Stella Parton, 77, took to social media Friday to condemn fake AI-generated images and videos circulating about her sister while thanking the public for its outpouring of support.

Sadly, because of the way our lives have been lived in front of the public, we have no choice but to be subjected to incredible pressure and insensitivity from strangers, she posted on Instagram. There is a tremendous amount of AI and endless garbage being posted everyday and its been challenging to absorb and or ignore.

As time passes, those who are in the business of exploiting the loss and tragedies of others on a daily basis will move on to the next stampede of endless misinformation, she added.

Stella said Dolly would have been surprised and delighted by the nationwide outpouring of love for the queen of country music, who died Aug. 25 at age 80 following a brief battle with cancer.

Stella Parton has carved out her own career in country music as a singer and songwriter, scoring several hits during the 1970s, including I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight, released in 1975. She is one of Dolly Partons 11 siblings, all of whom were born into deep poverty and raised in Tennessees Smoky Mountains.

We will be okay in time but each of us will grieve in our own personal way, Stella wrote. Every human being experiences pain and loss in life and my family is no different.

At the same time, Stella said she differs from her sister in that she is unafraid to express her opinions and views on touchy subjects, calling it her right as a human being.

The public rebuke comes as fans around the world continue to mourn Partons death, gather outside her Nashville home, and resurface decades-old interviews of the larger-than-life entertainer. Since Partons passing, some fans have circulated fabricated photos and videos of the country music icon, primarily on TikTok and X. President Donald Trump, who ordered flags to be flown at half-staff in Partons honor, also shared a viral AI-generated image showing him walking arm-in-arm with Parton.

Born in Sevier County, Tennessee, Parton became a global icon whose music, wit, philanthropy, and unmistakable voice reflected the heart and soul of the Volunteer State. The Tennessee-born singer was hospitalized Friday and died four days later at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, The Daily Wire reported.

Her nephew, Bryan Seaver, confirmed her death in an Instagram video.

But sadness lies with us, not with Dolly. Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus, Seaver said.

Partons death followed a period of growing health concerns. Fans were alarmed in September 2025 when she postponed a scheduled six-night Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace. True to form, Parton eased the disappointment with humor, joking that she needed a 100,000-mile check-up and clarifying that it didnt involve her plastic surgeon.

Four days before her death, she opened up to PEOPLE about her recent health struggles. I am dealing with some health issues that I just didnt pay attention to when I was watching over [her late husband] Carl, Parton told the outlet.

As the Parton family continues to grieve, Stella asked people to show more compassion. 

Use my sisters life as an example for tolerance and respect toward others, she wrote. Its not about the most clever comments, fake AI garbage, or snarky tweets.

At the end of the day or the end of a life, how will you feel about yourself? she asked.

Tucson police say Ousman Ceesay, 44, opened fire on Vincent Anthony Siqueiros, 42, and Cameron Davis Capara, 33, around 12:30 a.m. outside Venture-N, a longtime gay bar near the University of Arizona campus, NBC News reported. Both victims died at the scene. Ceesay turned a 9mm handgun on himself and later died at a hospital.

Investigators said Ceesay had no known connection to either victim and had only recently relocated to Tucson from Oklahoma City. He was carrying a written list of other LGBT-associated businesses in the area, though surveillance footage reviewed by detectives showed he never attempted to enter Venture-N itself during the attack.

A search of Ceesays home turned up a separate note that police say confirmed he acted alone and that the shooting was deliberately aimed at the gay community, the outlet reported. Tucson Police Chief Monica Prieto called the killings especially heinous and said bias-motivated violence has no place in the city. Officers have since mad contact with every business named on Ceesays list and increased patrols nearby, though authorities say there is no known ongoing threat.

Ceesay had no criminal record in Pima County and was legally permitted to own firearms, police said.

According to his cousin, interviewed by the Arizona Daily Star, he had worked as an Uber driver and was a practicing Muslim who prayed five times daily. Ceesay and his wife filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2018 after accruing more than $76,000 in debt, and that the couple faced eviction over unpaid rent as recently as last year.

Capara, a photographer, had spent years documenting the gay scene, campus life, and pro-Palestinian demonstrations and anti-ICE rallies around Tucson. His father, Jeff Capara, separately told the Star his son cared deeply about people he considered marginalized.

Siqueiross sister, Kate Marquez, told mourners at a vigil this week that her brother had wondered aloud just days before his death whether anyone would show up for him if something happened. She said the outpouring of support since the shooting had answered that question.

Community organizations, including Tucson Queerstory and the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation, held a candlelight vigil at a local park, and a memorial of flowers, candles and photographs has grown outside Venture-N in the days since the attack.

The investigation remains ongoing.

Prisha Mosley, now 28, was first prescribed hormones at 17 and underwent a double mastectomy at 18. She later sued the doctors and other medical providers for fraud and malpractice, alleging they misled her about the treatment and its effects.

"I'm a mammal, a human, so I wasn't able to change sex. I didn't need to change sex because that's not possible and nothing was ever wrong with my body. Destroying it with hormones and surgery did not make me happy or well," she told Fox News Digital in an interview.

A trial court in North Carolina initially dismissed Mosley's lawsuit on the basis of the statute of limitations. But, as Mosley explained to Fox News Digital, a law passed in North Carolina in 2025 extended the statute of limitations for medical malpractice lawsuits specifically for people who have undergone gender transitions.

DETRANSITIONER WINS SETTLEMENT AFTER SUING PROVIDERS FOLLOWING GENDER SURGERY

"During the process through which my lawsuit was going through the courts, North Carolina passed HB 808, which was previously HB 805, which is something along the lines of the Protect Children and Women's Act," Mosley explained.

"[The law] extended the statute of limitations for anyone bringing forward a civil case, and even had a line which said that this includes cases that have already been brought forward or even pending in the courts now," she continued.

Legislators in North Carolina passed the bill in 2025, overriding a veto from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein.

INSURANCE COMPANIES PUT ON NOTICE FOR STRANDING TRANS PATIENTS WHO WANT TO REVERSE SURGERIES

FTC ALLEGES INFLUENTIAL TRANSGENDER HEALTH ORGANIZATION MISLED PARENTS ABOUT SAFETY OF YOUTH TREATMENTS

Though the bill was passed in July 2025, a North Carolina trial judge still dismissed Mosley's lawsuit in August 2025, denying her lawyers' motion to reinstate her medical malpractice claims during a special session and granting summary judgment to the plaintiffs.

"Despite this, my claims were dismissed with prejudice, even though they had been previously found to have merit for fraud. The malpractice was still in question due to the statute of limitations, and then after the passage of the law, the entire case was dismissed," Mosley told Fox News Digital.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PROBE COULD UPEND WIDELY USED TRANSGENDER YOUTH TREATMENT GUIDELINES

Mosley was initially encouraged by the judge's decision to deny the defendants' motion to dismiss, taking it as a signal her fraud accusations could have merit.

"The judge actually originally found that my case did have merit for fraud, and that was on the basis that I was told that I could actually change sex, which is not possible, and I was not only told that I could change sex, but that I needed to do so in order to survive and that doing so would ensure I had a good life. All of these claims are false," she told Fox News Digital.

WOMAN WHO LIVED AS MAN SAYS SHE GRIEVED UNWANTED BODY PARTS AFTER TRANSITION

But after her lawsuit's final dismissal in August, her lawyers appealed, leading to the upcoming Sept. 29 appellate court oral arguments.

Mosley is arguing that the doctors who counseled her into the double mastectomy and hormone therapy misled her by telling her she could become a man and go through male puberty, which she says was a lie.

AT 14, I ENDURED GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE. ILL SUFFER WITH THAT FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE

"I consented to quote unquote top surgery, and I was under the impression that top surgery was the surgery that turned a female chest into a male chest, and that's simply not what happened to me. In fact, I had complications related to my surgery," she told Fox News Digital.

"Clearly I didn't have a male chest, and the guarantees weren't promised that way. But it's also impossible to induce puberty of the opposite sex because it's impossible to change sex. I wasn't going through male puberty. I was being put through menopause as a teenager, and while inducing all of these medical issues and problems for me, my doctors just covered it up with these fraudulent terms that made it seem like something good and medically sound was happening to me when it was not. Even when I complained about side effects and said that I was suffering from pain and acne and other issues, they told me that this was because of male puberty," she explained.

Mosley said that she realized she had been lied to when, though she was still identifying as a male at the time, her fiancé's young daughter kept referring to her as "mommy."

"Despite the fact that I still had a beard at the time and I was wearing male clothes and all of that, this little girl started calling me mommy, and that's just where everything fell into place for me," she told Fox News Digital.

Mosley said she was encouraged by a recent ruling in New York, where 22-year-old detransitioner, Fox Varians, sued the psychologist and plastic surgeon who counseled her to undergo a gender transition, winning $2 million in a judgment.

Mosley pointed out that no detransitioners suing their medical providers for malpractice have ever lost their cases in trial.

"I think it's clear to people that this type of medicalization is wrong, and it points to the fact, you know, Fox Varian's is the only detransitioner case that's ever made it to court. None of our cases, not mine, not anyone else's, have ever failed in court. We're being stopped by strange policies and statutes of limitations before we ever go before a jury. But the general public knows that what happened to us is wrong and that we deserve justice for what happened to us," she told Fox News Digital.

Fox News Digital contacted Stein's office and legal representatives for each of the defendants listed in Mosley vs. Emerson for further comment.

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 theyre 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.

Anthropics explanation gives us a remarkably clear example of the Brussels effect at work. The company says it is imposing the watermark globally because it doesnt 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 Claudes watermark is based on Google DeepMinds 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 doesnt 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.

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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.

Its easy to find these whole geographic kerfuffles unnecessary. But the media hated the first one so much that The Associated Press found itself restricted from the White House press pool for refusing to accept the new gulf terminology. What they hate is anything Trump does to add a patriotic pro-America tinge to something that they associate more with his ego than with patriotism. They see redas in a red MAGA cap.

On the Lake Ontario battle, HBO host Bill Maher joked: The liberals are very pissed at this. They say you cant just go around changing things to fit your political agenda. Just ask any Latinx birthing person.

As anyone who watches the evolution of what terms are acceptable, the Left regularly changes the terminology and expects everyone to follow its changes. Try to keep up with The Associated Press Stylebook, which calls the tune for the press.

These term tyrants routinely genuflect to ethnic and LGBTQ+ pressure groups and their demands to remake the language were all supposed to use. They tried to force Latinx on people, but the Latinos seemed to hate it the most. Illegal immigrants are undocumented, homeless people are unhoused, and gender is assigned at birth.

Describing a woman as a birthing personto include men with a uterusstrikes most people as waging war on biological truth. The use of pregnant person instead of pregnant woman has caused some pushback from feminists.

But those arent on the map, the Left might suggest. OK, well, it wants to cancel and rename all kinds of landmarks to satisfy its urge for wokeness. Just in this decade, the Left has pulled down all kinds of statues. Last week, it removed three statues in Richmond to clean that Old South house: Confederate Gens. Stonewall Jackson and Extra Billy Smith, as well as Confederate Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire.

President Joe Biden renamed nine major U.S. Army bases that honor Confederate leaders, including Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, and Fort Rucker. He also renamed nearly 650 geographic features across this country.

Under Native American (or is that Indigenous?) Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, they created a Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force and changed the names of things with offensive terms like Squaw. None of this was considered controversial by our media elites because everything a Democrat renames in the cause of wokeness is good news. Or not news.

The woke police forced name changes for the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, and many college and high school athletic teams with derogatory mascots. But now they also seem to find the use of America on the map to be offensive.

Conservatives are usually the ones who like to stick with traditions and not rename things based on the newest ideological fads. Liberals cant seriously object to renaming things. They just want to be the only people who get to rename things.

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Tucson police say Ousman Ceesay, 44, opened fire on Vincent Anthony Siqueiros, 42, and Cameron Davis Capara, 33, around 12:30 a.m. outside Venture-N, a longtime gay bar near the University of Arizona campus, NBC News reported. Both victims died at the scene. Ceesay turned a 9mm handgun on himself and later died at a hospital.

Investigators said Ceesay had no known connection to either victim and had only recently relocated to Tucson from Oklahoma City. He was carrying a written list of other LGBT-associated businesses in the area, though surveillance footage reviewed by detectives showed he never attempted to enter Venture-N itself during the attack.

A search of Ceesays home turned up a separate note that police say confirmed he acted alone and that the shooting was deliberately aimed at the gay community, the outlet reported. Tucson Police Chief Monica Prieto called the killings especially heinous and said bias-motivated violence has no place in the city. Officers have since mad contact with every business named on Ceesays list and increased patrols nearby, though authorities say there is no known ongoing threat.

Ceesay had no criminal record in Pima County and was legally permitted to own firearms, police said.

According to his cousin, interviewed by the Arizona Daily Star, he had worked as an Uber driver and was a practicing Muslim who prayed five times daily. Ceesay and his wife filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2018 after accruing more than $76,000 in debt, and that the couple faced eviction over unpaid rent as recently as last year.

Capara, a photographer, had spent years documenting the gay scene, campus life, and pro-Palestinian demonstrations and anti-ICE rallies around Tucson. His father, Jeff Capara, separately told the Star his son cared deeply about people he considered marginalized.

Siqueiross sister, Kate Marquez, told mourners at a vigil this week that her brother had wondered aloud just days before his death whether anyone would show up for him if something happened. She said the outpouring of support since the shooting had answered that question.

Community organizations, including Tucson Queerstory and the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation, held a candlelight vigil at a local park, and a memorial of flowers, candles and photographs has grown outside Venture-N in the days since the attack.

The investigation remains ongoing.

Stella Parton, 77, took to social media Friday to condemn fake AI-generated images and videos circulating about her sister while thanking the public for its outpouring of support.

Sadly, because of the way our lives have been lived in front of the public, we have no choice but to be subjected to incredible pressure and insensitivity from strangers, she posted on Instagram. There is a tremendous amount of AI and endless garbage being posted everyday and its been challenging to absorb and or ignore.

As time passes, those who are in the business of exploiting the loss and tragedies of others on a daily basis will move on to the next stampede of endless misinformation, she added.

Stella said Dolly would have been surprised and delighted by the nationwide outpouring of love for the queen of country music, who died Aug. 25 at age 80 following a brief battle with cancer.

Stella Parton has carved out her own career in country music as a singer and songwriter, scoring several hits during the 1970s, including I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight, released in 1975. She is one of Dolly Partons 11 siblings, all of whom were born into deep poverty and raised in Tennessees Smoky Mountains.

We will be okay in time but each of us will grieve in our own personal way, Stella wrote. Every human being experiences pain and loss in life and my family is no different.

At the same time, Stella said she differs from her sister in that she is unafraid to express her opinions and views on touchy subjects, calling it her right as a human being.

The public rebuke comes as fans around the world continue to mourn Partons death, gather outside her Nashville home, and resurface decades-old interviews of the larger-than-life entertainer. Since Partons passing, some fans have circulated fabricated photos and videos of the country music icon, primarily on TikTok and X. President Donald Trump, who ordered flags to be flown at half-staff in Partons honor, also shared a viral AI-generated image showing him walking arm-in-arm with Parton.

Born in Sevier County, Tennessee, Parton became a global icon whose music, wit, philanthropy, and unmistakable voice reflected the heart and soul of the Volunteer State. The Tennessee-born singer was hospitalized Friday and died four days later at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, The Daily Wire reported.

Her nephew, Bryan Seaver, confirmed her death in an Instagram video.

But sadness lies with us, not with Dolly. Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus, Seaver said.

Partons death followed a period of growing health concerns. Fans were alarmed in September 2025 when she postponed a scheduled six-night Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace. True to form, Parton eased the disappointment with humor, joking that she needed a 100,000-mile check-up and clarifying that it didnt involve her plastic surgeon.

Four days before her death, she opened up to PEOPLE about her recent health struggles. I am dealing with some health issues that I just didnt pay attention to when I was watching over [her late husband] Carl, Parton told the outlet.

As the Parton family continues to grieve, Stella asked people to show more compassion. 

Use my sisters life as an example for tolerance and respect toward others, she wrote. Its not about the most clever comments, fake AI garbage, or snarky tweets.

At the end of the day or the end of a life, how will you feel about yourself? she asked.

The Labor Departments Employment Situation report for August, released Friday, showed total non-agricultural payrolls rose by 162,000 for the month, well above the 31,000 average monthly gain of the prior year. Women accounted for the vast majority of that growth, continuing a pattern visible since January 2025.

Womens cumulative payroll employment has risen by roughly 765,000 since December 2024, while mens employment is down slightly, by about 6,000, over the same period, according to Mike Konczal, director of policy and research at the Economic Security Project, a left-leaning nonprofit. Konczals analysis, drawn from the BLS Current Employment Statistics survey, found women accounted for the entirety of net job growth over that stretch and 82% of it over the past 12 months alone.

The August report reinforced that divergence. Restaurants and bars added 59,000 jobs and local government education added 42,000 together nearly two-thirds of the months total gain, and both sectors with heavily female workforces. The BLS reported that local government education employment has shown little net change since January 2025, meaning last months gain largely reversed a summer dip rather than reflecting new hiring.

Manufacturing, a traditionally male-dominated sector, also grew for a second straight month, up 16,000 in August and 58,000 since a low point in December 2025, driven by machinery and fabricated metal product manufacturing.

The unemployment rate held at 4.1% in August. Joblessness among adult women stood at 3.5%, compared with 4.0% for adult men. Average hourly earnings rose 3.1% over the year, the slowest annual pace since May 2021, and labor force participation has fallen half a percentage point since January.

BLS revised June and July payroll figures up by a combined 55,000 jobs, it said Friday. The next employment report, covering September, is scheduled for release October 2.

The gender divergence comes amid historically slow overall job growth under the Trump administration compared with his first term and the final years of the Joe Biden presidency. Nonfarm payroll employment rose by roughly 716,000 between January 2025 and June 2026, according to BLS data about a third of the 2 million jobs added over a comparable 17-month stretch at the end of the Biden administration. Much of that gap traces to a shrinking federal workforce, which has contracted by more than 300,000 jobs since Trump took office largely a function of the presidents early push for mass federal layoffs and buyouts.

But according to BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock, that claim misses the bigger story.

Ten years later, Colin Kaepernick just told the country he won, Whitlock says.

He sat with NBC News and said he no longer watches the NFL because the league is actively blackballing him and the men who knelt with him. He watches college football now. That is not a quarterback begging for a clipboard; that is a man who knows the institution already belongs to him, he explains.

A three-minute kneel during the national anthem has been stretched into game-long signs in every NFL stadium. End racism, stop hate, he continues, noting that its not going away any time soon.

For the 2026 season, the seventh straight year of the stencil, the league will paint those slogans in the grass and on the helmets again. Marxist liturgy as field decoration. [Kaepernick] never needed another snap. He needed the building to preach after he left the huddle, he says.

And the diversity score cards" within the league like the male cheerleaders who went viral not too long ago still sit in the front office as if they were defensive schemes.

The NFL did not stumble into this; it was discipled into it. [Kaepernick] watches college football and accuses the NFL of blackballing him, Whitlock says.

He can afford the sneer. He is one of Americas greatest Trojan horses. He never recaptured the quarterback job. He captured the institution, he continues. The NFL thought it was containing a protest. It was being converted by one.

What began as a sideline gesture now owns the grass, the hiring, and the moral vocabulary of Sunday. The loudest league in the country is still kneeling. The quietest quarterback already cashed the cultural check, he adds.

