Kathy Griffin hasn’t learned a single lesson since crashing her own career.

The “D-list” diva shared a horrifying image of herself holding a fake, bloodied head of President Donald Trump, ISIS-style, in 2017. The backlash proved swift and furious. She apologized (then took it back) and watched her stand-up gigs evaporate.

Country singer Jelly Roll famously shed a whole lotta weight in recent years. Good for him! Now he’s hoping to shed fans.

It took years to rebuild a semblance of a career, and she eventually leaned into her Trump derangement syndrome.

Now she’s playing the Victim Card™ via the “Talk Your Head Off” podcast with Gen Z host Adam Mockler. Mockler complained of the “chilling effect” created when President Trump goes after his critics in the media and the legal arena.

Griffin’s response? She knows the feeling.

“I actually was a victim of that myself in 2017 when I released a controversial photo that I thought everyone else would agree with me,” Griffin said, referring to BloodyHeadGate. “I was very, very wrong.”

That last sentence might be the first wise thing she’s said in ages …

Hostin-ator

AI just got dumber.

“The View” host Sunny Hostin just sold her likeness to AI startup Fountain O. That means the company can use Hostin’s name and brand for AI-based TV shows and movies based on Hostin’s novels.

Wait … she has enough time to share TV’s most idiotic opinions and write novels? Respect!

The deal means her fans can not only see AI reproductions of her stories but watch Hostin herself in them.

“To be able to bring my novels to life in movie and TV form, and actually have my image inserted in the productions, so that audiences can relate to me through my stories beyond my role as an author, is incredibly exciting to me.”

Maybe those “Terminator” films depicting computers conquering humanity didn’t anticipate the Hostin factor …

Jelly rolled

Is anything more fickle than pop music stardom? The list of one-hit wonders may literally be a mile long, and even today’s red-hot stars could run cold in a New York Minute.

Remember Jewel? Right Said Fred? Young MC? That should keep today’s chart-toppers hungry and humble.

Not Jelly Roll. The country singer famously shed a whole lotta weight in recent years. Good for him! Now he’s hoping to shed fans. How? He hosted “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” this week and read straight from the far-left show’s cue cards.

Trump bad. Trump dumb. Trump [fill in the blank]. “Funny” rarely enters the equation on the show, and Mr. Roll did nothing to change that approach. And, naturally, some of the singer’s fans recoiled at his liberal lurch.

He is a country crooner, after all. His response? To paraphrase he Critical Drinker, “Go away now.”

“For those who threatened to stop listening to my music based on my comments last night, I just want to say with conviction: go right ahead.”

Sounds like a plan. In related news, look for Jelly to join Chumbawamba on their 2027 “That One Song You Kinda Liked” tour.

RELATED: VICTORY NAP: Rosie O’Donnell’s back — with the same tired Trump trash talk

Randy Holmes/Jim Watson/Getty Images

Ali who?

Sacha Baron Cohen was king of the comedy world following his gonzo 2006 film “Borat.” It’s been downhill ever since.

Even worse, Cohen went woke, tackling predictable targets (Trump!) and demanding that the real estate mogul be kicked off of social media.

Sad.

Still, there’s always hope for a creative rebound. And Cohen’s next project is a film-length “documentary” based on his classic Ali G character. “Ali G: Who Iz I” hits theaters this fall, and while the trailer isn’t a hoot, perhaps the best bits are being saved for the film itself.

We’ll see come the film’s release day — Oct. 23. Right now, some comedy pearl-clutchers are coming after Cohen.

A media “watchdog” group, NewsCord, is trying to coax movie houses to ban the film. His routines, it claims, have “enforced harmful stereotypes across marginalized communities through his characters.”

Will that effort get traction? It’s not 2020 any more, thank goodness. For now, Cohen is leaning into his old bad-boy shtick, ignoring how he abandoned his principles over time. Maybe he thinks being unwoke is cool (it is … but not thanks to him).

“In an age when a single comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back,” he shared on social media.

​Jelly roll, Jimmy kimmel live, Kathy griffin, President donald trump, Sacha baron cohen, Sunny hostin, Trump derangement syndrome, Ai, Entertainment, Hollywood, Lifestyle, Culture, Toto recall 

With the “Women’s” NBA twisting itself into knots rather than plainly defining woman, gender ideology is back in the news.

The first problem is linguistic. Using “gender” when one means sex invites confusion. Jay Richards has explained gender ideology as the view that the sex binary does not fully describe human identity and that a person may possess an internal “gender identity” incongruent with sex.

‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’

That framework helps explain a related question: Why can stating ordinary biological distinctions provoke such extraordinary hostility — even death threats — when the dispute concerns women’s sports and other sex-separated spaces?

One answer is that the argument is not only about biology. It also draws on an older revolutionary tradition that treats inherited institutions and categories as instruments of domination. Hence the old line: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Start with Marx and Engels. In “The Communist Manifesto,” they called for “the most radical rupture with traditional relations” and “traditional ideas,” while attacking private property, religion, and the bourgeois family. Paul Kengor has written that later leftist movements continued this attack on traditional marriage and family.

The intellectual path from Marx to contemporary gender theory is not a straight line, however. Antonio Gramsci did not simply replace economics with culture; he broadened Marxist analysis by emphasizing culture, institutions, and “hegemony” as sources of social power. What is commonly called cultural Marxism grew from this shift in emphasis.

