“You’re a traitor to your race!”

Hearing this insult made me realize I was not truly a moderate, but a conservative who needed to be more vocal.

When I was a 1L at Rutgers-Camden in my constitutional law class, we discussed issues such as affirmative action and disparate impact theory. I expressed the opinion that the law should be colorblind and merit-based, and that Asians were often harmed by these policies.

The left only celebrates minority success when it serves progressive grievance.

We also covered the Japanese internment camps. As a member of the Asian Pacific American Law Student Association, I reminded the class that the Japanese people at the time followed their political leadership with near-religious devotion and that it could be reasonably argued the camps were necessary at the time. I noted that while the internment camps were wrong, they did not rise anywhere near the level of the German death camps.

I was used to seeing dismay from students and professors when a minority student expressed conservative beliefs. But during this conversation, I first heard someone question my relationship with my mother’s heritage solely because of my political views.

To the best of my recollection, this statement came from a white law student who once bragged about working on Senator Ted Kennedy’s campaign on Martha’s Vineyard. I was a mixed-race student who had worked as a bartender while attending Penn State and as a roofer during summers just to make ends meet.

Identity politics has produced more division than unity. It becomes discriminatory by enforcing ideological litmus tests within racial groups. Those who prioritize colorblind merit, individual responsibility, and limited government are labeled traitors or inauthentic.

The liberal media and Democratic rhetoric claim to champion minorities while viciously attacking prominent minority conservatives personally — often without engaging their arguments on policy or evidence.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a black conservative who rose from poverty in the segregated South, embodies the self-made success story that identity politics struggles to accommodate. Rather than debate his skepticism of race-based policies, critics frequently resort to personal attacks and racial slurs. More recently, Charlamagne tha God called Justice Clarence Thomas a “coon” on “The Daily Show.”

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been one of Trump’s most popular cabinet members, recently gave a passionate defense of the American dream. It’s a dream he has long believed in, but Rubio has long been labeled a traitor to his own culture primarily because of his policy positions on immigration and economics.

Kash Patel is an Indian-American FBI director. He has been a victim of personal attacks and racist death threats, yet little has been offered to criticize his results on crime and national security. Identity politics won’t allow it.

Even prominent black voices in sports and entertainment take risks when they deviate. Stephen A. Smith has faced fierce backlash for simply suggesting black voters consider voting Republican or for criticizing certain Democratic policies.

Economist Thomas Sowell, one of the most influential black thinkers of our time, has been repeatedly smeared with terrible racist attacks for documenting how culture, incentives, and policy explain disparities better than systemic racism narratives. Refusal to conform comes at a personal cost.

RELATED: Democrats love free speech — until conservatives get some

Nathan Posner/Anadolu/Getty Images

A glaring example of this selective outrage appears among prominent Asian-American Democratic politicians. Senator Andy Kim (D-N.J.), the first Korean-American U.S. Senator, frequently highlights his identity as the son of Korean immigrants and advocates greater Asian-American representation in politics.

Yet when the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) that race-based admissions policies violated the Equal Protection Clause — policies that data showed penalized Asian applicants with higher academic standards — Kim expressed dismay and pivoted to criticizing legacy admissions rather than the clear anti-Asian discrimination.

In contrast, retired Navy Captain Hung Cao, a Vietnamese refugee and decorated veteran recently appointed acting secretary of the Navy, was immediately mocked by the Democratic Party’s official X account. (The post has since been deleted.)

These examples reveal identity politics’ discriminatory core: The left only celebrates minority success when it serves progressive grievance. When Asians or other minorities succeed through merit, service, and conservative principles, that success becomes a problem.

These Democrat lawmakers embrace group-based advocacy when it aligns with progressive causes — pushing for representation and condemning hate when politically convenient, and supporting affirmative action frameworks that benefit some minority groups. Yet when high-achieving Asians suffer from the very racial preferences identity politics demands, the commitment to fighting discrimination evaporates.

Identity politics demands loyalty to the liberal ideologies above consistent principle or the specific interest of their communities.

True equality comes from judging individuals by character and content, not enforcing racial political blocs.

​Affirmative action, Clarence thomas, Hung cao, Identity politics, Kash patel, American dream, Minorities, Democrats, Opinion & analysis 

An Arizona woman known as “GrammaCrackers” said she will not give in to the haters who called in a dangerous “swatting” call on her while she was livestreaming online.