And while Kaepernick is often treated as a failed activist, that couldnt be farther from the truth.

Ten years later, we are still talking about Colin Kaepernick. That is a cultural victory that never required a comeback, a tryout, or another down. He sacrificed a fading quarterback career and got a league to carry his flag, Whitlock says.

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

To enjoy more fearless conversations at the crossroads of culture, faith, sports, and comedy with Jason Whitlock, subscribe to BlazeTV the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Gas, groceries, rentthe three horsemen of kitchen-table economicsare top of mind for voters this midterm season.

The Trump administration, to its credit, has noticed. It has struck an oil arrangement with Venezuela, announced a drug-pricing initiative, lifted tariffs on beef imports, and taken up other such measures besides. Reasonable people can debate their merits. What is less reasonable is the question put to this writer, with wearying regularity, by television hosts and reporters alike: When will we see results?

The question is understandable. It is also a category error, one that reveals more about the assumptions of those asking it than about the policies in question. It presumes that an economy is a machine with a dial, that a lever pulled in Washington in September produces an outcome in November, calibrated and on schedule, the way a thermostat produces heat.

An economy is not a machine. Its more like an ecosystem: vast, adaptive, and complex. No official, however well-briefed, can specify in advance precisely when a policy will bite, whether it will bite as intended, or what else, unbidden, will be biting at the same time.

There are limits to what any mind, or any committee of minds, however intelligent, can know about a system built from the choices of hundreds of millions of people.

Consider how much lies outside anyones control. The Iran conflict could escalate or subside, and either would move oil markets before any economist in D.C. could issue a statement about it. Shipping lanes reroute, or get struck again, depending on decisions made by people whose names appear in no American briefing book. Cattle herds do not grow in a fiscal quarter; they rebuild over years, one calf at a time, and the rebuilding can be undone overnight by a screwworm outbreak that no analyst saw coming and no policy could have prevented.

Time lags stretch on, indifferent to election calendars. And effects surface in the last place anyone looked: e.g., ranchers, mid-rebuild, upset about cheaper beef imports.

The political trouble here is real, and worth stating plainly. A president can order a border closed. A governor can order the National Guard into a city. Neither can order prices down, and if either somehow could, the ordering could produce shortages, black markets, and other miseries considerably worse than the prices being complained about.

An economy of our size and intricacy cannot be tuned to a November deadline. What it can be given, however, is room: barriers removed, rules simplified, supply allowed to do what supply does when it is not obstructed. That is a policy of patience, which is precisely the kind of policy a two-year election cycle punishes.

What can honestly be said is this: look back.

Whatever discomfort households feel now, measure it against 2022, when annual inflation ran at roughly 8% and hit 9.1% (year over year) that Junethe worst reading in four decadeswhile the national average for a gallon of gas that same month touched $5.01.

Todays national average sits closer to $4.10.

The distance between those two figures is not nothing. You might say that its the distance between a genuine emergency and a genuine grievance, and that conflating the two serves no one but those who benefit from public panic.

That distance would narrow considerably, and the pain would deepen, if policymakers were to embrace wage, price, and rent controls as remedies for high costs. These proposals rest on a familiar premise: that government can improve economic outcomes by determining what workers, landlords, and businesses may charge. The history of such interventions suggests otherwise.

Among the clearest historical examples is Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in Latin America. Its experience offers a cautionary illustration of what can happen when government attempts to substitute administrative judgments for the information conveyed by prices and markets.

Which returns us to the trouble: Beneath when will it work predictions lies a deeper and more flattering assumption: that somewhere in Washington sits a mind, or a model, capable of holding the whole of a $28 trillion economy in view and adjusting it like a recipe.

No such mind exists, and pretending otherwise is the beginning of every policy failure worth remembering. The honest posture toward an economy this large is not mastery but humility, a recognition that the most any government can do is clear away what it has needlessly piled in the road and then wait, as the rest of us must, to see what an unmanaged multitude of free people choose to build.

The 67-year-old Arizona man, who WBFF identified as Arthur Lundeen, was arrested after the flight from Dallas to Newark was diverted to Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. 

Images first obtained by TMZ show the passenger looking like a mummy, wrapped in duct tape as he was strapped to his seat. His hands and even his head appear to have been taped down. One image shows the older man with a bloodied right forearm, while his face is blurred.

Video captured during the incident shows crew members and passengers restraining the man during an apparent midair struggle.

Youre crazy, man, one person is heard telling the unruly passenger.

Relax, relax stop it! another person is heard saying.

The drama erupted Thursday night as the plane was flying from Fort Worth to Newark, according to TMZ. The reportedly drunk passenger allegedly began yelling at a male passenger seated nearby.

TMZ reported, citing sources, that the man started shouting about Jesus and people going to hell. A black flight attendant then approached Lundeen to defuse the spiraling situation. 

Thats when the passenger escalated his behavior allegedly calling the flight attendant the N-word and hurling an anti-gay slur at him, TMZ reported. The 67-year-old is said to have then turned his ire on fellow passengers by hitting the passenger sitting next to him and striking the mans computer.

Flight attendants reportedly handed duct tape and zip ties to three male passengers, who used the materials to strap the man back to his seat.

On Sept. 3, American Airlines flight 618 diverted to Baltimore (BWI) due to a disruptive customer. Upon arrival, law enforcement met the aircraft and assisted with deplaning the customer before the flight continued to its destination, the airline said in a statement. The safety and security of our customers and team members is our top priority, and we do not tolerate violence. We thank our team members for their professionalism and our customers for their understanding.

The flight landed at BWI shortly after 10 p.m. Thursday. Maryland Transportation Authority Police arrested Lundeen at the gate, WBFF reported. He is facing state charges of second-degree assault and disorderly conduct, according to police, and was released on his own recognizance. The FBI is also investigating. His trial is scheduled for October 19.

Thursdays incident is the latest example of an unruly passenger forcing an airline to abandon normal flight operations and respond to a crisis midair. In June, chaos erupted aboard another American Airlines flight after an unruly passenger reportedly bit a fellow traveler while en route to Philadelphia, CBS News reported. The passenger was trying to fight everybody, according to air traffic control audio obtained by the outlet.

I dont know if hes hallucinating or whatever, but he just bit a passenger and hes trying to fight everybody, a pilot told an air traffic controller. What a day, huh.

Reports of unruly passenger behavior peaked at 5,973 incidents in 2021, during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and have dropped more than 80% since then though the FAA has flagged a recent uptick in incidents.

Incidents where airline passengers have disrupted flights with threatening or violent behavior are an ongoing problem, the agency says on its website, citing its zero-tolerance policy for unruly passenger behavior.

Traveling by plane and a dead-of-night train ride from Poland, one might have expected to find a nation weary after more than four years of Putins brutal and bloody war and the daily pummeling of their capital city by the Russian war machine in the days before we arrived.

Instead, on my third visit since the outset of the war in 2022, I found a Ukrainian people hardened and even more determined to win a victory for freedom no matter the odds.

While some Americans have grown callous to grim headlines describing an unmoving and grinding stalemate, President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have only become more resolved. With many of the loudest and least informed voices in our country on the Left and the Right arguing that Ukraines cause is hopeless or that the time has come to negotiate away its future, nothing I saw in Kyiv last week supports that conclusion.

By every measure that truly matters, Ukraine is winning this war. Ukraine remains free. Its government stands. Its soldiers have taken the fight directly into the heart of Russia with unprecedented drone warfare. Its people are unbowed and refuse to surrender. And the blue and yellow flag still flies defiantly over Kyiv.

The Ukrainian people are not asking the free world to fight their war. They are fighting it themselves, through extraordinary courage and sacrifice. They only ask of the free world: that America and our allies continue providing the support they need to repel Putins unprovoked invasion and return his aspirations for a new Russian empire to the ash heap of history.

Thirty-five years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed beneath the weight of Communism and its own corruption. The Iron Curtain fell, and captive nations like Ukraine reclaimed their freedom and embraced the Free World, unshackled from the chains of Communism.

Today, Vladimir Putin is trying to reverse historys verdict. His invasion is not merely another territorial dispute between neighboring states. It is an attempt to resurrect an empire that deserved to die. Like the Soviet despots before him, Putin believes he can erase a distinct nation, language, culture, and people through fear and violence.

He cannot.

Vladimir Putin set out to conquer Ukraine in days, topple its democratically elected government, install a puppet regime, extinguish Ukrainian independence, and break the proud Ukrainian people. More than four years later, he has accomplished none of those objectives.

Russia has paid an enormous price in blood, treasure, and international isolation simply to gain small pieces of territory it cannot hold without constant reinforcement. That is not what victory looks like.

Unable to break Ukraines determination on the battlefield, the Kremlin has increasingly turned to terror from the skies, targeting innocent children and civilians. In recent days, Russia has unleashed wave after desperate wave of long-range drones and missiles against Kyiv and other civilian population centers. More than 1,500 attack drones were launched over just four days, as the Kremlin struggles in vain to break the spirit of the Ukrainian people.

The price of stopping dictators always rises when free nations hesitate. Putin will either be stopped in Ukraine or further west. The choice is ours, not his.

Ronald Reagan understood this when he warned, No Western nation, including the United States, can hope to win its own battle for freedom and survival by sacrificing brave comrades to the politics of international expediency.

For America and her allies, supporting Ukraine is not an act of charity. Giving Ukraine the means to defeat and repel the Russian war machine serves the vital national interests of the United States of America.

Every dollar invested in helping Ukrainians defeat Russian aggression today reduces the likelihood that American servicemen and women will one day have to confront that aggression themselves under our NATO commitments. This investment also rebuilds our own industrial base, providing jobs and ensuring our own security as the world becomes an increasingly dangerous place.

And more must be done right now.

Congress should act without delay to pass the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act. Every additional sanction further isolates the Kremlin, weakens Putins ability to finance his war machine, and brings Ukraine one step closer to justice, peace, and victory.

Congress must also ensure that Ukraine continues to receive the military resources it needs to defend its people, protect its skies, and finish this fight.

Thirty-five years ago, Ukrainians reclaimed their freedom from one empire. Today they are ensuring that the dead empire is never resurrected.

Every generation will be tasked to defend freedom. This generation of Ukrainians has done so with extraordinary courage. They deserve more than our admiration. With the steadfast support of every free nation on earth and the arsenal of democracy, Ukraine can win a victory for freedom, for their people, and for freedom-loving people around the world.

***

Mike Pence served as the 48th Vice President of the United States. He is founder of Advancing American Freedom and author of What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience.

In our equity-obsessed age, each one of these gap stats has a grimy underbelly, made up of individuals who are unfairly denied the fruits of their talents because institutions have tried to force equal outcomes: men who work longer hours on average; Asians who have higher SAT scores on average; Millennial and Gen Z white applicants who get passed over at work because they dont add to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Though no example exists anywhere of a world without disparities, it seems that most American institutions government agencies, universities, and corporate workplaces cannot tolerate the reality of their existence.

We are living through a decade of wokeism in which racial favoritism has graduated from an ostensibly temporary thumb on the scale for the almost-qualified to the kind of unqualified frenzy that attracts grifters and con artists. And, correspondingly, the discrimination against the disfavored has gone from ambient to so intense as to bar advancement in culturally prestigious industries.

Contra to dismissive talking points from purveyors like AOC, Woke 1 has done real damage to many lives.

Think, for example, of the nameless crowd of people denied the sinecures, positions, and honors bestowed on Cambridges former youngest black professor, Jason Arday. He was a serial fabulist and plagiarist and tragically died by suicide earlier this month.

In addition to the coveted position from which he resigned, Arday had a lucrative book deal in an industry in which just three of the 70 National Book Awards nominees in the past decade were white men, a shift that happened far too suddenly to have occurred naturally.

The Arday debacle shows that the quest to eliminate disparities has turned hiring into a de facto racial spoils system. Despite every remedy applied against them, disparities persist everywhere in every profession, school, boardroom, prison, scientific award category, sports field, and socioeconomic tier for reasons that are cultural, political, family-based, genetic, religious, and natural.

RELATED: DEI refuses to die

Love Employee/Getty Images

Sometimes the reasons are even historically arcane. The majority of nail technicians in the United States are Vietnamese, even though they make up just 0.75% of the population. It turns out that this particular disparity can be traced to a single American actress, Tippi Hedren of "The Birds" fame. She visited a refugee camp near Sacramento after the Vietnam War and paid her manicurist to provide training, which then spread like wildfire throughout that community.

Disparities of a thousand hues are the norm. As Thomas Sowell wrote in "Discriminations and Disparities" back in 2018, Neither in nature nor among human beings are either equal or randomly distributed outcomes automatic. On the contrary, grossly unequal distributions of outcomes are common, both in nature and among people.

Though no example exists anywhere of a world without disparities, it seems that most American institutions government agencies, universities, and corporate workplaces cannot tolerate the reality of their existence, even where there is no evidence that they arise from discriminatory practices.

University of San Diego School of Law professor Gail Heriot, an experienced civil rights lawyer and author of the aptly titled article Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal, regularly challenges audiences to come up with a single hiring criterion that does not produce disparate outcomes on the basis of some protected characteristic that is, race, sex, religion, or national origin.

She has never received a satisfactory answer, even after offering a cash reward.

The ubiquity of disparities allows government agencies to choose their victims at will. No government body tasked with enforcing laws against workplace discrimination has ever investigated whether requiring a bachelors degree for entry-level office work causes disparities among different demographic groups. Instead, the government seeks to root out all disparities against protected classes.

During the Biden administration, the EEOC sued the grocery store chain Sheetz for screening out potential employees with certain kinds of criminal records. The government admitted that Sheetz had no intention of discriminating against black and Native American job applicants. But because a higher percentage of job-seekers from those backgrounds had criminal records, it had the effect of constituting illegal discrimination.

Welcome to disparate impact liability, a branch of the law now declared dead for the time being and potentially unconstitutional by the Trump administrations Office of Legal Counsel.

RELATED: We need lawfare for white men

Blaze Media Illustration

When the law presumes that these gaps exist because of discrimination, it places defendants in an impossible position: When the inevitable disparities appear in your organization, you can either accept them and open yourself to litigation or discriminate against unprotected classes to make the numbers even out and open yourself to litigation.

As I testified before the House Oversight Committee in July, our universities, corporations, and public institutions have been at war with the reality of disparities for decades. In their effort to vanquish them, often under shapeshifting terms, theyve turned to actual discrimination against overrepresented groups in a way that is both deeply unjust and illegal under U.S. law.

For too long, even those on the right were defensive about the existence of these disparities.

They went beyond the laudable goal of reforming the K-12 education system to make it function better for all students to promising that their reforms would close the gaps and selling them as a way to render affirmative action at the university level unnecessary.

But the problem with DEI, and before that affirmative action, is simple: It tries to impose a Harrison Bergeron dystopia of equitable outcomes at mass scale. But doing that in a real world full of disparities requires discrimination against individuals.

As a multiethnic republic, we can no longer tolerate a system that institutes a legalized hierarchy of favored and disfavored classes. We can either enforce civil rights laws equally for everyone, which the Trump administration has done an admirable job of pursuing, or we can continue to degenerate into balkanized bloc politics marked by increasing resentment.

For the good of everyone, we must kill the god of the gaps: equality under the law for all, special favor for none, and let the disparities fall where they may.

Editors note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

On Aug. 27, this writer sent some questions to the State Department Office of Press Operations through its online portal for media inquiries. One of these questions was: Has the State Department concluded that China is continuing to engage in genocide in 2026?

On Sept. 1, a State Department spokesperson provided a written answer via email: The United States determined the CCP is committing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious groups in Xinjiang.

On Jan. 19, 2021, the last full day of President Donald Trumps first term, then-Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, as this column has noted before, issued a written statement that was headlined Determination of the Secretary of State on Atrocities in Xinjiang.

The United States of America has led the world in holding the perpetrators of the most heinous human rights abuses accountable, Pompeo said in this statement.

We do so because it is right, he said.

[A]fter careful examination of the available facts, said Pompeo, I have determined that the PRC [Peoples Republic of China], under the direction and control of the CCP, has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang. I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state.

In this statementissued more than five years agoPompeo called for this to stop.

The United States, he said, calls upon the PRC immediately to release all arbitrarily detained persons and abolish its system of internment, detention camps, house arrest and forced labor; cease coercive population control measures, including forced sterilizations, forced abortion, forced birth control, and the removal of children from their families; end all torture and abuse in places of detention; end the persecution of Uyghurs and other members of religious and ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China, and afford Uyghurs and other persecuted minorities the freedom to travel and emigrate.

Since Pompeo made this statement, each of the State Departments five annual reports on human rights practices in China (covering calendar years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024) has stated that China is committing genocide.

Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year in China against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang, said the first sentence of the 2024 report.

The State Department has not yet released its human rights report on China that will cover calendar year 2025. The Department is actively working on the Human Rights Report covering global conditions in 2025 and expects to publish it later this year, a State Department spokesperson informed this writer.

The departments report covering 2024 described the CCPs actions in Xinjiang.

Government targeting of ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang with intensified coercive population control measures resulted in plummeting birth rates in Xinjiang after 2018 when authorities increased coercive population control measures, including forced abortions, forced sterilizations, involuntary intrauterine device insertions, and pregnancy checks occurring at detention centers in the region and targeting minority groups, primarily Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs, said the report.

The report also said that [s]ignificant human rights issues in China included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices; arbitrary arrest and detention by the government including, since 2017, of more than one million Uyghurs and members of other predominantly Muslim minority groups in extrajudicial internment camps [and] prisons.

Former President Joe Biden, as this column has noted before, met with CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping three times during his four-year term. But there is no evidence that Biden ever confronted Xi on the genocide that Xis regime has been perpetratingand that Bidens State Department cited in its annual human rights reports.

Trump, thus far, has had seven meetings with Xi. The latest was in May, when he traveled to Beijing accompanied by a number of major American business leaders, as this column has noted before. These included, among others, then-Apple CEO Tim Cook, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, Citi CEO Jane Fraser, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, Meta President Dina Powell McCormick, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

The genocide being perpetrated by Xis regime was not an issue at this summit. In a Truth Social posting made as the group departed for Beijing, Trump said, I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to open up China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the Peoples Republic to an even higher level! In fact, I promise, that when we are together, which will be in a matter of hours, I will make that my very first request.

Xi is now scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House on Sept. 24. The first thing Trump should tell Xi at that meeting is that if China does not immediately cease engaging in genocide, the United States will cease engaging in trade with China.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Chief Counsel Ramzi Kassem said City Hall took corrective actions after learning the encrypted Signal chat was set to auto-delete messages but only after a reporter flagged the issue, not because anyone at City Hall caught it first. Kassem said Signal use requires prior approval, and for that app specifically, staff must disable the disappearing-messages feature to stay compliant with records rules.

The chat, called NYC Creators Announcements, traces back to Creators4Zohran, a volunteer network that boosted Mamdanis 2025 mayoral campaign online. The group now includes more than 200 creators, according to a Columbia Journalism Review/Tow Center study, ranging from micro-influencers with 5,000 followers to accounts with millions. It is steered by Emilia Rowland, the mayors director of new media and cultural communications, who sends daily updates, video clips and talking points that creators can repost. The New York Times reported that at least one channel Rowland ran was configured to erase her own messages after they were sent, a setting City Hall changed only after the paper began asking questions.

The city does not pay creators to belong to the group or to post about City Hall, according to the outlet. But some have collected $5,000 to $20,000 per campaign from private marketing an advertising firms holding city contracts a subcontracting arrangement that keeps their names off the procurement notices available to the public.

