem. It is not. Every single year, tens of thousands of American prisoners convert to Islam.

Frank Cilluffo of George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute spent years documenting the rise of “cut-and-paste Islam” or “prison Islam.” In extensive congressional testimony and policy reports, Cilluffo detailed how American correctional facilities are hotbeds of Islamic extremism. Radical inmates assume the role of radical imams, using the Quran’s most aggressive verses to enforce territorial control and legitimize brutality among inmates. Many of these prisoners eventually re-enter American society, completely brainwashed by Islamic teachings.

The exact same dynamic has played out in other Western nations, and the consequences have been deadly.

In France, Cherif Kouachi, a terrorist responsible for the murder of innocent journalists, spent 20 months at Fleury-Merogis prison, where he met an unhinged imam connected to bin Laden. Amedy Coulibaly, a young man who murdered a policewoman and four hostages at a supermarket days later, was also radicalized while serving time.

Australia provides another concrete example of this perverse pattern. In 2007, Bassam Hamzy, serving 21 years for murder at Goulburn’s Supermax, converted more than a dozen fellow inmates to radical Islam, specifically targeting indigenous prisoners for recruitment. Through his Brothers 4 Life Gang, he sought out new followers and punished those who refused to comply.

Brutal system

From London to Los Angeles, Paris to Perth, four Western countries have produced almost identical findings. Christianity might be losing its appeal among the incarcerated and the general population. The same isn’t true of Islam.

I’m not asking you to feel sorry for every non-Muslim inmate who is pressured into serving Allah. That would be an idiotic request. Many of these men are absolute animals. They belong behind bars and deserve no sympathy.

But we must recognize that Western nations have become home to a brutal system that allows gang leaders to use Islamic identity as their primary means of domination. Unless the powers that be intervene to dismantle that system, this cycle of prison radicalization will continue in the U.K., the U.S., and beyond.

What happens in prison doesn’t necessarily stay in prison; today’s incarcerated Islamist could become tomorrow’s suicide bomber. Ignoring the threat inside the cell block only guarantees that innocent people will have to face it outside.

​British prison, Christianity, Convert, Islamic extremism, Islamification, Prison population, Radicalization, Muslim rape gangs, Lifestyle, Culture, Uk, America, Faith 

If you’ve been shopping for a used car lately and wondering why your money doesn’t seem to go very far, you’re not imagining it.

On a recent episode of “The Drive,” my co-host Karl Brauer and I looked at just how much the used-car market has changed since before the pandemic. Karl is executive analyst at iSeeCars, which tracks vehicle prices, and one number jumped out immediately.

A 3-year-old Hyundai Elantra that might have cost $12,000 or $13,000 in 2019 is now around $24,000.

The average price of a three-year-old used car has risen 38% since 2019. That’s roughly $9,000 more for a car of the same age.

That’s a lot. But another number may tell you even more about what has happened to ordinary car buyers.

Going older

In 2019, a $20,000 budget put nearly half — 49.5% — of all one- to five-year-old used cars within reach. Today, that same $20,000 gets you access to just 11.4%.

And if you can’t increase your budget, there’s really only one place to go: older.

In 2019, you only had to look at cars about four years old before a majority of the used market fell below $20,000. Today, you have to go back about seven years.

Edmunds is seeing the same thing. Its second-quarter 2026 data found that a $10,000 to $15,000 budget now buys a used vehicle averaging 8.7 years old and nearly 98,000 miles. In 2019, that same money bought a car averaging just 4.7 years old with about 58,000 miles. In other words, the same budget now gets you a vehicle roughly four years older with about 40,000 more miles.

RELATED: This used-car odometer scam is everywhere — and impossible to detect

CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

Not the same

There’s nothing inherently wrong with buying a seven- or eight-year-old car. I’ve owned plenty of older vehicles, and a well-maintained car can have years of life left in it. But you’re not buying the same thing. Mileage is probably higher, maintenance history matters more, and repairs that aren’t much of a concern on a three-year-old car start becoming part of the equation.

