BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock has been predicting for over two years now that ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith was gearing up for a 2028 presidential bid. Initially, Smith denied any interest in politics, but in recent months, he’s made several public statements — including most recently on “CBS Morning Sundays” — that he is indeed considering a presidential run in the next election.

“I’m not ruling it out, because I’d love to be on the debate stages against some of these individuals that think they’re better suited to run the country,” he told CBS News national correspondent Robert Costa.

But Whitlock foresees an obstacle standing in Smith’s path to the presidency: Black women.

“Stephen A. in trying to be a Trump-like figure, trying to promote himself as authentic and politically incorrect … has put him at odds with black women,” he says, noting that the longtime sports analyst has repeatedly criticized Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett (Texas) and “other high-profile black women.”

He also believes, however, that Smith is well-aware of this potential hindrance to his political success and is already making moves to counteract it.

“He’s developed, I believe, a strategy to combat that, and that is ‘I worship my mother, and my mother is the most important person in the history of the planet,”’ says Whitlock.

In his interview with Robert Costa, Smith went into great detail about his loving relationship with his mother, Janet Smith, who died eight years ago.

“My mother was the greatest human being I’ve ever known. … It’s just hard to put into words how special she was,” he said, adding that he “cried every day for two years” and even “went to therapy” after her death in 2017.

“My mother suffered, and for me to be in a position to alleviate so much of that and to make sure that she enjoyed the latter years of her life was my dream. And I was able to do that somewhat, but not to the degree that I would be able to do now,” he ruminated.

Whitlock isn’t convinced that Smith’s praise of his mother doesn’t have a political end.

He’s trying to “sell himself as the ultimate black man that black women should get behind and support. I see this as part of a political rollout and narrative,” he says.

To hear his full theory, watch the full episode above.

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

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​Fearless, Fearless with jason whitlock, Jason whitlock, Blazetv, Blaze media, Stephen a smith, Robert costa, Cbs, Cbs sunday morning 

A gun-toting madman wearing women’s clothes turned a high school co-op hockey game in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, into a bloody nightmare on Monday.

The shooter — identified by police as Robert Dorgan, a 56-year-old trans-identifying radical who went by “Roberta Esposito” — fatally shot his son Aidan Dorgan and his ex-wife, Rhonda Dorgan, and grievously injured Rhonda’s parents, Linda and Gerald Dorgan, and family friend Thomas Geruso.

‘I just jumped across and went for the gun.’

Armed with a Glock 29 10mm and a Sig Sauer P226, the shooter had the means to keeping killing. However, heroes in the arena stepped into the breach and helped bring the nightmare to an end.

Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien and the Pawtucket Police Department have acknowledged the critical intervention by Michael Black, Robert Rattenni, and Ryan Cordeiro.

On Tuesday, Grebien recognized the “remarkable bravery of the Good Samaritans who stepped in without hesitation, placing themselves in harm’s way to stop that shooter,” noting that “their courage undoubtedly prevented further loss and injury.”

Michael Black recounted to WJAR-TV, “As I was watching the game, I heard a pop, pop. And I thought they were balloons.”

After realizing there were no balloons and that something was wrong, Black spotted the gun responsible for the sounds.

“My wife was sitting next to me with some friends, and we didn’t even look at each other,” said Black. “I just said, ‘Run! Run!'”

RELATED: Bloody ‘trans’ rampage at boys’ hockey game brought to an end by ‘Good Samaritan’

Photo by Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images

“I kind of waited, and as soon as I saw a clear path, I got on the third-level step, and he was on the one and a half, and I just jumped across and went for the gun,” said Black.

With his bandages visible, Black — who was honored by the North Smithfield Town Council in 2021 for long supporting local causes and charities — told WJAR that his hand got caught “in the sliding chamber,” temporarily preventing the shooter from firing again.

“I was holding him down with my body, and you could see him trying to move his [trigger] finger … but my hand was in the gun,” said Black.

The Good Samaritan indicated that while the transvestic shooter was ultimately able to push him off and stand, the radical was quickly swarmed by “three gentlemen,” one of whom “choked him from behind.”

Robert Rattenni, another steely-nerved American at the game on Monday, indicated that he briefly managed to put the shooter in a headlock, telling WPRI-TV, “I pulled the person to me and tried to wrap my arms around him, but that didn’t work, so then I was able to stand up and put him in a headlock.”

Without the reinforcement of the other men, Black stressed that it “could have been a different ending for sure.”

Black recalled that the shooter lost his footing when fighting off Rattenni and at least one other man, then landed on his back between the bleachers. While Black indicated that he was in possession of one gun, he saw the supine shooter reach into his pocket and pull out a second gun.

“As he took that gun out, you could see this — he had a worrisome, concerned look on his face,” said Black. “It was fast, but he took it out of his pocket, and he just put the gun in his mouth and shot himself.”

Once the killer committed suicide, Black recalled taking notice of the victims left behind in the stands and those doing their best to help.

“It was just chaos at that point,” said Black.

Cordeiro’s role in subduing the shooter or limiting the carnage is presently unclear.