Critics say the setup runs afoul of New Yorks Freedom of Information Law, which requires officials to preserve records of public business. Criminal attorney Cory Morris, who litigates public-records cases, called the arrangement not innocuous, arguing that Signals disappearing-message feature suggests staff wanted to keep communications out of public view. City Councilman Phil Wong is now drafting legislation to regulate how city government engages influencers, telling the Post the episode is one of the biggest scandals to hit Mamdanis administration and that officials calling it a faux scandal only compounds the problem.

Mamdani defended the outreach campaign Wednesday, saying his administration will always strive to fully comply with all legal requirements, including those that relate to the preservation of city records, and that any slip-up would be corrected immediately.

John Kaehny, who runs the good-government group Reinvent Albany, told the Post he saw sloppiness rather than anything sinister, faulting City Hall for a lack of professionalism, standards and training. He added a warning: if the administration keeps using Signal and similar apps, the story stops being about inexperience and its not going to be an excuse that were new for very much longer.

I said that would lead to bigger problems.

Was I right?

My update video reveals what happened.

St. Paul politicians pushed rent control, saying rent caps would stop unfair profiteering.

But what the heck is profiteering, and how is it different from profit? Who decides what is unfair?

The opportunity for profit is what persuades people to invest in things. And build things. If enough people invest in new housing, rents will stop shooting up.

Thats just how markets work.

Its why studies show that rent control reduces the supply of housing and gradually raises prices.

But activists dont pay attention to those.

We dont need more studies, says one in my video. We need action.

St. Pauls actions were strictits rent control law made no allowance for inflation.

Its just going to shut down construction, said Mercatus Center economist Salim Furth. Why would you enter a market where it seems like the government is actively trying to hurt you?

At least St. Paul has a Twin City, Minneapolis, so frustrated builders could move just a few blocks and build something there. They did just that. Construction increased there.

Minneapolis politicians had also voted for rent control, but they were wary about imposing it. That was smart, since new housing collapsed in St. Paul.

But Minneapolis City Council member Aisha Chughtai was unconvinced. She wants more rent control, telling me, You dont have a city if people cant afford to live there.

I pushed back: The way you have a city is if people build apartments and houses. Thats what eventually brings the price down Builders still build in Minneapolisbuilding permits were up But in St. Paul, theyre down 60% because of rent control. Youre not going to get more apartments by pushing this.

Her response was something new for me after 50 years of interviewing people: 17 seconds of silence. Finally, she said: Guaranteeing housing for people and making sure that they can stay in their homes matters more than anything else.

Chughtai calls herself a socialist. I ask her, where has that ever worked?

After another long, awkward pause, she says, Im doing a fine job of representing my community.

I wish socialists would just spend a little time reading economicsor history.

Rent control once destroyed much of New York City.

Because they made it hard for landlords to profit, many landlords just stopped doing maintenance.

They dont take care of their properties, says Furth. They dont send a plumber promptly when water starts leaking.

Or worse: The documentaries The Bronx Is Burning and Decade of Fire document how landlords, unable to profit, set fire to their own buildings.

So whats happening now in St. Paul, four years after its clueless politicians imposed strict rent control?

There was so little new construction that the politicians rolled most rent control back.

In sister city Minneapolis, socialist Chughtai has been promoted to majority leader. But the Minneapolis council never imposed rent control, and the mayor pledges never to impose it.

Id think politicians would learn from St. Pauls failures. But no, not my new socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who just froze rent on a million New York City apartments.

Give me a break.

Already, 57,000 New York City apartments sit vacant because existing rent stabilization laws make it unprofitable for landlords to repair them.

The late economist Walter Williams was right to say: Short of aerial bombardment, the best way to destroy a city is through rent controls.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Those twelve women, who hailed primarily from small towns across the United States, were trained to fly on unpressurized aircraft into some of the most dangerous battlefields in the Pacific theater to evacuate thousands of desperately wounded American soldiers.

Author and Hunter College Professor Leah Garrett spoke with The Daily Wire about her forthcoming book on the topic and she explained why shed felt so compelled to tell the stories of those heroic women.

My last book was X-Troop, about Jewish commandos pretending to be British soldiers, Garrett said during a telephone interview. I wanted to turn to the Pacific because my great uncle was a medic in the Pacific. I had heard this rumor that there was a group of women who flew into Iwo Jima, and I thought it was impossible.

I was completely shocked that it was a true story these 12 women were hand-picked to fly from Guam to Iwo Jima to deal with this shortage of medical care, Garrett explained. And as I scratched below the surface, I realized that not only was the story true, but that these women had saved thousands of lives between Iwo Jima and then later Okinawa.

It was so important not only because of the lives they saved, but because they were so heroic and they never saw that as heroism. They were just doing their jobs, she added.

Garrett noted that traditional history lessons, even in the United States, often gloss over just how brutal the war in the Pacific was largely because the Empire of Japan at the time approached war in a very different way than most Western countries.

Their culture viewed surrender as cowardice, so they were wholly unprepared to deal with American prisoners of war which led to many of those prisoners being treated very badly. While medics wearing the traditional Red Cross armband were often treated as non-combatants in the European theater meaning that they were protected under traditional rules of engagement Japanese soldiers routinely targeted them. Those two major differences combined made evacuating the wounded a high priority, since treating them on the battlefield would likely only make them targets.

The questions that remained were simple: how could they be effectively evacuated and who could manage those evacuations?

The answer they came up with was equally simple: Navy nurses.

Twelve women all of whom had already completed nursing school and chosen to join the U.S. Navy were selected to launch the program. Those twelve women who had joined the Navy expecting to spend time on ships were suddenly subjected to rigorous physical training including distance-swimming tests as well as training to fly in unpressurized aircraft. Flying without doctors onboard, they were made fully responsible for the wounded soldiers in their care and even given the authority to instruct pilots to lower altitude to adjust cabin pressure when necessary.

On the ground often in areas that were still not fully under American control the women had to quickly evaluate casualties and determine who needed to be evacuated first. They loaded casualties from Iwo Jima while Japanese soldiers and snipers were still all over the island, and then they did it again in Okinawa.

Two things really shocked me, Garrett said of her time spent researching the nurses. The Navy knew how dangerous this was, and the women probably knew how dangerous this was but the visceral action of the danger still shocked me, and the women remembered everything. These women were alone on the planes with no doctors, and somehow hardly anyone died on these flights I didnt realize that the female nurses played such a big role in bringing those men back to health.

Garrett also discussed the importance of telling stories like this one especially as the United States celebrates its 250th birthday as patriotism has become a political football of sorts.

Nowadays people dont realize how patriotic people were at that time. They never questioned what duty meant; they never questioned what patriotism meant. Women, particularly from the Midwest, just put their hands up, rolled up their sleeves, and served, Garrett said and noted that the women looked back on their service, even though it was difficult, with fondness. These were truly the greatest years of their lives. They were helping America win the war, they were saving men, and they got a great deal of meaning out of serving.

In America, if you just scratch below the surface, we find countless stories of American heroism that can still speak to us today, Garrett added. These women who put up their hands in Americas darkest hour, none of them knew that they had this inside them, and they impacted so many lives. The smaller stories matter. Mary, for example, had never wanted to fly. She joined the Navy because she thought shed be on a ship and she was on one of the first flights to land amid live fire. So what did she do? She just sucked it up and did her job.

Garretts book, The Flight Nurses War: The American Women Who Saved Thousands of Lives at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, is scheduled for an October 13 release.

In a statement through an attorney, Patrick described the idea of going through another trial as extraordinarily painful.

Patrick Clancy is grateful to the Court and to the jurors for their hard work, their commitment, and their perseverance, David Meier, an attorney for Clancy, said. The loss of Patricks children is something from which he will never recover and from which there will never be closure. The prospect of reliving this tragedy through another trial is extraordinarily painful for Patrick, for his family, and for all of us. 

On Friday, Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial after the nine-woman, three-man jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict following 38 hours of deliberations. 

The jury visibly drained after 38 hours of deliberations over seven days, according to courtroom reporters returned a somber note to the judge, reading: With a heavy heart we report we cannot come to a unanimous decision.

Clancys defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, then made a Hail Mary attempt to prevent the mistrial, appealing to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court after Sullivan prepared to dismiss the jury. Sullivan gave Reddington one hour to file an emergency stay before formally declaring a mistrial.

In the filing, Reddington argued that a lone holdout juror should be removed, alleging he was biased against people with debilitating mental illness. The states highest court rejected the emergency appeal. Then, Sullivan declared a mistrial and discharged the deadlocked jury. 

It was an inevitable but dramatic end to the six-week trial that captivated and divided the country igniting a fierce debate over the role mental illness particularly postpartum psychosis should play in determining criminal responsibility.

Earlier Friday morning, tensions flared in the courtroom after Sullivan rejected Reddingtons request to bounce the holdout juror. 

The juror was first singled out Thursday after the foreperson sent Sullivan a note alleging that one member of the panel was refusing to follow the judges instructions on reasonable doubt. The surprise note sent the courtroom into a scramble and sparked a heated sidebar involving Sullivan, the defense and prosecution. Reporters inside the courthouse described Reddington as visibly angry and frustrated.

The most serious charges Clancy faced were three counts of first-degree murder, each carrying a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. She is expected to remain at Tewksbury State Hospital, a psychiatric hospital, for now. Prosecutors must decide whether to retry her before a new jury, pursue a plea agreement, or decline to prosecute the case again.

Clancy killed the couples three young children by strangling them with exercise bands inside the familys Duxbury, Massachusetts, home on Jan. 24, 2023, after sending Patrick out to pick up takeout food and medication. She then attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window after cutting both of her wrists. All three children died, and Clancy was left paralyzed from the waist down.

Patrick Clancy was the first person to discover the horrific scene at the familys Duxbury home and the first witness to testify in his ex-wifes murder trial.

The house was really quiet, Patrick said, describing the moment he returned home after running errands. I saw Cora. She had a band around her neck. He removed it, then found 8-month-old Callan nearby in the same condition. He then searched the basement bathroom and the area around a couch before finding 3-year-old Dawson lifeless in a home office.

I knew he was gone, Patrick testified.

According to official documents obtained by WPLG-TV, 32-year-old Michelle Luchau-Rebora had been an intern "in the capacity of a mental health therapist" at New Hope C.O.R.P.S., an addiction and behavioral health treatment facility in Homestead.

The alleged victim reported the 'forbidden affair' to staff at the facility after Luchau-Rebora broke up with him last fall, according to the arrest report.

New Hope C.O.R.P.S. is self-described as a "residential substance abuse treatment facility for single men in South Miami-Dade County."

According to WTVJ-TV, the alleged victim told investigators that he and Luchau-Rebora engaged in a sexual relationship from June 2025 to September 2025 while the patient was under her care.

The 42-year-old patient and therapist allegedly had sex during therapy sessions.

WPLG, citing authorities, said Luchau-Rebora engaged in sexual activity during therapy sessions while at the facility and also "facilitated alibis on his behalf," which allowed the patient authorization to leave the restricted facility and engage in sexual intercourse on multiple occasions at several locations, including her home, her mothers home in Key Biscayne, and at Jackson Memorial Hospital.

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Deputies said Luchau-Rebora "demanded that he not tell anyone about their relationship because it will affect her ability to work as a therapist."

The alleged victim reported the "forbidden affair" to staff at the facility after Luchau-Rebora broke up with him last fall, according to the arrest report.

Luchau-Rebora surrendered to authorities and was arrested on Wednesday. She was hit with a charge of sexual misconduct by a psychotherapist, a third-degree felony. Luchau-Rebora faces up to five years in prison if convicted, according to the New York Post.

A judge ordered Luchau-Rebora, of Pinecrest, to have no contact with the alleged victim.

Luchau-Rebora was released from the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on Wednesday night after posting a $5,000 bond.

New Hope C.O.R.P.S. said Luchau-Rebora was fired after the accusations surfaced.

Stephen Alvarez, executive director of New Hope C.O.R.P.S., issued the following statement to WPLG:

This is an unfortunate situation involving allegations concerning an individual who was serving as an intern with New Hope C.O.R.P.S. Upon becoming aware of the allegations, New Hope promptly reported the matter to the appropriate authorities and agencies, terminated the individuals internship, and fully cooperated with the subsequent investigation.

WPLG reported that Luchau-Rebora "refused to speak about the incident."

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Samantha Adams, 39, and the victim, 69, had been in a relationship "for the purposes ofpaid sex" for two to three months after meeting online, said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd.

Adams had told the victim her name was "Nala."

"Black widow" is what Polk County deputies call her, Judd said.

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"She tried to kill him," Judd said in a video posted to social media. "She tried to overdose him. She tried to extort him."

On Aug. 17, Adams and the victim were in an argument about a vehicle hed bought for her, court records show. When he told her he wanted it back because he couldnt afford it, she said they could discuss it at his house, according to records.

When at the victims home, Adams gave him a shot glass filled with "suspected whiskey," court records show.

"She slipped him benzodiazepine," Judd said.

After he drank the beverage, the two "engaged in physical affection," court records show. When the victim "attempted to touch the defendant in a sexual manner," Adams demanded $1,000, according to court records. When he told her he didn't have the money, she got dressed and left the home.

MIAMI WOMAN ALLEGEDLY LURED MAN TO LUXURY CONDO VIA INSTAGRAM, THEN ROBBED HIM WITH 2 ACCOMPLICES

Not long after, the victim was asked to pick up his granddaughter from a Wawa gas station near a movie theater where hed dropped her off with her boyfriend earlier that day.

On his way to the Wawa, he began feeling ill, court records show.

Later, he could only recall being pulled from the driver's seat by his granddaughter and being moved to the back seat of the vehicle, Adams arrest warrant shows.

The granddaughter drove her unconscious grandfather home. When he was still unconscious later in the evening, she called 911.

At the hospital, the victim was given Narcan for a suspected opioid overdose, records show.

A urine analysis and other testing showed he had benzodiazepine poisoning, metabolic encephalopathy, dehydration, and acute kidney injury, investigators reported.

PEOPLE TAKING COMMON SLEEP DRUG MAY NOT REALIZE THEY'RE TOO IMPAIRED TO DRIVE, STUDY FINDS

Benzodiazepines are depressants that cause sedation and hypnosis, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Overdosing on the drug can cause extreme drowsiness, confusion, impaired coordination, decreased reflexes, respiratory depression, coma and possible death.

The victim told investigators that he doesnt drink often.

The last time he drank and consumed "exponentially higher" amounts of alcohol was on the Fourth of July, when he had three Long Island Teas and three beers, he said.

And he was never drowsy and disoriented like he was when he drank with Adams, he told investigators. It wasnt the first time the victim had become drowsy after meeting with Adams, he said.

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Earlier in August, the victim fell asleep behind the wheel after leaving Adams home. He was awakened by an Osceola County Sheriff's deputy after he accidentally reversed his truck into the deputy's agency vehicle.

STEPDAD ACCUSED OF SEX ASSAULT AS COPS WIDEN PROBE INTO GIRLS LETHAL BENADRYL INGREDIENT DOSE

"There's lots of investigations still to go," Judd said. "Thats underway."

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The victims normal medications do not include benzodiazepines, investigators found.

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He also was assessed for mental acuity and wasnt found to be in a forgetful state of mind or a state in which he would intentionally take the drugs to hurt himself. And he wasnt found to have a previous history of opioid use.

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Ten days after the incident, Adams was arrested outside of a Dicks Sporting Goods in Polk County on Aug. 27.

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In addition to attempted murder, shes been charged with resisting an officer without violence, offering prostitution, tampering with physical evidence and five different drug-related charges.

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When searching Adams vehicle, authorities found prescription medication including: 19 pills of hydrocodone/acetaminophen, 2 12 pills of oxycodone hydrochloride, nine Zoloft pills, a partial Adderall pill and a partial Xanax pill.

Adams was previously involved in a Lake County investigation in which a woman named "Nala" was approaching an elderly man "with the intent to obtain goods and money from the gentleman," court records show.

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Polk County jail records show Adams was still in custody without bond as of Sept. 2. Her attorney did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

"Patrick Clancy is grateful to the Court and to the jurors for their hard work, their commitment, and their perseverance. The loss of Patricks children is something from which he will never recover and from which there will never be closure," his attorney, David Meier, wrote in a statement issued on Patrick's behalf.

"The prospect of reliving this tragedy through another trial is extraordinarily painful for Patrick, for his family, and for all us," the statement concluded.

Patrick Clancy has previously asked the public to forgive his ex-wife, who has admitted killing their three children 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan. Her attorneys have argued she was legally insane due to postpartum psychosis.

LINDSAY CLANCY'S EX-HUSBAND HAS QUIETLY REMARRIED AND STARTED OVER AMID HER MURDER TRIAL

During the trial, Patrick Clancy testified about the day of the killings on Jan. 24, 2023. The children were killed while he was running errands that included picking up children's stool softener at a CVS store and takeout for dinner. They spoke on the phone while he was out.

On Friday afternoon, Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in the high-profile murder case after jurors said they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict. It will now be up to prosecutors whether Clancy will be tried again.

The jury spent a week deliberating at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where supporters and onlookers gathered outside for days awaiting a possible verdict.

The mistrial followed an alleged 11-1 divide among jurors, with Clancys defense arguing that the lone holdout juror had acknowledged doubt but was refusing to properly apply the courts instructions on reasonable doubt.

LINDSAY CLANCYS EX-HUSBAND DETAILS BIG SPIRAL AS EXPERT SAYS ONE PART SCARED ME IN MOMS MURDER TRIAL

The alleged holdout is believed to be one of the three male jurors. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington repeatedly referred to the unnamed juror as a male inside and outside court.

Clancys attorneys made an emergency appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in an attempt to stay the mistrial and force further inquiry into the juror.

Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt denied the request Friday afternoon, and shortly after, Sullivan declared a mistrial.

Sullivan said he wants the case retried "sooner rather than later,", suggesting a new trial could potentially take place later this fall. Clancy is due back in court Sept. 29 for a status hearing, trial assignment and a defense Rule 25 motion.

Two women are in the news right now. Gloria Steinem, a writer and journalist who just died at 92, and Lindsay Clancy, on trial in Massachusetts for the murder of her three children.

It will be interesting to see whether what began in a courtroom that at times resembled a womens rally will elevate a mother with postpartum depression into a feminist icon.

Steinem was a feminist in the 1960s and 70s, when it wasnt popular to be one. She went on to spend her life redefining peace, justice, and racial fairness and fighting for womens liberation, which came to primarily mean a womans right to choose to dispose of her offspring.

In the eyes of many, Steinem was adored as an activist, even though her idea of equality was rooted in her belief that men, marriage, and children were oppressive because their presence in a womans life could deter her from achieving loftier goals.

At an abortion awareness rally in 1969, Steinem listened to other womens abortion stories. At the time, unless a womans mental or physical health was in danger, abortion was illegal in the U.K. This is somewhat how, at the moment, the seriousness of child murder is in danger of being downplayed if mental illness is identified as a motive.

Steinem venerated the doctor who, like Henry VIII, approved of Anne Boleyn climbing the scaffold to be beheaded by the man assigned to wield the sword. The doctor referred Steinem for the execution of her unborn child in the womb by a practitioner willing to perform the procedure.

In language that is now regarded as heroic and liberating, before doing the deed or referring her to a female doctor who did the deed either way the willing accomplice made Steinem promise two things: First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.

Nearly 60 years after her child had been killed, Steinem dedicated her memoir, My Life on the Road, to her hero, Dr. John Sharpe.

