Traditionally, one advantage of living in rural America was the ability to escape insufferable leftists. The trade-offs were obvious: fewer jobs, fewer restaurants, less entertainment, and fewer institutions built for upward mobility. But distance from liberal cultural centers meant the average community could preserve a sane, conservative, patriotic outlook — the kind of place where normal people could still breathe without asking permission from their urban cultural commissars.

That escape has narrowed. As media and universities became more radical, their disciples moved into rural America through government-mandated institutions like schools and libraries. Progressivism became harder to avoid no matter how far someone moved from the city. Thus the hicklib was born.

The fail-lib was promised luxury and elite influence. Now she serves people she despises while searching for any opportunity to make their lives worse.

The hicklib is usually a social outcast, a failson who needs a moral explanation for why he hates the community he never fit into. His resentment searches for a theory that will dignify his rage, and the progressive missionaries installed in local institutions are happy to provide one.

Teachers tell the hicklib his country is evil. His family and neighbors are racist, sexist, backward religious fanatics destroying the lives of minorities who do not even live in town. The white Christian culture that dominates rural America is primitive and responsible for the evils of the world. The hicklib’s failure to fit in becomes proof of moral superiority.

So the hicklib shows up at town council meetings in a Black Lives Matter shirt to denounce minority oppression in a community with no actual black people. That absence, naturally, becomes further proof of the town’s intolerance. He loudly organizes Pride events attended by two other hicklibs. The clique stages protests, distributes flyers, and imitates urban activist rituals.

By practicing the sacraments of their faith, they hope to summon the spirit of the age to judge their reactionary little town.

The hicklib has become one of rural America’s petty plagues. But as the value of college degrees collapses, a new breed is emerging: the fail-lib.

The fail-lib worked hard in high school and gave progressive teachers every approved answer. She wrote her college entrance essay on the oppression of transwomen of color in coal mining. On campus, she became an activist. She secured a degree in some woke humanities discipline and earned straight A’s by repeating everything her communist professors told her.

The path to success was laid out before the fail-lib was born. She followed it perfectly. All that remained was the cushy corporate HR job and her rightful place making ordinary people miserable.

Then the plan failed.

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Blaze Media Illustration

The college degree that cost $100,000 was supposed to guarantee success. The debt would be worth it because the credential would deliver a salary large enough for an apartment, a car, and monthly student loan payments. But the degree was not merely about financial security. It was also a symbol of status. College graduates were supposed to rule over the simple plebs who never left home.

The degree would confer wealth, power, and privilege. Instead, it turned out that too many people held degrees and too few jobs required them. Corporations began cutting HR departments that wasted resources and reduced productivity. Poor oppressed immigrant workers somehow found work while the fail-lib remained unemployed, though a good progressive would never complain. She could never explain how, but she knew the white Christian patriarchy was responsible for this injustice.

Earlier generations of college students had an insult for the ordinary residents of college towns: townies. The townie was contemptible because he was not merely passing through before collecting a credential and moving on to rule the world. He belonged to the place the student planned to use and abandon.

The arrogance required to insult the permanent residents of a community while you are a temporary visitor is staggering, but the slur was common. It revealed the sneering condescension of the would-be liberal elite. Now the tables have turned.

The college degree was once a ticket to the top. Now it is an expensive lottery ticket with worsening odds. More graduates emerge from extended stays in higher education with mountains of debt and few prospects.

The fail-lib spends a year unemployed, desperately seeking even the entry-level positions her fancy degree was supposed to let her bypass. After burning through savings and taking on more debt, she accepts a management job at the local Starbucks or retail outlet. If she gets lucky, she might run the local Apple Store.

The hicklib may be insufferable, but the fail-lib is worse. She was destined to leave the college town behind and move to a big liberal city like New York. She was supposed to be the person ordering lattes and $30 burrito bowls for important work lunches, not the person making them. Once, she mocked the parochial townies trapped in their backward existence. Now she is stuck among them with no escape.

RELATED: Almonds feed a people. AI feeds a machine.

Blaze Media Illustration

The fail-lib is not merely trapped in the backwater town. She is poor and low-status. A management job at Target might provide a decent life in a small town where prices remain low, but the fail-lib has a mountain of student debt she can never repay on a retail wage.

Plumbers, cops, firefighters, and mechanics all seem to make more money and enjoy more status in the community. The fail-lib was promised luxury and elite influence. Now she serves people she despises while searching for any opportunity to make their lives worse.