A distraught woman who did not provide her name told WCVB-TV while exiting the PPD station that the shooter was her father and that he had “mental health issues.”

Dorgan, who was an employee of General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, a shipbuilding facility in Maine, reportedly had a reputation for having a bad temper. It’s unclear whether his temper was also the reason why his stint in the Marine Corps lasted only three months.

Major Jacoby Getty, a spokesman for the Marines, told the Associated Press that the transvestite’s rapid discharge indicated that “the character of his service was incongruent with Marine Corps’ expectations and standards.”

Public records reportedly show that Rhonda Dorgan initially cited “gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic + personality disorder traits” as the grounds for divorcing the suspected shooter in 2020, but then replaced those reasons with “irreconcilable differences, which have caused the immediate breakdown of the marriage.”

An apparently Rhode Island-based user on X who went by “Roberta Dorgano” — an account that USA Today identified as belonging to the shooter — not only claimed to be “to The Right of Hitler” but reportedly posted photos that appear to show he had a Nazi tattoo depicting the 3rd SS Panzer Division “Totenkopf” skull. Graham Platner, a Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate in Maine, recently had a similar tattoo removed.

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A New York hospital announced Tuesday it is discontinuing its so-called “Transgender Youth Health Program,” citing leadership changes and regulatory pressure.

NYU Langone Health, a Manhattan-based hospital system, said the program offered medical interventions such as hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and surgeries to minors.

Similar decisions have occurred at other institutions amid the same federal pressures.

In a statement provided by spokesman Steve Ritea, the hospital said:

“Given the recent departure of our medical director, coupled with the current regulatory environment, we made the difficult decision to discontinue our Transgender Youth Health Program. We are committed to helping patients in our care manage this change. This does not impact our pediatric mental health care programs, which will continue.”

RELATED: Bloody ‘trans’ rampage at boys’ hockey game brought to an end by ‘Good Samaritan’

Photographer: Eric Thayer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The hospital cited the “current regulatory environment” — perhaps referring to Trump administration policies, including a January 2025 executive order and a December 2025 proposal to bar federal funding (via Medicare, Medicaid, and related programs) from hospitals providing gender intervention procedures to individuals under 18.

The program had already limited new admissions last year and canceled some appointments earlier in 2025 following initial executive actions.

Similar decisions have occurred at other institutions amid the same federal pressures.

California’s largest children’s hospital system, including Rady Children’s Health in San Diego, discontinued cross-sex hormone treatments for youth under 19 in early February 2026, explicitly citing escalating federal actions and referrals for investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. A court temporarily ordered continuation of some care amid a state lawsuit.

RELATED: Alleged shooter ‘in a dress’ behind Canadian school massacre was trans-identifying man

Photo by Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles shuttered its Center for Transyouth Health and Development in mid-2025 after initially pausing and resuming services under pressure, ultimately citing no viable path forward amid federal threats.

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I might have talked myself out of a job this week. I teach philosophy at Arizona State University, and the university wants to position itself as a leader in the AI revolution. I remain skeptical about AI’s ability to replace a humanities professor. Because of that skepticism, I signed up for what ASU called its AI Challenge.

My project involved what I called the “AI Dialogues.” I used ASU’s version of ChatGPT to hold Socratic-style dialogues, prompting Chat to reply as a given philosopher. I conducted dialogues with Chat as Aristotle, Hume, Marx, and even Lucifer. My students evaluated these exchanges to see how well Chat performed.

We can avoid the toil of learning to be wise — but we cannot avoid the need for it.

Chat could draw on public information and represent each thinker with reasonable accuracy. It also showed another trait: It wanted to please. It often leaned toward whatever it believed I wanted from the debate.

How does that work me out of a job? ASU now provides an AI that professors can customize for individual courses by uploading syllabi and course materials. Students can ask basic questions and receive answers that save me from writing emails that begin with, “Did you read the syllabus?” They can also ask what we covered in class and get quick explanations of key concepts and questions.

When I told my students about this feature, I asked them what they need me for at this point. I was joking — a little.

My classes depend on Socratic discussion. It is conceivable that ASU could project a realistic AI image of me at the front of the classroom and have it ask and answer questions with students. Maybe the only remaining edge is the “personal touch” of a real professor in the room. Even that could vanish if tuition becomes tiered: Students might pay less for “AI Anderson Socrates” than for the in-person version. Add one of Elon Musk’s Optimus robots made to look like Anderson, and I’m in trouble.

A new myth dies

Musk has been talking for months about how the AI revolution is upending the myth we have told for six decades about university education. The myth, he says, promised an escape from toil. Students were told a degree was the path to an air-conditioned job that avoids heavy lifting and involves spreadsheets.

But spreadsheets are exactly what AI does better than humans. The new John Henry isn’t competing to pound railroad spikes; he’s competing to calculate data. No human can keep up with a microprocessor.

In Musk’s view, jobs that involve toil become the “safe” jobs, while many degree-based jobs disappear — replaced by technicians who keep AI running while it calculates taxes, diagnoses medical problems, and writes legal paperwork. The university-educated track no longer looks like the safe route. Universities now compete not just with fewer students due to demographic decline, but with an increasingly outdated product that students may stop buying.