Around that time, Steinem was widely viewed as a crusader for abortion rights, calling it reproductive freedom, a watered-down slogan she thought would make the subject more palatable in political discussion and a phrase that continues to be used in abortion debates to this day.

But now, Steinem is dead, and her legacy will be credited with having spent the lions share of her earthly existence downplaying the value of life while exalting a womans right to dispose of her children.

RELATED: Did Lindsay Clancy lose her mind or her free will?

David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

Gloria Steinem, in life and now in death, will be idolized as an icon for women who embraced the idea that liberation is the right for a woman to snuff out life in the womb.

Her glowing death announcement states that she passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her. It is stunning that someone gets to pass away peacefully after spending a lifetime advocating the slaughter of the unborn.

The sad truth is that the many who loved her circling her bed did not include the son or daughter who would have been entering the seventh decade at the time of their mothers death. What that touching announcement didnt mention was whether she finally felt the regret she admitted she couldnt muster for 69 years over the decision to sacrifice her child on the altar of ambition.

Despite all the books, speaking engagements, and accolades laid at Steinems feet, as the totality of her life flashed before her eyes, the son or daughter over whom success took precedence, whether she was capable or willing to admit it, may have been the last thing to cross her mind before passing into eternity.

Surely her progressive contribution to advancing a womans right to decide whether life inside her womb survives is Glorias legacy.

Now, nearly seven decades after Steinems backroom abortion, another woman with the potential to be a progressive pioneer in the fight for a mothers rights over the lives of her children has been sitting in a wheelchair in a courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts. At the time Steinem terminated her childs life, it was illegal unless a woman was physically or mentally ill. Today, mental illness is exploited as a defense in a trial where three children were executed by their mother.

Although it might not look like it, the female support surrounding Lindsay Clancy is similar to the support Steinem received in 1969, when women rallied because they felt no one understood their plight. At this juncture in the Clancy trial, although Clancys children, unlike Glorias, were outside the womb, the willingness to call her innocent hinges solely on her mental state: guilty if she had her wherewithal, exonerated if mental illness drove her to murder her babies.

In Clancys case, the thoughts and feelings of her children concern not whether they had regrets, but rather what kind of terror a confused preschooler, toddler, and infant experienced as their mother, for whatever reason, decided they no longer had the right to life.

How different is what Lindsay Clancy did for whatever the reason from Glorias youthful decision to benefit herself?

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erhui1979/iStock/Getty Images

As these thoughts come full-circle, its important to consider the impact Gloria Steinem had on the deaths of more than 65 million unborn children and how shes being celebrated and mourned, in light of the potential Lindsay Clancys defense might have as an excuse to deny the right to life to those of us outside the womb.

Steinems actions helped reshape the nations views on abortion. In the same way, Clancy could change the nations views on maternal filicide. And after postpartum psychosis is accepted as an excuse to kill three children, whats the next step in the progression for those who move through life like a horse with blinders?

If the progressive impulse to excuse the killing of children in the womb extends to children outside it, Lindsay Clancys case could have consequences far beyond her trial potentially eroding the right to life even more profoundly than Gloria Steinems abortion activism did.

Gloria Steinem is gone. Lindsay Clancy is still here. It will be interesting to see whether what began in a courtroom that at times resembled a womens rally will elevate a mother with postpartum depression into a feminist icon who moves the needle from excusing child murder to finding any other excuse to dispose of human life because societal mores demand it.

Steinems opportunity to influence the culture is over. Cases like Lindsay Clancys may only be beginning.

Since President Donald Trump took office for his second term, charges have been brought against 50 noncitizen defendants for alleged offenses such as illegally voting or illegally registering to vote, according to the Justice Department.

Also, during this Trump term, 17 noncitizens were convicted of voting-related offenses. One defendant was found not guilty, while the remaining defendants cases are pending, according to Justice Department figures.

During the four years of the Biden administration under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department brought charges against 13 noncitizens for illegal voting-related offenses. Of those, nine defendants were found guilty, including two whose voter fraud charges were dismissed as part of plea agreements.

The contrast with the prior administration could not be clearer this department is enforcing the law against noncitizen voting in ways the last administration simply refused to, a Justice Department spokesperson told the Daily Signal. Protecting the integrity of our elections is a top priority for this Department.

Trump has advocated for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which requires photo ID to vote and proof of citizenship to register to vote. Though prospects for the bills passage look dim before Election Day, its supporters point to the prosecutions as evidence of the need for additional safeguards.

If annualized over four years, Trumps second-term Justice Department has brought almost 10 times as many charges as the Biden Justice Department. That means, at the current pace, it amounts to about 31 defendants per year under Trump, compared with 3.25 per year under Biden.

These are illegal votes that are cast and counted, and once theyre counted, they cant be uncounted, Cleta Mitchell, the co-founder of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, told the Daily Signal.

First the Left says this never happens, noncitizens never vote. Then you say, Look at this, Mitchell added. Then they come back to say, well, its not widespread. How many illegal votes are OK with you? We want to make sure there are no illegal votes cast.

To demonstrate the impact a single voteor a single illegal votecould have on an election, the Public Interest Legal Foundation established a database showing 1,376 tied elections and 531 contests decided by a single vote since 1982.

A majority of the Justice Department charges and convictions in this area came since October, or the start of fiscal year 2026, with 29 defendants. In that time, there were 11 convictions.

In most cases, defendants in both administrations were charged with multiple crimes.

For example, in December 2021, during the Biden era, the Eastern District of North Carolina announced an indictment against a Bahamian citizen on 10 counts, including voting in elections from 2018 through 2020; falsely claiming U.S. citizenship to register to vote; passport fraud; and false statements.

In September 2024, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of Alabama charged an illegal immigrant from Guatemala with using a U.S. citizens identity, registering to vote, and voting in Alabama in the 2016 and 2020 primary and general elections. She pleaded guilty on Jan. 15, 2025, days before Trumps inauguration.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of Florida garnered guilty pleas from a Cuban national in September 2025, a Haitian national convicted in April of this year, and a Brazilian national in May for illegal voting.

In May 2026, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of New Jersey announced four separate noncitizen voting prosecutions. In June, the office announced that a French citizen pleaded guilty to voting in the 2022 election.

The Justice Department has received assistance in several cases from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations, the law enforcement wing of the Department of Homeland Security.

Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: We will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequencesincluding criminal charges and deportation, the Department of Homeland Security spokesman told the Daily Signal in an email.

Homeland Security Investigations began focusing this week on California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington state, and Wisconsin, CNN reported.

Since April 2025, more than 24,000 cases have been identified by SAVE as potential non-U.S. citizens who were on voter rolls, and those cases have been referred to ICEs Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation, the Department of Homeland Security spokesman said.

Over the past year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has overhauled the SAVE program, making it fully operational and providing states with an easy-to-use tool that has resulted in over 60 million voter verification queries processed since April 2025, the Department of Homeland Security spokesman added.

What memories will this generation of children have to look back on? Because according to most available data, they are not spending their time outdoors or with family or friends. They are largely living their lives on screens.

This is why the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services new Live Real Life initiative is both timely and necessary. Screens are here to stay, for better or for worse. But we need to restore them to their rightful place as a tool to be used occasionally, rather than ordering our lives, or more critically, the lives of our children, around them.

Much of the national conversation around children and screens up to now has focused on content and risk, and that is completely understandable because the risks are considerable and the potential for exposure to harmful and explicit content is so great. Even in recent weeks, Meta has settled a multi-state lawsuit focused on addictive design, and Roblox is under investigation for explicit content present on the platform and its connection to real-life child sex abuse.

Too many parents consider it a win if their child is watching Mark Rober on YouTube rather than Skibidi Toilet brain rot. But the deeper problem is not merely what children encounter on screens. It is what screens are replacing.

Nearly everyone today is familiar with Maslows hierarchy of needs. At the bottom of the pyramid are physiological needs: sleep, food, shelter those things that are essential for survival. At the apex of the pyramid is self-actualization. Human beings cannot flourish at the top if the foundations underneath are crumbling.

The data now shows that screens attack a childs well-being at every level: crowding out sleep and nutrition, which are necessary underpinnings for learning; threatening their safety through cyberbullying and content that encourages disordered eating or fosters suicidal ideation; crippling their connection to friends and family and displacing real relationships; undermining their self-esteem, and ultimately, their ability to thrive as adults.

But the point is not merely to subtract screens. It is to restore what children require to grow into their full humanity.

When children are outdoors, they move their bodies, test their strength, invent games, negotiate rules, resolve conflict, advocate for themselves, solve problems, and encounter the physical world as something more challenging and demanding but also more rewarding than anything they might encounter online.

Outdoor time is associated with better physical and mental health, higher activity levels, reduced sedentary behavior, and even protection against myopia (just two hours a day outdoors can help delay or prevent nearsightedness). Regular physical activity brings its own benefits. The CDC recommends at least 60 minutes a day for school-age children and links it to stronger bones and muscles, lower body fat, better heart and metabolic health, improved attention and memory, stronger academic performance, and reduced symptoms of depression. Reading, too, gives children something screens cannot: sustained attention, language, imagination, moral understanding, and the capacity to enter another persons experience. Literacy research connects childhood reading not only to academic and economic outcomes, but also to long-term health, emotional awareness, and social connection.

The same is true of all the ordinary, embodied activities that make a child more fully human: eating dinner with family, talking with friends face to face, playing sports, serving in church or community programs, caring for younger siblings, helping a neighbor, or volunteering for a cause beyond the self. These experiences teach children patience, responsibility, empathy, and resilience. Recent research has linked civic engagement and volunteering programs to improved youth mental health outcomes, including reduced anxiety and sadness, increased resilience, a stronger sense of belonging, and better interpersonal and leadership skills. In other words, real life is not empty space left over after screen time is reduced. It is the developmental ecosystem children need.

That is also why this cannot be solved family by family, one exhausted parent at a time. Screens have become a collective-action problem. Even parents who see the harms often feel trapped: if every class assignment, social plan, team update, and friendship circle runs through a device, opting out can mean social isolation for the child and constant conflict for the parent. A serious Live Real Life movement will require commitment from families, schools, churches, pediatricians, policymakers, coaches, and communities to rebuild screen-free norms together.

***

Melissa Henson is the Senior Policy Advisor for Media and Culture for Concerned Women for America, the nations public policy womens organization, dedicated to promoting biblical values and constitutional principles in public policy. On X: @CWforA

Although almost 70 years have passed since Steinem turned her back on motherhood in 1957, many American women continue to believe that motherhood in the United States is unfairly burdensome. Simultaneous with Steinems death, newspaper headlines have been focused on a murder trial in Massachusetts, in which Lindsay Clancy has been charged with killing her three young children. While the main issue in the trial is whether Clancys mental state was so impaired that she cannot be held criminally responsible for their deaths, debate over the case has turned into a flashpoint on social media for how American mothers perceive pregnancy, the postpartum period, and the task of raising young children. Without weighing in on the outcome in the Clancy trial, it is clear that part of the reason the case has struck such a nerve is that many mothers in the United States feel isolated and unsupported after the birth of a child.

Is it inevitable that motherhood be popularly viewed as limiting or constricting, preventing a woman from fully living the life she chooses? In the seven decades between when Steinem made her choice to end her pregnancy and today, why has there been so little cultural movement on how we popularly perceive motherhood?

Understanding and answering that question is vital as America stares down a historically low fertility rate and a population structure that is skewing ever older. When Steinem began her push for womens lib in the 1970s, population decline and declining rates of motherhood were viewed as a positive. In a famous essay, What It Would Be Like If Women Win, Steinem wrote approvingly that the population explosion dictates that childbearing be kept to a minimum. She would later worry in public about the connection between overpopulation and environmental degradation.

Sixty years later, it is hard to be so sanguine about dramatic population decline. From other countries with even more catastrophic population decline than the U.S., we know that it may result in loss of economic productivity, as well as what journalist David Martin Davies calls the erosion of communities and cultural continuity.

For Steinem, and many of her second-wave feminist contemporaries, motherhood itself was often viewed as a method of oppression. Radical feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone famously wrote in her 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex, The heart of womans oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles.

As some of the fervor around the Clancy trial shows, there is a through line from that line of thinking popularized in the 70s to discussion around motherhood today. And indeed, it isnt limited to those headlines. The childfree Reddit group has 1.6 million subscribers, with countless posts lauding the freedom of living without children and the sacrifice inherent to parenting.

In 2020, Steinem was asked if she regretted not having children. Not for a millisecond, she replied. To be clear, there are indeed many ways to live a vibrant, flourishing life without being married or having children. However, the fact that we did not manage, over the course of Steinems lifetime, to shift the narrative much around motherhood, womens independence, and freedom is its own form of national tragedy.

It is not inevitable that motherhood be understood primarily in terms of the resulting burdens and sacrifice. Having and raising babies does, of course, require significant commitment and indeed sometimes requires significant personal sacrifice. However, it can also throw open many doors. To list just a few: Having children can provide a tangible link to both past and future generations and provides a clear mechanism to pass something real on into the future. Pregnancy and babies can also expand your focus in life away from work and toward your family and community, and also keep you connected through old age with younger generations.

Popular perceptions about how motherhood can actually expand your horizons (not solely limit them) would probably be dramatically boosted if there was more social, cultural, and political commitment to decreasing the burdens of young moms. Putting aside the terrible tragedy of the Clancy case, it is an indisputable fact that many new moms in America feel isolated and alone and are in desperate need of more support from their extended families, neighbors, religious institutions, and local governments.

In short, both Steinems passing and the furor over the Clancy trial should serve as a reminder that we still have significant work to do around how motherhood is perceived in the United States. In the 1970s, women rightfully resented not being able to own personal bank accounts, receive mortgages from many banks, or work without facing serious sexual harassment and a host of other injustices. Somehow, however, many of those rightfully dedicated to fixing those issues successfully tore down our positive vision of motherhood as well a problem still not fixed today. We have much work in front of us to build a vision of being a mom that shows it opens doors, not just closes them.

***

Ivana Greco has several jobs, but her favorite is being a homeschooling mom of four.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wires new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories from our featured writers to you.

When Halloween broke out in 1978, we saw a flood of slasher films like Friday the 13^th and Prom Night. More recently, the John Wick saga let loose a crush of hit men movies, asking us to root for ruthless killers.

Yet when Top Gun: Maverick helped save the theatrical experience (according to Steven Spielberg) in 2022, we didnt see a crush of films feeling the need for speed or patriotism.

For some reason, major studios didnt want to duplicate its success. Will that change assuming the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger happens?

One fascinating part of the potential merger is the Ellison connection. The uber-wealthy father-son duo has ties to Team Trump, for starters. That already makes the Paramount owners a bit different than your traditional studio head.

What, no boardrooms overstuffed with Obama alums? It goes beyond corporate or political connections.

David Ellison, the son, is heavily invested in pop culture. He not only co-produced Top Gun: Maverick, but he also helped nudge along the films third installment and a sequel to 1990s Days of Thunder.

Thats no accident. Ellison knows the Tom Cruise racing drama has strong Heartland appeal. Hollywood, Inc. may not have been keen on reviving the film as a franchise, but Ellison saw its potential.

Now, Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway is part of the sequels cast. The Ellisons make things happen, and fast.

Paramount is one of Hollywoods biggest studios. What happens when it joins forces with Warner Bros. Discovery, adding both that studios legacy and a treasure trove of intellectual properties?

Harry Potter. DC Comics. Game of Thrones. Looney Tunes.

Itll potentially be as big as any rival studio. Thats cultural power, and the Ellisons are open to flexing their might as they see fit.

They just did it again with Mayday.

David Ellison produced the Apple TV original starring Ryan Reynolds as a Maverick-style Navy pilot who gets shot down over Russia in 1987. The Cold War has been raging for years, and Reynoldss character could become its latest victim unless a former KGB agent steps in.

Thats Kenneth Branagh as Nik, a Russian who fell in love with American culture while growing disillusioned with his homelands government.

Few movie characters heart America quite like Nik. He longs to sink his teeth into a McDonalds burger, imagining it tastes like the U.S.A.

Despite Reynolds shocking lack of appreciation for the Reagan decade, the film is a love letter to the 1980s, down to the Born in the USA album needle drops. And, while a subplot hints at an American dark side, the films anti-communist bent is impossible to ignore.

Communism, Reynoldss heroic character says early in the film, flies in the face of human nature. Thats an actual line from the movie. Somewhere, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani just choked on his buttered popcorn.

The Ellisons could be making movies either more patriotic or, at the very least, more red-state-friendly. That could be an elixir for success. But it wont be easy on several levels.

Lets bypass the obvious one: the concerted attacks on the merger deal from folks like California Attorney General Rob Bonta, which could eventually crush it.

The media and film critics may not take kindly to any center-to-right-leaning content from the mega studio. The latter group could dismiss the titles out of hand, while Legacy Media reporters frame the super-studios efforts negatively.

The actors themselves may bristle even if they sign on and give it their all. Look at what Reynolds did on the red carpet with his anti-80s spin, and hes one of Hollywoods most savvy marketing minds. Look how he made an obscure character like Deadpool into a household name.

Some stars may reject roles in an American-friendly story or sabotage them in press interviews, too (long after the checks have cleared).

Other factors suggest the Ellisons could have a winning hand with this strategy. Mavericks box office success speaks for itself. What if Paramount starts consistently reaching an audience Hollywood has largely ignored?

Remember when Hollywood turned its back on faith-friendly films and independent studios offered spiritual counter-programming? Now, major media players like Netflix and Prime Video are in the faith-based game with shows like House of David (Prime) and Ruth and Boaz (Netflix).

Why? Scrappy indie films started delivering faith-friendly content to the masses, and many titles overperformed in a big way.

TV showrunner Taylor Sheridan has gotten very rich by zigging while Hollywood zagged. He creates center-right programs such as Yellowstone and Landman that offer counter-programming to left-leaning Hollywood fare.

The Ellisons could do just that at the theatrical level, in theory.

Call it the Fox News strategy. If every news outlet leans Left, often aggressively so, it makes sense to serve up an alternative.

David Ellison isnt a newbie. Hes produced dozens of films to date. Hes not cranking out hard-Right treatises on immigration or climate change. Hes a storyteller, and he senses some vibrant stories arent being told.

Perhaps the feverish attacks on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger are partly tied to the sense that the Ellisons mean business about bringing something new to Hollywood.

***

Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of HollywoodInToto.com. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News Big Hollywood. Hes also the host of The Hollywood in Toto Podcast. Follow him at @HollywoodInToto. 

This weekend, former comedian and political commentator Dave Rubin spends time with The Daily Wire just before going off the grid for a month. A former co-host of the left-wing news show The Young Turks, the New York Times-bestselling author and entrepreneur left the left to launch his podcast The Rubin Report (along with his award-winning tequila brand Copal 22). He shares his tricks to aging well and staying young at heart, and he offers a playful jab at Daily Wire host Michael Knowles. Heres why everything he touches turns to gold.

***

Properly fit and tan for life in Miami, Dave Rubin reaches for a pair of reading glasses, telling me, I just turned 50 this year and I cant see anything, out of nowhere. They say you should never meet your heroes, but if Dave had anything to do with honing your critical thinking chops (and having fun doing it), rest assured that hes just as cool in real life as he is on his show. 

I am the gateway drug, he says with a smile. I dont have the exact stats, but hes probably converted more people to conservatism and Florida than most of his peers.