Karl gave me a couple of examples that put the change in perspective. A three-year-old Hyundai Elantra that might have cost $12,000 or $13,000 in 2019 is now around $24,000. A comparable Toyota Camry went from roughly $14,000 or $15,000 to about $24,000.

I still tell people to consider used or certified pre-owned before automatically buying new. Used cars can offer tremendous value, particularly because somebody else has already absorbed that initial depreciation. But “buy used” isn’t enough advice in today’s market.

Know your worth

Know what the vehicle should be worth. Look at its history. Find out what maintenance has already been performed and what expensive service may be coming. If a seller can’t provide satisfactory answers about the condition or maintenance of an older vehicle, be prepared to walk away.

And don’t let today’s prices convince you that spending $20,000 means you’re buying the kind of car $20,000 bought a few years ago. That’s the real problem with the current market.

The price may look familiar. The car attached to it isn’t.

​Edmunds data, Used car market, Lifestyle, Used cars, Iseecars, Auto industry, Used car dealers, Karl brauer, Automotive 

The greatest threat to America isn’t military invasion or economic collapse — but a slow, conscious effort to change how Americans perceive reality itself.

In a discussion on psychological warfare and ideological subversion, BlazeTV host Nick Freitas revisits a famous Cold War-era warning from former KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, who argued that nations can be weakened from within through a decades-long process of demoralization.

“Psychological warfare,” Bezmenov began in his now famous warning. “What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”

“It’s a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow, and it’s divided in four basic stages,” he continued.

The first stage, Bezmenov said, is “demoralization.”

“It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation,” he explained.

“Marxism Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged … by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism,” he continued.

“You cannot change their mind. Even if you expose them to authentic information,” he added.

“Think about what Bezmenov says there,” Freitas comments. “And again, ladies and gentleman, he’s saying this in the 1980s. This is during the Reagan administration.”

“He’s like, ‘No, no, you’re too far gone with too many of your students with your younger generation because they’ve just been fed this relentlessly. This was by the ’80s,” he continues.

“Well, we’re in 2026,” he adds.

“Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK40 for $40 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Psychological warfare, Yuri bezmenov, Demoralization, America, Nick freitas, Brainwashing, Blazetv show, Defector 

Last summer, European news outlets reported that “volunteers” from Mexican and Colombian drug cartels had infiltrated Ukraine’s military — considered the world’s “drone superpower” — to learn cutting-edge drone warfare so they could use the knowledge to kill their enemies back home.

Claims that this problem is ongoing have not yet been publicly verified by the U.S. intelligence community or the media. As yet, however, they remain undisputed. They now demand further scrutiny and broader attention in the United States to prompt appropriate action. If it’s not too late, and if the reports are correct, the U.S. urgently needs to terminate this knowledge transfer from Ukrainian soldiers to Latin America’s crime lords.

‘The drone industry has exploded, and criminals have adapted the technology for attacks, which is a major challenge to battlefield aerial supremacy.’

American military, law enforcement, and intelligence personnel are deployed for clandestine work inside and around Mexico and Colombia, working to eradicate the very same criminal organizations now siphoning drone expertise from Ukraine.

This means that top-of-the-line, battlefield-proven tech and tactics could empower vengeful cartel murderers to do to U.S. ground personnel what the Ukrainian army claims it did to 30,000 Russian soldiers in July alone.

One might hope that, after the problem was made public in 2025, Ukraine quickly moved to clear out all cartel infiltrators. One would be sadly disappointed. The Financial Times reported that Ukraine has discovered yet more Colombians with organized crime connections in-country, demonstrating “unusual obsessions” about battlefield drone fighting. The exfiltration problem persists.

“Former paramilitaries, former guerrillas, and former soldiers are fighting and learning together here how to operate drones,” a Colombian aid worker in Ukraine told the Financial Times for the August 6 story. U.S. outlets, meanwhile, are largely sitting this one out so far.