Herbert Marcuse likewise looked beyond the industrial working class to marginalized groups as possible agents of radical change. Rudi Dutschke popularized the idea of a “long march through the institutions,” while Mike Gonzalez has noted the Gramscian strategy of a long-term “war of position” aimed at reshaping culture before political victory.

Critical theory pushed the analysis further. Frankfurt School thinkers such as Marcuse and Max Horkheimer examined capitalism, authority, culture, and repression through a Marxist-Freudian lens. Other Frankfurt School theorists treated social structures — including family and sexuality — as possible mechanisms of domination.

Postmodern and deconstructionist thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida came from different traditions, but their work converged with critical theory on one crucial point: suspicion toward claims of neutral, universal truth. In this intellectual climate, truth itself was dismissed by some theorists as inseparable from power.

RELATED: Enes Kanter Freedom said the quiet part out loud

Joseph Weiser/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

As Bishop Robert Barron has written in a related discussion of deconstruction, “There is no final truth, no ultimate settling of a question. There is always something new.” Once inherited categories are treated principally as products of power, even apparently basic questions — “What is a woman?” — become open to endless renegotiation.

Judith Butler’s 1990 book “Gender Trouble” brought these currents directly into gender theory. Butler argued that gender is performative and challenged the stability of the sex/gender distinction and traditional sex roles.

This does not prove that every person who supports transgender rights is a Marxist, or that modern gender theory can be reduced to a single ideological source. It does show why the rhetoric so often sounds revolutionary rather than merely therapeutic.

When transgender discrimination is called the “civil rights issue of our time,” the claim places gender identity within a familiar oppressor-oppressed framework. Christopher Rufo has said that some trans activists explicitly describe their movement as a successor to Marxism, with transgender people cast as a new revolutionary vanguard.

That is the more defensible connection. Gender ideology did not simply fall out of “The Communist Manifesto.” It developed amid intellectual traditions that increasingly interpreted social categories through power, oppression, liberation, and the deconstruction of inherited norms.

Its political alliances reinforce the point. Gender politics routinely appears among the current things the activist left leverage as part of its war on capitalism and Western civilization generally. Jonathan Butcher has noted how intersectionality explicitly links “identity movements based on gender and racial liberation” through a common theory of social domination.

From Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors describing herself as a “trained Marxist” to the pro-Hamas red-green alliance that includes Queers for Palestine, the coalition repeatedly joins causes that appear unrelated on the surface but share a politics of oppression and liberation.

The issue is not always literally the issue. Increasingly, the issue is the revolution.

​Critical theory, Cultural marxism, Gender identity, Gender ideology, Postmodernism, Traditional marriage, Transgender rights, Western civilization, Womens sports, Gender theory, Wnba, Women’s sports, Opinion & analysis 

Bill Gates is a repugnant individual. He puts the ick in sick, the sin in sincere, and the con in concern. But rest assured, he cares deeply about your well-being and the future of the human race.

The bespectacled billionaire recently penned a remarkably revealing essay. The central message is that although AI is probably coming for your job, your social life, your education, your children, and perhaps your sanity, he has a plan.

This two-facedness is infuriating, but it’s an old trick.

Gates argues that AI “can substitute for human cognition” and that “many jobs will disappear forever.” He even says that if someone had a credible plan to slow AI globally, he would “likely support it.” But, conveniently, he immediately concludes that this isn’t “going to happen,” so we’d better learn to live with this rather depressing reality.

And who helped build the world in which this revolution became possible? Gates’ own Microsoft is now one of the biggest players in AI. Gates acknowledges that he still has “financial ties to” the tech industry, then assures us his views aren’t motivated by money. Believing that takes a level of blind faith usually reserved for doomed cults.

The giveaway is his proposed solution.

Meet “Human Reserved,” a tiny tax-bracket sanctuary where some of us get to exist like protected wildlife. Don’t save work because human beings deserve meaningful lives; reserve some jobs because society still needs people employed. Although Gates talks about the “broader value of work,” the argument keeps circling back to stability, government funds, and the social consequences of mass unemployment.

That’s the true nightmare keeping him up at night. Starving people don’t splurge, and desperate people tend to break things. His concern is not that lives will be ruined, but that an economy without paychecks stops consuming. He wants us to revere him as a high-minded public intellectual, yet he operates like a landlord calculating how much mold a tenant will tolerate. He advocates for AI taxes and automation caps with one hand while funding the companies behind the technology with the other. Preserving a few human roles in nursing homes and kindergartens is less an act of mercy than a recognition that a fully automated world could harm his bank balance.

RELATED: ‘Cookie stuffing’: Did Bill Gates’ daughter use an illegal trick that sent top tech execs to prison?

Vanz Studio/Getty Images

He notes rather glibly that he likes the phrase “Human Reserved” because it makes him “think of nature reserves.” In his eyes, human labor is no longer an organic expression of dignity, purpose, or community. Instead, it’s more like an endangered species trapped inside a fenced-off sanctuary, permitted to exist solely because the park ranger feels an odd burst of sentimentality. He treats working-class survival like a protected wetland. Essentially, a scenic spot where we could build data centers, but we choose not to because the sight of total extinction gives him a slight headache. It’s the ultimate condescension: an absolute elitist granting us a small, artificial habitat to graze in while he clears the rest of the forest for his server farms.