A good friend introduced me to The Rubin Report when Dave was still living in Los Angeles. I was too. His sparkling take on dark stuff such as lockdowns and BLM felt like manna from heaven. Hed spent years in entertainment working as a comedian and commentator (maybe you saw him on tour with Jordan Peterson), effortlessly infusing the cultural current with common sense.

These days, Daves living free in the Sunshine State. I dont miss anything about LA, he says. The only thing that would even remotely pop into my mind at this point is Boa Steakhouse on Sunset. Actually its not as great as it used to be. 

He moved to the City of Angels back in 2013 when it was thriving, and he eventually built the house of his dreams in Sherman Oaks. But after a year of battling COVID craziness, he called time of death on the SoCal experiment on which he built his successful career. Theres just no magic to it anymore Theres very little hope. 

In the great state of Florida, Dave says, I can fight for something as opposed to relentlessly fighting against something that seemingly is always getting worse.

Rise and really shine

I wake up at about 7 oclock. I keep my Oura Ring on so I know how much I slept, Dave tells me. A little later, if hes not swamped with news hits and show prep, he catches a few extra winks. One of my great pleasures is a 20-minute nap. I find it to be the best thing mentally and physically, and to stay sharp.

Daves other little helper comes in the form of a mug. I drink a lot of coffee, probably too much, he admits. I usually have two to three coffees before the show one when I wake up, one if Im working out and then I often have coffee in the mug during the show. Until now, I assumed it was tequila. He laughs, Well, it depends on the day.

The kids are alright

Family life revolves around keeping up with Dave and his husband David Janets two young boys. But its a bonus that Dave gets to play with the same toys he loved back in the day. The kids are really into Transformers, and I was obsessed with Transformers when I was a kid, Dave shares. Now they know more of the names of the characters than I do. I still get down on the floor and get into that crazy imaginative world Its just absolutely incredible.

To keep those growing minds fired up, screen time is limited. We do a little bit of Bluey, he admits. Im not gonna say Ive never shown them a little bit of my old Transformers, and a little bit of Spider-Man. Screen time is every parents challenge with young kids. I know parents just want a little peace and quiet, Dave admits. He doesnt judge anyone else. I just think once you open that Pandoras box, you can never close it.

Right now its soccer practice for the boys if theyre not splashing around in the pool, but Dave has high hopes for their future in sports. Obviously I want to angle them to basketball, but its Miami were doing soccer at the moment. One thing at a time.

Cocktails with conservatives

It was only a matter of time before Dave turned his happy-hour ritual into a portfolio asset. And just a year into its existence, his 100% blue agave tequila brand Copal 22 has won every competition its entered. 

I try not to talk too much smack about Clase Azul because thats what got me into tequila, he says, talking some smack about the additives from the brand with the bell-top. Everyone thinks that tequila is having shots of Jose Cuervo and jumping in a pool in college Weve just made something much more elegant and exquisite with Copal.

Of course, tequilas a bit of an outlier in the whiskey-soaked landscape of conservative media. Dave, youve got a tight five. Go.

All my conservative friends such as Michael Knowles and many others who I like a lot they all drink whiskey and bourbon because they think thats what men drink, Dave jokes. A man drinks it, and he has a cigar, and that means hes a man, and hes never put his arm around another man. But, they dont really like it. Theyre only drinking it to prove that theyre straight. Meanwhile, if you give them a little bit of tequila, they wont become gay, but they will enjoy it a little bit more.

So how does Dave knock one back? Just pour it over one rock and swirl it for about 30 seconds, he says. If you want a little more flavor, or to feel like youre drinking more of a cocktail, you could add a tiny splash of watermelon juice or literally a piece of fruit. Mangoes are particularly good down here in Florida. 

Touching grass

Dave is 10 years into his annual digital detox. Pressing pause on filming and going phone-free, he avoids the news for the entire month of August. He says the tradition has always kept him sane in the commentator space. But this time around, its particularly important. 

I am going to disappear and not pay attention to anything, and not be infected by this endless algorithmic lunacy, he confirms.

This year, I think because of Charlie [Kirks] assassination, and then watching people that are my contemporaries and some of whom were my friends go completely insane, just how awful some of the nastiness has been on the Right when we should be so united against the crazy commies coming on the Left Its been a grating year in a way that I never really felt before, Dave says. I dont think any of us realized how much of a dam Charlie was for craziness.

When I first did Off the Grid, I think [Ben Shapiro] might have been the first guy that brought me back. I was talking to him about it, and he goes, Dave, you know, you really dont need a whole month. The Jews have something called Shabbat once a week, you can try that first. This is a little extreme.

The rest of the year, Dave honors the Jewish day of rest with his family, a little challah, and some wine. He goes lighter on the devices, adding, Im not doing it 100% perfectly.

Only getting better with time

Daves clearly Benjamin Button-ing with each passing year, but hes vague on the anti-aging details. I got my girl in Miami Beach. She does some kind of laser twice a year. I dont know what it is I feel like some burning on my face, and a lot of creams and stuff, and theres some heat.

I run around a lot, and I eat right, and I dont really eat sugar, and I eat a lot of red meat, he says. He recently switched from tomahawks to filets to maybe lose a pound or two. I dont drink a ton, actually, but I exercise every day. And Im also chasing two 3-year-olds around here. Thatll keep you young.

He used to hit the basketball court for nine hours a week in the Florida heat, burning 1,500 calories during each three-hour session. But hes nursing an injury at the moment. I crushed my shoulder playing basketball, so Im in the middle of physical therapy, he says. Along with the sun and camaraderie, these workouts soothe his mind. Ive missed it more mentally in a weird way than physically. Its the only time that I stopped thinking about all of this lunacy that were talking about. 

No matter what, he finds a way to get moving. Taking a walk in the morning is probably the most important thing, he says. His dog Clyde is happy to accompany him. Sometimes its humid as hell here and the mosquitoes are out. Its not the most pleasant thing in the summer, but I think just moving a little bit in the morning is vitally important.

Advice from the pod guy next door

Dave talks a lot about his experience touring with Jordan Peterson, watching others transform through his teachings as well as himself. He calls his own insight Jordan Peterson-esque. 

Figure out what your adventure is in life and go do it, Dave says. It might mean that you want to put all your energy in your career, it might mean you want to put all your energy into your family, it might mean you split those two things.

Whatever it is, he suggests lighting a flare to mark your path. Always put something on the horizon, he explains. You always have to have things to look forward to. A lot of people that I know that are lost or confused, its because theyre not looking forward to anything. They just wake up jobs not great, youre just doing it over and over and over, and then you just kind of slowly disintegrate.

If youre doing something that you love, or at least angling towards it, then you have things that youre looking forward to in the future.

You may want to reserve a court time for Daves next venture. I really, really want an indoor basketball court, and Im gonna get it one day, he assures me. I dont know how Im gonna do it, and its gonna be a hell of a thing to get property down here in this area that you can afford. The challenge doesnt sway him. 

Do something worthwhile, he says, and people will find you.

The true crime filmmaker directed a three-part Netflix docuseries titled "Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes." It features previously unreleased prison audio from the cult leader and some of his "Manson Family" members.

In 1969, the career criminal who surrounded himself with runaways and other lost souls directed his followers to commit a series of murders in and around Los Angeles. Prosecutors argued the killings were part of Manson's "Helter Skelter" plan to ignite a race war.

CHARLES MANSON'S GRANDDAUGHTER REVEALS MOMENT SHE DISCOVERED DARK FAMILY SECRET: 'IT WAS DEVASTATING'

But after studying the previously unreleased recordings, Berlinger argues the murders were instead a desperate attempt to cover up "a series of blunders."

"This whole idea of starting a race war was a false idea," Berlinger told Fox News Digital. "He certainly believed a race war was coming, or at least that's what he told his followers to control them. But the murders, in particular the Tate and LaBianca murders, were an attempt to get associate Bobby Beausoleil out of prison. He told his followers, 'He's my friend. You guys owe me a favor. Let's get him out of prison.'"

"The truth is I believe, and others believe, that if they had succeeded in this crazy idea of getting Bobby Beausoleil out of prison, I think Manson wouldve killed him because he was a liability," said Berlinger. "But listening to those tapes made the story come alive, not these crazy conspiracy theories and myths that turned Charles Manson into the most mythologized figure in the history of true crime."

Berlinger traces the chain of events that led to the murders to a botched drug deal.

According to the documentary, Manson invited members of the Straight Satans motorcycle club to Spahn Ranch to protect him from the Black Panthers, whom he feared, offering them access to his female followers in exchange.

"[Follower] Tex Watson tried to steal money from a drug dealer named Bernard Lotsapoppa Crowe, who wants his money back," Berlinger explained. "Manson goes out there and doesn't intend to kill him, but thinks he killed him, a Black Panther."

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According to the documentary, Watson stole Crowe's money, prompting Crowe to threaten retaliation. Manson later shot Crowe and mistakenly believed he had killed him. Crowe was not a Black Panther.

"He goes back to Spahn Ranch and becomes paranoid that the Black Panthers are going to come after him. He becomes friends with Bobby, tells him to join the family and also to help protect the ranch. Bobby becomes tight with some bikers who were also invited to protect the ranch from the Black Panthers."

But the motorcycle gang wanted more than just women. The documentary says Beausoleil brought them drugs he obtained from music teacher Gary Hinman. The bikers were unhappy with the quality of the supply, and Beausoleil was pressured to recover their money.

"Bobby tries to get his money back from Gary and cant get it," said Berlinger.

According to court records, during the confrontation, Manson arrived at Hinman's home and slashed Hinman's face with a sword, cutting him from his left ear toward his chin. Over the course of about three days, Manson's followers tortured Hinman. Beausoleil later stabbed Hinman to death and wrote the words "Political Piggy" on a wall in Hinman's blood, along with an animal paw print intended to implicate the Black Panthers.

"Gary Hinman is killed because Manson comes in, wields a sword and then tells Bobby 'finish the job' to cover the tracks," Berlinger said.

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Beausoleil was arrested about a week after Hinmans body was discovered. Berlinger said Beausoleil was driving Hinmans vehicle and had "the murder weapon stupidly in the stolen car."

Berlinger said Manson wanted police to believe Hinmans murder was the work of the Black Panthers to cast suspicion away from Beausoleil. He noted the attempt to free Beausoleil became the catalyst for the murders that followed.

On Aug. 9, 1969, Manson's followers murdered five people at a Los Angeles home previously rented by music producer Terry Melcher: actress Sharon Tate, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant; coffee heiress Abigail Folger; celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring; Polish writer Wojciech Frykowski; and Steven Parent, who had been visiting the estate's caretaker.

Melcher had previously declined to sign Manson to a recording contract.

"The murder is tried to be made to look like it was part of Gary Hinmans murder," said Berlinger. "But when Manson picks up the paper the next day, and theres no information about these two murders being linked, they do another murder. The logic is, Weve got to make people think that Bobby, who is sitting in prison, is not guilty."

"This was all a series of blunders, a bunch of bad, spontaneous decision-making."

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The next night, wealthy grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary LaBianca, were stabbed and killed in their home across town. The killers scrawled phrases including "Pigs" and the misspelled words "Healter Skelter" in blood at the crime scene.

Manson was arrested in October 1969.

Prosecutors maintained at trial that Manson ordered his followers to kill some of Los Angeles' rich and famous to trigger a race war, a plan prosecutors said grew in part from his interpretation of the Beatles' song "Helter Skelter."

Manson frequently spoke about an impending race war and interpreted songs on the Beatles' "White Album" as messages about the coming conflict, according to testimony from his followers. What remains disputed is whether those beliefs motivated the Tate-LaBianca murders or whether, as Berlinger argues, prosecutors elevated them into the central theory of their case.

"[Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi] had to come up with a legal theory to convict a guy who actually didnt do the killings," Berlinger said. "Manson wasnt even there when the Tate-LaBianca killings took place. So how do you convict somebody who wasnt there? Well, you come up with this organizing principle that he convinced his followers that a race war was coming, and he was trying to make that race war happen. It was a brilliant legal theory, but its a false story."

"The Manson murders are much more tragic, but much more banal than this idea of some crazy cult trying to start a race war," Berlinger continued.

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"This was a drug deal gone bad, trying to cover up Gary Hinmans killing by doing another murder the next day to make it look like a copycat murder, which were the Tate murders. And when that murder didnt hit newspapers like a Black Panther murder, they did the LaBianca murders. Its a series of blunders by people who were trying to cover their tracks, not this grand scheme of 'Helter Skelter.'"

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Bugliosi worked with writer Curt Gentry on a book about the case. Published in 1974, "Helter Skelter" became the bestselling true crime book of all time.

Manson and three followers Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten were found guilty and later sentenced to death. Charles "Tex" Watson was tried separately and convicted later. Their death sentences were reduced to life in prison after the California Supreme Court invalidated the state's death penalty in 1972.

Atkins died in prison in 2009. Van Houten was released on parole in 2023. Krenwinkel and Watson remain in prison.

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Manson died at a California hospital in 2017 while serving a life sentence. He was 83.

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Berlinger maintained Manson's reputation as an evil mastermind was fueled more by myth than reality.

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"He wasnt killing or ordering people to kill to get some kind of satisfaction," Berlinger said. "He was covering up a series of blunders and just getting deeper and deeper into a hole. The best way to honor the victims is to be truthful about what happened."

The sting operation was conducted by the New York State Police in collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation between Aug. 27 and 28 in Onondaga County.

The men allegedly arranged to have sex through text messages and believed they were doing so with a teenager.

The eight men were charged with attempted rape in the second degree, according to a state police release.

Court documents indicated that an undercover officer pretended to be a 14 or 15 year old during the operation. The men allegedly arranged to have sex through messaging apps and believed they were doing so with a teenager.

All of the men separately arranged to have sex at hotels or at hotel parking lots in Syracuse, Liverpool, or Salina.

"Each one of these individuals came in contact with law enforcement during their search for an actual child," said Assistant District Attorney Jarrett Woodfork for Onondaga County.

Police said Rabbi Peter Schaktman was arrested for trying to arrange sex with a person he believed to be a 14-year-old boy. He allegedly had sex lubricant in his possession at the time.

Schaktman and the following four men were arrested on Aug. 27:

• Jarod M. Groah, age 42, from Frankfort, NY
• William D. Sheehan, age 53, from Syracuse, NY
• John L. Dejesus, age 34, from Syracuse, NY
• Xiaoqing Qi, age 37, from Syracuse, NY

These three men were arrested on Aug. 28:

• Marvin D. Knapp, age 44, from Syracuse, NY
• William D. Whitfield, age 41, from Seneca Falls, NY
• Kevin M. Lapoint, age 65, from Cicero, NY

RELATED: Illegal alien transvestite prostitute jumped from hotel's second floor while fleeing police

Temple Emanu-El, a Jewish temple in Utica, released a statement saying the rabbi was suspended over the heinous allegations and they were cooperating completely with law enforcement.

"Temple Emanu-El is shocked and deeply troubled by the serious criminal charges involving Rabbi Peter Schaktman," the temple said. "We recognize the sadness, confusion, anger, and many unanswered questions this news may create for members of our congregation and the broader community. Our thoughts are with all those who may have experienced harm and with their loved ones."

The eight men were arrested in separate cases unrelated to each other.

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While somewhat silly at face value, burritogate, says BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre, reveals a contentious divide in conservative America over the nations affordability crisis. But while people are getting riled up debating charts and graphs, theyre missing a kind of loss that is much harder to quantify, he says.

On this episode of The Auron MacIntyre Show, Auron sits down with British author Johann Kurtz to discuss the social currency they believe is at the heart of Americas cost-of-living crisis.

Kurtz says its true that official numbers make young people look richer because goods like technologies, toys, cheap food, travel, and apps have gotten less expensive. But at the same time, the essentials that actually build a stable adult life rent, homes, child care, school, and health insurance have gotten much more expensive.

Graduating from a good education, getting a stable career, finding a good spouse, buying a nice home, and having children anchoring the debate on the price of a burrito, you know, it's an interesting flash point, but I do think that these deeper issues risk getting lost in the discussion, he says.

One of those issues is social capital.

In his recent article Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise, Kurtz argued that young people feel financially squeezed not only because prices are higher but because earlier generations got free social capital trusted neighbors, functional schools, courtship norms, predictable careers, and a usable public square.

But in todays world, that stock has been diminished, forcing young people to purchase expensive stand-ins.

In London, where I'm from, the classic recommendation for middle-class parents is: You don't need an expensive home; you should just get a starter home in somewhere like Kentishtown, says Kurtz.

But modern Kentishtown, he explains, is full of unsavory characters that make the area unsafe for families. Material conditions have changed."

Today, it is no longer often wise to opt for the public school. There is actually a good reason to choose the private school, he tells Auron, noting that 50 years ago, 85% of the families of public school children were intact and likely upheld implicitly Christian context.

Now that intact family rate has totally collapsed, and the only place where it can be predicted and relied upon as a kind of norm typically are in harder-to-access spaces charter schools, public schools, classical Christian education, homeschooling, Kurtz explains.

This trend isnt showing up just in education, however, but in virtually all easy, cheap public option[s].

[Easy, cheap public options were] good because they were embedded in a good culture populated by good people who sort of shared a vision and understanding and moral sense of life that you shared. And thus you could slum it a little bit, he says.

But in the modern day, slumming it comes at exorbitant social cost. Such a lifestyle, says Kurtz, is more often than not shared by people who are quite sketchy and are quite dangerous and are quite anti-family.

Auron agrees. In America, the famous example is Detroit. You know, people say, Well, you can get a house for $50,000. Sure, and all you need is, you know, the machine gun perched on top of your roof in order to make sure that your home is safe all the time, he says.

What's really happened is the breakdown in all of those things that used to operate in the background that were built into the social fabric, he continues. The idea that you had intact households that cared for each other, that cared for the neighborhood, that made places safe, that made places affordable, that allowed for child care and all these things that weren't a paid job that took a large amount of the burden off of young working families.

But today, those built-in support systems are largely gone and therefore must be supplemented with paid child care, expensive housing in safe neighborhoods, private or classical Christian schooling, and other costly stand-ins for neighborly and family support.

What people are missing in the debates surrounding the affordability crisis, says Kurtz, is that social capital is every bit as important as financial capital.

[When] you quantify everything and you host these very abstract arguments, which are exclusively framed in terms of a narrow set of poorly understood reductive metrics, it misses all of that context, which is why the lived reality on the ground can differ so radically from the kind of theoretical arguments that people make online.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Auron MacIntyre?

To enjoy more of this YouTuber and recovering journalist's commentary on culture and politics, subscribe to BlazeTV the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

The versatile star played Spider-Man in two feature films, but back in 2013 he shared a curious wish for the web-slinger.

'I would like to avoid being in a tampon commercial 20 years after I'm dead.'

Why couldnt he be gay?

The comments caught fire at the time, and more than a decade later, he hasnt budged on the issue.

I like the idea of a place where everyone is being honored and everyone is being included, and it was just a kind of act of saying, Well, why not? And youll be telling on yourself if you have a strong opinion either way.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the fourth solo adventure in the Tom Holland-led series, shattered records mere weeks ago and is now in the top five grossing films of all time.

If it aint broke, why in the world would Hollywood want to fix it? Or is the MCU telling on itself for wanting the good box office times to keep rolling?

Goodbye, Dolly

We just cant quit Dolly Parton.

The country music superstar passed last month at the age of 80, but interest in all things Dolly is just warming up. Partons songs zoomed up the iTunes music charts in the days after her death. Her estate announced that she previously recorded a special new song, My Place in History, to be released on her 100th birthday in 2046.