Artificial intelligence will intensify the problem. The bureaucratic make-work jobs progressive college graduates once dominated are among the easiest to automate, consolidate, or eliminate. The bitter entitlement of a psychology major with $100,000 in debt helping you find the cereal aisle will become more common.

The fail-lib may make less money than you. She may be less respected than you. She may even be despised by the townies she once mocked. But in her heart, she knows she is superior.

Nothing could convince her otherwise.

And she will spit in your burrito just to remind you who was supposed to be in charge.

​Opinion & analysis, Woke culture, Colleges and universities, Leftism, Rural america, Christianity, Employment, Human resources, Artificial intelligence, Jobs, Hicklibs, Debt, Affordability 

A pilot allegedly threatened to call authorities this month over a Wi-Fi name that was determined to be a potential security threat.

The story came from a person who claimed to have been a passenger on a United Airlines flight that featured an awkward moment when the pilot addressed the travelers and issued a warning.

‘You could feel everyone looking around.’

The alleged passenger said the pilot came over the speaker “sounding extremely serious” and said the name of the Wi-Fi hot spot was being interpreted as a potential threat and security issue, Simply Flying reported.

According to the witness, the pilot warned whoever was hosting the network labeled “Free Palestine, F Zionists” had “30 seconds” to disable it or remove it from public view or he was going to have the FBI meet the aircraft when it landed.

“FBI will meet the plane,” the passenger recalled hearing.

“The entire cabin got dead silent,” the witness alleged in a post on Reddit. “You could feel everyone looking around, trying to figure out who it was.”

RELATED: Dear airlines, please stop pitching your credit cards at 33,000 feet

Karl Gehring/Denver Post/Getty Images

The social media user also claimed that while some of the passengers looked nervous, others were laughing because they thought it was an absurd situation.

The storyteller said it felt like an example of hyper-political-polarization, where regular people are bringing political messaging into almost any situation, causing institutions to react with full force rather than risk missing a warning sign.

The quick escalation is what the storyteller found most startling, noting that there was no request from a flight attendant, but rather a serious public announcement that turned an “edgy hot spot name” into a security issue.

However, it is not irregular for pilots or flight crews to raise the alarm over Wi-Fi names out of an abundance of caution.

RELATED: ‘Fewer choices = higher prices’: Elizabeth Warren laments Spirit shutdown she helped cause

Nasir Kachroo/NurPhoto/Getty Images

In February, Hungarian airline Wizz Air had fighter jets scrambled during a flight from London to Tel Aviv over a Wi-Fi network labeled “Terrorist” written in Arabic. According to PYOK, security forces were waiting to meet the plane at Ben Gurion Airport.

PYOK also reported on an incident from January when fighter jets from both France and Spain were scrambled over a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to Barcelona. This incident related to a network named “I HAVE A BOMB. EVERYONE WILL DIE.”

United Airlines did not respond to a request for comment about the recent alleged incident.

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​News, United airlines, Fbi, Aviation, Terrorism, Politics 

This week at Google I/O 2026, the company announced what it called “the biggest upgrade to our Search box in over 25 years.” Translation: It’s officially done pretending Search is about helping you find websites.

The centerpiece is a new AI-powered Search box running Gemini 3.5 Flash. It expands as you type, accepts text, images, files, videos, even Chrome tabs as input, and spits back AI-generated answers where the blue links used to be. Google also unveiled “Search Agents,” AI systems that monitor blogs, news sites, and social platforms around the clock to proactively ping you when something matching your criteria happens. There are agentic booking features and custom AI-generated interfaces that build dashboards instead of sending you to actual websites.

It’s seamless. It’s free. And the traffic to the websites that actually created the information? That’s not Google’s problem anymore.

Google’s AI is a factory trawler scooping up everything in its path, indifferent to whether the fishery collapses behind it.

A slow suffocation

This didn’t happen overnight. Google has spent three years systematically strangling the open web that built its empire.

September 2023: The helpful content update

Google pushed an algorithm change targeting content “created for search engines instead of people.” Sounded reasonable. Then, independent publishers watched their traffic crater. Recipe bloggers, how-to sites, product reviewers. They never got that traffic back. The message was clear: Your content exists at Google’s pleasure, and Google decides what’s “helpful.”

