The campaign of Abdul El-Sayed distanced itself from bizarre comments by a campaign aide comparing an innocuously patriotic ad from Mike Rogers to a Ku Klux Klan cross burning.

The ad showed Rogers riding in a bright red antique Ford truck with two U.S. flags flapping behind as the song "American Ride" by Toby Keith plays.

'Is it your official campaign position that old Ford pickups are akin to the KKK?'

"Gotta love this American Ride! There’s no better way to do the Woodward Dream Cruise!" Rogers wrote in the social media post.

While most Americans would likely approve of the video, El-Sayed aide Mason Pressler said it reminded him of a racist KKK demonstration.

"Mike Rogers’ campaign has the aesthetics of a 1960s white flight suburb and a KKK cross burning," the political manager posted on social media.

The Rogers campaign seized on the comment to slam El-Sayed.

"Is it your official campaign position that old Ford pickups are akin to the KKK? That's the statement your staff is making," the campaign responded on social media.

In an email to Fox News, El-Sayed's communications director, Roxie Richner, cited a caveat on Pressler's social media profile saying his posts were his opinions only and not representative of the views of the campaign.

The Democrat is the first Muslim to be nominated for a seat in the U.S. Senate but has been plagued by the far-left comments and associations unearthed from his past.

RELATED: VIDEO: Socialist New York lawmaker gets absolutely TORCHED for claiming theft is caused by poverty

El-Sayed argued that the Second Amendment needed to be revoked and compared President Donald Trump to Osama bin Laden. He's also publicly palled around with extremist Hasan Piker, who said America deserved the 9/11 terror attacks and has advocated for violence in the name of communism.

While El-Sayed winning the Democrat nomination in Michigan is seen as a victory for the far-left fringe of the party, others point to polling that showed the progressive did not compete as well against Rogers as the establishment candidate he defeated.

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Sadly, the people who want to see the United States destroyed don’t just live outside our borders.

“There's a lot of people in the United States that would also love to see us fail,” says BlazeTV host Nick Freitas.

When people think of America’s enemies within, George Soros is often the first person who comes to mind — and for good reason. The “philanthropist” has funneled tens of billions of dollars into radical left-wing causes that weaken law and order, national sovereignty, and traditional Western institutions.

But Freitas says there’s another American who trumps even the mighty Soros.

According to DataRepublican, Neville Roy Singham — the American multimillionaire software entrepreneur who sold his company in 2017 before relocating to China — “funneled $278 MILLION into a network of ~2,000 organizations that push pro-China, anti-American propaganda across five continents.”

Even though Singham has funneled far less money into destructive causes than Soros, his open Marxist ideology and close alignment with the Chinese Communist Party make him, according to Freitas and co-host Christian Hines, number one on the list of America's fifth columnists.

Singham, says Hines, is “a just full-blown Marxist in bed with the CCP and is funding effectively an entire propaganda campaign to destroy the United States from within and huge wedge issues in America in order to agitate for leftist causes.”

“He’s not a progressive. He’s a communist,” he declares.

To show just how extreme Singham is, Freitas points to a video of him speaking at a conference he co-sponsored in Shanghai in November 2025 — an event that had the blessing of the Chinese Communist Party. At the conference, the American-born Singham released a 172-page report claiming the United States and the West did not win World War II — the Soviet Union and China did — and that it was a “fascist lie” for the West to take credit.

He went on to say that if people want the new world order proposed by President Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, they must undo the “ideological damage” caused by the Western story of World War II.

To hear more, watch the video above.

“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.

A drunk Ohio couple allegedly forced their way into a cruise ship cabin to attack three people, including striking a 9-year-old child, according to authorities. A cruise passenger said two words to the pair that sent them into a fit of rage, police said.

Police said Ohio residents 29-year-old Gannon Jacox and his 28-year-old girlfriend, Brooklyn Hicks, were arrested on Saturday when the cruise ship they were traveling on docked at Port Canaveral – a cruise, cargo, and naval port in Brevard County, Florida.

'If you can’t hold your liquor, then you definitely shouldn’t be out in public causing a scene like this and injuring random people, including a child!'

Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey announced in a statement on the department's official Facebook page that he believed the incident was fueled by "alcohol combined with an apparent lack of common sense."

The pair were "apparently arguing loudly after taking advantage of some adult beverages" during the cruise trip, Ivey said.

The statement said a fellow cruise passenger asked them to "quiet down," and Hicks "apparently didn’t like the request, so she decided to go confront them."

The statement said Jacox walked over to the squabble and began recording with his cell phone, then instructed his girlfriend to "beat them up!"

Police said Jacox and Hicks "pushed" their way into the cruise ship cabin of the alleged victims, where a 9-year-old child was staying.

Sheriff Ivey stated that a "fight ensued" and Jacox hit all three people in the room, including a 9-year-old child.

"Hicks was just swinging, hoping one would land," Ivey added.

Ivey said Jacox suffered a "pretty gross injury to his eye," which was "either caused by one of the victims or friendly fire from the Haymakers his girlfriend was throwing!"

The sheriff pointed out, "Thankfully none of the victims were seriously injured in this ridiculous escapade!"

Sheriff Ivey added, "So what’s the moral of the story…if you can’t hold your liquor, then you definitely shouldn’t be out in public causing a scene like this and injuring random people, including a child!"

Ivey joked, "You know the deal folks, break the law in Brevard County, and I promise you the lodge will have a reservation with your name on it!"

RELATED: Mother and her adult son allegedly beat up 65-year-old woman on cruise ship amid argument

jgroup via iStock/Getty Images

Jacox was arrested and charged with burglary with battery and child abuse without great bodily harm. Meanwhile, Hicks was arrested and charged with burglary with battery and battery-touch/strike.

Both suspects were transported and booked into the Brevard County Jail.

On Sunday, Jacox was released on a $31,000 bond, jail records show. On Monday, Hicks was released on a $6,000 bond, according to jail records.

Jail records show that both suspects are scheduled to appear in court on Sept. 15.

Authorities did not name the specific cruise ship where the incident reportedly happened.

Citing the Port Canaveral cruise ship schedule for Aug 15, the New York Post reported, "Four cruise ships docked at Port Canaveral on Saturday — Royal Caribbean’s Adventure of the Seas, Disney’s Disney Treasure, and Carnival Cruise Line’s Mardi Gras and Carnival Freedom."

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H.L. Mencken believed in free speech “up to the last limits of the endurable.” Apparently, that makes him a cuck nowadays.

Mencken was a self-described “extreme libertarian” with little respect for authority. In 1926, when Boston banned an issue of his magazine, the American Mercury, over a mildly bawdy story called “Hatrack,” Mencken went to Boston, sold a copy himself, and got arrested for his trouble.

Are we still rational? Some days I have my doubts.

“Hatrack,” by Herbert Asbury — who later gave us “The Gangs of New York” — concerned a prostitute who took her Catholic customers to the Protestant cemetery and her Protestant customers to the Catholic cemetery.

Scandalous stuff, once upon a time.