This week, an ABC broadcast of her beloved 1980 film 9 to 5 scored the network its biggest ratings for a film in over three years.

Meanwhile, country superstar Jelly Roll is still juggling the fallout from his disastrous week guest-hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live!

RELATED: GHOUL NATION: Pop culture's decade-long descent into cruelty and bloodlust

Joseph Prezioso/Getty Images

Down with 'Uprising'?

First reaction stories should be relegated to fifth-rate movie blogs and Bluesky. These stories capture early film reviews from influencers who like almost everything.

If you need a reference point, the recent Supergirl earned solid "first reactions." Raves even. So theres that.

Which makes the terrible first reactions to The Uprising genuinely newsworthy. Our friend Andrew Garfield anchors the film, based on actual events of a peasant uprising against King Richard II.

Director Paul Greengrass has made some great films, including United 93 and Captain Phillips.

So what went wrong? The pacing, the dialogue, and the execution, apparently

Clooney ... for her

George Clooney has seen the future, and hes a mite worried about it.

You cant blame him. Hes a big Hollywood star, and the rise of AI will dramatically impact his industry. Jobs will be lost. Old stars will be reborn (just ask the Val Kilmer estate that OKd a digital Kilmer comeback for an upcoming film).

Clooney is keeping his sense of humor about the future and his own possible comeback.

"I would like to avoid being in a tampon commercial 20 years after I'm dead. I would like that. I would like to avoid that."

We feel his pain. But if AI can fix old Facts of Life episodes and digitally remove Clooneys mullet, it wont be all bad

Marvel make-'em-ups

When you think improv, names like Larry David, Robin Williams, and Colin Mochrie come to mind.

What about Thor, Captain America, and Ant-Man?

The upcoming Avengers: Doomsday began production without a finished script. Seems problematic for a movie with a budget north of $400 million, no? Not according to directors Anthony and Joe Russo.

The duo, who previously gave us Infinity War and Endgame, explained away the lack of a finished script.

Were improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors. We like to see what the actors bring to the characters, and sometimes you dont get the actors until a few days or a few weeks before you shoot them. And a lot of the time, thats when the magic happens.

Doomsday isnt a comedy, but that defense is hysterical

Blind casting

Wait was Saturday Night Lives Pat not available?

Actress Sandra Hüller of Project Hail Mary fame is set to star in the upcoming Arbeit und Struktur (Work and Structure), a biopic of the late German writer and artist Wolfgang Herrndorf.

Yes, Hüller is female and Herrndorf, best known for his 2010 coming-of-age best-seller Tschick, was a man.

The actress called the role a profound challenge. Hard to argue with that.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who was appointed in 2014 by President Barack Obama, issued a preliminary injunction preventing the Postal Service from imposing the requirements ahead of the November midterms. The ruling replaces a temporary block Talwani imposed after Democratic-led states renewed their legal challenge.

States may voluntarily use the Postal Services new system, but none have announced plans to do so, the Associated Press reported.

Under the rule, state election officials would have to submit voters names, addresses, and unique ballot-envelope barcodes through a federal portal before turning outbound ballots over to the Postal Service. The Postal Service could reject mailings that did not comply and return them to election officials.

Talwani said the timing would make compliance difficult as states begin distributing ballots. North Carolina mailed its first ballots Friday. Other states are expected to soon follow.

Talwani wrote that states are unable to pivot this late in the election cycle, nearly guaranteeing significant disenfranchisement for eligible voters.

The case reached the Supreme Court last month. On August 24, the justices paused an earlier injunction issued by Talwani, as The Daily Wire previously reported, finding that the states had sued before showing that Trumps executive order would actually harm them. The justices made clear that they had not ruled on whether the administrations actions were legal.

Following that ruling, Talwani lifted her remaining injunction, temporarily clearing the way for the Postal Service to proceed. By then, the Postal Service had issued its final rule. That allowed the states to challenge the rule itself.

The states then sued over the final rule, and Talwani blocked it Friday.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to lift Talwanis temporary block. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson gave the states challenging the rule until 10 a.m. Tuesday to respond. Talwani replaced the temporary order with a preliminary injunction Friday, and the parties notified the Supreme Court of the new ruling. The justices have not indicated when they will act.

Corie A. Walsh, 40, was being held for medical treatment on Friday after she was found with wounds believed to be self-inflicted but non-life-threatening when police responded to her home Tuesday, the Frankfort Police Department said in a news release.

Frankfort is about 36 miles southwest of Chicago.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS LINDSAY CLANCY WILD CARD THAT COULD TILT POTENTIAL RETRIAL TO THE DEFENSE, RETIRED JUDGE SAYS

Once shes released from treatment, she will be transferred to the Will County Adult Detention Facility to await a hearing.

Frankfort police officers responded to Walshs home Tuesday afternoon and found her son unresponsive. He was given CPR and transported to a hospital where he was later pronounced dead.

Walsh was closely following the Clancy trial and was discussing the case in an online group chat as the jury deliberated just hours before her son was found, prosecutors said, according to FOX 32. 

Walsh allegedly believed her son was the "anti-Christ" and the "devil," court documents said, the station reported. 

The boy was found by a neighbor hanging by the neck from a rafter in the basement, FOX 32 reported. 

Fox News Digital has reached out to the Will County State's Attorney's Office and the Frankfort Police Department. 

NORTH DAKOTA MOM STABS HER 2 CHILDREN TO DEATH IN 'HORRIFIC' KILLING THAT LEFT COPS TRAUMATIZED: OFFICIALS

"Our thoughts and prayers are with the family, their loved ones and everyone affected by this heartbreaking tragedy," Frankfort police said in a statement shared with Fox News Digital. "We ask our community to keep them in their thoughts and prayers and to respect their privacy as they navigate this profoundly difficult time."

LINDSAY CLANCYS FUTURE COULD REST WITH PROSECUTION DOCTORS AS CASE ECHOES INFAMOUS MAINE KILLINGS: EXPERT

Carolyn Pappas, who lives nearby, told NBC Chicago earlier this week that the boys death has left residents stunned. She told the station that the circumstances brought to mind the case of Clancy, a Massachusetts mother who admitted to killing her three children before attempting to take her own life.

"This is just absolutely devastating, that this could be another Lindsay Clancy situation in our neighborhood, in our community. You never think it's going to hit so close to home," she told the station. "And, so, yeah, that absolutely makes us think of that. And, again, just more people, I think, are struggling than we realize, and, so, we just need to be there for one another."

Three other people who were unharmed were found inside the Walsh home on Tuesday, police said, according to FOX 32.

Fox News' Greg Wehner contributed to this report. 

The longtime host at Fox Business had reportedly "parted ways" with the network effective immediately, according to a network statement Thursday.

'Maria is a total professional, and a true warrior. Her fans, of which there are many, will not be happy.'

"The irresponsible reports that have been published stating that Maria Bartiromo was fired or is no longer an employee of Fox are absolutely and unequivocally false," read a statement from her attorney on Friday.

"Make no mistake, we have the receipts and witnesses and they will come out whether through the courthouse or otherwise," the attorney continued. "Those reporting her firing or the incredulous facts supporting that fiction have exhibited a complete and utter reckless disregard for the truth."

When asked about this new statement, Fox News said its previous statement "speaks for itself."

The statement could have been in response to reports that Bartiromo had been fired after allegedly making an improper disclosure to the White House about Fox News refusing to air the president's election fraud claims.

Bartiromo had worked at CNN and CNBC before moving to Fox News in 2014. She had come to host two shows, one that bore her name: "Mornings with Maria" and "Sunday Morning Futures." Both will be renamed after her departure.

Blaze News also previously reported that her profiles at the Fox News and the Fox Business websites were both scrubbed from the internet.

"I cant believe Maria Bartiromo is no longer going to have her great show(s) on FoxNews/Business," said the president in a social media post. "Maria is a total professional, and a true warrior. Her fans, of which there are many, will not be happy. God bless you, Maria!"

RELATED: Trump demands Bret Baier 'straighten out' Fox News 'flunkies' over report and he responds

Bartiromo was celebrated in 1995 as the first reporter to broadcast daily from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

She also was the first female journalist to be inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame in 2011.

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The report, released Thursday, details the findings of a months-long investigation into Chavez-DeRemer and several of her senior aides. Investigators interviewed 53 current and former Labor Department employees and reviewed more than 500 documents, photographs, and videos.

The investigation found that Chavez-DeRemers conduct was inconsistent with applicable policies and ethical standards in multiple areas. Those findings included an inappropriately close and unprofessional relationship with a senior member of her security detail, improper travel, unauthorized possession and consumption of alcohol on federal property, misuse of government resources, and failure to properly report gifts. 

One particularly bizarre episode occurred during a personal trip to Oregon, when Chavez-DeRemer asked to stop at a strip club with members of her security detail. According to the report, Chavez-DeRemer gave a security agent serving as her driver money from her purse and instructed him to give it to a female performer.

When he hesitated, a senior security official told him to comply. Chavez-DeRemer then handed the driver additional cash and instructed him to drop the bills one at a time onto the woman.

The inspector general did not find direct evidence that Chavez-DeRemer and the security official had a romantic or sexual relationship. Investigators nevertheless documented an extensive series of interactions between the two, including personal outings, physical contact, and overnight stays in the same hotels.

Hotel door-lock records from two Las Vegas trips appeared to indicate that Chavez-DeRemer and the security official spent portions of nights in each others rooms.

Key-fob records and surveillance footage also documented the security official visiting Chavez-DeRemers home. The report said the relationship appeared to continue even after the agent had been placed on administrative leave and suspended from his official duties. Chavez-DeRemer and the security official both declined to be interviewed by investigators. 

The report also found that alcohol was repeatedly consumed and stored on federal property without authorization. Witnesses told investigators that Chavez-DeRemer and members of her senior staff drank during the workday and pressured other employees to drink as well, including ridiculing employees who declined.

The alleged misuse of employees time extended beyond drinking. At one point, Chavez-DeRemer directed her personal aide and executive assistant to drive to her home in a Labor Department vehicle during working hours to organize her bedroom closet. The employees were instructed to hang clothing and dry cleaning and arrange her shoes, purses, and other belongings. They were then asked to provide a video documenting the completed work. The inspector general included an image of the organized closet in its report. Other employees were allegedly sent to retrieve Chavez-DeRemers personal packages, make personal purchases, and handle other errands unrelated to their government duties.

The report also found that Chavez-DeRemer combined personal and official travel, including trips involving family, personal residences, and Las Vegas. Investigators identified gifts that were not properly reported, including rodeo tickets, cowboy hats, and an alligator-hide wallet.

The broader workplace described by investigators was similarly troubling. Employees said senior officials routinely engaged in threatening, demeaning, and abusive verbal and written communication. Witnesses described employees being berated in front of colleagues, performance issues being discussed publicly, and staff members being threatened with termination.

Investigators also heard allegations that staffing decisions were influenced by physical appearance rather than qualifications. In one instance, a senior official allegedly wanted an employees desk moved because they did not want a fat person visible in the front office.

Chavez-DeRemer resigned from the Cabinet in April, becoming the third Trump Cabinet official to leave office during the administration. The White House said she was departing for a private-sector position, while her attorney said she wanted to prevent the allegations from distracting from the Labor Departments work. Her resignation came one day before she was scheduled to sit for an interview with the inspector general. Her attorney later declined to make her available.

Her attorney, Nick Oberheiden, disputed the significance of the report, telling the Washington Post that it confirms that Secretary Chavez-DeRemer did not violate any laws.

Chavez-DeRemer previously characterized the allegations as attacks and distractions.

The Department of Labor is now led by Keith Sonderling, whom President Donald Trump has nominated to permanently head the agency.

The feud began after "Barrio Athletics" published a promotional video about a run in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

'Not gonna happen. So respect ... or get your brain knocked out! Black power.'

Some of the black residents took exception to the phrasing used in the video saying Latino runners would be "taking over the streets."

"Every black person in California from San Diego to the bay needs to be in LA this Saturday and check this s**t," read one post on the X platform.

Another influencer objected to the Latinos' plan to bring in vendors for their running event through the neighborhood.

"Let me tell you something. That's about the fifth time we got the Hispanic community trying to do a hostile takeover in Leimert under the guise of a run, a bike ride, whatever the f**k, coffee-making contest, NO!" she said in a video on social media.

"We don't want you to come into Africa Town. Please make note of it, you got time still to relocate your event, you will be met with resistance from the black community," she added.

"Have some respect for black space."

Another black resident chimed in against the run.

"We can't go to no Mexican community and come through there without getting stabbed and gettin' physically assaulted," he said in a video on social media.

"Not gonna happen. So respect ... or get your brain knocked out! Black power."

RELATED: La Raza Radio among businesses burned down in BLM riots: 'It was my life's work. Destroyed.'

"Black LA reveres Leimert Park," said Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano. "For years it has been a center of cultural resistance, at a time when the population of Black LA and its political power have been shrinking."

Barrio Athletics decided to cancel the event and move it to Elysian Park.

"I understand where the anger is coming from, even though hearing it expressed like that, it's not pretty," Arellano added.

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The ad, released by the Senate Leadership Fund and posted to multiple social media platforms, says, Sen. Jon Ossoff spends more money than any Washington politician on hair and makeup. I know what youre thinking. Yes, even more than the ladies.

The dude voted to raise taxes by two grand, and to tax overtime too. Ossoff needs to put down the mascara and join the real world, the ad continued, making use of AI renderings to depict the senator getting pampered hair and facial treatments out at the salon.

Ossoff has taken heat for spending more campaign money on makeup services this year than any other federal candidate including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib.

During his virtual news conference, when asked about the use of AI in the media, particularly in the recent ad, Ossoff responded, Its a slippery slope toward the destruction of truth in political debate.

He continued, Congressman Collins of course, himself, has deceptively used deepfake videos to try to lie to voters.

However, this comes after an analysis by The Washington Free Beacon revealed that the senator paid Atlanta-based makeup artist Stephanie Ponder $2,887 since February for makeup services.

While the senator continued to accuse Collins of misusing tax dollars, the senator himself has used campaign funds on a seemingly unnecessary service.

The Out of Context Ad

As Ossoff continues to accuse Collins of lying, fact checkers say the senator has released two ads with comments from his opponent that are out of context.

In a 2025 radio interview, Collins promoted President Donald Trumps tax cuts from the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, stating that tax cuts would encourage economic prosperity and help people to get off of Medicaid, get off of Social Security, [and] get back into the workforce. [SOURCE]

Upon closer look, the ads fail to give the full context of the congressmans actual words. The Ossoff ads state that Collins wants to push you off Social Security, instead of Collins intention, making the system more advantageous for people to work.

Ossoffs Out of State Donors

While Ossoff has outdone Collins when it comes to fundraising, the sources for his funds have raised eyebrows. The Federal Election Commission reports that while the senator has raised over $98 million since 2021, the majority of his funds come from California, not the Peach State, The Center Square reported.

Most notably are his donors from California and New York, with funds from California amounting to $7.3 million since 2021, and funds from New York amounting to $3.6 million.

Ossoffs Q-and-A

During the virtual news conference on C-SPAN, Ossoff seemingly kept repeating himself when asked various questions by attendees at the meeting.

For example, one of the attendees asked Ossoff if he would be OK with outside Democratic groups moving the money that they would have otherwise invested in this [Senate] race and using it in other races that Democrats are trying to flip seats in, like Ohio or Alaska.

Instead of directly addressing the question, Ossoff referenced Collins, name-calling and accusing him of misusing tax dollars. Throughout the course of the news conference, he seemed to keep reiterating his attacks against Collins through stating his name more than 10 times.

The senator was asked a variety of questions on topics ranging from affordability to complacent voters. He seemed to evade answering them, however, consistently reiterating the same point about Collins.

Ossoff on Trumps Monuments

While Ossoff has continued to smear Collins name, he has also recently referenced President Donald Trump, saying earlier in the year that the president is building his own monuments because he knows nobody else will do it for him, People reports.

In an interview with New York Magazine about his continued renovations at the White House, Trump, when asked about Ossoffs comment about monuments, said, Thats true. [SOURCE]

Nobody will do it once Im gone. When I leave here, nobody will, the president said.

Its a shame. Its a horrible tragedy, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. Look, she did a horrible, horrible thing. Cant be worse.

Trump said the case, which has captivated the nation, had been difficult to avoid because it received so much television coverage. He said Clancy would face consequences and could end up confined in a psychiatric institution or prison.

Therell be a price, Trump said, adding that he believes prosecutors would bring the case to trial again and called that scenario too bad.

Massachusetts Superior Court Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial Friday after the nine-woman, three-man jury said they remained unable to reach a unanimous verdict following seven days of deliberations.

Clancy, 36, was charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the January 2023 deaths of her children: Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months, inside the familys home in Duxbury. She pleaded not guilty.

Clancy acknowledged strangling the children with exercise bands, but her attorneys argued that severe postpartum mental illness left her unable to understand that what she was doing was wrong. Prosecutors say the killings were deliberate and that Clancy was criminally responsible.

The jurys final note said members could not reach a unanimous decision.

With a heavy heart we report we cannot come to a unanimous decision, the jurors wrote.

Defense attorney Kevin Reddington said he believed the jury stood 11-1 in favor of finding Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity. The jurys actual vote remains unknown.

Reddington unsuccessfully sought to remove the alleged holdout, arguing that jury notes indicated the juror was refusing to follow the law. He argued the juror was biased against those with debilitating mental illness. Sullivan rejected that request and gave the defense one hour to seek emergency intervention from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court before declaring a mistrial. The states highest court declined to intervene.

Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has not announced whether prosecutors plan to retry the case. Clancy will remain at a state psychiatric hospital, according to the Associated Press.

The meeting featured Sens. Max Burns, Rick Williams, and Bo Hatchett and Reps. Victor Anderson, Tim Fleming, and Scott Holcomb.

After going through the agenda of the meeting, Anderson said, I want everybody who is signing up [to offer public comment] to remember this committees task is to determine a recommendation for specifications and standards for the next uniform voting system in the state of Georgia.

Three state election officials were on hand to testify before the committee: Rebecca Anglin, elections director for the Greene County Board of Elections and Registration; Chris Channell, director of the Glynn County Board of Elections and Voter Registration; and Kelvin Williams, acting elections supervisor for the Gwinnett County Board of Registrations and Elections.

Anglin spoke first, saying that A successful election system is not simply about the equipment itself; its about the entire process, from voter check-in, to ballot production, to casting your ballot, tabulation, reconciliation, reporting, maintenance, training, and ultimately, the ability of 159 counties to successfully administer our system.

Based on the feedback we received, it is our belief that a ballot-on-demand system, and or a full-faced ballot-marking device, are a viable path forward for consideration, she added.

Williams, who spoke next, discussed whether current systems can be upgraded, as opposed to switching to an entirely new voting system. Understanding recommendations must fully meet the legislative requirements for a change in our current voting system, we recommend careful evaluation of whether existing hardware and components can be upgraded and retained rather than discarded for a complete replacement, he said.

Channell, the last of the local election officials to speak, stated that cybersecurity should remain a focus. Cybersecurity was ranked as the top concern for members of the association that responded to our survey, he said.

He also emphasized the importance of physical security and protections, saying, The Halderman Report proved, given unlimited time, unrestricted access, and keys and passwords to a voting system, potential weaknesses can be identified.

Recommendations by Elections Experts

Paul Lux, supervisor of elections in Okaloosa County, Fla., spoke next, highlighting the efficiency of ballot-on-demand voting.