U.S. lawmakers should note the bitter irony that the drone warfare knowledge America’s enemies are stealing was funded by some of the $70 billion in U.S. taxpayer money appropriated to Ukraine. Then they should use that as leverage: There are tens of billions more dollars in the pipeline, which should be withheld until the gang operatives are purged.

What we think we know

On July 30, 2025, the French website Intelligence Online first reported that Ukraine’s Security Service launched an investigation after Mexico’s National Intelligence Center warned that Mexican cartel fighters had infiltrated Spanish-speaking units of the International Legion.

Their alleged intention was to learn how to fly first-person view drones, gather ideas for drone-attack tech, and study battlefield tactics that Ukraine’s armed forces have famously used to stall Russia’s invasion.

Foreign outlets keep turning up new information. Poland and Bulgaria have begun their own investigations into smuggling pipelines through their territories. Granular details seem to bolster the reports. For instance, some volunteers already accomplished in drone fighting have joined the legion’s specialized tactical intelligence combat unit, known as “Ethos,” in the combat-heavy Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, according to the reports.

Polish officials reportedly revealed that private Mexican and Colombian security companies with alleged ties to drug trafficking networks financed and smuggled the volunteers into Ukraine through neighboring countries. One Colombian security firm based in Cali and Medellín reportedly recruited former Colombian Army rangers.

One smuggled Mexican legion volunteer, operating under the alias “Aguila-7,” registered in March 2024 using fraudulent Salvadoran documentation. He proved so technically proficient during drone training in Lviv that instructors called for an investigation, which later found probable connections to Mexico’s elite GAFE air-mobile special forces. Former GAFE personnel have joined cartels, the reports said.

RELATED: The Navy has a choice: Get better or become less relevant

HUGE PERALTA/AFP/Getty Images

Why it matters

The infiltrations coincide with President Trump’s day-one declaration of a U.S. war to eradicate the cartels, designating many as foreign terrorist organizations. If cartel leaders are out to avenge what they have suffered, their drones can find many more targetable American personnel.

No one should have been surprised, for instance, when two CIA officers died this past April in a Chihuahua State car accident while traveling with Mexican forces after a drug lab raid. They were present because Trump has surged military and CIA personnel into Mexico and Latin America, as well as naval and aircraft assets for lethal boat bombing operations that have killed hundreds of drug smugglers. The operations have included supposed CIA-facilitated assassinations in Mexico.

An “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition” of 19 Latin American countries is heavily reliant on local national security forces within which U.S. intelligence community operatives are embedded. Additionally, some 9,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed along 845 miles of the U.S. southern border in expanding “National Defense Areas” intended to deny cartel drug-load entries along with illegal immigration. By many accounts, gangs in Colombia and Mexico are angry about the resulting killings, drug lab raids, boat bombings, profit disruptions, and imprisonments on U.S. terrorism charges.

By now, we would know if the cartels were killing more American personnel. They are not, likely deterred by the knowledge that crossing such a bright line would incur even more painful American wrath. But are the cartels building that capacity to get Trump off their backs in due time?

Before any reporting about cartels in Ukraine, Mexico’s cartels were already using sloppily repurposed commercial drones to drop grenades and explosives on rivals and indigenous security forces. That’s still happening in Mexico and Colombia, including the first recent attacks by FPV drones. In October 2025, a coordinated three-drone FPV attack hit the state prosecutor’s office in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, destroying six vehicles a mile from the U.S. border.

Senior Colombian officials told the outlet they are already seeing Ukraine-style first-person-view drones in recent widespread use. However, a Colombian drone pilot in Ukraine told the Financial Times that pilots still hadn’t mastered how to replicate some technology or set explosive charges.

“The drone industry has exploded, and criminals have adapted the technology for attacks, which is a major challenge to battlefield aerial supremacy,” Colombian Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez told the newspaper.