March 2024: Core and spam update

Google promised to reduce “low-quality, unoriginal content” by 40%. It folded the Helpful Content system into its core engine and introduced spam policies against scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse, and expired domain abuse. The targets sounded like bottom-feeders. By April, Google announced it had exceeded its 45% reduction target. Translation: 45% fewer reasons to visit the websites that used to rank.

From there, the updates kept coming: August 2024 core update, November 2024 core update, December 2024 core update, March 2025 core update, June 2025 core update, August 2025 spam update, December 2025 core update, and March 2026 core update. Nine major confirmed updates in under two years, each tracked by Search Engine Journal. Each one was another announcement that Google had “improved quality,” with no real transparency, no appeals process worth the name, and zero accountability for the livelihoods it flattened.

What the numbers actually say

The data is not ambiguous. Multiple independent studies tracking billions of search queries tell the same story, compiled in aggregate by the SEO Spot from Chartbeat, Seer Interactive, Ahrefs, and similar data providers:

Organic click-through rates on queries with AI Overviews dropped 61% between June 2024 and September 2025;Position-one CTR fell 34.5% on queries triggering AI Overviews;Overall CTR across the top 10 positions dropped 36% as AI Overviews went from under 7% of queries to nearly 30%;Global Google search traffic to publishers dropped 33% year-over-year; in the U.S. it fell 38%;When an AI Overview appears, only 8% of users click any link below it. When there’s no AI summary, 15% do;58.5% of U.S. Google searches result in zero clicks at all.

Even when users click a link inside an AI Overview, 43% of those links don’t go to external websites. They just run another Google search. Google replaced the web with a layer of summaries that links back to itself.

The casualties

NPR reported extensively on the damage. The travel blog the Planet D lost 90% of its traffic and shut down entirely. CNN dropped roughly 30% year-over-year. Business Insider and HuffPost both saw traffic plunge around 40% year-over-year. Business Insider cut 21% of staff. NPR reported the Verge’s publisher calling it an “extinction-level event.”

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Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images

Digital Content Next, a trade organization for digital publishers, measured median referral traffic from Google Search down 10% in just eight weeks. Non-news brands lost 14%. News brands lost 7%. Declines outnumbered gains two to one. Meanwhile, Google’s own advertising revenue shifted from a roughly 50/50 split with the rest of the web to over 90% flowing to Google itself.

The question Google won’t answer

Here’s the part that should worry everyone, not just publishers.

Google’s AI is trained on the open web. It ingests billions of pages written by journalists, researchers, hobbyists, bloggers, doctors, chefs, and travelers. It paraphrases their work, synthesizes their expertise, and presents it as its own answer. Then, it sends fewer readers to the originals. Then, the originals, starved of traffic and revenue, stop publishing. Then, the AI has nothing fresh to train on.

This is the information ecosystem equivalent of overfishing. Google’s AI is a factory trawler scooping up everything in its path, indifferent to whether the fishery collapses behind it. The only thing that could force a course correction is monopoly accountability, and Google is fighting that on multiple fronts, from the Justice Department’s search antitrust case to EU antitrust complaints.

Google’s sitting on 95% of the mobile search market. Publishers who want out of AI training must opt out of Google Search entirely, which is corporate suicide. As the News/Media Alliance put it, “Google is using our content without compensation, offering no meaningful way to opt out, and then turning around and using that same content to compete with us.”

The endgame

What Google announced at I/O 2026 isn’t innovation. It’s enclosure, the final stage of the monopoly playbook. You build the infrastructure everyone depends on. Then, you extract rent. Then, you replace the producers entirely and capture all value inside the platform.

The Search Agents Google launches this summer for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers will monitor publisher blogs and news sites in real time, pull the information, and deliver it to users without the user ever visiting the source. Google’s Search box won’t just summarize the web anymore. It will replace it.

Google executives say users prefer this. Sure. People prefer free music, free news, and free social media too, right up until the platforms that gave them those things finish strip-mining the industries that produced them.

The open web worked because it was a virtuous cycle. Search engines indexed content. Users clicked through. Publishers earned revenue. Publishers produced more content. Search engines had better results. Google’s AI strategy breaks that cycle. It takes the content, kills the revenue, and hopes nobody notices that an AI trained on a shrinking corpus of old information is just a very expensive echo.

Liz Reid, Google’s head of Search, called the new Search box “the biggest upgrade in 25 years.” For the publishers who built the web Google is now devouring, it’s the biggest downgrade since Search began.