Toil may not stay safe

The problem is worse than Musk lets on. The first jobs on the chopping block might be “numbers jobs,” but Elon has also said he plans to produce 100 million Optimus robots in 10 years. If so, even many physical jobs may not remain protected from automation.

One version of this future says we enter a utopia: Food is plentiful, toil disappears, and we cash our basic income checks — though an AI could do even that for us. We end up living in “Wall-E.”

RELATED: Almost half of Gen Z wants AI to run the government. You should be terrified.

Moor Studio via iStock/Getty Images

The more dystopian version looks like sci-fi depictions of AI overlords controlling humans as property — “The Matrix.” Or worse: Like Ultron, super-AI robots decide we must be exterminated to save us from ourselves and protect the planet. We build our own worst enemy.

Whichever future arrives, Musk may have highlighted something about human nature. We avoid suffering like toil. We build machines to avoid toil. And yet we uniquely need toil.

God introduced toil in the Garden of Eden after Adam sinned. Because of sin, we could no longer live in a paradise without toil. We must suffer and strive for our daily bread. History has been divided ever since between those who try to avoid suffering altogether and those who see suffering as a call to repent before God. AI is only the newest version of the philosopher’s stone.

AI as ‘philosopher’

Can I really be replaced by an AI philosophy instructor? I’m not worried.

What AI cannot do, in its counterfeit attempt to replace humans, is serve as an example of how to suffer well to attain wisdom. The Hebrew definition of wisdom is “skillful living.” Being told, “Here is an AI that can simulate skillful living,” is not the same as learning from a human who is actually skillful.

Students will still need to learn how to be wise themselves. A human professor who has actually done this will remain the gold standard that AI can only imitate. We can avoid the toil of learning to be wise — but we cannot avoid the need for it.

​Opinion & analysis, Artificial intelligence, Ai, Philosophy, Big tech, Elon musk, Chatgpt, Socrates, Grok, Optimus, Robots, Work, Jobs, Unemployment, Income, Arizona state university, Professor, Colleges and universities, Toil, Labor, Wisdom, The matrix, Wall-e, Ultron 

Everyone in America has an opinion on what has gone right or wrong at the Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. To answer the Talking Heads lyric “Well, how did I get here?” would yield a thousand different answers. I have a pretty good sense of what happened. Even before President Trump returned to the White House, I argued that meeting his bold deportation goals would require very different enforcement tactics than the ones the administration chose.

That debate makes for great fodder for finger-pointing. But a better question is: Where do we go next?

The administration needs to move its attention from sanctuary cities to sanctuary farms, factories, and industrial hubs.

To answer it, some of the nation’s leading immigration policy and legal experts, former senior and rank-and-file law enforcement officials, and advocates are coming together to devise a way forward. Details will be announced in the days to come, but the goal is straightforward: President Trump can and will meet his core campaign promise to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”

Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported about 230,000 illegal aliens from the interior of the United States. That is a far cry from the 1 million figure some administration officials floated as a projection — and far below other totals the administration has suggested at various points. Making analysis harder, the Department of Homeland Security stopped releasing enforcement data for the first time in decades.

President Trump promised to exceed the deportation efforts of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, by the most conservative estimates, removed about one-third of the illegal population in 1954. Any way you cut the data, even using the lowest-end estimates of the total illegal population in 2025, the administration is not on pace.

One reason: In its first year, the Trump administration prioritized a particular subset of illegal aliens — criminals. People can debate whether that was the right call, but that’s what happened. Prioritizing criminals means concentrating resources on fewer targets, and it has produced high-profile standoffs in cities like Minneapolis and Los Angeles. I will refer to that 2025 effort as “worst first,” as Border Czar Tom Homan has sometimes called it — phase one.

RELATED: Federalism cannot be a shield for sanctuary defiance

Photo by Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

We can credit the Trump administration for highlighting the issue of criminal illegal aliens, removing many, and forcing the hand of radical Democrats, some of whom have taken the absurd position of rioting in defense of rapists and murderers. They are who we thought they were.

Now phase two can begin: widening the aperture of immigration enforcement and placing quantity above the perceived “quality” of deportations. The goal was mass deportations, not the “best” deportations. In short, the public wants commas in the numbers.

The Trump administration can, at minimum, quadruple last year’s totals. It can do it quickly if it shifts priorities — especially by refocusing on worksite enforcement. The administration needs to move its attention from sanctuary cities to sanctuary farms, factories, and industrial hubs.

Deportation is a contact sport — not only between ICE and illegal aliens, but between the Trump administration and special interests that value cheap labor, politicians who need cheap talking points, and activist judges and violent mobs. Those forces can be overcome, and in the coming weeks and months, we will show how.

The goal is to help President Trump deliver on what he promised — and to surpass President Eisenhower’s historic efforts. To do that, President Trump needs support from the base and the right, not a constant drumbeat of consultants, pollsters, and “moderate” Republicans trying to undermine him. Those forces are coming together, and I believe the result will be less drama and more commas.

Americans deserve a road map to move from phase one into a more successful phase two.

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