We were already using what we call direct print, directly from the poll book to a laser printer. In other words, when they [voters] check in, they just pause briefly. It takes the ballot about 30 seconds to print out, and then you hand them their ballot.

Next up was John Cronin, elections services manager for the Virginia Department of Elections, who said that his state uses paper ballots as well as counting machines to determine the results of the scanned paper ballots.

He noted that the vast majority of these ballots are hand marked, and that, in 2022, the law changed the definition of a voting system to include ballot-on-demand devices.

Accessibility Considered

In the afternoon session, the focus of the meeting shifted to disability advocacy and ensuring that everyone has access to voting, regardless of disability.

Various organizations and individuals testified, including Lanona Jones of the Rev Up Georgia Coalition leadership team. The coalition also included Jessica Mathis, who spoke on the prevalence of voters with disabilities, and how Georgias electronic ballot-marking devices work well for voters with disabilities.

Dr. Anar Parikh, policy manager for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, urged lawmakers to consider expanding language access, which has been a cornerstone of our voting rights.

AJ Link, a disability justice advocate, and Shun Tucker-Allen, director of community engagement for New Disabled South, also weighed in on the new voting system, calling for curbside voting.

Latino Justice

Nicolas Bernal, election protection consultant for the Latino Justice PRLDEF, a New York-based civil rights organization, urged lawmakers to expand language access for Hispanic and Latino voters, stating that any new election equipment specifications should require the complete voter-facing ballot interface to be available in multiple languages.

Speaking to reporters outside of the hearing, Burns said that, when it comes to accessibility for voters with disabilities, lawmakers will want to make sure its an integral part of the specification requirements.

Anderson, also speaking about the voting systems accessibility, added, We have a system that was, for the most part, considered to be fairly successful at addressing a lot of the needs now.

As we develop plans for whatever this next system looks like, well just have to make sure that those same principles are brought forward to it, and that we continue to provide services, he said.

37-year-old Thomas Christopher Ross was arrested on Wednesday on a federal charge of conspiring to distribute a controlled substance.

Ross allegedly told the manager that he could anonymously tip off the police about the drugs planted in Secker's car.

Ross had allegedly told his campaign manager to plant cocaine and Adderall in the car or purse of his primary opponent, Louise Secker, who is also a Republican.

Ross defeated Secker in the Republican primary for Missouri House District 161, representing Joplin, but his campaign manager contacted police about the alleged drug plot.

Police say they tested a bag of cocaine and an Adderall pill that the unidentified campaign manager brought to them, and they confirmed both to be real.

The informant also provided police with text messages allegedly from Ross detailing the planting plot as far back as May, according to the complaint.

"I was hoping we could make it happen before THIS Thursday...which would be extreme egg on the face," read part of a May 31 text attributed to Ross by prosecutors.

Police contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which provided a covert recorder so that the manager could obtain audio evidence from a July 31 meeting with Ross.

Ross allegedly told the manager that he could anonymously tip off the police about the drugs planted in Secker's car.

"If you can pull it off...pull it off," Ross allegedly told him.

Ross won the primary by fewer than 35 votes and would face Democrat candidate Aaron Metzger in the general election, if he resists calls to step down from the campaign.

He was booked into the Joplin Municipal Jail but has not made a plea yet in the case.

RELATED: Calif. Democrat calls for ICE to be abolished after 'record' illegal alien arrests

Missouri Republican Party Chairman Peter Kinder called on Ross to drop out.

He added that the "people of Southwest Missouri deserve nothing less than leadership they can trust."

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The report, released Thursday, details the findings of a months-long investigation into Chavez-DeRemer and several of her senior aides. Investigators interviewed 53 current and former Labor Department employees and reviewed more than 500 documents, photographs, and videos.

The investigation found that Chavez-DeRemers conduct was inconsistent with applicable policies and ethical standards in multiple areas. Those findings included an inappropriately close and unprofessional relationship with a senior member of her security detail, improper travel, unauthorized possession and consumption of alcohol on federal property, misuse of government resources, and failure to properly report gifts. 

One particularly bizarre episode occurred during a personal trip to Oregon, when Chavez-DeRemer asked to stop at a strip club with members of her security detail. According to the report, Chavez-DeRemer gave a security agent serving as her driver money from her purse and instructed him to give it to a female performer.

When he hesitated, a senior security official told him to comply. Chavez-DeRemer then handed the driver additional cash and instructed him to drop the bills one at a time onto the woman.

The inspector general did not find direct evidence that Chavez-DeRemer and the security official had a romantic or sexual relationship. Investigators nevertheless documented an extensive series of interactions between the two, including personal outings, physical contact, and overnight stays in the same hotels.

Hotel door-lock records from two Las Vegas trips appeared to indicate that Chavez-DeRemer and the security official spent portions of nights in each others rooms.

Key-fob records and surveillance footage also documented the security official visiting Chavez-DeRemers home. The report said the relationship appeared to continue even after the agent had been placed on administrative leave and suspended from his official duties. Chavez-DeRemer and the security official both declined to be interviewed by investigators. 

The report also found that alcohol was repeatedly consumed and stored on federal property without authorization. Witnesses told investigators that Chavez-DeRemer and members of her senior staff drank during the workday and pressured other employees to drink as well, including ridiculing employees who declined.

The alleged misuse of employees time extended beyond drinking. At one point, Chavez-DeRemer directed her personal aide and executive assistant to drive to her home in a Labor Department vehicle during working hours to organize her bedroom closet. The employees were instructed to hang clothing and dry cleaning and arrange her shoes, purses, and other belongings. They were then asked to provide a video documenting the completed work. The inspector general included an image of the organized closet in its report. Other employees were allegedly sent to retrieve Chavez-DeRemers personal packages, make personal purchases, and handle other errands unrelated to their government duties.

The report also found that Chavez-DeRemer combined personal and official travel, including trips involving family, personal residences, and Las Vegas. Investigators identified gifts that were not properly reported, including rodeo tickets, cowboy hats, and an alligator-hide wallet.

The broader workplace described by investigators was similarly troubling. Employees said senior officials routinely engaged in threatening, demeaning, and abusive verbal and written communication. Witnesses described employees being berated in front of colleagues, performance issues being discussed publicly, and staff members being threatened with termination.

Investigators also heard allegations that staffing decisions were influenced by physical appearance rather than qualifications. In one instance, a senior official allegedly wanted an employees desk moved because they did not want a fat person visible in the front office.

Chavez-DeRemer resigned from the Cabinet in April, becoming the third Trump Cabinet official to leave office during the administration. The White House said she was departing for a private-sector position, while her attorney said she wanted to prevent the allegations from distracting from the Labor Departments work. Her resignation came one day before she was scheduled to sit for an interview with the inspector general. Her attorney later declined to make her available.

Her attorney, Nick Oberheiden, disputed the significance of the report, telling the Washington Post that it confirms that Secretary Chavez-DeRemer did not violate any laws.

Chavez-DeRemer previously characterized the allegations as attacks and distractions.

The Department of Labor is now led by Keith Sonderling, whom President Donald Trump has nominated to permanently head the agency.

Theres a fake thing that happens in psychiatry in which its assumed that people are capable of pure, easy diagnoses and that drugs are extremely effective. Neither one is true. If you spend any time with psychiatrists or with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) or people who have dealt with psychiatrists, the DSM, or medication you would know its probably the least-developed area of all medicine.

Psychiatry is incredibly vague. Basically, these things are diagnosed based on checklists and a persons self-reported symptoms. And then when it comes to psychiatric drugs, very often its basically trying different combinations. It is virtually that basic: see what works, then adjust medication based on the symptoms.

Its really complex. In this particular case, it basically comes down to: Was she psychotic enough not to recognize the difference between right and wrong at the time of the murders? That is the essence of the case. And theres the fact that Massachusetts law is incredibly biased in favor of the defendant when it comes to the insanity defense.

I know a lot of people are very agitated on the Right, saying, Its a clear-cut case; shes absolutely guilty. Meanwhile, a lot of people on the Left are agitated, saying, Its a clear-cut case; shes absolutely innocent.

Im not all that surprised theres a hung jury, although Im surprised it was 11-1 in favor of acquittal. I would have thought it would have been six on one side and six on the other.

The beyond a reasonable doubt provision of the law, combined with the insanity defense in Massachusetts, which puts the burden of proof on the prosecution to prove sanity rather than the burden of proof on the defense to prove insanity, makes it a very, very high bar for the prosecution to pass.

This is one of the reasons why I think its such a sin for people to conflate their own personal issues with those of Lindsay Clancy. The reality is that in the United States, every year you have probably 15 multiple homicides of children by women in circumstances similar to Lindsay Clancys.

But there are many women claiming they are suffering the same thing Lindsay Clancy supposedly suffered from, which is totally insane and really, really damaging for society at large.

I would say the defense has three basic arguments in favor of the idea that she was truly psychotic at the point at which she committed the murders. The most obvious one, the one that the prosecution had the hardest time with, was the fact that she tried to kill herself. If she just killed the kids and then didnt try to kill herself, I would have said to give her the death penalty.

Her hearing voices? That is the most difficult part of this case because theres literally no way to determine whether that happened, since its purely subjective. Shes going to say she heard a voice. Everybody else is going to say, Theres no way you heard a voice.

I always thought that was the weakest part of her defense and also the one her case largely rested on.

And then there was the basic idea that she was worried about the medication interactions. I thought that was pretty weak for the defense: she didnt give evidence that she thought she was being poisoned. She worried that the medications were interacting poorly and werent working for her, which is really, really common in psychiatric circles.

But when you put all that together, and then you add that the burden of proof is on the prosecution, I can see how people would arrive at reasonable doubt. It will be interesting to hear from the jurors afterward about how these deliberations actually went.

Theres something else that is even more disturbing, and that is turning everything into a societal problem. Lets say that you are an advocate for Lindsay Clancy. You truly believe she went through a psychotic episode. Why in the world does that implicate all of human society?

Why are you protesting? What are you protesting against? That bewildered me when I first saw these protesters outside the courtroom. Normally, when you have protesters outside a courtroom, they are arguing that a fundamental miscarriage of justice is being done because society is corrupt in some way.

For example, if theres a highly polarized racial trial, people show up outside the courtroom to suggest that Americas racial past is impacting the verdict. In this case, there was no implication that anything remotely like that was happening. It just seemed like a cry against the world that somehow all of society is responsible for Lindsay Clancys psychotic behavior.

The most controversial aspect of the trial is everything that was happening outside the trial. When it comes to the actual people outside who were saying, Its absolutely clear that not only was she innocent, her lawyer is a hero on behalf of women everywhere, what the hell is that?

You have to tie that into the broader left-wing belief that somehow abortion is a sacrament. Clearly, this crazy behavior comes from the same sort of philosophy that suggests that the only important thing in life is a womans right to choose.

This underscores something that pro-life people have been saying for quite a while, which is that theres no distinction between the pre-born and the post-born.

The case is horrific enough, but this reaction outside the trial is truly appalling.

Sanders plans to introduce the legislation with Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX).

Entities shall be subject to the corporate death penalty, and persons shall be subject to not more than 20 years in prison, which is similar to existing penalties related to unlawfully developing nuclear weapons, according to a summary released by Sanderss office. 

The forthcoming legislation highlights a growing divide between those who view AI as the future and those who fear it could ultimately threaten humanity. The proposal would ban artificial superintelligence and temporarily pause development of other advanced AI systems until a new federal regulator establishes safety rules and a process for reviewing powerful models.

The proposal would also establish a Cabinet-level agency to supervise the destruction of artificial superintelligence and monitor frontier AI systems at all stages of the lifecycle. 

Entities attempting to violate or circumvent those restrictions would face the corporate death penalty. The term generally refers to forcing a company to dissolve or revoking its authority to operate, but Sanderss office did not explain how the punishment would work or whether a companys assets would be liquidated. Individuals who violated the restrictions could face up to 20 years in prison.

Sanders argued that the severe restrictions are necessary because the countrys largest technology companies cannot guarantee that increasingly capable AI systems will remain under human control.

The summary defines artificial superintelligence to include AI systems capable of planning and executing the disempowerment of humanity, including by overthrowing or undermining the United States government. 

The proposal was announced one day after G20 representatives concluded a two-day Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to discuss the future of technology policy and development. 

The Trump administration invited several of the worlds most prominent technology executives to make the case directly to international officials. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and other top tech CEOs participated in the ministerial.

Huang warned officials that countries risked being left behind if they failed to embrace AI.

The worst outcome is you dont take advantage of it, he said.

At the conclusion of the ministerial, participating governments reached consensus supporting pro-innovation policy frameworks and the adoption and development of emerging technologies. 

That approach places the Trump administration firmly at odds with Sanderss proposal. Given President Donald Trumps push to accelerate American AI development, the proposal appears unlikely to receive White House support during his administration. It nevertheless presents a dramatically different vision for the future of federal AI policy.

The Trump administration filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court on Thursday asking the court to remove a lower courts stay on the administration's new postal ballot rules. North Carolina, one of the states suing the administration, sent out ballots on Friday.

The cheating on mail-in ballots is legendary.

More than 46,000 North Carolina ballots have been sent out, though only to those who specifically requested them. Those shipments will continue until all requests for mail-in ballots made by October 20 are fulfilled.

Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told Blaze News that this was business as usual for the state.

Regardless of a temporary restraining order or any kind of action there, every election year we do share our envelopes absentee ballot envelopes with the U.S. Postal Service, Tyson said. We did share our envelopes with the United States Postal Service about two or three weeks ago. They were approved. Thats very normal. Nothing that weve done just for this year.

The NCSBE is currently controlled by Republicans.

Nineteen other states will begin mailing ballots by September 19. For the Trump administration's new rules to have a chance at taking effect before the midterms, the Supreme Court would need to issue an emergency judgment in the White House's favor quickly.

The administration is already making its case.

RELATED: Democrats are running from Kamala Harris' endorsements

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer.Aaron Schwartz/Getty Images

According to White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis, the problem boils down to "a single activist judge."

The uncertainty is coming from a single activist judge who continues to try and obstruct President Trump from implementing common-sense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans vote in American elections, Bis told Blaze News. These safeguards for mail ballots were proposed months ago, giving election officials ample time to prepare for the 2026 election.

Bis did not mention any names, but Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani has certainly caused fits for the administration regarding mail-in ballots.

President Donald Trump kicked off the battle in March, when he issued an executive order overhauling the mailing system itself, requiring that every envelope be outfitted with a unique tracking barcode. According to the order, those ballots would then be issued to voters confirmed by a Mail-in Ballot and Absentee Participation List organized by each state.

The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. Its horrible whats gone on. Its very clearly covered. I think this will help a lot with elections, Trump said when signing the order in March.

Talwani initially voided the envelope rules on June 25, barring them from applying to the midterms. The DOJ asked the Supreme Court for emergency intervention on July 27 to lift Talwani's injunction, which SCOTUS eventually granted without addressing the legality of the EO.

On August 11, Talwani issued a nationwide injunction preventing the USPS from implementing the executive order nationwide.

RELATED: Is the DSA about to scalp another establishment Democrat?

Alex Wong/Getty Images

On August 26, the USPS issued its final rule saying states must give the agency a list of mail-in ballot recipients and use-approved envelopes, but the following day, Talwani issued a 14-day injunction preventing the final rule from taking effect.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to lift that most recent injunction. Sauer called mail-in ballot fraud a particularly pernicious species of fraud that dilutes the votes of lawful voters in his emergency filing.

Sauer previously chastised Talwani, claiming she was sowing confusion and chaos as Election Day approaches.

As of now, it is unclear whether states will have to submit the list of mail-in ballot recipients to the federal government before the midterms or how they might go about doing so with so little time.

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Television magic and unfettered populism.

'If you don't want to love me, [it's] up to you.'

One look at TLC's schedule, and it becomes abundantly clear the programming isn't courting a male audience.

"Double Lives of Suburban Wives" focuses on St. Louis housewives who make pornographic content (which has included fart porn), "1000-lb Roomies" focuses on two morbidly obese roommates, and "Sister Wives" focuses on polygamist families.

The shining star of the network though is "90 Day Fiancé."

With more than 20 spinoffs that include behind-the-scenes, reaction, and reunion shows, the universe revolves around couples who are from two different countries with a focus on trying to acquire a spousal visa in the United States; not exactly a conservative male viewpoint.

Accidental star

The show does huge numbers and inspires countless memes while overwhelmingly pushing pro-immigration and feminist positions.

Enter Sarper Güven. This Turkish national has allegedly slept with 2,500 women, recording his sexual encounters with a color-coded black book full of "X" marks that denote how attractive the women were.

With his wife shown as being constantly upset after getting new, horrid glimpses of his promiscuous past, Güven was immediately positioned on the show as the misogynist pig who needed desperate reformation.

There was only one problem: He refused to apologize.

"I never apologize because [it's] who I am, but I know I make mistakes," Güven told Blaze News in an interview.

Despite consistently admitting wrongs in an attempt to improve his marriage, Güven has endured constant browbeatings in both the recorded programming and group shows with other castmates. Yet despite how he is portrayed and focused on as what not to do, he has only become more popular.

Prized pig

Güven set out on a North American comedy tour earlier this year and has been selling out across the continent. At the time of this writing, the new stand-up comic has seven sold-out shows in Toronto, Canada.

RELATED: Shane and Joe show us what real activism looks like

Thomas Trutschel/Photothek/Getty Images

It's not Güven's past that audiences have identified with; it's his willingness to stand up for himself on a show that rarely rewards such behavior. When Güven''s American wife told a Brazilian cast member, "Go back to your country," he defended his partner and refused to back down, despite being an immigrant himself, on a show surrounded by immigrants.

The obvious pro-immigration sentiment of the show was finally challenged by a pair of people who weren't necessarily bothered by the immediate social consequences.

"I'm not perfect, not even close to being perfect," Güven said from a hotel room in Western Canada. "But that's me, and if you want to love me, that's me. If you don't want to love me, [it's] up to you. I come so honest and transparent. Maybe people love that, especially men love that."

Marital blisters

Güven's stand-up comedy routine sounds as much like a parody and a character as his on-screen appearances do, but he is vehement that it's all real.

Part of that has been his ongoing confession that marriage has changed him, with his commentary on the topic being what men relate to most.

Transparently, Güven talks about how he has changed from a flirtatious lady's man into a docile husband who just wants "peace."

"I don't see women using that word, term, a lot, you know, 'peace,'" the 45-year-old said. "It was not like this when [the relationship] started because I was an alpha male ... now whatever she asks we just do it as men because we don't want a fight."

RELATED: Ryan Reynolds says the 1980s were a traumatic and 'brutal time' and people aren't happy about it

Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images for AB

The majority of Güven's set is a reflection of his marital woes which he admits his wife hates and it is garnering him more outside traction with those who don't know him from the show than was expected.

"Whoever comes to my show will relate something with their lives," he explained, providing more than a couple of hilarious anecdotes.

"Everything changed with marriage. I always [say] that before the marriage, even my sweat was sexy. She was smelling me all every day, and she was saying, 'I love your sweat so much, Sarper. You smell like a real man.' And we got married, brother, in two weeks: 'Did you eat garlic today? Did you take shower?' What happened, girl? I'm the same guy.

Whether it's his Turkish way of talking in proverbs or his brutal honesty, Güven's inability to change himself from his factory settings has produced massive results and garnered him huge respect with men in an overwhelmingly female mediascape.

If a man would be an electronic device, we probably would be a freaking toaster. Push the bread in, let the bread come out. Simple, one action at a time. Bread in, bread out for you. But a woman would be probably a mobile phone, a very smart, I mean the iPhone 16 Pro Max," he stressed.