​Tech, Google, Search, Ai 

An elderly woman, her 50-year-old daughter, and her 24-year-old granddaughter were all arrested Wednesday for the alleged “horrific abuse and torture” of a 7-year-old girl.

Paramedics were sent to a residence in Bayport on December 29, 2025, at about 10:30 a.m. after being alerted about a child who was unresponsive.

‘This was not an alleged single act of violence. It was months of alleged systematic cruelty and sadistic abuse, meticulously documented.’

Jor’Dynn Duncan was rushed to NYU Langone Hospital-Suffolk, where she was pronounced dead from a cardiac arrest.

Prosecutors said Barbara Renner, her daughter Emily Kelly, and Kelly’s daughter Elyssa Seymore each had a part in the “prolonged torture, abuse, and the brutal murder” of the “defenseless, innocent child.”

The Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office was able to document 90 injuries to the child’s body at her death, which led to a homicide investigation being opened.

Investigators said Duncan was the daughter of Kelly’s fiance, who is incarcerated, and that Kelly requested the child be placed into her care in Dec. 2024 by Child Protective Services. By April 2025, Kelly obtained full custody and guardianship of the girl.

Digital evidence from Kelly’s cell phone and cloud services allegedly revealed “prolonged abuse and torture” of the girl that included physical injuries, prolonged restraint, and lack of medical attention for the injuries since Jan. 2025.

One of the texts allegedly read, “You can’t hit her face. You gotta hit her body if you going to hit her. That’s another thing we gotta hide.”

The girl was also kept from attending school for a total of 40 days, allegedly in order to conceal the torture and her injuries.

Kelly was indicted on numerous charges that included murder in the second degree, Renner was indicted for second-degree manslaughter, and Seymore was indicted for unlawful imprisonment in the first degree.

“This was not an alleged single act of violence,” Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney said. “It was months of alleged systematic cruelty and sadistic abuse, meticulously documented. The child was allegedly left to die while these defendants watched her deteriorate. No child should ever endure such horror, and we will seek justice for Jor’Dynn.”

Officials are now calling for accountability from the government organizations that were intended to detect these kinds of cases.

“How was this child placed in the hands of somebody who could be this unfit and this abusive?” County Legislator Rebecca Sanin asked. “How could the school not see her for 40 days over the course of a year and not ask questions?”

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Neighbors said they were shocked to find out about the horrific abuse allegedly perpetrated on the child.

“The cutest little thing that you want to see in your life,” Tim Lowe said. “I never saw any marks on her face.”

Relatives of the 7-year-old girl refused to comment to CBS News about the case.

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​Cardiac arrest, Child murder, Child torture, Child guardian murder, Crime 

The left has developed a strange blind spot when it comes to artificial substitution. In entertainment, its leading voices warn that AI threatens to replace real actors, writers, voices, and images. In women’s sports, many of those same voices insist that biological reality can be redefined without consequence.

The two issues may seem unrelated. They are not. Both turn on the danger of allowing what is artificial to replace what is real.

The left sees the problem when the artificial threatens its own institutions. It refuses to see the problem when women and girls pay the price.

Charlize Theron recently criticized Timothée Chalamet for disparaging ballet and opera after he said, “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though, like, no one cares about this anymore.’”

Theron not only defended ballet and opera but also warned performers to recognize the threat AI poses to their livelihoods.

“In 10 years, AI is going to be able to do Timothée’s job,” she said, “but it will not be able to replace a person on a stage dancing live.”

Theron is hardly the first performer to sound the alarm. Earlier this year, a 15-second, AI-generated fight scene featuring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise sent shock waves through Hollywood. The clip looked polished, and its creator claimed to have produced it with a two-sentence prompt. One top screenwriter responded bluntly: “I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us.”

Hollywood has reason to worry. AI-generated images, voices, scripts, scenes, and performances could overwhelm an industry already weakened by self-inflicted creative problems and growing competition from other forms of entertainment. Actors, writers, and many others could find themselves displaced by a few keystrokes.

On this point, the left sees the threat clearly. Hollywood, one of the left’s most reliable cultural strongholds, understands what happens when an artificial substitute can perform at or above the level of the real thing.

Yet many celebrities, athletes, journalists, and activists refuse to apply the same logic to women’s sports. They insist that biological males who identify as transgender should compete against women. Many more likely stay silent because objecting would alienate their peers.

The difference in perspective is stunning.

