Idaho votes like a conservative juggernaut. Republicans hold the governor’s mansion, both legislative chambers, and every statewide office. Yet the administrative state still runs on autopilot, and progressives who never win at the ballot box keep their hands on levers of power.

Last week delivered a clean example. Estella Zamora, the 72-year-old vice president of the Idaho Human Rights Commission, lost her seat after Gov. Brad Little withdrew her reappointment. Progressive activists erupted. The press corps dutifully framed it as a purge. But the real scandal sits one step earlier: Little’s office initially recommended her for another term, as if nobody bothered to look.

President Trump’s ‘drain the swamp’ mandate doesn’t end at Maryland and Virginia’s borders. It reaches every state capital where permanent bureaucrats ignore the electorate.

That rubber-stamp culture explains how red-state voters keep getting blue-state governance.

Zamora held influence for more than three decades. She didn’t win it from voters. She inherited it from the system. A Democratic governor appointed her in the 1990s. Republican administrations kept renewing her anyway, term after term, until she became another “untouchable” fixture inside Idaho’s bureaucracy.

Only public pressure forced movement. Conservative activists and outlets like the Gem State Chronicle, along with our own program, Idaho Signal, highlighted Zamora’s political activism online. She appeared before the Senate State Affairs Committee on Jan. 28 as part of the reappointment process. Lawmakers asked questions. The public noticed. Little reversed course a few days later.

Little made the right call in the end. The process that led to the near-miss should worry every Idaho voter.

Zamora didn’t simply hold personal opinions. She couldn’t resist using her public platform to attack Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency charged with enforcing federal immigration law. Her posts pushed anti-ICE propaganda, circulated protest material, and condemned enforcement operations as “harmful.” She aligned herself with the activist line that treats border enforcement as a moral offense.

Idaho doesn’t need every commissioner to share the governor’s politics. Idaho does need commissioners who can credibly carry out their duties without turning a state post into a political megaphone. A human rights commission depends on public confidence. Activism that signals contempt for lawful enforcement undermines that confidence.

This isn’t a free-speech dispute. Zamora can say whatever she wants as a private citizen. Voters can judge it. Officials must still decide whether that behavior fits a role that demands impartiality and restraint.

Progressives are already shouting “censorship” and “partisan purge.” They’re portraying Zamora as some saintly Latina icon victimized for speaking out. That rhetoric flips the facts. Nobody owes a lifetime appointment to someone who campaigns against the policies Idaho voters repeatedly choose in overwhelming numbers at the ballot box. Public service carries conditions. When the public loses trust, leaders should act.

RELATED: Trump’s primary endorsements are sabotaging his own agenda

Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

The greater lesson extends beyond Zamora.

Idaho’s bureaucracy keeps reappointing the same figures because too many Republican offices treat commissions and boards as background noise. Staffers recycle names. Vetting becomes procedural. Appointments become habit. Progressives understand this weakness, so they play the long game: They entrench themselves in institutions that outlast elections.

That pattern repeats across the country. Red states elect Republican leaders. Agencies keep advancing progressive priorities through regulation, enforcement discretion, and institutional culture. The left loses elections and wins governance anyway.

Republican governors and legislators can’t keep solving this problem only after activists force their hand. They should audit commissions and boards, review reappointments with real scrutiny, and replace partisan operatives with people who respect the mission and the law without bias and without apology.

President Trump’s “drain the swamp” mandate doesn’t end at the Maryland and Virginia borders. It reaches every state capital where permanent bureaucrats ignore the electorate and treat public posts as ideological turf.

Idaho voters spoke loudly. The administrative state had better listen because we’re just getting started.

​Opinion & analysis, Deep state, Administrative state, Idaho, Brad little, Red states, Red state governors, Estella zamora, Idaho human rights commission, Anti-ice, Immigration, Immigration and customs enforcement, Rubber stamp, Autopilot, Bureaucracy, Donald trump, Drain the swamp 

Many in the AI field believe that the future is inevitable, a destination arrived at through the brute application of electricity and capital. This prevailing faith, known as the scaling hypothesis, posits that if one feeds enough data into enough GPUs, AI will emerge as a matter of course. It is a comforting determinism, suggesting that the machine evolves under its own logic, provided the resources are sufficient.

However, if we observe the actual dynamics of this revolution, we notice that the machinery is useless without a very specific, rare kind of human intervention. Servers may hum in their air-conditioned vastness, but the architecture of the computing they house does not emerge spontaneously from the chips. It is crafted, often painfully, by a handful of individuals. As the entrepreneur Naveen Rao observed, there are perhaps “only a couple hundred people in the world” who possess the deep expertise required to train cutting-edge models.

Progress relies on the spark of insight that only a human mind can provide.

The leaders of the industry are betting that a brilliant mind can unlock more progress than an extra few billion parameters can. While scaling provides the clay, the spark of human genius acts as the catalyst. This scarcity has precipitated what Elon Musk called the “craziest talent war” he had ever seen. Companies are not merely hiring; they are offering seven-figure salaries to lure researchers away from rivals, regarding these individual experts as the ultimate competitive edge.

There is a historical resonance here, a recurring pattern in which the movement of a few minds alters the geopolitical trajectory. We saw it in the 20th century, when the United States imported Wernher von Braun and his team under Project Paperclip, a move that enabled America’s achievements during the space race. We saw the inverse when the U.S., concerned with communist espionage, deported the Caltech-trained scientist Qian Xuesen to China, an act later described by a U.S. official as the “stupidest thing this country ever did.” Qian returned to China to orchestrate its nuclear program, proving that the loss of talent can be a strategic error that capital cannot fix.