Sue Jacquot has hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube, but she got a shock on Monday during a 24/7 livestream campaign she ran to raise money to pay her grandson’s cancer bills.

‘They’re not going to tell me what I can do. They’re not going to make me afraid to do that.’

Jacquot had posted videos of herself playing Minecraft with her grandsons, Jack and Austin Self. Then one of the kids was diagnosed with cancer.

“He’s had 200 chemo treatments in like a year and a half, and that’s a lot of expensive bills that the insurance company won’t touch,” the 81-year-old said to KPNX-TV.

The family was planning to livestream for 15 days when the cops showed up at their doorstep.

“We got a call that Jack shot his grandma and killed her and that he was going to kill himself, and right then, I was like, ‘Whoa,'” Jack Self said. “It was kind of like a punch to the stomach.”

Swatting is a very dangerous tactic where police are falsely alerted to a violent crime at a victim’s home in the hope that the victim might be harmed during the emergency police response. Some of these incidents have resulted in lethal shootings.

More than a dozen Queen Creek police officers reported to the home and swarmed the residence after the call. The livestream showed police waking up Jacquot from her bed.

“They just sort of escorted me out, and they were apologizing,” GrammaCrackers said. “I just wondered what my grandkids had done.”

RELATED: Romanian man pleads guilty to orchestrating online ‘swatting’ campaign against US lawmakers, including an ex-president

Police said they are investigating the incident, but Jacquot says she won’t let the startling incident stop her.

“They’re not going to tell me what I can do. They’re not going to make me afraid to do that,” she said.

Jacquot recalled the swatting incident in a video on her YouTube channel, where she said she had never gotten so many hugs and attention from her grandsons afterward.

“It was kinda fun!” she said.

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​Swatting, Cancer bills, Livestream gamer, False police reports, Crime 

America’s gambling problem has a new face, and it looks suspiciously like yours. Or your brother’s. Or the guy next to you at Mass who keeps checking his phone during the homily.

A recent Ohio State University study found that religious affiliation does almost nothing to prevent sports betting. Catholic men ranked among the most enthusiastic gamblers in the dataset. The pew and the parlay, apparently, get along fine.

It trains people to seek deliverance through randomness rather than work, discipline, family, or faith.

Americans love believing that gambling addiction belongs to someone else: the degenerate, the Vegas burnout, the man at the racetrack, clutching losing tickets and emitting fumes that could strip paint.

Bottoming out

That stereotype has expired. Online gambling has democratized self-destruction, and the business of bottoming out is booming.

Personal responsibility matters — nobody disputes this. No app physically forces a man to wager his rent on a Tuesday game between two NBA teams he has never watched or followed and whose rosters he couldn’t name under torture. Adults make choices, and adults must own those choices. But treating this purely as a failure of weak individuals overlooks the scope of the problem.

America built a digital temptation machine that previous generations couldn’t have imagined. Old-school gambling required some effort. You drove somewhere. You walked through doors. You made bets in person. It also carried a healthy stigma: Someone might spot you. Shame had room to operate.

Online gambling vaporized that friction. The casino now follows you to the kitchen, the office bathroom, your daughter’s soccer game, and, yes, occasionally a funeral reception.

Value play

The trick of online gambling is that it markets itself as entertainment and finance at the same time. You’re not gambling. No, you are “making picks.” “Building parlays.” “Finding value.” The jargon sounds vaguely like a hedge fund internship for guys in tank tops.

The apps borrow heavily from social media design. Bright colors. Instant dopamine. Notifications calibrated to land at psychologically vulnerable hours. Near-misses engineered to keep users emotionally hostage. Vegas relied on free drinks and flashing lights. Modern sportsbooks use behavioral science perfected by Silicon Valley.

Sports betting hits young men particularly hard because it bonds with masculine identity. Sports have always offered escape, but now they double as a cruel promise of freedom from economic anxiety.

Every game now functions as a financial event. A chance to win. A chance to recover. A chance to prove you outsmarted the algorithm. I say this as someone who enjoys the odd wager, maybe 20 bucks on a soccer match or a UFC fight every few months. Plenty of my friends go harder. A few are clearly addicted, though they would never admit it.