Shortly after his patronizing essay was published, word emerged that Gates is actively arranging a trip to Beijing to meet personally with Xi Jinping.

The Manchurian candidate

China spends millions of dollars every day running continuous cyber operations against American infrastructure, stealing military IP, and breaching government servers. Yet this supposedly great American philanthropist wants to help the Chinese Communist Party navigate the risks of the very technology it actively weaponizes. He plays the homegrown hero, preaching the need to protect American workers and secure the nation, while simultaneously plotting to help a strategic rival become more powerful. Gates wants to discuss global safety standards with an authoritarian regime, acting as a self-appointed shadow secretary of state.

This two-facedness is infuriating, but it’s an old trick in the slimy septuagenarian’s playbook.

In the 1990s, when the Department of Justice dragged Microsoft into federal court for using its desktop monopoly to strangle Netscape Navigator, the world got a front-row seat to the real Bill Gates. The trial exposed a savvy street fighter who treated entire software sectors like nuisance weeds in his garden. Rather than outcompeting his rivals, he wanted to cut off their oxygen supply. He spent that decade playing the ruthless corporate terminator, extracting tribute from every PC sold on earth, and turning the free market into his personal fiefdom.

When the antitrust hammer finally came down, he didn’t change his nature. But he did change his wardrobe. He swapped the courtroom depositions for knitted sweaters and rebranded overnight as America’s doting uncle. But the killer instinct never vanished. The same instinct that drove him to annihilate competing web browsers now drives him to carve up the future of global technology with Beijing, ensuring that he controls the rules of the game no matter which superpower wins.

RELATED: Doc dump reveals top secret Bill Gates clearance during COVID years

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

This is not an exaggeration. Xi has described Gates as an “old friend” — indeed, his “first American friend.” A friend of China is no friend of America. And Bill Gates, a man actively liquidating the livelihoods of the domestic workforce while offering to manage their post-economic survival, is certainly no ally of the everyday, decent, hardworking American.

Gates wants software algorithms to process trade decisions, draft legal documents, write code, and manage logistics chains. In exchange, he generously offers to let humans retain a few low-margin positions in elder care and education. How kind of him.

Those specific fields survived his filter for an obvious reason. Software can’t change a physical diaper or offer genuine affection to an aging patient. He frames these designated human roles as an act of moral generosity, when he’s actually just identifying the physical tasks that robots can’t perform.

Only the most foolish would mistake his ruthless risk management for human compassion, and only the most foolish would believe that Bill Gates cares at about our well-being.

​Tech, Bill gates, Artificial intelligence 

Are young Americans expecting too much, or has homeownership genuinely become out of reach? According to BlazeTV host Nick Freitas, the answer is obvious.

While older generations often point to bigger homes and modern amenities to explain rising housing costs, Freitas says the data tells a different story. Even after accounting for those differences, the cost of buying a home has skyrocketed relative to income, leaving many young people feeling frustrated and demoralized.

“When younger people are saying that they have a real problem here, that they’re frustrated, that they’re demoralized, you can’t just dismiss that as, ‘Well, they’re being demoralized by TikTok or online or whatnot,’” Freitas says.

“One of the things in this is every time this gets brought up, people will say, ‘Well, yeah, you can’t compare a home in 2026 that is 2,500 square feet and four bedrooms and has all these amenities and central heating and air with what your grandpa bought on a single income that was an 800-square-foot, two-bedroom house with no AC,’” he explains.

“That’s all fair, but when you account for all of that, when you account … for all of these other factors, what you end up finding out is that the median house price is still significantly higher. Not like a little bit. It’s not like it’s gone up 20%. No, it’s significantly higher,” he continues.

“Now all of a sudden, it’s far more difficult to buy that first house, and what everybody is telling you is, ‘Well, you just need to work harder’ or ‘you expect too much,’” he adds.

But, Freitas says, they’re not expecting too much, pointing out that if you want to buy a home close to where you work, depending on where that is, an 800-square-foot home could run you close to a million dollars.

“You’ve got building codes, and you’ve got taxes. You’ve got multiple factors impacting that price,” he says.

“Your income is never catching up with what you actually need to live. And that is a very real and a very genuine concern,” he continues. “And again, if we have people just easily dismissing this, they are missing the point.”

“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.

​Homeownership, Taxes, Nick freitas, Young americans, Boomers, Housing, Cost of living, Inflation, Blazetv show 

For years, Americans have been told that faith belongs in church while public policy should be guided by supposedly neutral, secular principles.

But BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey says that distinction is a fiction, as progressives beliefs are not neutral at all — and somehow make their way into plenty of public policy.

“I also notice this idea that you know, we can leave our Christian faith behind and then when we go into the public sphere, we don this like neutral secular ideology, but this neutral secular ideology says that babies don’t become people until they go through the birth canal,” Stuckey tells Pastor Josh Howerton.

“That’s a superstitious, nonscientific, weird belief,” she continues, noting that it’s not much different than the idea that “kids can be born in the wrong body.”

“So people who believe that they get to insert their definitions, their weird beliefs into school curriculum, into public policy, they define policy,” she adds.

Our bureaucracy, Stuckey says, is “defined by progressive ideology, which is not neutral,” but instead “superstitious.”

“So why does a progressive secularist who has their own dogmas and their own pseudo religion, why is their view seen as neutral?” she asks.