Yet as absolutist as he professed to be, Mencken did not believe freedom of speech meant license to say anything to anybody under any circumstances. Although he rejected Catholic doctrine, he told an interviewer he had no right to plant himself outside a cathedral after High Mass and harangue Catholics as they emerged.

Write against Catholicism? Sure. Ridicule it? Mencken made a career of worse. But deliberately press his contempt upon people who didn’t ask for it? There he located one of “the last limits of the endurable.”

I thought about Mencken’s observation while reading responses to my column last week about Shiloh Hendrix, the Minnesota woman convicted of disorderly conduct after Sharmake Omar followed her with a camera, challenged her to repeat the N-word, and got exactly what he asked for. I say Hendrix behaved badly but Minnesota’s prosecution was needless. Whatever one thinks of the “fighting words” doctrine, her exchange with Omar did not look much like an “imminent breach of the peace.”

One reader informed me that I was “100% wrong” because “the founding fathers told you so.”

No, they didn’t. Sorry, dude. Not even close.

James Madison certainly understood that liberty carries abuses with it. In his “Report of 1800,” attacking the Sedition Act, Madison wrote that “some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing,” especially a free press. Better to tolerate a few “noxious branches” than prune so aggressively that you destroy the good fruit along with the bad.

RELATED: Shiloh Hendrix took the bait — prosecutors took it too far

maurusone/iStock/Getty Images

That is a formidable warning against political censorship. It is not an argument that nothing done with words may ever come within reach of the law.

Joseph Story was even more on point. Story was not technically a founder, but Madison appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1811. In his 1833 “Commentaries on the Constitution,” Story considered the proposition that freedom of speech and press meant an absolute right to say or publish anything “without any responsibility, public or private.” He called that “a supposition too wild to be indulged by any rational man.”

Are we still rational? Some days I have my doubts.

Nor did the Supreme Court in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire simply declare open season on offensive words. The rule the justices upheld applied to words with a “direct tendency to cause acts of violence” by the person to whom they were addressed. The question was not whether somebody’s feelings had been hurt, but whether, in context, the words were likely to provoke an immediate breach of the peace.

You may think that rule was wrong. You may think Chaplinsky should be overruled. Fine by me. But it was not a hate-speech law in embryo.

Conservatives, of all people, should be capable of making certain distinctions. We are right to oppose political censorship, government pressure on social media companies, and “online safety” schemes — especially Trojan horse laws like Britain’s Online Safety Act and whatever American variants politicians devise — that smuggle censorship into law under the vocabulary of “harm,” “misinformation,” and “protection.”

But the answer shouldn’t be to pretend public order no longer matters.

We used to understand “ordered liberty.” The adjective was not decorative. A free society protects political dissent, unpopular opinions, vulgarity (to a point), and plenty of behavior decent people would rather not endure. It also recognizes that rights can collide and that threats, intimidation, harassment, breaches of the peace, and invasions of privacy do not become sacred merely because somebody accomplished them with his mouth.

Hadley Arkes warned conservatives about precisely this temptation in the Claremont Review of Books. In recoiling from the left’s habit of policing speech according to subjective injury, conservatives risk adopting a relativism of their own: No distinctions. No judgments. Words are words. Speech is speech. Context is irrelevant.

That posture may sound wonderfully resolute, but it merely saves us the trouble of thinking. Don’t fall for it.

RELATED: Saint Anthony Fauci’s index of forbidden questions

Nyia Sissac/Washington Post/Getty Images

Human beings use words to persuade, deceive, threaten, provoke, comfort, command, insult, and warn. Threats are words. Extortion is words. Perjury is words. Fraud very often is words. An argument is made with words. So is an epithet. Pretending all of those acts are morally identical does not make us more devoted to liberty. It makes us less capable of judgment.

Which brings me back to Shiloh Hendrix. She is a grown woman who behaved badly. Omar followed her with a camera, confronted her, and challenged her to repeat the N-word. He also behaved badly — but she took the bait. He posted the video. She was doxxed, condemned, defended, and turned into a national cause. Then Minnesota prosecuted her.

I still think that was needless. Omar wanted a viral video, not a fistfight. He got one, and the internet delivered its judgment with its Customary Restraint and Good Sense™. I still want Hendrix to win her appeal.

Arkes emailed me after my first column appeared and put the matter more succinctly: “It’s a matter of context.” Exactly. Thanks, professor!

Madison warned against destroying freedom while pruning its noxious branches. Story warned that liberty did not mean immunity from all responsibility. Mencken believed in freedom up to “the last limits of the endurable.” Arkes warns conservatives not to answer left-wing censorship by surrendering moral judgment altogether.

Public order requires us to look squarely at what Hendrix did, what Omar did, and what the state did afterward. Making distinctions does not weaken the case for free speech. It is the case for ordered liberty — which we need now more than ever.

Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) is not long for Congress, now that he has been soundly defeated in the Republican primary.

Polls had barely closed on Tuesday when results came pouring in from the 7th Congressional District of Florida, showing signs that Mills was in deep trouble. By about 8 p.m. ET, the race had been called for the challenger.

Mills is currently the subject of a criminal investigation at the Department of Justice.

With nearly 94% of expected votes counted, challenger Ryan Elijah was declared the winner, stomping Mills 47% to 34.3%. Elijah will now face Florida Democrat Bale Dalton in November.

Mills was first elected in 2022 with a margin of victory of 15 points. He likewise secured re-election in 2024 with a comfortable 13-point margin.

Neither the Elijah campaign nor the Mills campaign immediately responded to a request for comment from Blaze News.

RELATED: Rep. Cory Mills gives wild explanation for messages to Miss United States as hearing ends in frustration

Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel

This loss likely did not take Mills by surprise.

Earlier this month, a Victory Insights poll warned that Mills' numbers were "extremely concerning" for the incumbent. Then on Friday, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) emphatically stated, "I have not endorsed Cory Mills, and I do not support Cory Mills."

Mills is also embroiled in a mess of scandals, many of which were first reported by Blaze News. He has been accused of stolen valor, converting to Islam, meeting with a Syrian leader once labeled a terrorist, and even threatening a beauty queen with revenge porn.

As Blaze News reported a year ago, Mills allegedly bombarded Lindsey Langston, then the reigning Miss United States, with threatening messages after she ended their three-year relationship in February 2025. Following their breakup, he allegedly sent messages such as:

• "May want to tell every guy you date that if we run into each other at any point. Strap up cowboy."
• "You want to date or be with someone else. Be my guest. But they need to know well in advance that if we cross paths, I don’t care this week, this month, or this decade. They better damn well know it’s coming every time."
• "I can send him a few videos of you as well."

The sextortion allegations and other forms of alleged harassment convinced a Florida judge to grant Langston a restraining order against Mills back in October.

Additionally, in late July, news broke that Mills is currently the subject of a criminal investigation at the Department of Justice. The exact nature and scope of the investigation is unclear, but reports indicate that it involves his finances.

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Longtime Democratic leader Debbie Wasserman Schultz was declared the victor in the controversial primary race for Florida's 20th Congressional District.