If the left fears AI-generated images, voices, and writing because artificial creations can displace real performers, why does it deny the consequences of allowing biological males to compete against biological females?

RELATED: Jack Osbourne takes message to Capitol Hill: Celebrities need to ‘keep their mouth shut’ about politics

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

The threat to female athletes is clear. Biological males have a competitive advantage in female sports. Beyond the headline examples of individual male athletes dominating female competition, many women’s teams have competed against male teams — often much younger male teams — and lost decisively.

The advantage moves in only one direction. Biological females do not enter men’s sports and outperform males at scale. The controversy exists because biological males entering female competition changes the competitive field.

The more institutions accept that advantage, the more common it will become. That is why advocates fight so aggressively for acceptance. The goal is not merely access in a few isolated cases. The goal is normalization.

The stakes grow as athletes move up the competitive ladder. At first, the rewards involve satisfaction, recognition, and the opportunity to keep playing. But anyone who follows sports understands that money enters the picture early.

High school athletes compete for scholarships, especially at expensive private schools. College athletes compete for even more valuable scholarships. Those opportunities can shape a young person’s education, finances, and future. At the top of the ladder, professional athletes earn money for competing and often gain endorsement opportunities as well.

As the rewards grow, so does the incentive to win. Economics does not change because an athlete identifies as transgender. Without clear rules reserving female sports for biological females, more biological males will have an incentive to enter female competition.

The current debate exists because this is already happening.

The threat does not exist only at elite levels. Biological males displacing females anywhere on the ladder can affect who keeps playing, who develops, and who moves up. Girls who do not get a fair chance in grade school may never prepare for high school sports. Girls pushed aside in high school may never reach college competition. Women displaced in college may never receive professional opportunities.

Title IX was created to address exactly this problem: to ensure that women and girls have equal opportunities to compete in sports. That meant female sports, with females competing against other females.

The left once championed that principle. Now it champions the greatest threat to it.

The irony should be impossible to miss. The same cultural class that fears AI because it can imitate and displace real performers now insists women should accept biological males in their own sports. Hollywood understands substitution when the threatened class includes actors, writers, and directors. It becomes strangely confused when the threatened class includes girls and women.

Artificial creations threaten the real when they can perform at similar or superior levels. AI can. Biological males in female sports can too.

The left sees the problem when the artificial threatens its own institutions.

It refuses to see the problem when women and girls pay the price.

​Charlize theron, Timothee chalamet, Ai, Hollywood, Title ix, The left, Women’s sports, Ai images, Opinion & analysis 

Conventional wisdom suggests that the 2028 Republican primary is shaping up to be a chaotic affair. Supposedly, it’s anyone’s game, as Vice President JD Vance is weaker than he appears, while potential adversaries, including Marco Rubio, are gaining an advantage.

This view is untethered from reality. The fact is that the 2028 Republican nomination is Vance’s to lose. The faulty prevailing opinion has calcified for two reasons: a poor reading of history and a deficient understanding of the political landscape.

JD Vance has had one of the fastest rises to the executive branch in modern American political history.

“George H.W. Bush is the only sitting vice president in the last 190 years (since 1836) to be elected president,” an MS Now analyst recently wrote. He is not alone: the “190 years” number has been trotted out by those who contend that Vance stands little chance of winning the presidency in 2028.

On its face, this line of argument should be ignored because comparing the politics of 1840s America to the present is a fool’s errand: The country has changed significantly in that time, as has the party system.

Looking to history

But even if one disregards this, another historical fact emerges: For much of American history, the vice presidency wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm piss,” to borrow an infamous line from Vice President John Nance Garner. It was mostly used to balance a presidential ticket geographically and had little power on its own, as the office was typically a capstone to one’s career rather than a stepping stone to the presidency.

Particularly ambitious politicians instead sought the position of secretary of state, which often acted as the president’s chief adviser. Every commander in chief from Thomas Jefferson through John Quincy Adams served as secretary of state, as did Martin Van Buren, James Buchanan, and a host of individuals who lost the presidency.

Andrew Jackson broke this mold by picking Van Buren, his ideological successor, to be his vice president, as Jackson was specifically seeking to undertake a long-term political revolution. He was the only president to select his second-in-command for such a purpose — that is, until Donald Trump picked JD Vance.