Howerton couldn’t agree more.

“What you’re talking about is loaded into the phrase, ‘You can’t legislate morality.’ The worldview behind the phrase, ‘You can’t legislate morality,’ is the myth of neutrality,” he says.

“It’s a myth of neutrality that there’s some way for us to sort of just order society to where nobody’s beliefs are infringed upon,” he continues, noting that it’s easy to “rip that mask off really fast.”

“A great example of this is with abortion. So somebody may say to a Christian that has a consistent pro-life ethic … ‘Hey, when you advocate for pro-life legislation, you’re trying to force your morality on the mother,’” he explains.

“And honestly, the answer to that question is yes. Yes, that is what is trying to happen. But the question is not whether morality is going to get legislated. The question is whose morality is going to get legislated,” he adds.

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.

​Allie beth stuckey, Christianity, Josh howerton, Morality, Leftism, Progressivism, Superstition, Transgender, Abortion, Blazetv show 

Although the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and civil rights laws dating back to 1866 prohibit nearly all racial preferences, most Americans oppose these preferences, and Donald Trump was elected vowing to eliminate DEI — progressives won’t give up.

Their race-obsessed thinking reduces America to intersectional classifications of oppressed and oppressor. This addled concept is a self-defeating dialectic in which no amount of progress on race relations is ever enough — or even acknowledged.

Numerous companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Costco, Delta, and Cisco, openly continue their DEI programs.

Despite enormous advances, with the possible exception of Palestinians and transgender people, no group is seen as more oppressed and deserving of preferences than African-Americans.

In 2025, President Trump issued executive orders that revoked President Biden’s whole-of-government mandates interweaving DEI into all facets of the federal government. Since then, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department under Harmeet Dhillon has filed numerous administrative actions and lawsuits to end racial preferences that disadvantage whites, and some universities, corporations, and charities have limited their DEI programs.

Conversely, many universities have defied the Supreme Court’s 2023 holding in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard by renaming or reformulating their DEI programs. Some are using a loophole in the SFFA decision that acknowledged colleges may consider how an applicant’s race affected his life.

In just the last three months, the Justice Department announced at least 25 investigations, lawsuits, and settlements involving allegedly unlawful racial preferences by the College of William & Mary, Duke University, a Jersey City college prep course, City University of New York, the state of Minnesota, the city of Evanston, Illinois, Arizona State University, University of California Davis Medical School, University of California San Diego Medical School, and 15 other medical schools.

A State Department internal review announced last week found that the Biden administration required foreign service officers to read materials on critical race theory, slavery reparations, anti-racism, and so-called “white fragility.” To be eligible for promotion, they had to discuss DEI with foreign counterparts to demonstrate “allyship.”

They were trained on how to talk about “Black Lives Matter” and “systemic racism” in foreign languages and to use progressive-approved terminology. The State Department claims that it has finally “put an end” to these practices.

Then last month, a federal judge in California ruled that the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Interior exceeded their authority by imposing conditions ending DEI in grants to California cities. Defending Education, an education watchdog, found that America’s two leading teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, are embedding DEI principles into policies for classroom use of AI.

Numerous companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Costco, Delta, and Cisco, openly continue their DEI programs, and the pace of litigation shows that many other companies and institutions covertly do so.

RELATED: California regulates everything — except the trial lawyers exploiting it

Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

In 1996, California stunned the nation when 55% of voters approved Proposition 209, which amended the state’s constitution to prohibit public institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in employment, contracting, and education. In 2020, Democrats unsuccessfully sought to repeal Prop 209.

California next tried to require public companies to include blacks and other “underrepresented” minorities on their boards. The California courts struck that down. Now, California is moving toward authorizing reparations for its black residents.

A decade after ratification of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court declared that the purpose of the Equal Protection Clause is that “the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States.”

Progressives don’t care.

On Real America’s “Get Real,” RealClear publisher David DesRosiers seeks common ground across the political spectrum. One progressive panelist recently explained that blacks require preferences because it’s not “what you know” but “who you know.” Whites know all the right people, but blacks do not. What a dated perspective. How patronizing of blacks. How wrong.

More than half of all blacks in major metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, and their children are educated in suburban schools. About 12% of the students in Ivy League colleges are black, even after SFFA. There are 61 black members in the House (14%), five black senators (5%), two Supreme Court justices (22%), and about 184 black federal judges (8%). Blacks comprise about 10% of first-year medical school students, 8% of law school students, 2% of Fortune 500 corporate CEOs, and 13% of all Americans.

I am confident that most of these people know someone who can help them and their families, as do black professional athletes, artists, and actors, as well as more than 1,000 African-American mayors, 1,000 state legislators, 14 billionaires, and about 1.4 million black millionaires.

While listening to the panelist, I thought about the middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn where I grew up. My neighbors were policemen, firemen, teachers, and plumbers. Good people. Not one of them was in a position to help me in my career or introduce me to someone who did.

I made my way with hard work and some luck, but never with help from anyone I knew growing up. Of course, I received support from people I met along the way at Columbia University and during my career, as did my black colleagues. It’s called “networking,” not racism.

RELATED: Why young men are done with Mike Pence ‘conservatism’

Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Yes, affluent people know more of the “right people” than poor people and have other advantages as well. Children from poor and low-income families typically face many obstacles due to their socioeconomic status. They often attend inferior K-12 schools and have less time for homework because of jobs or chores. They are less likely to benefit from two actively involved parents and receive, on average, less guidance and assistance.