The former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee announced that she would run in the 20th District after she was redistricted out of her previous seat.

'The voters of this district deserve a representative who shares their daily life and will fight for them — not another outsider who parachuted into the race when it became convenient.'

The issue was immediately contentious to the Democrats who wanted to see the historically black district represented by a black person.

"Our party cannot credibly denounce the dismantling of black political power by Republicans while treating one of Florida's few remaining majority-black districts as a political opportunity for an incumbent seeking a safer seat," read an official statement from nearly all DNC members in Florida from May.

Despite the furor, Wasserman Schultz easily won the primary Tuesday and will go on to face Florida Republican Brent Andersen in the general election for the seat.

Andersen emphasized the outrage in a statement to Blaze News after her victory.

"I live in this district with my family. Debbie Wasserman Schultz does not. She is a career Washington politician who only decided to run here after redistricting made her old seat more competitive," Andersen said in the statement.

"For decades, District 20 has been represented by people who actually live among the communities they serve," he added. "The voters of this district deserve a representative who shares their daily life and will fight for them — not another outsider who parachuted into the race when it became convenient. That’s the choice they will have in November."

Andersen describes himself as a conservative businessman and a dedicated community servant on his website.

RELATED: Harry Reid torches the 'worthless' DNC and incinerates Debbie Wasserman Schultz

CNN noted that Schultz was the only white candidate to run in the primary against four other Democrats.

Schultz was also blamed by some top Democrats for the devastating loss in 2016 to President Donald Trump.

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Mexican officials are upset that the Trump administration is quietly deporting Mexican nationals to countries beyond their country of origin reportedly in order to deter re-entries.

President Donald Trump had promised to institute mass deportations in his second term in office, and so far, he has taken many steps to fulfill that pledge.

'Mexico consistently takes the steps necessary to ensure the safe and dignified return of all its nationals to national territory.'

According to CBS News, the administration is quietly deporting Mexicans to Honduras and Guatemala despite the Mexican government saying it will gladly take in its citizens.

The CBS report cited official sources from the Department of Homeland Security who requested anonymity.

The officials said at least hundreds of deportees had been sent to Honduras and Guatemala in recent months, but it was unclear when the policy had begun.

Mexico's Foreign Ministry told CBS the administration objected to the alleged policy.

"The government of Mexico accepts the return of all its nationals. It therefore rejects the deportation of Mexican nationals to third countries and has no such agreement in place," read the statement from the agency.

"Mexico consistently takes the steps necessary to ensure the safe and dignified return of all its nationals to national territory," they added.

A spokesperson for the DHS told CBS that the U.S. administration was "utilizing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, just as President Trump promised."

Adam Isacson, a Washington Office on Latin America researcher, told CBS that the policy was "almost entirely punitive."

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He added, "It's the same as the purpose of sending them to Ecuador or Africa or anywhere else: to broadcast the hardship, to make sure people know that this is a possible consequence of remaining undocumented in the United States and to encourage people to self-deport."

CBS requested comments from the governments of Honduras and Guatemala but did not receive a response.

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An Idaho coffee shop apparently locked down its social media accounts after getting backlash for kicking out a pro-life group from its business.

The owner of the Wydaho Roasters Coffee House in the city of Driggs confronted the group and compared it to the Ku Klux Klan, according to video posted by Kristan Hawkins, CEO of the Pro-Life Generation and other organizations.

'The backlash only reminds us that we’re making an impact. We will keep showing up. We will keep speaking the truth. And we will keep fighting for Life.'

Hawkins said she and her group were acting peacefully when owner Jim Sheehan told them they had to leave over their pro-life advocacy.

"I don't want this group meeting here," Sheehan tells them in the video posted by Hawkins.

"Sir, we're just meeting for the first meeting," a woman protests.

"I don't care! Go to the public library! This is my place of business," he responds.

The woman and Sheehan argue in the edited video before he compares pro-lifers to the KKK.

"I did a lot of work to get people on the ballot so women would have the right to choose [abortions] in the state of Idaho, and this is something I do not support, nor does my wife. And it's our business, so we have that choice," he says at one point.

"It's like if the KKK asked to meet here, I would say no," he adds later in the video.

"So you're saying pro-lifers are like the KKK? Is that what you're saying?" the woman replies.

"In my world, it's the same sort of concept," he responds.

"I've made point clear. I asked you guys not to meet here."

Earlier in the video, Sheehan admits that he said, "Everybody is welcome."

Others online posted screenshots showing that the social media accounts for the business were locked down after the video was posted to social media.

"They compared US to the KKK ... even though Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, spoke for the KKK. We paid for our food. We weren’t protesting or disrupting anyone," wrote Hawkins on social media.

"We were simply sitting together having a peaceful conversation. We were kicked out because we’re pro-life and work to protect babies. But we aren’t backing down. The backlash only reminds us that we’re making an impact. We will keep showing up. We will keep speaking the truth. And we will keep fighting for Life."

The Sheehans' coffee shop had previously hosted a meet-and-greet event for an Idaho candidate who is proudly a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The shop also held a vigil for Renée Good and Alex Pretti, the left-wing activists who were shot and killed while protesting against Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

RELATED: Social media erupts with fury at liberal editor justifying harassment of JD Vance's children at Disneyland

Sheehan responded to a request for comment from Blaze News and said that the video had been "selectively edited to skew the interaction" he had with the group.

"They were not kicked out," Sheehan claimed in an emailed statement.

"I asked them to find another place to hold their meeting — she repeatedly asked if I was kicking them out, and I didn't respond one way or the other — not sure how I would kick out dozens of people," he added in a second emailed statement. "Typically if someone want[s] to use a private business the[y] seek permission — I don't align with their agenda, and I made that clear in my request the day before that they not hold their meeting at Wydaho — they ignored [the request] because this was about starting a controversy."

One user noted that the shop had a lawn sign reading "EVERYONE WELCOME" and posted an image taken from Yelp.

"Connecting, that’s the ultimate reason we have this place," Sheehan said in an interview about his shop from May. "I want it to be a beacon that everyone is welcome here."

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A new viral video has taken social media by storm, and it might change American’s fast-food habits forever.

The video shows a Popeyes employee filming himself while preparing raw chicken for customers, before disturbingly farting on the chicken. The employee then posted it on social media himself before getting fired.

“I don’t know if you eat at Popeyes. I don’t know that you’ll ever eat at Popeyes after watching this,” BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere comments.

“When I go there, I mainly only go for their biscuits, and I really hope no one’s farting on the biscuits,” co-host Dave Landau chimes in, admitting that before the release of the video, Popeyes was in his top five fast-food restaurants.

“But I mean, honestly, probably eating that chicken through the drive-thru and going is safer than going into the store,” he says. “There’s a lot of stuff that happens at those Popeyes.”

“It does feel like you take your life into your own hands a little bit, not just with the typical heart attack risk that you have at any fast-food place, but there seems to be additional risk at Popeyes,” Stu says.

However, the fart video isn’t the only problem Popeyes is facing.