What to do now

Ukraine-style drone attacks against Americans in Mexico or Colombia could upend U.S. counter-cartel initiatives tactically and politically. Body bags returning home are a tragedy. But they also have a way of undermining public support in any war. Tactics and strategic trajectories change as a result. Just ask Moscow.

To head off this shameful outcome, the White House must forcefully leverage direct U.S. military aid to have Kyiv immediately remove cartel operatives from its formations, subject to direct verification by American investigators.

Next, the U.S. must speed up and diversify current efforts to counter the emerging drone threat along the border and to help foreign allied governments protect embedded U.S. personnel. The U.S. should do what it can to intercept drone equipment and technology imports into Latin America. And leadership should make sure American soldiers and operatives posted abroad burrow deeper out of sight.

In the meantime, if anyone wonders whether the U.S. might actually redouble its efforts if the cartels kill any Americans, the Trump administration should loudly message that they had better believe we will.

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

​American military, Drone warfare, Latin america, Special forces, Ukrainian military, Us intelligence, Russia, Ukraine war, Cia, Opinion & analysis, Colombia, Mexico, Drug cartels, Donald trump 

Anthropic has started marking text generated by its newest Claude models with an invisible watermark that can travel with the text after it leaves the chatbot. Copy a Claude response into a document, paste it into a website, drop it into a codebase, and the mark may still be there. Anthropic says models launched on or after August 2 support machine-readable marking at launch, and the company is applying those markings wherever Claude is offered worldwide, while it is adding support to older models as well.

There is a perfectly defensible reason for doing this. The internet is filling up with synthetic text, images, audio, and video, and some method of establishing where that material came from could be useful. Anthropic also deserves credit for attempting something more sophisticated than the current generation of AI detectors, which mostly look at finished prose and make an educated guess about whether a machine wrote it.

American users who never asked for it are getting it anyway.

Unfortunately, Anthropic’s solution comes with a fairly spectacular collection of problems. The watermark does not necessarily prove Claude wrote the material carrying it. Anthropic acknowledges that aggressive rewriting can remove it. And rather than confining the system to the European market that created the requirement in the first place, Anthropic is rolling it out across Claude worldwide, including Claude Code.

That last part is especially strange. Europe demanded a way to identify AI-generated text, and an American developer using Claude to write software in Tennessee now gets his code fingerprinted too.

Brussels writes the rule

This is not a case of Anthropic inventing a bizarre new restriction all by itself. Article 50 of the European Union’s AI Act requires providers of generative AI systems, including general-purpose systems, to mark AI-generated text, audio, images, and video in a machine-readable form so that it can be detected as artificial. Those requirements took effect August 2, 2026, while the EU’s accompanying voluntary Code of Practice lays out practical steps companies can use to comply.

The underlying concern is reasonable enough. Deepfakes are becoming more convincing, AI-generated propaganda is becoming cheaper, and fraudsters have an increasingly powerful collection of tools for impersonating real people. If someone generates a fake recording of a politician declaring war or a fake video of a CEO announcing a bankruptcy, having some reliable way to determine that the material came from an AI system could be genuinely useful.

RELATED: Now they’re saying the AIs built ‘secret civilizations’ — the truth is far worse

Ole_CNX/Getty Images

But Anthropic is not limiting its response to Europe. According to the company’s own documentation, marking applies to output from supported models “wherever Claude is offered, worldwide,” including Claude itself, the API, Claude Code, and Claude delivered through AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry.

Political scientists call this the Brussels effect. The EU controls a market too large for multinational companies to ignore, so regulations written in Brussels can wind up shaping products and business practices far outside Europe. Companies often find it easier to build one product that satisfies the strictest major jurisdiction than to maintain entirely separate versions for everyone else. The concept was itself modeled on the older California effect, in which regulations imposed by America’s largest state, particularly automobile emissions rules, influenced products and policies far beyond California.

Anthropic’s explanation gives us a remarkably clear example of the Brussels effect at work. The company says it is imposing the watermark globally because it doesn’t yet “have a durable way to scope it by region.” The EU imposed the requirement, Anthropic cannot reliably fence it off to Europe, so everyone gets it.

