Why does it take the specter of violence before we can have a little political respite?

"A really bold move"

Jaylen Brown claimed on Sunday that NBA refs had an "agenda" to call fouls on him as the Boston Celtics lost their playoff series to the Philadelphia 76ers in seven games.

In the final push before voters head to the polls this week to choose who will staff their local council governments, Nigel Farage's Reform UK party unveiled perhaps its most tantalising policy prescription for illegal migration: let the Greens deal with it.

The post Reap What You Sow: Farage’s Reform Party Promises to Place Deportation Centres in Green Party Areas appeared first on Breitbart.

A shooting Sunday night at a party at a lake near Oklahoma City sent least 12 people to hospitals, according to police and hospital officials. Edmond police spokesperson Emily Ward said authorities received reports of shots being fired at about 9 p.m. at a gathering of young ...

Grey Bull Rescue founder Bryan Stern is contesting State Department claims that every American who sought evacuation help during the U.S.-Iran conflict got it.

Former Rep. Barney Frank claims Democrats have neglected economic inequality by pushing progressive causes, arguing in a forthcoming book for a more strategic approach.

Spanning centuries, more than 100 historic shipwrecks have been uncovered on the seafloor of the Bay of Gibraltar by researchers with Project Herakles in Spain.

Sen. Jon Ossoff faces GOP attacks over his ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center following its indictment for alleged fraud and money laundering schemes.

From the time of one’s childhood, a person learns a sense of proportion in addition to a sense of right and wrong. Even good things must be measured in the right proportion. It is this lack of proportionality that is missing from advocates of Big Tech seeking to build hyperscale AI data centers — often multiple facilities — in nearly every region of the country.

A recent Washington Post exposé of the data center fight in Archbald, Pennsylvania, exemplifies why the data center agenda is unprecedented, is unsustainable, and makes the entire generative AI concept economically insolvent.

We have never asked so many communities to give so much for abstract and speculative promises of return.

Tucked into the Pocono Mountains northeast of Scranton, Archbald is a mountain town of 7,000. Now, town council leaders have sold out to Big Tech and plan to build six sprawling hyperscale data centers covering about 14% of the town’s land.

Those campuses would include 51 data warehouses — each about the size of a Walmart supercenter — including seven buildings encompassing more than 1 million square feet. If all the data centers were built, they would occupy about 2.5 miles of land.

We have simply never done this before. And remember, this is playing out to varying degrees in thousands of places throughout the country. And of course, these campuses offer locals nothing but surveillance and slop relative to what edge computing can do with an infinitesimal footprint.

Over the past month, most members of the seven-person Archbald Borough Council, along with several planning board members, have resigned.

Keep in mind that Big Tech wants to rezone and buy up land that is exponentially larger than anything ever done before. Apologists for the industry within the GOP accuse some of us of being anti-growth and anti-infrastructure, but there is an obvious difference between this and every other infrastructure project: namely, the return on investment.

For a fraction of the space, a gas-powered plant supplies the power to an entire region and is a universal need. These behemoths, on the other hand, require exponentially more land, and rather than offering power, they suck it out — not to mention treating the neighbors to a constant 90 decibel humming. It is all being done on the promise of “artificial general intelligence,” which is nothing more than a scam.

It would be one thing if the scaling of large language models required that one region of our country get turned into a parking lot, such as what is being proposed in Archbald. But they are trying to do this with mega-hyperscale facilities in thousands of places across the country.

To provide some sense of proportion, let’s just take eight of the proposed hyperscales under contract in Indiana. Taken together, these data centers that will power cloud computing for Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon will consume 8,300 MWs of power. That is the usage equivalent of twice the number of households in the entire state.

RELATED: Republicans must reject Big Tech land grabs or start losing elections

Nathan Howard/Washington Post/Getty Images

If not for opposition from locals, Prince William County, which is already saturated with data centers, was going to permit a 2,100-acre, 37-building campus that would have been one of the largest in the world. To put that size in perspective, one could probably build well over 50 gas-powered plants in that footprint.

The Box Elder County, Utah, Commission is about to sign off on a mega data center project on 40,000 acres of private and DOD lands that, when completed, will eventually use nine GWs of power. To put that in perspective, the entire state of Utah uses four GWs.