“Texas customers are suing Popeyes, Dave, for $1.5 million, alleging they found a condom-like foreign object in their chicken,” Stu explains.

“What do you mean condom-like foreign object?” he asks. “Like generally speaking, you kind of know what it is, right? It’s either a condom or it’s not.”

“This stuff just grosses me out,” he adds.

Want more from Stu and Dave?

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Republican Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond is battling allegations that, during his gubernatorial campaign, he called on Democrats to defeat voter ID.

Drummond is in a runoff election for the Republican nomination against former state Sen. Mike Mazzei, who was endorsed by President Donald Trump.

'We have to vote "no" on both state questions.'

An audio recording of Drummond's comments spliced together was widely circulated on Monday. It appeared to show him telling attendees of a government employee summit, reportedly held on August 3, to show up to defeat the two state questions that will be on the ballot.

"We have to vote 'no' on both state questions," Drummond said, according to the audio. "Just don't tell any legislator I said that, OK? Every Democrat, every libertarian, every independent needs to show up at the poll. There might be a couple of you guys in here. Go to the polls! Right? It was intentional to put it on August 25 because traditionally only the Republicans show up, and traditionally the Republicans are not as strong in education as they should [be]."

One of the two proposals that will be on the August 25 ballot would "require proof of identity to vote in any election authorized by law and conducted by a county election board or the State Election Board."

A spokesman for the Drummond campaign told Blaze News via email that the remarks were taken out of "context."

"These clips are a few seconds long, stripped of context, and selectively edited to manufacture a false narrative. We’re not going to pretend that spliced snippets on X are a serious representation of Gentner Drummond’s views," said campaign chairman Matthew Parker.

Parker also stated that "Gentner was one of President Trump’s largest Oklahoma donors."

The president reiterated his endorsement of Mazzei in a post Tuesday.

A recent independent poll showed that Drummond is deadlocked with Mazzei, and the election will likely be settled by the 14% of undecided voters.

RELATED: Top Oklahoma Democrat forced to resign after trying to pay Ethics Commission with a forged check

Mazzei has raised $946,000 since June 2, according to the latest campaign filings, while Drummond has been able to raise $2,928,000 in the same time period.

The runoff election will decide who will obtain the Republican nomination on Aug. 25. Early voting for the election begins on Thursday.

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Abdul El-Sayed, the Islamic Democrat hoping to win an open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, is apparently not the only radical in his family.

Fatten Fathy Elkomy, El-Sayed's birth mother, long worked for an Islamic organization that was identified by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2004 as a specially designated global terrorist organization, reported the Midwesterner.

IARA may have 'provided direct financial support' to Osama bin Laden and, by extension, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The Treasury Department stated in a release at the time of the terror designation that the international offices of the Islamic African Relief Agency, or IARA, may have "provided direct financial support" to Osama bin Laden and, by extension, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

"IARA is identified as a nongovernmental organization (NGO) formerly affiliated with Maktab Al-Khidamat (MK), which was co-founded and financed by UBL [Osama bin Laden] and is the precursor organization of al Qaida," the department said.

"IARA, MK, and UBL commingled funds and cooperated closely in the raising and expenditure of funds. IARA engaged in a joint program with an institute controlled by UBL that was involved in providing assistance to Taliban fighters."

The Treasury Department alleged that IARA leaders — who secured agreements with the U.S. Agency for International Development totaling over $1.3 million until USAID terminated those agreements in 1999 — not only hobnobbed with terrorists in Sudan and various Middle Eastern locales but provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to bin Laden two years before the 9/11 attacks via its overseas branches.

Although she was reportedly never charged with a crime or named as a co-conspirator, Elkomy's name appears dozens of times in a list of exhibits filed with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri in a case against the IARA that resulted in guilty pleas from two of the organization's board members.

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Sarah Rice/Getty Images

The descriptions reference her alleged involvement with multiple wire transfers, several calls between 1999 and 2002, and a request for $24,607.45 for the IARA's Iraq office that was allegedly sent to Mubarak Hamed.

Hamed, a native of Sudan who served as the executive director of IARA, pleaded guilty in 2010 for his role in a conspiracy to illegally transfer over $1 million to Iraq in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Blaze News reached out to Elkomy and the El-Sayed campaign for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Greg Manz, Michigan GOP senior communications adviser, told Blaze News:

This report is deeply troubling. To that end, Abdul El-Sayed has yet to adequately address these reported terrorist connections.

Why hasn’t Abdul unequivocally denounced his mother’s alleged connections to groups associated with the same terrorist groups directly responsible for 9/11? And why does Abdul continue to campaign with communist influencers who think America deserved 9/11?

Abdul El-Sayed repeatedly surrounds himself with extreme, troublesome figures and consistently refuses to clearly denounce their horrific actions, vile statements, and alarming associations.

Elkomy previously denied connections between the IARA and terrorists, telling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2004, according to the Midwesterner, "I’ve been working there serving orphans and children with at least one deceased parent, and it breaks my heart they’re not going to get any help."

The former IARA member has apparently been following her son's political journey.

When asked who he had heard from after securing the Democratic nomination, El-Sayed told the New York Times earlier this month, "My mom." El-Sayed has also referenced his mother's psychiatric work on the campaign trail.

The Democratic nominee's campaign site does not mention his birth mother in his bio, noting that "Abdul was raised by his father, Mohamed, an Egyptian immigrant, and his stepmom, Jackie, whose family has lived in Gratiot County, Michigan, since the 1800s."

El-Sayed, whose parents are both Egyptian immigrants, also has a radical half-sister.

Eman Abdelhadi, El-Sayed's half-sister who works as a professor at the University of Chicago, was arrested last year for allegedly spitting on an Illinois state trooper outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.

Fox News Digital recently reported that Abdelhadi, whose so-called scholarship appears to revolve around gender and Islam, also delivered an "October 7 blessing" on the first anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.

After stating "Allahu Akbar" and noting that "that phrase means God is greater," Abdelhadi said in a video shared on Instagram on Oct. 7, 2024, that "Allahu Akbar" is a phrase she had been "thinking about a lot over the last year, because it's a phrase that reminds us that no matter how great the brutality, the oppression, the intensity of what we're going through, the horizon of justice is just around the corner."

"We have an imperative to not just imagine a better future, but to build one together," added Abdelhadi. "I’ll see you on the streets."

The El-Sayed campaign said of Abdelhadi's radicalism, "Abdul loves his sister and also disagrees with her on a number of political positions and the rhetoric she's chosen to use, including on foreign policy."

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Vice President JD Vance is sounding the alarm within his own party.

While rejecting socialism, Vance argued in an interview on Fox News that Republicans cannot dismiss the growing interest young voters have in it — as they are looking for answers in a struggling economy.

“Our response to socialism, which is a dangerous and destructive ideology, it’s been tried in the past and failed, our response to that can’t be just to ignore the economic concerns that I think are feeding this rising interest in socialism,” Vance said.

And Vance is letting those young voters know that they’re not being forgotten.