Anyone who uses the modern web has already experienced one version of the Brussels effect. European privacy rules helped produce the thicket of cookie banners, consent forms, and tracking pop-ups that now greet users on countless websites, including users nowhere near Europe. California has pulled the same trick domestically with privacy and automobile regulation. A government does not necessarily have to persuade the rest of the world to pass the same law if the market is large enough to persuade companies to impose its preferred standard voluntarily.

Maybe that will prove harmless, but the regulatory chain is pretty clear: Europe demanded the feature, Anthropic globalized it, and American users got it too. European regulators demanded a particular feature from an American AI company, and American users who never asked for it are getting it anyway.

What exactly is Claude putting in your text?

Anthropic says Claude’s watermark is based on Google DeepMind’s SynthID-Text, which does not hide metadata or invisible characters inside the output. Instead, the watermark is created during generation by slightly changing the odds that Claude will pick one acceptable token over another.

A language model usually has several plausible choices for the next word. Google gives the example of assigning different probability scores to possible next tokens and then adjusting those scores slightly to create a detectable pattern. Over a long enough passage, those tiny choices add up to a statistical signature that can be recognized later. Google says the process does not measurably affect the quality, accuracy, creativity, or speed of the output.

Anthropic says Claude uses the same basic approach, with an important limitation: The model needs some freedom to choose among acceptable tokens. If only one answer will preserve a fact, satisfy a constraint, or keep a piece of code working, there may be little or nothing for the watermark to manipulate. Anthropic says factual answers and code therefore tend to carry less watermark signal than open-ended prose.

Because the watermark only operates where Claude has room to choose, Anthropic says it should not sacrifice accuracy or produce broken code merely to preserve the mark. The trade-off is that highly constrained output can carry a weaker signal and may be harder to identify later.

Anthropic also says its watermark carries no identifying information and cannot be traced to a particular person, company, or conversation. If Anthropic is to be believed, Claude is not quietly slipping your account ID into every paragraph you generate. However, researchers have already demonstrated multi-bit watermarks that can carry provenance data such as a user ID, timestamp, and model ID. That means a text watermark can do more than answer, “Was this probably generated by AI?” It can potentially carry information about who generated it, when, and with which model.

Once a company starts deliberately shaping generated text so that it can carry a hidden machine-readable signal, users have a legitimate interest in knowing exactly what that signal contains, who can read it, and whether the system could change later.

Claude’s fingerprint does not prove Claude wrote it

Anthropic’s own explanation puts some hard limits on what the watermark can actually prove.

Anthropic warns that detecting a Claude watermark means only that the material may have been processed by Claude. Claude might have generated the text from scratch, but it also might merely have proofread something written entirely by a human, translated it, summarized it, reformatted it, or otherwise transformed it.

That sounds like a technical distinction until you imagine how the detector will actually be used. A professor finds a Claude watermark in a student’s paper. An editor finds one in a freelancer’s submission. An employer detects one in a report. A company finds one in source code supplied by a contractor. In each case, the obvious conclusion will be that Claude wrote the work, even though Anthropic itself says that conclusion may be false.

Anthropic then manages to make the opposite case equally murky. Failure to detect a watermark does not mean Claude did not write the material either. The company warns that heavy editing, paraphrasing, translation, mixing Claude-generated material with other text, or simply using too short a passage can make the signal disappear or become unreliable.

The translation example is especially funny. Ask Claude to translate your human-written text, and Anthropic says the result may acquire a Claude mark. Take Claude-generated text and translate or paraphrase it aggressively enough afterward, and the mark may disappear. The same basic transformation can therefore help create the evidence on one side of the process and destroy it on the other.

This doesn’t make the watermark completely worthless. A positive signal may still be useful evidence when interpreted alongside other facts. But Anthropic is building a system that institutions will be sorely tempted to treat as a yes-or-no answer even though the company itself says it is nothing of the sort.