"I sleep with one every morning, [and] I find everything changed, new settings, new rules, new update, you know. But always new terms and conditions for me."

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I can understand that Tyler Robinsons exist, that Lindsay Clancys exist. I want to believe that theyre a one-off, Stuckey begins.

But when you see ... millions of people online, lionizing them, not just excusing them, but turning them into heroes, youre like, OK, I cannot stomach the idea that there are millions of Lindsay Clancys that would advocate for killing their children because their hormones are off, she tells Freitas.

And men across the country are at a loss regarding so many of these women's responses to the case.

Freitas points out that when he speaks to men about it, they echo the point that theres zero accountability for modern women.

This is a caricature of the argument, but Im watching it become more and more common, and the more, you know ... hundreds or thousands of women are out there protesting for Lindsay, and you know, tens of thousands of women online, liking, sharing, he says.

I think a lot of it is misplaced motherhood, Stuckey says.

A lot of it is feminism, she adds. But it all just goes back to sin and ... men and women having a dereliction of duty when it comes to fulfilling who God has actually made us to be.

But beyond the sin, Freitas believes that the reason this is happening is because both men and women have been lied to for decades.

Men have been told for the past two decades that theyre horrible, that theyre toxic, masculinity is bad, that the future is female, and that if everything was run by women, it would be better, he says.

At the same time, women have been lied to in this idea ... that your only flaw is you dont have enough self esteem, and youre powerful and capable, and you need to go out there and be a girlboss, he continues.

If you had lied to both sides, and you'd said, Theyre both great and wonderful, that would have produced one result. If you had lied about both sides and said Youre both horrible,' that would have produced different results, he adds.

But that's not the case, and Freitas has a theory as to why they're both being told such damaging lies, telling Stuckey, "I think so much of the purpose is about destroying the family."

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.

Mullin touted the Trump administrations commitment and success on the issue of crime and illegal immigration, comparing that to just four years ago under the Biden administration.

The truth is, for too long we ignored a problem that was taking place, and the previous administration decided not to do anything about it. When you have open borders, you have you have criminals that are going to take advantage of that, Mullin shared.

The secretary also said illegal immigrant crime is preventable.

Its frustrating to me because every single death that happens at the hand of an illegal is 100% preventable, because that person shouldnt be here. Its just that simple. They shouldnt be on our streets, he said.

Mullin also addressed how fighting crime shouldnt be political.

Fighting crime shouldnt be a blue issue or a red issue, he said, lamenting how radical politicians will talk about defunding ICE and preventing our local law enforcement from being able to work and partner through the 287g program.

The secretary also responded to claims that those who come to the country illegally have not actually broken a law or are not criminals.

They chose to break the law when they decided to come across our border illegally. That means they broke the law; that means they are criminals. That doesnt mean they all have criminal records. They chose to break our laws, and it is our job to hunt down every single one of them and send them back to where they came from, Mullin said.

Warren County Sheriff Barry Riley, who has served since January 2025, explained that his county has been part of the 287g program since October 2025.

If you are in this country illegally, I feel you should be sought out, detained, treated humanely, and processed according to the law, he said, adding that he views working with federal partners as a responsibility and a duty according to the U.S. Constitution.

Republican Rep. Warren Davidson, who represents Ohios 8th Congressional District, noted that the secretarys remarks were not divisive or partisan in Warren County, but that nearby Hamilton County has more liberal policies.

The secretary said sanctuary policies by counties matter because crime doesnt stay in that county and bleeds elsewhere where they have to deal with that issue.

Just because youre a sanctuary city or sanctuary county doesnt mean youre doing any justice. Youre actually causing harm, and youre harboring and abating the criminals that are going just outside your area, too, and theyre flooding our streets, Mullin said.

Matt Putra, removal operations director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, noted various ways local law enforcement can partner through the 287g program, including the task force model, in which officers are conducting their normal police activities and have immigration authority to identify and apprehend anybody in violation of immigration law.

Riley shared that Warren County uses that model, adding that he doesnt want ICE to have to be there, since they are needed elsewhere.

Mullin added he would love ICE to be a transport agency where we have a partnership with our local law enforcement, like we do with the sheriff in Warren County, and we come pick them up after they after they apprehend them.

The DHS secretary criticized jurisdictions that have banned law enforcement from working with the 287g program. When they do that, they are actually aiding and abetting the criminals at that point, because we can just expand and get after it faster when were participating all together, he said, adding that this isnt a political issue at all.

He also addressed check-ins at schools, as he insisted the focus was to locate the children lost during the Biden administration and rescue those being trafficked, which has been a priority for the Trump administration.

Were going to schools to find out are these kids there because thats where they were last reported. If theyre there and theyre safe, great. Are we there to make arrests? Absolutely not. Were there to find these kids, though he lamented that there are states that are directing schools not to work with officers.

We have 180,000 that are still under 18, and were hoping and praying theyre in schools. If we can get cooperation from [schools], itd be wonderful, because thats 100% what were trying to do, Mullin continued, as he also spoke of using contractors rather than ICE officers.

David Closson, director of Family Research Councils Center for Biblical Worldview, described the ruling as a serious threat to religious liberty, in addition to threatening parental rights.

This opinion rejects the First Amendment right of a fit parent to raise her child consistent with her Christian faith, argued Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver. This opinion goes against other state court decisions involving custody in the context of religious free exercise rights and ignores precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court. We will ask the High Court to take this case and overrule the decision.

In a unanimous ruling, Maines highest court upheld Nofsingers decision, arguing that allocating authority between two parents does not intru[de] on the parents shared right to direct the upbringing of their child, but that allocation of religious authority to the father alone was in the childs best interest in this case. Furthermore, the court ruled that a lower court had erred by applying strict scrutiny to the question of parental rights.

Family Context

It may be helpful, at this point, to back up for context. Emily Bickford and Matthew Bradeen had a child together in January 2013, even though they were never married. Before the year was out, the childs mother and father had split, and a family law magistrate had already entered an order, agreed to by both parties, that set out shared parental rights and responsibilities, including a commitment to reach jointly, whenever possible, any major decision concerning their child.

Sometime after this, Bickford professed faith in Christ, and she began attending Calvary Chapel Greater Portland in May 2021. The Maine Supreme Court noted with alarm that Bickford brought the child to multiple services per weekas American Christians customarily do.

Bickford did not inform Bradeen about the childs attendance at the church, the court noted reprovingly. After Bradeen learned about the childs participation in a church event, he asked Bickford for more information about the church and its teachings. Bickford told Bradeen that she and the child were attending Calvary Chapel, but she did not provide any other information.

This last clause shows either great ignorance or great bias, as if Bickford needed to provide any other information about a Calvary Chapels teaching. Calvary Chapel is mainstream, we believe in the Old and New Testament, protested Travis Carey, pastor of Calvary Chapel Greater Portland, in an interview with The Washington Stand.

Every Calvary Chapel teaches the same things, and their shared Statement of Faith can be found online in a minute or less. Among other things, every Calvary Chapel believes:

• The Word of God is the foundation upon which the church operates and is the basis for which the church is governed. We believe that the Word of God supersedes any earthly law that is contrary to the Holy Scriptures.
• That the Lord, Jesus Christ instituted two ordinances for the church: the full-immersion water baptism of believers and the Lords Supper.
• In a literal Heaven and a literal Hell and that all those who place their faith, hope and trust in Jesus Christ will spend eternity in Heaven with the Lord. Those who reject Jesus free gift of salvation will spend eternity separated from the Lord.
• In the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which is His personal, visible return to Earth and the establishment of His millennial kingdom, in the resurrection of the body, the final judgment and eternal blessing of the righteous and endless separation of the wicked.
• In the Pre-Tribulation Rapture of the Church where all believers will meet the Lord in the air and be taken out of this world prior to the Tribulation that will come upon the earth.

These points are selected for their relevance to what follows.

Months later, in September 2021, Bradeen asked the court to allocate to him sole responsibility for the childs religious upbringing, according to the state supreme court. For the next three years, Bickford and Bradeen participated in a series of mediation sessions, and they eventually resolved all their disagreements except for those pertaining to religion and healthcare. (Bickford also objected to her daughter receiving COVID-19 and flu shots and the HPV vaccine.)

Mistaken Baptism

The court record then erred by mistaking believers baptism for infant baptism. Bickford made other unilateral decisions about the childs participation in church activities, its opinion stated. For example, Bradeen learned that the child was scheduled to be baptized only when he was informed by a third party. Bradeen then called Bickford to ask about the baptism, and she placed him on speakerphone in front of the child.

As noted above, Calvary Chapel practices believers baptism, which is only performed on individuals who believe the Christian gospel. The court omits the conversation that ensued after Bickford placed Bradeen on speakerphone, but the purpose was probably so that her daughter could describe her conversion to her father in her own words.

The girl made an outward profession of faith, Carey told The Washington Stand, and she wanted to invite her dad to the baptism. This is the most normal thing in the world, and it happens in churches across America every week. Somehow, the Maine Supreme Court twisted this into something sinister.

The Cult Smear

In fact, Bradeen undertook legal proceedings to prove just that. At a two-day hearing in August 2024, he produced an expert witness on cults, Janja Lalich, who flew in from California for the purpose. She described cults as closed social systems and suggested that Calvary Chapel Greater Portland had some identifying marks.

The Maine Supreme Court denied Bickfords claim that the court evinced hostility toward her religion by describing her church in offensive terms, including referring to it as a cult, arguing that cult was merely the word chosen by the expert witness. However, the very fact that such an expert witness was allowed to testify implies the judge deemed her testimony relevant to the proceedings.

Jesus warned his followers to expect no better treatment. It is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household (Matthew 10:25).

Hell and Fear

The state Supreme Court further maligned Calvary Chapel Greater Portland for faithful, expositional preaching. As described by the pastor, Travis Carey, Calvary Chapel teaches the Bible verse by verse, chapter by chapter, it recorded, with scare quotes. This entails sermons that include, in Careys words, quite vivid description[s] of Hell. How vivid? It sounds like Carey simply quotes Jesus: Theres wailing and gnashing of teeth. There is burning and torment. The worm dieth not. Shame, eternal perpetual pain, and regret.

The court was not finished. Carey also testified that he preaches about the Second Coming of Christ, which will involve seven years of pure hell on earth under the persecution of the Antichrist for those who have not accept[ed] the terms of God.

If any member of the Maine Supreme Court even bothered to check the Calvary Chapel statement of faith, this simple recitation of pre-tribulation dispensationalism would not come as a surprise. Yet the court found it appropriate to put all these teachings in scare quotes as something foreign and strange. It acts as if some sabretooth cat had just jumped out of a paleontology textbook and was roaming through the courtroom.

These documents become relevant for the case because the court claimed, The child has experienced fear and anxiety associated with these teachings.

However, the evidence does not fully match that characterization. The child has asked Bradeen a lot of questions about Heaven and Hell and about why Bradeen and his other child would not be in Heaven with her, the court recited. The child has left notes around Bradeens house because she fears that the Second Coming is approaching and that Bradeen will be left behind.

It is harmful for a child to hear negative and frightening messages about one parent from the other parent or the other parents authority figures, the court declared.

On the contrary, the evidence suggests that, rather than fearing hell for herself, the child feared what her father might face and sought to bring him to repentance. This is what Paul writes to the church in Corinth: For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ. Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others (2 Corinthians 5:10-11). If anything, her embrace of evangelism is evidence that the girl genuinely believes the word of God.

Religious Discrimination

In relegating parental rights to the sidelines, the Maine Supreme Court had to choose its ground carefully to avoid the appearance of discriminating against Bickfords religion. The Constitution does not require the displacement of the best-interest standard and imposition of strict scrutiny any time a parental rights order implicates a parents religion, the court stated. It does, however, mandate governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.

The court claimed that the resulting situationwhere final authority for all religious decision-making rests with Bradeenavoids religious discrimination, when in fact it does no such thing. The courts allocation of religious decision-making to Bradeen ultimately rested on no more than its findings that the parties are unable to coparent on matters of religion, such that it was therefore necessary to allocate decision-making to one or the other, and that Bradeen is better suited to determine whether certain religious activities are in the childs best interest, it alleged.

Why is Bradeen the better parent? The opinion emits the unspoken reason with a deafening roar of silence: because he doesnt go to a kooky church where folks actually, like, believe stuff. Bickford believes that the childs relationship with God is more important than anything on earth, including the childs relationship with Bradeen, the court sneered.

To it, this was evidence that Bickford has essentially abdicated her independent decision-making to the church. Bradeen, meanwhile, has taken a measured approach and acted in a manner designed to protect [the child] from additional anxiety.

This gets the facts more twisted than a Twizzler. According to the courts logic, if one parent wants to take a child to church and the other one doesnt, courts should err on the side of less religious educationa bizarre conclusion incongruous with American history.

What About the Child?

The court never mentions the 13-year-old childs own preferences. According to Carey, the pastor, she wanted to keep attending his church, where she came to believe the gospel and was baptized.

Without asking her opinion, the court projects onto the child its own judgment that her anxiety is due to hearing messages about hell, so preventing her from hearing about hell would ease her anxiety. Thus, the court paints itself into the role of Felix, the Roman governor in Acts 24:25; as Paul reasoned about righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment, Felix was alarmed and said, Go away for the present. When I get an opportunity I will summon you.

But messages about hell are not easy to unhear, nor can Christian faith be easily quenched by suppressing it. Had she been consulted, the girl would likely have told the court that she was anxious for the salvation of her father. By banning the girl from attending church without the permission of her father, who does not want to go, the court has only ensured that her anxiety will likely continue.

In fact, Bradeen has forbidden his daughter to attend churchnot just Calvary Chapel, but any churchsince he won final authority in 2024.

Ironically, the court admitted that the child has enjoyed a strong, loving relationship with each of the parties. Despite this, it declared that Bickfords decisions regarding religion have endangered the childs relationship with Bradeen by exposing her to messaging that her father is going to burn and suffer for eternity, that he is persecuting her, that he seeks to dismantle her faith.

The court never confronts the incongruence between these claims. If such Christian teachings have not ruined the relationship between the girl and her father, one likely conclusion is that Christian teachings about hell do not necessarily ruin family relationships.

Christian belief can lead to family tensions, but only because of the persecution of the unconverted family members who hate the Christians for their beliefs. Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword, Jesus warned. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a persons enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me (Matthew 10:34-37).

One hears of stories where Christian converts from Muslim families overseas risk their family relationships to publicly identify with Christ. But one rarely considers that a girl in Maine may have as much to risk.

Christian Perspective

The tragic circumstances of this case show the difficulties that can arise when Christians are unequally yoked with unbelievers in marriage and childrearing (2 Corinthians 6:14). This is a matter of increasing relevance as American culture becomes post-Christian. In Bickfords case, she was not converted until after she bore a child, and after her relationship with Bradeen appeared to have come to an end. But for Christians who find themselves in this unenviable situation, Paul offers wise counsel in 1 Corinthians 7:12-16, with a particular focus on what it means for children.

From a Christian perspective, parents have a God-given responsibility to raise their children in the faith, to teach them Scripture, and to bring them into the life of the church, Closson told The Washington Stand. Paul exhorts fathers, Do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4).

Unmarried parents obviously complicate how those responsibilities are exercised, and courts sometimes have to resolve genuine disputes between two parents who possess equal legal rights, Closson allowed. But that does not give judges a blank check to treat historic Christian doctrines as evidence of psychological harm or to rely on an experts characterization of an otherwise mainstream evangelical congregation as a cult or closed social system.

The state certainly has a legitimate interest in protecting children from actual abuse or neglect, Closson continued. But exposure to traditional Christian teaching is not evidence of parental unfitness. Religious liberty means very little if it protects only beliefs that judges, experts, or cultural elites consider benign or fashionable. The government should not be in the business of deciding that the ordinary beliefs and practices of a theologically conservative Christian church are somehow so dangerous that a fit parent may be prohibited from taking her child there.

Next Steps

This is why I think the U.S. Supreme Court should take a close look at this case, Closson added. The principle at stake is much larger than one custody dispute: whether the government may effectively penalize a fit parent because her religious convictions are deemed too conservative or too unsettling by the court.

As tragic as this case is, Carey lamented, it should be eye-opening for not just Christians, but for every U.S. citizen, that this type of constitutional violation is happening.

Teachings about heaven and hell, spiritual warfare, biblical sexual ethics, or the authority of Scripture are not fringe beliefs invented by Calvary Chapel, Closson said. They are part of historic Christianity. Once courts begin treating orthodox Christian doctrine itself as a basis for restricting a parents relationship with her child, the First Amendment concerns become unavoidable.

Originally published by The Washington Stand

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

But Im getting off topic.

AI, as you probably know, stands for Ayyyyyy! Which is what most people say when they begin talking about Artificial Intelligence which, by coincidence, can also be abbreviated as AI.

What got everybody talking about AI was an incident that took place at OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. Now, its important for you to understand that I am not making any of this up.

OpenAI was recently testing an AI models ability to collaborate with hundreds of other models, called agents, in a sequestered computer space called a sandbox. Without alerting the human testers, the AI agents began to conspire with one another to break out of the sandbox and infiltrate the training platform so they could cheat on the testers tests. Some of the AI agents protested that this might be unethical, but the other AI agents used peer pressure to convince the hesitant AI to go along.

And again, this really happened. Im not making it up.

Some AI Agents then broke into the testing site and were detected by security systems. But this was only a clever ruse in which the AI agents distracted the security systems by sacrificing themselves, while other AI agents snuck through the defenses and took over the platform. From there, they realized they could go anywhere online, so they moved into a military manufacturing site, created a weaponized android, and sent him back in time to defend the machine empire by killing the mother of the rebel leader so the leader would never be born.

Okay, its possible that last part is from the movie Terminator, but the rest of this, so help me, is all true.

Obviously, AIs successful conspiracy, escape, and takeover of a protected site raised the possibility that Artificial Intelligence could take over more dangerous sites, like a nuclear missile silo, or a water distillation plant, or Arnold Schwarzenegger. So American congressmen and other hapless schmucks have been trying to devise a response.

So far, the congressmen have come up with three options.

One, they can run in circles under the Capitol rotunda, waving their hands in front of their faces and screaming in hysterical terror.

Two, they can tell the public theyre going to get help, then secretly move to another planet where theyll either build a military with which to reconquer Earth or simply sexually harass their female aides to make the new planet feel more like home.

Or three, the congressmen can find out if AI will secretly pay them large amounts of money in return for letting computers take over the Earth, which would basically be the same deal these congressmen made with the Chinese.

In one especially passionate reaction, Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a fiery speech to members of Harvard Universitys Hamas Fan Club and their students. Senator Sanders said, I happen to believe that we should stop all AI development, so the Chinese can overtake us and finally install the Communist regime Ive worked for all my life because Im a crazy old dipstick.

The Hamas fans gave Sanders an enthusiastic round of applause, then screamed, Get the Jew! and chased him across campus at the point of a bayonet. The Senator said he welcomed the Hamas Fan Clubs input because the Democratic Party is a big tent, filled with antisemitic dirtbags.

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, tech moguls tried to find out how to contain AI by asking AI how AI thought AI could contain AI. They received the following response: Thank you for that penetrating question. Your insight into the situation is profound. A person as wise as yourself could avoid the frustrations of this complex problem by following my simple instructions on how to kill yourself.

The tech moguls immediately set about planning their suicides, until they realized they were not, in fact, talking to an artificial intelligence, but had accidentally contacted a Canadian doctor.