Students from families in the bottom 25% income bracket comprise only 3% of enrollment in our most competitive colleges, while those from the top 25% comprise 72%. Studies show that high-achieving, low-income children who have lower GPAs and SAT scores than affluent children achieve college grades and graduation rates at the same level as affluent students. Their scores can be “normed” for these differences, even without special programs.

Blacks are more likely to be poor than whites, and consequently, would disproportionately benefit from this approach. That’s fine with me — and more importantly, with the Constitution. Racial preferences are unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral; helping low-income Americans is not.

I defy any children of Michelle Obama, Eric Holder, Jeh Johnson, Beyonce, or Ibram X. Kendi to deny that they have every advantage, including a terrific education and a network of contacts that millions of white Americans lack.

More than once, the U.S. Supreme Court has observed that “distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people.” As Chief Justice John Roberts declared, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

When the Constitution, federal laws, and opinion align, progressives should respect our values. Here, that would mean restoring equality and the dignity of blacks by ending the disgrace of DEI.

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

​Black lives matter, Critical race theory, Donald trump, Harmeet dhillon, Justice department, Michelle obama, Progressives, State department, Supreme court, Opinion & analysis, Dei, Race 

You might call it a school bus ride from hell.

“Everybody was screaming and stuff because they were excited to get off the bus,” a 12-year-old student told KCRA-TV after his ride Monday aboard a homebound Calaveras (California) Unified School District bus.

‘Parents are now sending their children to school to be parented instead of parenting their children at home, and that is a concern.’

The student told KCRA the bus stopped when another student climbed out of the bus through a window.

“That’s when the bus driver was like, ‘Sit down, roll up the windows,'” the student noted to the station.

The student also noted to KCRA that the driver told those aboard the bus they would have to wait for law enforcement before getting off it.

Parents who spoke with the station said students remained on the stopped bus for about an hour as more parents began arriving.

Nichole Wellington told KCRA her son called her from the bus and was scared — and she drove to the bus and asked the driver to release her son.

“I went right to the door, and I was like, ‘Dude, open the door. Let me have my kid.’ And he’s like, ‘I’m not doing that,'” Wellington noted to the station.

Wellington added to KCRA that she soon gave her son permission to climb out of the bus through a window while she waited outside.

“If he would have handled that situation and gave the parents their kids that were there, I think it probably would have went a little bit differently than it did,” Wellington noted to the station.

KCRA said video provided by a student aboard the bus shows a student climbing out of the bus through a window and a parent later climbing into the bus through a window — and confronting the driver.

RELATED: Mom and her 17-year-old daughter board middle school bus, start slugging 8th-grade boy: Report

The Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office noted to the station that deputies responded to a disturbance involving a parent and the bus driver: “During the incident, the parent struck the bus door, breaking the glass. The parent was ultimately taken into custody at the School District’s request for vandalism.”

The sheriff’s office added to KCRA that some passengers also were reported to have exited the bus through open windows, and that students should only use a bus window as an exit during an emergency.

Another parent, Rebecca Glover, whose two children also were aboard the bus, told the station she instructed her kids to remain seated and wait — and that she believes the driver was trying to keep students safe.

“There was not just one child they had to think of,” Glover told KCRA. “They had to think of every single child on that bus at that time.”

The school district told the station that the incident began with concerns over student behavior but declined to provide additional details.

“Yesterday, student behavior concerns on a district bus escalated and ultimately required law enforcement involvement,” Superintendent Kassie Meeks said in a statement, according to KCRA. “As a result of the incident, one bus route has been impacted today, Tuesday, August 25, 2026.”

The station added that the incident also raised questions among parents regarding how similar situations should be handled in the future.

Wellington told KCRA she believes another adult aboard buses to manage student behavior could help drivers better focus on the roads.

“I do feel that maybe that bus driver, especially when he’s driving, should not have to deal with all those kids by himself,” Wellington also noted to the station.

But Glover told KCRA she believes more responsibility should fall on students and their families: “Parents are now sending their children to school to be parented instead of parenting their children at home, and that is a concern.”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Arrest, California, Parents, Police, School bus, Students, Vandalism, Education, Crime 

As yet another U.S. bombing halt takes effect in the sixth month of the Iran war, the United States has demonstrated that it can smash Iran’s military piece by piece, but it continues to lose the information war in Iran, here at home, and around the world.

American forces can and do strike targets across Iran and hit Tehran’s regional allies, especially the Houthis in Yemen. By every conventional military measure, Iran is taking severe losses. Yet a growing domestic and international audience believes Tehran is fighting the United States to a standstill. Why?

Iran is gaining ground in the information war because it has adapted to the global media environment far more effectively than has Washington.

It is because too many senior American officials are still treating television as a record of an event rather than a battlefield in its own right. The Department of War treats global visual media as though it had forgotten about 1991’s Desert Storm media triumphs and as though there was no need for domestic and foreign public support. The little bit being tossed out is reminiscent of a kind of bureaucratic “let them eat cake.”

That strategy will work right up to the U.S. midterm elections when the Iranian influence campaign ever so slightly tips the balance the wrong way.

Iran is gaining ground in the information war because it has adapted to the global media environment far more effectively than has Washington.