The sheer unprecedented amount of power these leviathans would need also necessitates an unnatural and inordinate number of transmission lines that will cut through, distort, and disturb private property. For example, Dominion Power is proposing a $1 billion 765 kV high-voltage transmission line project that would span from Lynchburg to Culpeper County, Virginia. The project would impact nine counties with the most powerful lines, standing 135-165 feet tall.

It’s even worse in West Virginia, where the residents are being forced to fund projects that cut up their land with transmission lines to fund the Northern Virginia “Data Center Alley” that is not even in the same state!

Is it any wonder why there is a national bipartisan revolt against the ruling class of both parties on the sheer insanity of this model? We have never asked so many communities to give so much for abstract and speculative promises of return.

It’s more likely that we will be stuck with the surveillance state, a degraded quality of life, and a decrepit internet full of slop than that we will achieve any greatness in human progress from such sacrifice of land, power, and continuity of communities.

Never before have we had a technology that is supposedly so progressive and futuristic, yet its resource-stripping is so cloddish, archaic, and draconian.

Everyone knows the industry lacks the power and money to actually operate thousands of hyperscale data centers. Everyone recognizes that the scaling model of LLMs is unsustainable and is not the future of AI. But will we stop this madness before so much of our land is rezoned and re-owned by a centralized monopoly?

Remember, the land-grab is not the side effect, but the main point.

Mets rookie right fielder Carson Benge laid out for a breathtaking diving catch against the Los Angeles Angels as the slumping New York picked up a 5-1 series win Sunday.

A trucking industry insider warns about unqualified CDL holders on U.S. highways, calling sham driving school abuse and lax standards "just madness."

Long COVID affects up to 18 million Americans, yet research funding remains inadequate. Experts call for aggressive NIH investment in novel treatments.

President Trump calls the Iran blockade unbelievably effective as U.S. forces seize ships carrying oil worth millions, sending a message to Russia and China.

China is developing AI-powered robotic wolf packs designed to scout and support troops in a potential Taiwan invasion, according to an Foundation for Defense of Democracies report.

Rhode Island's SB 2710 targets semi-automatic rifles, pistols and shotguns while leaving enforcement unclear, raising fears of forced confiscation.

A very disturbing TikTok video has gone viral after a pregnant woman recorded herself playing ABBA songs to make her unborn son gay — while thousands of mothers cheered her on in the comments and across social media.

The video shows her blasting the lyrics “Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight” next to her stomach.

BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is shocked to read the comments, which include things like, “My son is 4 and exclusively listens to Sabrina Carpenter. Hopes are very high for him being gay.”

“My son just officially came out a few months ago,” reads another comment with a cheering emoji.

Another one reads, “My son was born to ‘Dancing Queen.’ I have high hopes for him.”

“This is disgusting that you are thinking about your child’s sexuality,” Stuckey says.

“It’s a horrible thing to wish on someone. It is. Now, I’m a Christian, and I believe that homosexuality is a sin, OK. But I also think that it’s bad for society to encourage this kind of thing,” she continues.

“We should be encouraging our boys to be strong and to be brave and to be protectors and to be fighters and to rein their masculine energy into good things. Yes, and you can call that old-fashioned, but it’s true,” she adds.

Stuckey likens these mothers’ hopes for gay sons to “conversion therapy” and calls it “very, very grotesque.”

“I talk about this concept of what I call ‘toxic mommy culture’ in my book, ‘You’re Not Enough (and That’s Okay)’ — when moms make their feelings and their validation and their social image the highest priority and they project that onto their kids and they use their children as props to perform this, like, progressivism on social media for likes, affirmation, cultural approval,” Stuckey says.

“I just find this little thing that this mother is doing gross. ... Kids are always the unconsenting subjects of progressive social experiments,” she continues. “It’s not good.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Between January 2023 and May 2025, Fortune 100 companies reduced their use of the term "DEI" by 98%, according to an analysis by Gravity Research.

Within weeks of President Trump's executive order targeting federal DEI initiatives, major corporations including McDonald's, Walmart, and Target announced they were ending DEI programs.

Conservatives celebrated as one company after another backed away from the acronym that had dominated (and in many cases terrified) corporate America for years.

That celebration was premature.