Since Van Buren won the presidency in 1836, only three incumbent vice presidents sought to succeed a two-term president of their own party: Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, and Al Gore. Nixon and Gore lost razor-close contests. Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and would likely have been president had the infamous butterfly ballot not confused a few thousand voters in liberal Palm Beach County into voting for arch-conservative Pat Buchanan.

Out of the remaining incumbent vice presidents who ran, two did so after one-term presidents suddenly dropped out — Hubert Humphrey after Lyndon Johnson and Kamala Harris after Joe Biden — and were therefore forced to run abbreviated campaigns. The third, John Breckinridge, ran in the four-way 1860 election in which his party was split in two, a situation that’s not analogous to today. The final incumbent vice president, John Adams, ran after George Washington and won, but he did so under an entirely different electoral system.

The tally of incumbent vice presidents running after a two-termer of their same party is two large wins (Van Buren and Bush) and two incredibly narrow losses (Nixon and Gore). The wins tally jumps to three if Adams is included.

This is hardly a reason for Vance to be concerned with history being a hindrance to his hopes of winning the White House. Plus, neither Nixon nor Gore was running as specific ideological inheritors of their respective presidents’ legacies. Gore arguably ran away from Bill Clinton, while Van Buren and Bush were successors — and they both won.

RELATED: The Trump administration is cracking down on fraud

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Ahead of the pack

“It’s anybody’s to win” is a second piece of conventional wisdom stated without evidence. Polling on the GOP 2028 nomination so far reveals an indisputable picture: Vance is dominating his competition. The RealClearPolitics average has him at around 40% — which is 20% ahead of his nearest competitor. A recent Echelon poll had Vance similarly ahead, as have a bevy of others.

Only a recent Atlas poll shows Marco Rubio leading Vance. But there are numerous reasons to question that poll, from the sudden massive swing to Rubio to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leading the pack among Democrats.

In the Trump era, political analysts have grown accustomed to one man dominating the Republican Party’s primary contests. But Vance’s dominance two years out is also historically stronger than most previous nominees not named Trump.

In 1986, although George H.W. Bush was leading, he was stuck at 29%, in front of Senator Howard Baker by only 13%. In 1998, his son George W. Bush led with 30%, only 16% ahead of Elizabeth Dole, who had not yet been elected senator. Other than Trump, no Republican has so clearly led the field in the history of modern presidential primary elections — and Vance has done this without a definitive Trump endorsement, which would likely send his numbers even higher.

Then there are Vance’s prospective challengers. Though Secretary of State Marco Rubio often places second, the secretary has repeatedly ruled out running against Vance, saying at one point, “If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.” The specificity of Rubio’s statements, seen with his and Vance’s repeated expressions of praise for each other, would make any Rubio candidacy extraordinarily difficult.

Running now would destroy Rubio’s relationship with Vance and his wing of the party, and arguably with some in the administration. Rubio would need to explain why he changed his mind on Vance, and he would also likely have to resign from office a year and a half early to campaign. Many outside observers insist that a race between the two is on, but that seems based on a desperation for clicks — or a desperation to stop Vance — rather than on real evidence.

The secretary of state is an extremely effective politician, is careful with his words, and is incredibly experienced. He will make a phenomenal president. But if he wanted to run in 2028, he would not have said what he said.

What about the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.? He also polls rather well, usually placing third but sometimes second. The younger Trump, like Rubio, has been at the center of endless presidential chatter for months. In the past few weeks alone, multiple articles from outlets as diverse as the Los Angeles Times and the American Conservative have talked up a Trump Jr. candidacy.

But there is one person not talking up a Trump Jr. presidential run: Trump Jr. Like Rubio, he has explicitly and repeatedly made clear he will not run against Vance. He has expressed frustration at the constant speculation, at one point angrily castigating a Mediaite article, and following it up with another condemnation of the idea on X.

Other candidates known to voters, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, are unlikely to catch fire. If Americans wanted to support them, they would already be polling well.

RELATED: Spencer Pratt is showing conservatives how it’s done

Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Staying the course

Of course, there is the possibility that Vance may not run. Those who are desperate for him to stay away from the White House have seized on reporting that Vance would wait to decide to run until after the summer, when his fourth child is born. His desire to wait to make a decision is eminently reasonable; any parent can attest to the change a new child brings, particularly if it is one’s fourth.

But Vance’s statement was also entirely standard. He will be going on a book tour this summer, a perfect soft launch for an unofficial candidacy — unofficial because he would never announce his run before the midterm elections, and there are still two and a half years left in his term.