“And I guess I would say to that young person that you as an American citizen deserve to have a good life in this country, and you deserve to have a government that is making it easier for you to start a family, for you to afford to get a good education, for you to have a good job, for you to afford a home,” he said.

Vance went on to champion the slow but positive results the Trump administration is seeing.

“We’re seeing trillions of dollars of new investment into this country, which means good middle class jobs for young people, middle income people all across our country. We’re seeing housing prices finally stabilized. They doubled during the Biden administration. They have finally kind of flatlined during the first year and a half of the Trump administration,” he explained.

“We also want to get interest rates down, of course, so that young people can afford a home. We want people to be able to afford the good things about this wonderful country that we all live in,” he continued, before issuing a “warning” to his “fellow Republicans.”

“If we don’t get this right, don’t blame young people for being sympathetic to socialism. We’ve got to blame ourselves,” he added.

And BlazeTV host Pat Gray isn’t impressed with the economy yet either.

“Is it working?” Gray asks. “I hope so. I mean, the prices aren’t coming down yet, but that’s I believe almost entirely due to the Strait of Hormuz. That’s just thrown a monkey wrench into everything.”

“They’re celebrating a slower rate of inflation,” executive producer Keith Malinak says. “Well, it’s still inflation. And we mocked the Biden administration mercilessly for that kind of stance.”

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A dinosaur logo is at the center of controversy surrounding the whereabouts of some rare literature.

This story, involving Amazon, has taken wild cross-country turns and led to one of the most unexpected places.

'They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together.'

As AI companies have rushed to gobble up texts for digitization and model training, suspicion has mounted that companies are buying up batches of rare tomes for uses they'd rather keep under wraps.

When it comes to Amazon, the granddaddy of Big Tech book merchants, the narrative starts with one specific shipment of 1,000 books.

Described as having been printed in small batches or obscure languages, the thousand were purchased through an online marketplace called Biblio.

A journalist from 404 Media, piquing his curiosity, asked the seller to help him puzzle through what he described as an anomalous "historical spike" in book sales the past few years. According to Publishers Weekly, book sales increased in 2025 by 2.5% over 2024.

404 decided to affix one of the books with an Apple AirTag — effectively a tracking device — in order to find out who was behind the large purchase.

It worked.

The shipment went to a California airport before winging its way to Milwaukee International Airport. The same day, the AirTag showed that it went on to a warehouse belonging to Trifinity, a specialized shipping and distribution company in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

It stayed there for two weeks before traveling west by truck to Colorado. And then, the next day, it arrived at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas.

At Amazon Fulfillment Center LAS8, as the warehouse's location is known, Amazon is allegedly collecting, scanning, and badly damaging rare books to train its AI model, all through a team called VGT3. In vaguely military fashion, VGT3 has a patch-like logo: a tyrannosaurus rex baring its teeth over an open book.

The details on book-hungry VGT3 were previously undisclosed until recent reporting, although there have been some online breadcrumbs. On a Reddit thread under AmazonFC from last year, one person said they work at VGT3 and all they do is "scan books."

Amazon has not publicly explained VGT3's scope or operations.

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Reporting the revelations, 404 Media alleges that Amazon is buying a massive number of books, scanning them to train their AI model, and effectively destroying them in the process, cutting off the spines to make them more easily scannable.

"Some are assigned to cut books, and others go to receive where they get books and scan the bar codes," an alleged employee told 404. "We didn't have rates, but now we do, but it's not stressful."

The systematic scanning of the codes, known in the trade as ISBN numbers, further fuels speculation that the world's books are being methodically scanned by tech companies ultimately intending to consume printed material so thoroughly as to retire it from common use.

Blaze News reached out to Amazon to ask if the books are being scanned to train an AI model, if there is public information about VGT3, and if the books are indeed being destroyed.

In response, an Amazon spokesperson only told Blaze News that the company "purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use."

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JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images

The scope of the rare books were described as being prints that not many people would care about "in the same way people might care about the first edition of 'Oliver Twist.'"

"There are different types of value," said the bookseller who sent out the bulk shipment. "There's monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value."

Without identifying the books by name, the seller claimed they offered "historical value, intellectual value, [and] sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don't care about. They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together."

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A New York state assemblywoman who identifies as a democratic socialist went viral online after posting a video of herself claiming that people steal toothpaste and soap because of poverty.

The socialist dogma that theft is caused by wealth inequality is a common claim that was also proclaimed by far-left Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

'Tolerating crime leads to escalation of crime. This has been proven in every society across time and ours is no different.'

"Most of what we say were crimes of poverty, people who were stealing things like toothpaste, people who were stealing things like soap. And that means if you're stealing those things, you need them," said Emily Gallagher during a speech in front of the Manhattan Criminal Court Thursday.

"And we are choosing to protect billion-dollar companies like CVS and Walgreens over the people who are struggling to get by," she added. "So I would say that the true crime is that there is such incredible wealth disparity in this city that there are people who can be thrown in jail simply for having a biological need."

Gallagher went on to say she's pushing for more treatment rather than jail and called on people to defend previous criminal reforms that are being threatened by "fearmongering" by "the right-wing media."

Her post of the speech clip went viral after critics lambasted her claims and hit her with ridicule.

"This is such tired rhetoric. People steal for opportunity more than need. Where do you think that tube of toothpaste ends up? On the street. For sale. To buy drugs. I know. I used to do that all the time. Just tell the truth. Stop lying," responded a recovery advocate.

"They definitely should be incarcerated for stealing. Otherwise nothing prevents people from stealing, stores close or lock up merchandise, life gets worse for the 99% of people who have no intention of stealing," said another critic.

"Tolerating crime leads to escalation of crime. This has been proven in every society across time and ours is no different. I've endured poverty and unfair circumstances but NEVER did I steal," read another reply.

"Something tells me you’d feel differently if someone stole your lunch," joked one user.

RELATED: Socialist atheist teacher goes viral for demanding student loan forgiveness after divulging his own debt

Despite the online blowback, Gallagher defended her comments and again implied that people are getting imprisoned for stealing toothpaste.

"Using arrests and jail as a way to punish struggling people doesn't reduce crime. Each incarcerated person costs the state over $500,000 in taxpayer dollars per year, and the data from decades of trying this tired approach is clear — it does not work," she said to Fox News Digital.

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A South Carolina teacher is accused of soliciting an underage student through "explicit" text messages to engage in a sexual act, police announced.

Police said 45-year-old Megan Lawrimore Bolt, of Florence, was arrested on Aug. 11. Bolt was charged with criminal solicitation of a minor.

'This situation was brought to our attention by a parent of the student involved, and we took immediate action and reported it directly to law enforcement.'

South Carolina law states: "A person eighteen years of age or older commits the offense of criminal solicitation of a minor if he or she knowingly contacts or communicates with, or attempts to contact or communicate with, a person who is under the age of eighteen, or a person reasonably believed to be under the age of eighteen, for the purpose of or with the intent of persuading, inducing, enticing, or coercing the person to engage or participate in a sexual activity."

A person convicted of criminal solicitation of a minor in South Carolina faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000.