The goal is no longer to showcase diversity initiatives. The goal is to make those initiatives invisible and permanent.

DEI is far from dead. According to “inclusion consultant” Lily Zheng, its disguise is now called FAIR: Fairness, Access, Inclusion, and Representation. "It's not just a communications rebrand," Zheng recently told Time magazine. "It's not just that we're avoiding the letters DEI and trying to replace it with FAIR. It's that the work itself is evolving."

What Zheng calls "legacy DEI" focused on visible programs like heritage months, diversity training sessions, and demographic targets. These programs were public-facing, easy to identify, and therefore vulnerable to political pressure. The new approach abandons surface visibility in favor of work to change what Zheng calls "systems."

Instead of counting the number of women or people of color in leadership positions, FAIR focuses on changing institutional systems. Instead of heritage celebrations, FAIR embeds what it calls "inclusion" into hiring algorithms, promotion processes, and organizational structures.

The goal is no longer to showcase diversity initiatives. The goal is to make those initiatives invisible and permanent.

Progressives adapted after losing Virginia elections in 2021. Teachers' unions suffered a historic defeat. Rather than retreat, Data for Progress and similar groups spent millions analyzing voter habits and anxieties, then redesigned their campaign around different messaging. By 2023, Democrats won nearly every close Virginia race.

Progressives don't abandon goals when challenged. They simply adapt their methods. Similarly, when conservatives successfully challenged outrageously unconstitutional explicit DEI programs, the machinery wasn't dismantled. It burrowed deeper into institutional foundations, where it became harder to identify and harder to remove.

RELATED: How Republicans have failed to defund sanctuary cities for a generation

J. David Ake/Getty Images

Companies dropped "DEI" and adopted phrases like "universal fairness," "algorithmic bias mitigation," and "inclusion by design." The framing shifted from blatant identity-based preferences to much more subtle process-based interventions.

In my book, "The Political Vise," I describe group identity politics as organizing around grievance rather than achievement. This fact explains why DEI programs can never declare victory and dissolve. If equity were achieved, the machinery would become unnecessary. The system requires permanent grievance to justify permanent intervention.

Legacy DEI focused on representation metrics that could theoretically be satisfied. FAIR abandons those metrics in favor of systemic analysis that can never be completed.

There are always more systems to audit, more processes to redesign, more barriers to identify, and more marginalized people to uplift. A company can cancel a heritage month event, but it cannot skip the algorithmic audit hardwired into its hiring platform.

President Trump's executive order triggered the strategic retreat. The grievance lobby, however, wasn’t giving up without a fight. Its members demanded that companies and public institutions find other ways to keep DEI alive. By January 2026, when Zheng described the FAIR framework to Time magazine, the evolution was complete.

Trump’s March 2026 executive order requiring federal contractors to certify that they do not engage in discriminatory activities based on race or ethnicity suggests the Trump administration recognizes the evasion.

The order notes that "some entities continue to engage in DEI activities and often attempt to conceal their efforts." But just prohibiting "disparate treatment based on race or ethnicity" can't root out systems-based approaches that claim to focus on universal fairness while pursuing the same demographic outcomes through different methods.

RELATED: Trump’s antitrust policy is working for everyday Americans

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

DEI under any name serves the larger goal of institutionalizing learned helplessness. It teaches that your struggles result from discriminatory systems rather than personal choices, that flourishing depends more on institutional intervention than individual effort. Worst of all, it teaches dependence. And a lot of progressives are deeply invested in maintaining that dependence.

Eliminating DEI departments and scrubbing corporate websites of diversity language are satisfying, but not final a victory, not when the actual work of grievance culture continues under different names.

With the grievance machinery adopting ever more subtle disguises, the fight to defend merit requires more shrewdness and patience than ever before. We must ask direct questions.

When companies rebrand DEI programs as "universal fairness" initiatives, we must demand to see the metrics. When they tout "algorithmic bias audits," ask what disparities trigger intervention — and what outcomes those interventions produce.

The left hid the machinery underground because the surface became too costly to defend. It is critically important to drag DEI back into the light and destroy it once and for all.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.

The family of an Iowa woman who died after hernia repair surgery alleges nurses dismissed fecal drainage and sepsis symptoms as normal in medical malpractice lawsuit.