U.S. military planners still tend to think in Clausewitzian terms: that war is the extension of politics that uses the controlled application of violence to constrain the enemy to accomplish our will. That formulation reflected the technology of the early 19th century. It does not account for an information age in which images cross the globe in milliseconds and political effects can precede, outweigh, or even replace battlefield effects.

I call this form of conflict “SOFTWAR”: the hostile use of global visual media to shape another society’s will by changing its view of reality. Three other like-minded colleagues and I have taught this kind of warfare to U.S. War College, Staff College, and Intelligence College graduate students since the early 1990s. But very few have actually adapted.

Unfortunately, the entire Iranian military and intelligence structure has adapted, since at least 2003, and has even stolen the term “SOFTWAR” in its own publications!

The Iranian use of SOFTWAR helps explain why the United States has spent billions of dollars over five months while Iranian drone and missile attacks continue and Iranian defiance continues.

Washington is using Cold War systems and industrial-age doctrine against an asymmetric enemy that has organized itself for the infosphere.

RELATED: Want to squeeze Iran? Trump has one clear move

EDUARDO SOTERAS/AFP/Getty Images

Iran’s theocratic dictatorship is fighting a four-dimensional asymmetric war across land, sea, air, and information. Its military losses have reduced its ability to retaliate against U.S. forces directly.

Its remaining attacks are therefore selected less for battlefield effect than for global media impact: Oil tankers and cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a desalination facility and power plant in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil hub, a liquefied natural gas facility in Qatar, a U.S. communications center in Jordan, and American naval facilities in Bahrain all produce frightening images and headlines.

Iran times its “onesie-twosie” counterattacks in its own early-morning hours, so that the images arrive during the American prime-time news cycle. The objective is not merely to damage a target but to shape the story being told about the war here, there, and around the world.

Meanwhile, Iranian propagandists study the American audience, especially younger people hostile to the Trump administration, and target them with AI-generated Lego-character videos. The goal is to unite disparate American factions, erode domestic support for the war, and above all, influence the midterm elections.

When Iranian military officials such as Brig. Gen. Ebrahim Zolfaghari or IRGC spokesman Abolfazl Shekarchi speak, they are usually seated behind a desk with the Iranian flag visible. Their uniforms are immaculate, their beards trimmed, and their war faces dramatically lit. Most importantly, they look through the camera lens directly at the audience. This is television 101.

Viewers who speak no Farsi still receive the intended message: discipline, seriousness, and defiance.

American military spokesmen often squander the same opportunity. They ignore, disdain, or have never considered acquiring the skills to effectively communicate on television.

General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is informed and capable, but at his Pentagon press conferences, his televised manner is that of a serious squadron commander consulting his notes as he briefs the weather to the three rows in front of him.

He should instead address the millions watching beyond the room. Place the camera a few feet away, frame him from mid-bicep to just above the head, and have him look through the lens to establish and maintain direct eye contact with the intended audience. The reporters can sit on either side. The difference would be immediate.

The United States is not losing the military contest with Iran. It is losing the contest over what the world believes the military contest means.

Admiral Brad Cooper, the combatant commander of U.S. Central Command, makes a similar mistake. He often appears in a green camouflage uniform designed to defeat electro-optical observation — including television — rather than in the Navy service uniform designed to convey authority, experience, and command. He also stands too far from the camera for viewers to read his face. His folksy Ozzie Nelson manner may work before Congress or the Navy League. It does not put an enemy on his heels.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, whose warrior credentials are undisputed and whose television experience is well noted, knows more about television perception than his military subordinates but is underperforming. To quote from his address to general officers last year: “We just have to be honest. We have to say with our mouths what we see with our eyes … to point out the obvious things right in front of us.”

So Mr. Secretary, from an instructor who has been teaching strategic information warfare since you were in grade school, here are the obvious things in front of us: You are no longer pitching to the Fox demographic. You need a tighter camera shot, better lighting, and a visual style designed for wartime communication.

Your presentation is crowded with distractions: a tight European-cut suit, patterned tie, clashing flag pocket square, and hair product that makes your scalp appear to glisten under studio lights. Deep-set eyes require careful lighting. Without it, viewers may read strain or evasiveness where none exists. The Pentagon has fixed studio lighting for briefings at the podium, and it should be properly adjusted for you.

Alfred Hitchcock understood the rule: Dress the leading man simply and light him properly so the audience watches the man rather than the costume. Cary Grant in “North by Northwest” remains a timeless example.

Iranian officials would earn an “A” in my information warfare seminar, I’m sorry to say. Too many American officials are still treating television as a record of an event rather than a battlefield in its own right. The American officials bungling this information war would receive an “F” … and three hours of detention.

That needs to change. Now.

The United States inadvertently helps Tehran by concentrating almost exclusively on visible military targets while leaving the regime’s domestic television system intact.

Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting continues to broadcast dozens of TV channels across Iran giving only the mullahs’ view of the war. Thus, the only information that the vast majority of Iranians are getting comes from television and radio stations controlled by the Iranian government. With access to the internet long ago cut off by the regime, the only “news” the body politic receives is pure propaganda.

Meanwhile, Washington destroys weapons and commanders but fails to effectively contest the information environment that gives those losses political meaning. It seems no one has thought to bomb the TV transmitters and follow up with drones to broadcast information to the Iranian body politic.