RELATED: Bill Gates is freaking out over AI — so why did he just spend hundreds of millions on this?

KENT NISHIMURA/Getty Images

As I wrote recently for Blaze News about Substack’s integration of the Pangram AI detector, even an unusually sophisticated detector can put genuine human writers in the position of having to prove that they wrote their own words. Pangram falsely flagged a passage by Freddie deBoer as completely AI-written, only to classify the same material as human when it was submitted with more surrounding text. Technology journalist Taylor Lorenz was also falsely flagged before Pangram’s CEO investigated and acknowledged the mistake.

The problem is broader than Pangram. Vanderbilt University disabled Turnitin’s AI detector after calculating that even Turnitin’s claimed 1% false-positive rate could translate into hundreds of incorrectly flagged papers at the university’s submission volume. Turnitin itself warns that its AI score should not be used as the sole basis for adverse action against a student, because the system can misidentify human and AI-generated writing.

Claude’s watermark is technically different and potentially more reliable because the model itself inserts the signal. But the institutional temptation will be exactly the same: Somebody in authority sees a red warning light and treats it as proof, while the caveats buried in Anthropic’s documentation disappear from the conversation.

The people trying to cheat can just wash the mark off

There is also a more practical problem: People who actually want to hide their AI use may be able to remove the mark.

Anthropic acknowledges that heavy paraphrasing and other transformations can make the mark disappear, and academic research on text watermarking has repeatedly found the same problem. A 2025 paper describing the Self-Information Rewrite Attack tested an automated rewriting method against seven recent watermarking schemes and reported nearly 100% attack success, without requiring access to the watermark algorithm or the watermarked model.

That does not prove the attack works against Claude. Anthropic has not disclosed enough about its system for anyone outside the company to know how robust it is, and Claude’s watermark could turn out to be substantially stronger than the experimental schemes researchers tested.

But Anthropic has already conceded the important point: Sufficiently aggressive rewriting can break detection.

The incentives are therefore almost backward. Someone who uses Claude openly, copies the result into a document, and makes ordinary edits may leave the watermark intact. Someone who actually intends to conceal his use of AI has an obvious extra step available: paste Claude’s work into a different model and order it to rewrite everything aggressively while preserving the meaning.

The EU wanted to make AI-generated work easier to identify. What it may have helped create instead is an incentive to launder AI prose through multiple models.

That is not some exotic hypothetical attack involving a team of computer scientists. Anyone serious about concealing AI use is already motivated to rewrite generated text because untouched chatbot prose has recognizable habits of its own. Now Anthropic has given that same user another reason to do it.

Claude is not the only model leaving fingerprints

Anthropic is not the first major AI company to watermark text. Google has been doing it through SynthID in Gemini since 2024. Unlike Anthropic, Google has publicly explained at least the basic mechanism: SynthID changes the probability scores used during token selection, creating a statistical watermark without attaching conventional metadata to the finished text.

OpenAI has taken a different public approach so far. It has embraced provenance and watermarking for generated media and currently uses SynthID for supported images and audio, alongside C2PA metadata for generated images. Its public provenance materials do not describe a comparable watermark being embedded in ordinary ChatGPT text. That may not last. OpenAI says its goal is to expand provenance signals to all modalities, including text, as it works to comply with the EU’s Code of Practice.

Claude users are not choosing simply between “watermarked AI” and writing everything themselves. They are choosing among competing models whose providers have made different decisions about whether generated prose and code should carry a persistent vendor signal.

The bigger question is what happens when the rest of the industry complies. If Brussels gets its way, invisible fingerprints in AI-generated prose may soon become the norm rather than an Anthropic oddity.

Claude Code is where this starts looking suicidal

The stakes look different once the watermark reaches software.

Claude Code exists because developers want an AI agent that can write useful code directly into real projects. If Claude generates 200 lines that work correctly, there is no reason a programmer should have to rewrite those 200 lines merely to put his personal stylistic stamp on them. Accepting useful machine-generated code with minimal changes is the product.