RELATED: Predatory gambling apps are using loopholes to avoid state laws

Gabby Jones/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Undue influence

This is not a male-only problem. Women participate too, in growing numbers. The image of gambling addiction as a strictly male affliction belongs to the era of landlines, fax machines, and Blockbuster late fees. Apps market aggressively to everyone, repackaging an old vice as lifestyle entertainment.

Casual. Social. Empowering. America took compulsive wagering and gave it influencer branding. Lives ruined, families wrecked, mounting debt across every demographic. Yet the celebrity endorsements roll on without a hint of hesitation.

Joe Rogan and Theo Von have both taken DraftKings sponsorships.

Neither man invented gambling. Neither forces a listener to do anything. Both have every right to accept advertisers.

But there’s an important question worth asking. At what point does cultural influence carry moral weight? Both men are multimillionaires. Neither needs the sponsorship money to keep the studio lights on. With tens, perhaps even hundreds, of millions of dedicated listeners, they could sell practically anything. Sneakers, protein powder, trucks, premium tequila, leather wallets thick enough to stop a bullet, ergonomic office chairs, mattresses that promise spinal enlightenment. The list is endless.

But they choose gambling, which is reckless given that many of their listeners are young men who treat an ad read by either of them as an endorsement, a recommendation from a trusted voice, practically a green light from an older brother who has supposedly figured life out. Von, in particular, should know better. He has spoken honestly about his battles with addiction, and yet here he is, reading copy for an industry built on the same psychological hooks.

Gaming addiction

A ruthless and exploitative industry, I might add. The online gambling giants don’t build empires on casual users dropping five dollars on the Super Bowl. Profits come disproportionately from heavy users chasing losses at 2 a.m. while insisting they are “due.” America has normalized this sickness into something that no longer registers as strange. Ads run during games, before games, after games, across social media, and occasionally during segments warning about gambling addiction itself. “Call this hotline if you have lost your house. Also, use code TOUCHDOWN for a risk-free bet.”

The damage runs deeper than money. Online gambling sells the fantasy that rescue is one lucky bet away. One hit. One miracle payout. It trains people to seek deliverance through randomness rather than work, discipline, family, or faith.

The isolation makes it uniquely dangerous. Alcoholics gather in bars. Drug users move through visible circles. The online gambler hemorrhages money for years beside a sleeping spouse who trusts that everything is under control. Across the country, an increasing number are rolling the virtual dice, each one believing he is the exception.

He is not. The house always wins, and these days the house fits in your back pocket.

​Gambling, Addiction, Joe rogan, Theo von, Culture 

As BlazeTV’s Sara Gonzales continues her investigations into H-1B fraud in the state of Texas, the Indian media is growing more angsty.

“The Indian media is going crazy over my latest H-1B video,” says Sara, referring to her recent exposé in Frisco/Plano, where she confronted Great America Technologies’ owner Nagarjuna Reddy Sakam over suspected fraud.

Even though Sara’s H-1B investigations have sparked significant legal action from the state — including Attorney General Ken Paxton’s investigations, CIDs, and lawsuits against nearly 30 North Texas businesses, plus Gov. Greg Abbott’s freeze on new H-1B petitions by state agencies and universities — the Indian media continues to frame the Indian community as the victims.

“The Indian media is working overtime to try to discredit what I show in my videos,” says Sara.

She points out the irony of Indian media outlets trying to invalidate her investigations using an obscure report by a self-proclaimed entrepreneur who goes by the name James Blunt (@JBlunt1018), who apparently claimed that he “looked into the company and found nothing wrong.”

Given his strongly pro-Indian immigrant stance and an X profile picture that appears to be AI-generated, Sara strongly suspects that Blunt is “some sort of an Indian national.”

She then plays a clip from Times XP, a video news platform from the Times of India, where a news anchor claimed that America’s “social media activism,” “immigration politics,” and Sara’s “online investigation” are creating a “dangerous coalition” that might hurt Indian immigration efforts.

“This story is no longer just about H1B visas or the companies in Texas. It is becoming a part of much larger battle over immigration identity and who gets to define the American workforce in the years ahead,” the anchor said.

“I got a big problem with people in India trying to dictate to America what our workforce looks like or should look like,” says Sara in response.

She notes that according to “credible sources,” she is now being “monitored by the Indian government.”

But Sara isn’t phased.

“I’m not going to stop. We’re going to keep going until all your buddies get sent home,” she declares.

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Greg abbott, H-1b fraud, Ken paxton, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Texas, India, Visas