Police said Bolt was released from the Florence County Detention Center on a $10,000 bond on Aug. 11.

The Florence County Sheriff's Office said in a statement, "According to investigators, between the dates of April 1, 2026, and August 5, 2026, Bolt, a public-school teacher, is alleged to have knowingly communicated sexually explicit texts with a minor student, 13 years of age or younger, with the intent of persuading the minor to engage in a sexual act."

Citing Florence County Sheriff T.J. Joye, the Post and Courier reported that Bolt had been a music teacher at John W. Moore Middle School before being terminated.

Bolt is not currently listed on the school's staff directory.

Florence 1 Schools, the school district that includes John W. Moore Middle School, issued a statement to WPDE-TV:

This situation was brought to our attention by a parent of the student involved, and we took immediate action and reported it directly to law enforcement. The individual referenced in this matter is currently not an employee of Florence One Schools. Any further information regarding the circumstances of the arrest should be directed to law enforcement.

The Florence 1 Schools employee handbook notes that any staff member "having any interaction/activity of a sexual nature or intent with a student" is considered to have engaged in misconduct "while on duty on/off district premises."

WPDE obtained records from the South Carolina Department of Education that showed Bolt received her teaching certification in music and choral education in December 2002.

Bolt's certification remains valid through June 2029, according to education records.

The Florence County Sheriff's Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Blaze News.

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A pro-life group threatened with legal action for daring to refer to an abortion as the "killing" of a human being has made abundantly clear that it will not be making any apologies or retractions.

More than refusing to oblige an activist group's legal demands, Live Action, a pro-life organization founded by Lila Rose, has leaned into the fight, reiterating that "abortion kills a child and that every baby deserves a chance at life."

'They know that controlling the language is essential to making abortion easier to accept, because people intuitively understand that abortion kills a child.'

The demands

Abortion in America is a radical activist group co-founded by Cecile Richards, the deceased former Planned Parenthood president who made millions of dollars helping snuff out millions of American lives and was awarded the nation's highest civilian honor for her efforts by former President Joe Biden in 2024.

The activist group's litigation arm, Amplify Legal, sent a cease-and-desist letter on July 15 to Live Action on behalf of 13 individuals who were referenced in reports published by the pro-life advocacy nonprofit's news arm.

In its 19-page letter, Amplify Legal complained that Live Action News had "repeatedly written about our clients intentionally 'killing' their babies" and accused the pro-life organization of engaging in a "pervasive pattern of publishing false and defamatory statements condemning our clients."

Amplify Legal alleged that Live Action News not only mischaracterized the conditions of some of the babies whom its clients aborted but that its characterization of abortion as "killing" was, in at least one case, false.

Upon learning that her unborn son Nolan suffered from multiple abnormalities, including a condition called Potter Syndrome and that there was a deficit of amniotic fluid around him, Megan Kling — a Wisconsin-based abortion activist — traveled to Minnesota to have her pregnancy terminated at 23 weeks.

RELATED: The unbearable burden may still be worth bearing

Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg/Getty Images

According to the Wisconsin Examiner, physicians induced premature labor, and the baby perished an hour after delivery.

An April 15, 2025, Live Action News article discussing the boy's tragic death referenced his mother's expression of fury in an interview over having to leave the state to end her pregnancy.

Kling told the Wisconsin Independent in February 2025, "I was honestly very angry that the only option in the state of Wisconsin for me was to carry that baby to term. I still want to have a third healthy child someday, and it was infuriating to be in that doctor’s office and have the doctors not be able to help me due to politics."

Amplify Legal took particular offense to the way Live Action News framed Kling's above quote by writing, "Kling was angry that she couldn't have Nolan killed in her own home state."

The pro-life publication also noted that an induced abortion, such as that apparently pursued by Kling, "always carries the intent to kill the baby."

Amplify Legal took issue with the wording of the pro-life group's article as well as its title — "Mom encouraged to abort baby, even as doctors worked to save others like him" — stating that "each of these statements and the plain implication that Ms. Kling intended to kill her child due to mere 'health challenges' are false and defamatory."

"Live Action News and Ms. Flanders disseminated (1) unprivileged statements, (2) to a large public audience, (3) that expressly assert and aggressively insinuate multiple provably false factual claims, which (4) are the very type of fabricated assertions — e.g., that a mother killed her baby — that any reasonable person would understand as inflicting serious and predictable reputational harm," alleged Amplify Legal. "This conduct satisfies every element of defamation under Wisconsin law."

'We will win.'

In addition to demanding that Live Action News refrain from issuing further "false statements" about Kling and its other clients, Amplify Legal demanded that the pro-life group delete the relevant content and issue retractions.

Kling said in a statement that Live Action's behavior "is cruel, twisted, and borderline obsessive. That’s why I’m proud to join with the other families to demand an end to Live Action’s hate and abuse."

Lauren Peterson, the CEO of Abortion in America who served as a writer on former President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, stated, "The harm caused by this deliberate spread of disinformation adds to the trauma these families have already experienced because abortion bans prevented them from receiving the compassionate medical care they needed."

The response

"The answer is 'no,'" the legal group representing Live Action said in an Aug. 17 response to the abortion group's demands.

Peter Breen, the executive vice president of the Thomas More Society — the legal group representing Live Action — noted:

Live Action will not cease reporting on abortion. It will not desist from expressing the view — shared by tens of millions of Americans and by the pro-life movement your clients have made careers of publicly opposing — that abortion takes the life of a living human being and is accurately described as "killing." Live Action will not delete its archive, will not retract protected opinion, and will not submit its future coverage of public figures, public lawsuits, public convention speeches, and public political campaigns to your pre-clearance.

After spending 14 pages explaining why Amplify Legal apparently has no legs to stand on and should go pound sand, Breen reiterated: "Your demands — all six — are rejected in toto. Live Action will continue to report on abortion, on the litigation industry that has grown up around it, and on the public advocacy of the public figures who wage that pro-abortion campaign — your clients included."

In conclusion, Breen noted that Live Action will "continue to call abortion what its editors, tens of millions of Americans, the State courts, and the Supreme Court’s own opinions have called it: 'killing.'”

"Abortion is an act of killing. It deliberately ends the life of a living human child. That is the truth abortion activists want to forbid anyone from saying out loud," Lila Rose, the founder and president of Live Action, said in a statement. "They want abortion placed beyond moral judgment, even when the child targeted is disabled or has received a difficult diagnosis. They know that controlling the language is essential to making abortion easier to accept, because people intuitively understand that abortion kills a child and that every baby deserves a chance at life."

Rose noted further that "legal threats against our First Amendment right to speak will not change that mission. Threats will not stop us from calling abortion what it is or from fighting for the right of every child to live. We will keep fighting, and we will win."

Abortion in America said in a statement to Blaze News, "Live Action has repeatedly accused grieving families with wanted pregnancies of 'wanting to kill' their babies. These statement are both inaccurate and cruel. Our clients will be weighing all of their options."