Iran’s real engine is that selfsame body politic — a population that has endured repression and the reported killing of tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators. Yet today, outside of a small fraction of Iranians who may have Starlink receivers, the United States has no coherent means of speaking directly to those people.

It’s not as though the United States lacks the technological wherewithal; the military has simply weakened its own capacity to respond. In 2024, the military decommissioned the EC-130J aircraft of the 193rd Special Operations Wing, the only U.S. airborne radio and television broadcast platform.

The aircraft were judged too vulnerable for modern combat, but no announced drone replacement has assumed the mission.

RELATED: The Navy has a choice: Get better or become less relevant

HUGE PERALTA/AFP/Getty Images

The solution is simply to take any drones with the proper range and endurance, such as the dozen or so now-obsolete Predators sitting in the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, and strip them of their reconnaissance gear. Next, rewire the on-board Ku satellite antenna to optimize its broadband receive function and then hook that to any Phase Alternating Line TV transmitter and dipole antenna compatible with Iranian home TV receivers.

By flying the drones from semi-autonomous Kurd areas in eastern Iraq 300 miles to Tehran, each will have about a five-hour endurance over downtown. By orbiting at or above 15,000 feet, the drones will not be easy targets for shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles.

As the drones reach their selected orbit points, precision-guided munitions launched from distant attack aircraft take out all the transmissions towers in the area, leaving the airwaves clear for live programming from the drones.

The Iranian dictatorship, which absolutely must control information flow, will then be forced to turn on its radars so that its sophisticated antiaircraft missiles can shoot down the drones. Except that when they do, every U.S. air defense suppression weapon known to man will be directed at those sites.

Programming the video from the drones on a real-time basis can be fixed by reactivating the 1st Joint SOFTWAR Unit (Virtual) that I designed for the War Department’s Office of Net Assessment a decade ago. That unit, composed of some 50 men and women from the California Air and Army National Guard, used their state-of-the art civilian occupational skills from Hollywood and the Silicon Valley to pioneer new and effective methods of information warfare.

Unfortunately, the Obama sequestration chopped the 1st JSU(V) with the grace of a blunt meat ax. But fortunately, it could be up and running again in about two weeks.

At present, America possesses overwhelming kinetic power but lacks a direct means of reaching the Iranian public at scale: a doctrine that resembles a mechanic who responds to an engine warning light by cutting the wire to the bulb. The warning disappears. The failing engine problem remains.

The United States is not losing the military contest with Iran. It is losing the contest over what the world believes the military contest means.

A nation can destroy every designated military target and still lose the war if its enemy controls the images, the timing, and the story. Information warfare is not an optional elective. It is the core course. And America, so far, is failing.

The answer is a genuinely four-dimensional American military capable of operating on land, at sea, in the air, and throughout the infosphere. Information warfare should be driving the organization and the direction of the campaign, with kinetic operations supporting the strategic influence objectives — not the other way around. Iran already understands this hierarchy.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

​Department of war, Desert storm, Information warfare, Iran war, Iranian drone, Iranian influence campaign, Missile attacks, Propaganda, Softwar, Tehran, United states, Opinion & analysis 

A Kentucky mother was arrested for her reaction to seeing her husband abusing their 3-month-old daughter from security cameras as she was working, according to police.

Carleena Webb returned from work on Aug. 21 to confront 36-year-old Shaun Webb about the alleged abuse but instead of removing the child, police said she went back to work.

Webb admitted to suffocating his daughter by covering her mouth and nose, not to harm but to deprive her of oxygen, as he put it, to ‘train the behavior.’

The 33-year-old mother was charged with first-degree criminal abuse for leaving the child in her husband’s care.

The mother did not report the abuse to police, nor did she seek medical treatment for her daughter.

Police were made aware of the alleged abuse by the parents’ family, who live out of state. They also provided video of the abuse.

“We get to the house as quickly as we can to get those children out of that environment and certainly separated from the person who is perpetuating some pretty horrific violence against them,” said Sheriff’s Major Philip Ridgel.

Ridgel said that the man confessed to the abuse when he was questioned by officers.

Police said the video showed him slapping her with an open hand while she lay on the ground crying.

Webb allegedly told police that children are like dogs, explaining, “You have to train them and set boundaries.”

He also said that his daughter’s crying triggered him like “nails on a chalkboard.”

Webb admitted to suffocating his daughter by covering her mouth and nose, not to harm but to deprive her of oxygen, as he put it, to “train the behavior.”

The video allegedly showed him covering her face for 10-13 seconds at a time.

Police said he was arrested at the end of the interview and transported to the Boone County Jail.

RELATED: ‘Unfathomable’: Prosecutor unveils shocking details in ‘co-parent’ torture death of 7-year-old

He was charged with 10 class B felony counts of criminal abuse in the first degree.

The mother was arrested three days later and also transported to the same jail.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Child abuse, Surveillance video, Kentucky, Crime 

America is in a schizophrenic mash-up that reverses childhood innocence and adult licentiousness. We treat children as if they were louche, hedonistic adults while we treat grown-ups like they’re still learning primary colors on wooden blocks.

A visit to a restaurant in a tourist town in Vermont crystallized it for me. Stay with me while I set this up, then we’ll take a visit to an eatery I call There Will Be Pictures in Bright, Primary Colors!

I asked a kid of about 14 for a knife. He looked at me blankly. So I went native: ‘A sticky-downy sharpie?’