And Anthropic says its marking system applies to Claude Code, although code generally carries less watermarking than prose because programming often leaves the model with only one correct choice. The mark is more likely to show up where Claude has some freedom, such as comments or interchangeable names and terms. That makes the commercial risk harder to quantify, but it does not eliminate it.

That potentially leaves Claude’s signature in private company repositories, open-source projects, contractor deliverables, student assignments, and commercial software. Some organizations will not care at all. Plenty of software companies openly encourage AI-assisted coding and may regard provenance as useful rather than threatening.

But some companies restrict which AI tools employees may use because of confidentiality concerns. Some clients expect contractors to disclose AI assistance. Some schools ban AI-generated code. Some open-source maintainers are nervous about provenance and licensing. A developer may also simply prefer not to have his source code carry an invisible identifier tied to a particular vendor.

That leaves Anthropic in a strange competitive position. The AI coding market is viciously competitive, and programmers have no shortage of alternatives. If two coding agents perform roughly the same job but only one deliberately leaves a detectable fingerprint inside the output, there will be users who choose the other one for that reason alone.

Anthropic appears to be betting that the benefits of provenance will outweigh that concern. Maybe they will. But fingerprinting Claude Code worldwide to comply with a regulatory regime centered in Europe is an extraordinary way to test the theory.

Could Anthropic use the watermark to claim your code?

One obvious fear is that Anthropic could eventually find its mark in a program and claim ownership of the code. Under the company’s current commercial terms, that is not a strong concern.

RELATED: This top school says AI has shredded college — and every university is next

Prostock-Studio/Getty Images

Anthropic says its commercial customers own their outputs, while U.S. copyright law creates another obstacle because purely machine-generated material may lack copyright protection altogether. The U.S. Copyright Office’s current position is that copyright still requires sufficient human authorship; prompts alone generally do not provide enough human control over the expressive elements of generated material, although human selection, arrangement, modification, and other creative contributions can be protected.

So the current watermark should not be understood as Anthropic secretly stamping its property claim onto your work.

Traceability is the more plausible concern. There is no evidence that Anthropic is putting account IDs, timestamps, prompts, session identifiers, or other personally identifying information into Claude’s watermark today. Anthropic has not claimed to do so, and there is no basis for accusing it of secretly doing it.

But the technology makes a few obvious questions unavoidable. What exactly does Claude’s current watermark encode? Is the mark identical for every user? Can it identify a particular model or generation system? Could Anthropic later add a timestamp or account-specific identifier? Would users know if it did?

Those questions are not conspiracy theories. Once a company announces that it is invisibly embedding machine-readable information directly into the prose and code its customers produce, asking what information is being encoded is about as basic as asking what information a website stores in a cookie.

AI provenance may be useful. This is still a mess.

As AI-generated material becomes harder to distinguish from human work, provenance will matter more, not less. A reliable method for establishing that a piece of media came from a particular system could help expose fraud, propaganda, impersonation, and manipulated evidence.

But Claude’s watermark illustrates how quickly that seemingly simple goal becomes complicated once it reaches ordinary text. Anthropic is now altering output so that it carries a hidden signal that users cannot see. It is doing so worldwide in response to European regulation. The signal may survive normal editing but can apparently be destroyed by sufficiently aggressive rewriting. Finding it does not prove Claude authored the work, while failing to find it does not prove Claude did not.

Anthropic has explained the basic mechanism and says the watermark contains no identifying information, but outsiders still cannot independently inspect the hidden signal or verify exactly how the system behaves in practice.

The result may punish the least-deceptive users most. Someone who treats Claude as an ordinary work tool, accepts useful output, and moves on may carry Claude’s fingerprint into whatever he publishes or ships. Someone determined to pass AI work off as entirely human has a fairly straightforward workaround: He can ask another AI to wash the fingerprints off.

​Artificial intelligence, Tech