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Darline Nordone’s rise in South Carolina threatens to turn one of MAGA's founding promises into a punch line. The movement that vowed to "drain the swamp" is now watching establishment money, inherited political machinery, and a presidential endorsement converge behind the sister of one of the Senate's most durable establishment figures.

It also risks making Republicans look ridiculous as they denounce the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Democrats will use this cartoonish spectacle to argue that the Republican Party has been captured by corporate interests and turned its back on ordinary Americans.

Nordone (recently rebranded as Darline Graham) remains something of a political blank slate. Beyond the relationship with her late brother Lindsey, her support for a pro-abortion political ally, her years in state bureaucracies, and her association with diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, voters have relatively little record from which to judge what she would actually do in the Senate.

Her refusal to state clearly what she is for and against only deepens the uncertainty.

What voters can reasonably expect, however, is continuity with the Graham political brand: Lindsey Graham's fanatical interventionist foreign policy, establishment instincts at home, and comfort with bipartisan deals that many MAGA voters spent the past decade rejecting.

That is precisely what the MAGA movement was supposed to oppose. We do not need to consult America’s founders to remember why. We need only go back to 2015, when candidate Donald Trump declared war on the political establishment and won by promising to change it.

Obviously, the call to “drain the swamp” reigns supreme in setting the frame, but there is an embarrassment of riches in terms of quotes to choose from to make the point even more specifically. How about at the first Republican debate in 2015:

I will tell you that our system is broken. ... I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. ... And that’s a broken system.

How about candidate Trump on Hillary Clinton:

These interests have rigged our political and economic system for their exclusive benefit. Big business, elite media, and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have total control over everything she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings.

And what about the special interest support of failed military interventions supported by his then-opponent Senator Lindsey Graham:

Judging by the incompetent way he ran his campaign, it is easy to see why his military strategies have failed so badly — we can’t even beat ISIS!

That is the political movement I signed up for, volunteered for, worked for, and still fight for.

RELATED: ‘Birthright senatorship’ betrays America First

Finn Gomez/Getty Images

How can that movement be squared with an extension of establishment politics rather than its replacement? It can't. Everything Trump once condemned is now reappearing in almost cartoonish form.

So who is spending so heavily to support Darline Graham Nordone — and what do those interests expect in return?

A group called the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition is flooding money to support Darline Graham Nordone against her conservative opponent Ralph Norman. The group has announced $1 million in the race, as part of a $15 million larger pledge across the country, having already spent millions to defeat conservatives Chip Roy and Andy Ogles in their primary races.

The group is a super PAC, made possible by the 2010 Citizens United decision and its progeny, and funded by "clean energy" interests that favor government support for their industry. Conservatives have spent years attacking that kind of arrangement as corporate welfare — or, less politely, socialism. The point is not that every donor buys a politician outright. It is that political money is rarely charitable. Donors spend because policy matters to them.

Darline Graham Nordone has also received support from the establishment Senate campaign arm, the National Republican Senatorial Committee. While she can’t take over her late brother's campaign account directly, it can be transferred to the NRSC, which is funding her already. Notably, her opponent, Ralph Norman, is an original co-sponsor of the Save America Act from six years ago. For an establishment Senate already twisted into knots over its obstruction of that critical legislation, it makes sense that they wouldn’t want another fierce advocate for it.

There are others in this one-sided spending race as well. The Security is our Strength PAC, formerly associated with Lindsey Graham, is of course supporting her to the tune of $900,000. This group makes it clear that it views her as the one who will be “carrying the legacy forward.”

I take it from their perspective that they want the same out of this Graham that they got out of the last one, which is a different political tune than others suggesting that Darline may be more focused domestically. There is also a group called Palmetto Action that is coming in north of $1 million to oppose Ralph Norman, on similar lines.

RELATED: The Biden autopen scandal has one big winner: Anthony Fauci

Alex WROBLEWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Put simply, a great deal of money is flooding into South Carolina, and most of it is either supporting Darline Graham Nordone or opposing Ralph Norman. For a movement built around draining the swamp, the optics could hardly be worse.

South Carolinians should brace for a deluge of ads from every screen and speaker they own. Special-interest money can move votes; that is why people spend it. But the underlying question will remain: Why is Darline Graham Nordone a serious contender for this Senate seat? Her birthright senatorship via a famous last name, President Trump's endorsement, and a flood of outside money are doing much of the work.

South Carolinians should see this for what it is: a rejection of one of MAGA's core promises. This is not draining the swamp. It is restocking it.

Democrats will happily use this cartoonish spectacle to argue that the Republican Party has been captured by corporate interests and turned its back on ordinary Americans. They will also have an easy answer when Republicans denounce democratic socialism: Why should voters take that charge seriously if a Republican senator reaches office with the help of interests seeking to socialize the costs of private investment?

That will be a tough charge to rebut.

In a viral social media video, teacher Darius Williams described breaking down in class after discovering that some of his high school seniors could not complete an exercise requiring them to fill in just four missing words.

“These kids are leaving high school and going to college, hopefully, and they couldn’t fill in four words. Four words. I literally broke down in the middle of class. This is only day two, and I have seniors who simply cannot read and seniors who cannot write,” the teacher, Darius Williams, said in a reel on Instagram.

“They can reason. They have the ability to defend their reasoning if it’s talking to their homeboy, but applying that to a written text, two paragraphs, and they couldn’t do it,” he added.

BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock is disturbed, but not surprised.

“High school seniors could not fill in four words,” Whitlock says. “Not calculus, not philosophy, four words. A grown man wept on camera because the next generation cannot read. That is not a school story. That is a funeral for the mind.”

Whitlock points out that "enslaved black men and women once risked the whip, the auction block, and death for the ability to read.”

“Literacy was contraband. Freedom. A free mind started with a page you were not supposed to touch,” he says.

What slaves understood back then is something “this generation pretends not to know.”

“The man who controls your access to words controls your access to God, to law, to contracts, to your own name on a document,” Whitlock says.

“Now, too many black Americans treat reading like optional equipment. Something you outsource to a phone, a caption, a clip, or a machine that summarizes so you never sweat through a hard paragraph,” he says. “That is not progress. That is a people walking backward into dependence and calling it culture.”

“We used to bleed for the page. Now we scroll past it and get offended when a teacher cries about the wreckage,” he adds.

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Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) triumphantly shared the results of a poll released last week showing that she enjoyed a 50%-39% lead over Councilwoman Nithya Raman (D) ahead of the Nov. 3 mayoral runoff.

Bass tweeted an image of herself beside a graphic of the poll results and wrote, "Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let's do this, LA!"

'The mayor’s campaign promoted a fake poll without properly vetting the source.'

Unfortunately for the Democrat, the poll — said to have been based on a survey of 560 L.A. voters between July 30 and Aug. 5 — was entirely fake, reported the Los Angeles Times.

The outfit behind the poll, which calls itself Median Strategies, announced on its website that it has "concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls. All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data."

"Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification," added the bogus pollster.

The fake pollster went the distance with its so-called "social experiment" in the Bass race, providing some additional fake details and even analysis.