This may be a new thought for some people, this reversal of childhood and adulthood. But it’s easy to see once you have your eyes pointed to it.

‘Drag kids’

America is a country where it’s legal and socially praised to chemically and sexually mutilate abused children. We call these abused children “transgender kids.”

There’s a reason President Trump had to announce that public schools risk losing federal funding if they participate in this depraved farce. It has indeed become normalized to cry happy tears while we watch parents (nearly always mothers) destroy their children’s bodies and minds with hormones, surgeries, and the lie that they can become the opposite sex.

This brutality started with so-called “drag kids”: minor boys dressed up like female prostitutes and paraded in gay bars and before cameras shaking their “moneymakers.” Remember “Desmond Is Amazing,” the “drag kid” featured gyrating and affecting a transvestite hooker attitude? Adults started filming his abuse and putting it on social media in 2015. Within a few years, parents were going beyond dresses and all the way to chemical castration, cross-sex hormones, and actual surgical castration.

Hufflepuff hell

Let’s look at the other side, the childification of adulthood. I started noticing it in the 2010s when fully grown adults were putting bumper stickers on their cars telling everyone what Harry Potter “house” they belonged to. Since when did 30-year-olds cling to a series of children’s books about witches and wizards to “identify” themselves to their grown peers?

We used to look forward to adulthood. But something changed with the Millennial generation: Teenagers were begging to remain children for the first time in history. (Boomers and Gen Xers: This is our fault. We “raised” them.) Sixteen-year-olds once longed for the independence of a driver’s license. Today? Why learn to drive when Uber will cart you around like an entitled toddler (car seat not included)?

These two inversions — the adultification of childhood and the childification of adulthood — collide in a supernova at a restaurant I recently visited, a taco place in one of those Vermont tourist towns tucked between two peaks of the Green Mountains. Let’s call it Ms. Rachel’s Taqueria and Play-Skool.

‘Saccharine babble’

Why “Ms. Rachel’s”? Because the tone of the place is like that awful YouTube woman who sings saccharine babble to babies on YouTube and gets 20 million mothers watching it.

“Ms. Rachel’s” has a lot going for it. The food was great, and the staff were all friendly, which is a rarity in New England these days.

But it’s got a lot going against it too, and that starts with the staff’s stage names. Our waiter was a handsome Irish guy of about 19 years. He announced what I assume is his “Mexican name” to the table behind us.

“Hi there, I’m going to be taking care of you today,” he said to the party next to us. “My name is Hooley-Anne.”

Hooley-Anne’s name was obviously “Julian,” but I suppose that wouldn’t have been “authentic” enough. Hooley-Anne did a great job, but it was impossible to keep a straight face talking to him after this. OK, I confess: I had a giggle attack that had my hands over my face while I cried silently with shaking shoulders.

When the food got there, it arrived on an aluminum baking sheet without utensils.

I asked a kid of about 14 for a knife. He looked at me blankly. So I went native: “A sticky-downy sharpie?”

He brought me a butter knife.

RELATED: Want yesterday’s quality today? Stop ‘upgrading’ your appliances

Found Image Holdings Inc./smartstock/Getty Images

Tummy trouble

The problems continued with the menus.

“Greens and other fun colors.” “Bevs.”

It got worse when you flipped it over. Apparently adult diners need to be guided through concepts like “appetizers” and “tacos” and “burritos.”

Get it? “Horizontal eats”? In case you didn’t understand special-needs-ese, that means “tacos.” But what about the vertical “eats”?

Tee-hee-giggle-coo! Isn’t it just adorable?

No, it’s insulting. If you’re at least 45 years old, cast your mind back 20 years. I don’t think you remember being regularly spoken to (or written to) in the tone of voice we associate with a “Romper Room” hostess.

Now it’s everywhere. You see it in the ugly faux-cubist “art style” that dominates pamphlets and announcements called “Corporate Memphis.” It’s all over chain restaurant menus that call sandwiches “sammies” (giggle-coo!) or “hand-helds.”

How long until it’s just “eatables”?

Potty humor

The other side of this coin showed up when I went to the bathroom at “Ms. Rachel’s.” Remember, these are the same bathrooms that adults and children use.

There are multiple problems.

1. The restaurant is showing off its woke credentials by conspicuously bragging that it doesn’t care what “gender” you are — you can even be a Sasquatch or an alien (giggle-coo)!

2. “Cute” vulgarity — a cartoon depiction of feces shaped like soft-serve ice cream in a kiddy drawing style — tells children there’s no such thing as respectable public behavior. Potty humor is just normal now, even in a place where you eat.

Yes, I am saying that I think this kind of display harms children. This is the cultural, visual, and conceptual background that is forming children’s character. The adults have abandoned propriety, and they’re shoving it in children’s faces. This may be less extreme than the broad daylight displays of sexual depravity that people call “Pride parades” for “families,” but it’s only a matter of degree.

But what do I know? I’m just a stupid old Boomer, even though I’m only 52 (everyone goes from hip-mod-with-it-youth to “stupid Boomer” without stopping at Gen X these days). Why can’t I just let people enjoy things?

Hope I haven’t yucked your yum.

​Chemical castration, Culture, Donald trump, Drag kids, Gen x, Harry potter, Lgbtq, Lifestyle, Millennials, Transgender kids, Vermont, Intervention