Until he formally announces, which will likely happen next year, Vance will continue doing what he’s been doing: supporting the president and the administration, fundraising for Republican candidates, and dominating the polls.

It is easy to forget that JD Vance has had one of the fastest rises to the executive branch in modern American political history. Even Barack Obama, who seemed to ascend quickly to the presidency, followed a relatively traditional political path: state senator to senator to president over the course of 12 years. Vance, by contrast, won a U.S. Senate race in 2022 and then the vice presidency only two years later. Now he is the obvious ideological successor to two-termer Donald Trump.

The future is never certain. But in our era of shocking twists, too many have been primed to expect the unexpected. Sometimes reality is obvious: JD Vance is the clear front-runner for the 2028 Republican nomination.

Editor’s note: This article appeared originally in The American Mind.

​2028 election, Andrew jackson, Donald trump jr, Gop, Jd vance, Marco rubio, White house, Republican primary, Opinion & analysis, Donald trump 

Over a decade after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished without a trace, Ashton Forbes believes the public still isn’t getting the full story — arguing that the United States government knows what happened to the missing Boeing 777 and is actively concealing critical information from the public.

“There’s clearly a cover-up going on with respect to that missing plane,” Forbes tells BlazeTV host Pat Gray on “Pat Gray Unleashed,” pointing out that the government has satellites everywhere.

“We’ve got over-the-horizon radar systems. We can detect every whale in the ocean and every submarine,” he continues, before pulling out a stack of responses to Freedom of Information Act requests Forbes has sent, which he calls “glamour responses related to MH370.”

“I figured out everything, and I’ve been FOIA requesting everything from them. Every single thing’s being met with a rejection, including a transcript of a communication that the U.S. Navy supposedly intercepted of the plane having a mayday and then a document related to the fate of MH370 that was given to the Malaysian government from the United States,” he explains.

“Why would the CIA glamour response that if they don’t have information about it, right?” he asks, adding, “So the evidence to me is overwhelming, there’s something going on regarding the missing plane.”

Forbes goes on to say he thinks “it’s clearly some type of espionage.”

“I would say it’s got to be China versus the United States, given the proximity, given the South China Sea, given the fact that there’s 20 engineers on the plane that were working for an American company that were flying to Beijing,” he explains.

“The scenario seems pretty obvious that that’s had to be generally what was going on. As to why they did this, I’m not entirely sure,” he says.

“But I can tell you … the director of the science and technology of the CIA is where they’re hiding this super advanced technology,” he adds.

As to what they did with the plane, Forbes tells Gray that it’s a “directed beam teleportation.”

“This sounds crazy as hell of course,” he says. “‘Cause you would think, hey, if you can wormhole something, why can’t you just wormhole it anywhere you want? And in theory you can, but there are limitations in physics.”

“You can’t signal faster than the speed of light,” Forbes explains, calling this the “no communication theorem.”

“You couldn’t do teleportation. But there’s ways around this. And one of those ways if you have an anchor, like if you have a preset anchor, you could think of like a warp gate in sci-fi. If you have an anchor like that, now you have a pre-established connection bridge,” he says.

“So what I think is happening specifically is that when they’re spinning around that plane, they’re aiming exactly the direction in which they want that plane to show up through an extra dimension and then it goes in a straight line,” he continues.

“And that’s where your anchor comes into play. They aim it in a direction, it hits this point, and there’s an opposite polarity charge. Like, let’s say these orbs have a three positive charge polarity. Then there’s an opposite polarity. So it hits that point and then just reemerges in our spacetime,” he adds.

“That is so cool,” Gray comments, shocked.

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​Ashton forbes, Malaysia airlines flight, Mh370, Pat gray, Pat gray unleashed, Wormhole, Teleportation 

A top candidate vying among a crowded field for New Jersey’s 12th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives is facing flak from other Democrats over his alleged terror ties.

Physician Adam Hamawy, who also served as a U.S. Army combat surgeon, downplayed his interactions with the “blind cleric” Omar Abdel-Rahman, the late Islamic leader with ties to the terror bombing at the World Trade Center in 1993.

‘Any Muslim is going to be called a terrorist at some point, and these tropes are outdated and worn. Unfortunately, they continue to be used right now.’

Hamawy did not respond to a separate report indicating he had volunteered with a Chicago-based group in Bosnia that was later discovered to be a front for al-Qaeda and shut down.

Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp, who is also running for the Democratic nomination, called Hamawy a “radical extremist” over his ties to Abdel-Rahman.

“The blind sheikh was not a marginal or misunderstood figure,” Mapp said. “He was a convicted terrorist, convicted of seditious conspiracy. He was connected to one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history.”

Hamawy admitted that he carpooled with the blind sheikh once in 1991 and later testified for Abdel-Rahman out of a sense of “civic duty,” but he called the accusations Islamophobic.

“I was called as a witness, and I gave my testimony under oath, and then I walked out,” he explained. “It was never an issue back then, and they’re trying to make it an issue now.”

He also fired back at fellow Democrat Mapp.

“My patriotism and my record is clear,” he added. “I think he’s desperate, and desperate people say desperate things.”

Hamawy obtained endorsements from high-profile politicians including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ro Khanna (Calif.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.).

According to a Jewish Insider report, he also worked for the “Benevolence International Foundation” according to an unearthed interview Hamawy had with the Newark Star Ledger from 1996.

The 911 Commission Report found that the group was part of a complex network of organizations set up to help provide resources for terrorist operations linked to Osama bin Laden.

Hamawy, who was born in Egypt, cited his extensive service in the U.S. military to undermine the accusations.

“Any Muslim is going to be called a terrorist at some point, and these tropes are outdated and worn. Unfortunately, they continue to be used right now,” he said. “These are not serious arguments, and they’re getting old.”

RELATED: WHO director was a leader of political group designated as a terrorist organization by US officials

Mapp responded by saying he was not attacking Hamawy’s faith and accused other Democrats of being too fearful to criticize his past ties to terrorists.

Hamawy and Mapp are running for the nomination to seek the office vacated by Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D), who is retiring. Whoever wins will run in November against Republican Gregg Mele, who ran unopposed for the Republican nomination.

Abdel-Rahman died in 2017 at a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina.

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​Adam hamawy, Islamophobic, Midterm elections, Terror ties, Politics 

So many LGBTQ refugees are fleeing from Republican-controlled states to Seattle that the city’s LGBTQ Commission is calling on the mayor to issue a civil emergency order.

The commission said the throngs of 2SLGBTQIA+ people streaming into Seattle were leading to a strain on community organizations and a lack of resources available to them.

‘We’re seeing families coming to Seattle to protect their trans kids.’

“We are at risk of seeing some of these community-based organizations ceasing to exist in the next three, six, or 12 months,” LGBTQ Commission member Jessa Davis said.

“The downstream costs of letting people slip through the cracks is going to cost the city more,” Davis continued.

She admitted that there were not “busloads of thousands of people coming here” but said that “the numbers are significant.”

On Saturday, members of the Mutual Aid Network for Trans and Intersex Individuals in Seattle and the Gender Equity Movement organized a rally to push for the emergency declaration.

“With the kind of awful stuff that’s going on today, we need to say something,” 76-year-old Maridee Bonadea said.

A report from KIRO-TV verified nine fundraisers through GoFundMe from members of the LGBTQ+ community asking for help to relocate to Seattle.

One fundraiser asked for $2.2K to help three transgender roommates move from North Carolina to Seattle in order to seek “gender affirming care” so they can truly enjoy life. They have only raised $295 from six donations so far.

Mayor Katie Wilson (D) stopped short of issuing the emergency order but said the city would push for greater coordination to provide better access to resources.

She also called for a new city team to “develop community-informed responses that center housing, behavioral health, food, transportation, legal navigation, and survivor-centered violence prevention.”

Davis responded positively to the mayor’s order in an email statement to Blaze News.

“We’re pleased to be working with the Mayor’s Office and City Council as part of the inter-departmental team (IDT) being set up to address this issue,” she wrote. “We’re also preparing to continue engaging with this topic as it relates to the urgent needs our community at this time and will have further comment as we formulate more in-depth policy recommendations in light of the IDT’s objectives.”

RELATED: TPUSA speaker hit with death threats after trans-identifying student is killed — suspect turns himself in

“Trans people are coming, from especially red states, to Seattle, not just for gender-affirming care but for safety,” commission member Andrew Ashiofu said. “We’re seeing families coming to Seattle to protect their trans kids.”

Wilson said she would work with the commission to ensure “Seattle is a place of safety, dignity, and inclusion for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.”

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​Seattle washington, Lgbtq commission, Politics, Emergency declaration, Refugees