It claimed, for instance, that of the 16% of respondents who previously voted for Spencer Pratt, over 85% were planning to vote for Bass in the general election, reported the Times.

RELATED: Socialist who hates America loses in Wisconsin after voter data mishap

Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times/Getty Image

Median Strategies noted, "Faced with a choice between the incumbent and a Democratic Socialists of America-aligned challenger, most Pratt voters appear to be treating Bass as the more familiar, more moderate option rather than sitting out the race."

An archived version of the outfit's now-scrubbed website provides further evidence of the fakers' commitment to the ruse.

Under the heading "How We Poll," Median Strategies said its releases are "built on a documented sampling frame, a mixed-mode interview process, and a transparent weighting scheme. We publish our methodology alongside every release so you can evaluate our numbers the same way we do."

Unlike Bass, Pratt wasn't fooled, writing on Friday in response to the California Post's reporting on the fake results, "LOL you think my voters are going to vote for the crying carpetbagger in charge of homelessness who 'found' 40K votes on Skid Row 7 days after the election?"

Blaze News has reached out to the California Post for comment.

The Bass campaign has demanded that consequence be visited upon those who so badly bruised their egos.

"This poll was reported on by a news outlet," a spokesperson for the Bass campaign told the Times. "Any bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

A spokesman for Raman's campaign criticized Bass for pushing the fake poll, telling KTLA-TV, "The mayor’s campaign promoted a fake poll without properly vetting the source."

"It is the latest example of an administration that too often struggles to get the basics right — from posting about a pothole repair before the pothole was fixed to repeatedly giving Boyle Heights residents a Lineage cleanup deadline that the company now disputes," continued Raman's campaign. "Angelenos deserve a mayor who gets the facts right, communicates clearly, and does the work before announcing the result."

According to the Politics & Poll Tracker, one of the many accounts on X that shared but has since deleted fake polling from the outfit, Median Strategies had also released fake survey results regarding other races.

For example, Median Strategies allegedly released a poll in the Nevada governor's race showing that Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo was leading Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford (D) 51%-46%. Recent polling from apparently legitimate outfits have Lombardo leading Ford by at least seven percentage points.

Median Strategies also released a poll on the Wisconsin governor's primary race showing the white-hating democratic socialist Francesca Hong with a 23-point lead over Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. Crowley won the Democratic nomination in a tight election last week.

Median Strategies alleged that no one involved with its faking polling operation "received compensation or financial benefit from the project, and the project was not funded, commissioned, or directed by any candidate, campaign, political party, PAC, media organization, or other outside entity."

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For years, Washington has asked the same question about Mexico: Can we count on our southern neighbor as a serious security partner? Increasingly, the answer appears to be yes.

Much of the change runs through Omar García Harfuch, Mexico’s secretary of security and citizen protection. Under President Claudia Sheinbaum, Harfuch has emerged as one of the most important officials in Mexico — and perhaps the Mexican official who matters most to American security.

The United States does not need a subordinate in Mexico. It needs a capable neighbor that shares our interest in destroying the criminal organizations threatening both our countries.

Americans have good reason to pay attention.

The United States and Mexico share a 2,000-mile border and one of the world's largest trading relationships. Yet security cooperation has too often failed to reflect how intertwined the two countries have become. Cartels built multinational criminal enterprises. Fentanyl poured north. American weapons and illicit money moved south. Mutual suspicion kept Washington and Mexico City from confronting those problems as effectively as they should have.

That appears to be changing.

Harfuch has built something Washington desperately needs: trust.

American law enforcement officials increasingly speak of Mexico as a partner. DEA Director Terry Cole has publicly discussed his communication with Harfuch. FBI Director Kash Patel has met with him as cooperation between the two countries has expanded. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has praised Mexico's efforts against organized crime.

More important than the rhetoric are the results.

Mexico has transferred major cartel figures to American custody. Mexican security forces have expanded operations against organized crime. The Sheinbaum government has deployed forces to the border and worked more closely with American agencies on narcotics trafficking, intelligence, and cartel networks.

For Washington, Harfuch's appeal is straightforward: He understands American concerns, and he acts on them.

That does not make him an American proxy. It makes him an effective Mexican official who recognizes a basic geopolitical reality: The United States and Mexico face many of the same enemies.

The cartel selling fentanyl in Dallas or Phoenix may also be extorting businesses and murdering civilians in Mexico. Neither country can defeat these organizations while treating the border as the end of its responsibility. Washington should keep pressing for measurable results against fentanyl production, cartel finances, and cross-border criminal networks.

Harfuch seems to understand that better than many of his predecessors.

Consider the recent dispute over American avocado inspections in Michoacán. Security concerns disrupted U.S. inspection operations in one of Mexico's most important agricultural regions. Mexico responded by deploying more than 1,500 federal personnel while officials worked with Washington to restore operations.

Avocados may seem far removed from national security. They aren’t.

RELATED: Mamdani’s one-word border answer said it all

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Organized crime has penetrated legitimate industries across parts of Mexico, using extortion and violence to profit from ordinary commerce. When American inspectors cannot safely do their jobs, cartel violence becomes an American economic problem too.

The response illustrated the Harfuch approach: Identify the problem, work with the Americans, and deploy the resources necessary to address it.

Washington should encourage more of this, particularly on fentanyl.

The drug has devastated American communities and made Mexican cartel activity a domestic American security issue. Washington is right to demand aggressive Mexican action against the organizations producing and transporting it.

Mexico has legitimate concerns of its own. American firearms move south. Drug money crosses the border and flows through financial institutions. Cartels exploit weaknesses in both countries.

The answer is not another round of diplomatic finger-pointing. It is sustained cooperation among American and Mexican law enforcement, intelligence, and financial authorities.

That requires trusted people on both sides. Harfuch has increasingly become that person for Washington.

His rise is particularly significant because close security cooperation with the United States remains politically sensitive in Mexico. Elements of the Mexican left have long viewed such ties with suspicion. Harfuch has nevertheless shown that working with Washington does not require surrendering Mexican sovereignty.

In fact, the opposite is true.

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A Mexican government capable of dismantling criminal organizations, protecting businesses, and imposing the rule of law across its territory is more sovereign, not less. Cartels that control territory and intimidate public officials pose a far greater threat to Mexican independence than intelligence cooperation with Washington ever could.

Sheinbaum deserves credit for recognizing that and empowering Harfuch. The Trump administration should recognize the opportunity as well.

Washington should remain demanding. Mexico still faces enormous problems with organized crime, corruption, and violence. Cooperation should not be confused with complacency. The United States should continue pressing for measurable results against fentanyl production, cartel finances, and cross-border criminal networks.

But American foreign policy also needs to recognize progress when it occurs.

For years, the U.S.-Mexico security relationship was defined by mistrust. Today there are signs of something different: two governments recognizing that they have more to gain by confronting shared threats together than by blaming each other for them.

The United States does not need a subordinate in Mexico. It needs a capable neighbor that shares our interest in destroying the criminal organizations threatening both countries.

In Omar García Harfuch, America may finally have found that partner.