We are now witnessing a diffusion of genius that belies the American assumption of dominance. For years, American discourse failed to see the rise of Chinese AI, lulled by the belief that innovation was a function of Silicon Valley’s unique ecosystem. Then came DeepSeek. In early 2025, this Hangzhou-based lab released a model that rivaled the best American systems, trained at a fraction of the cost.

RELATED: Zuckerberg names ex-White House deputy Meta’s new president — and Trump LOVES it

Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The shock was palpable. It was described as a “Sputnik moment.” DeepSeek did not achieve this by out-spending the Americans; it did it by out-thinking them. It utilized architectural efficiencies to achieve frontier capability with about a tenth of the computing power of its competitors. It demonstrated that elite technical talent can compensate for, and optimize around, resource constraints. Brains had outsmarted brawn.

This dynamic is reshaping the cultural geography of the field. Talent is no longer content to sit in the monolithic campuses around the San Francisco Bay Area. Consider the exodus from Meta. Of the 14 authors who wrote the original LLaMA paper, 11 had departed by 2025. They did not vanish; they circulated. Many resurfaced in Paris, founding Mistral AI, which quickly raised over €100 million on the promise of making AI accessible through open-source models.

The shift is from institutional loyalty to intellectual nomadism. Some researchers are driven by an open-source ethos, preferring to publish their model weights and invite global collaboration rather than lock their work behind corporate walls. Openness can be a strategy to harness talent. When Alibaba’s Qwen team or DeepSeek release their models, they are not just releasing code; they are signaling to the global community of mathematicians and engineers that the work is happening there, outside the confines of the American giants.

The scaling hypothesis suggests a kind of inevitability, that any sufficiently funded lab would eventually reach the same breakthroughs. The history of the field suggests, rather, that the Transformer architecture, the very backbone of modern AI, might not have appeared in 2017 had Vasilii Vaswani and his collaborators not been in the room to imagine it. These shifts are not guaranteed by external conditions: They require advocates, mavericks, particular minds capable of the conceptual leap.

Michael Polanyi spoke of tacit knowledge, the ineffable know-how that cannot be written down but resides in the intuition of the expert. With neural networks, this tacit knowledge is the feel for tuning a loss function, the aesthetic judgment required to guide a model’s learning. To build machines that behave intelligently, we are dependent on the rarest and most distinctively human forms of creativity.

The models are getting larger. The data centers consume the power of small nations. However, the direction of this juggernaut is still determined by a very small number of people. The scaling hypothesis was only ever half the story. The other half is the talent hypothesis, the stubborn fact that progress relies on the spark of insight that only a human mind can provide.

The intelligence we are so desperate to manufacture is not a commodity we can mine from the earth but a reflection of the people who build it. Without the elite engineers to imagine what to do with the compute, the ambitious visions of artificial intelligence remain just that — visions, waiting for a mind to bring them to life. The servers may be loud, but it is the quiet work of these few hundred people that will determine what they are saying.

​Tech, Ai 

On June 18, 2024, Collin “Mia” Bailey gunned down his parents in cold blood in their Southern Utah home and attempted to do the same to a brother and sister-in-law.

Through bodycam footage and police reports obtained via public records requests, Blaze News can confirm that less than two weeks before the heinous shootings, Bailey made a disturbing call to police, accusing his then-housemate of harassing him and threatening to kill him with a shotgun.

Sound amplifier, ‘X-ray’ device, and poison: Bailey spins wild tale

At 3:41 a.m. on June 5, 2024, Officer Weston Hughes knocked on a door inside a residence in a quiet neighborhood in St. George, Utah. A sign reading “Baby is Asleep” hung on that interior door, and behind it lived Joseph Earl, his wife, and their young children.

Other tenants lived in the house as well. Collin “Mia” Bailey was one of them.

‘I’m going to screw my wife and make you die from masturbation.’

Though not for long.

Bailey was supposed to move out later that day. Earl’s wife, whose name is not provided in any of the reports, told police they were evicting Bailey for repeatedly making noise at night and waking up their kids.

This night was apparently no exception.

Officer Hughes and backup Officer Rob Anderson arrived at the residence in response to a 911 call from Bailey made at 3:23 that morning. The officers met Bailey outside the residence and listened to his wild rantings about Joseph Earl, whom he identified as the “house manager.”

“He hates me quite a bit, like, hates my guts,” Bailey emphasized. “And he’s pulling these stunts for months now. And the moment he pulled the gun, it was like, all right, I gotta say something.”

Bailey then explained to the cops that about a half-hour earlier, Earl had loaded a shotgun and threatened to kill him. Bailey reiterated to Anderson that Earl threatened to kill him “multiple times” and that he had been making similar threats for days.

“I know he has a shotgun because he tried loading it and then threatened to kill me and stuff,” Bailey told Hughes.

Hughes later asked Bailey to describe the gun. Bailey replied, “I don’t know what it was. It was too dark, but it was a shotgun.”

After Bailey gave meandering and seemingly inconsistent statements about what happened that night, Hughes asked him to clarify how he could have seen the gun but didn’t “know what it looked like.” Bailey replied: “I saw it. I’ve heard it. But I quickly opened the door and closed it.”

RELATED: Groomed for violence? The dark world of furries and transgenderism in America’s classrooms

In addition to accusing Earl of brandishing the shotgun, Bailey repeatedly claimed that Earl had a “sound amplifier” that allowed him to hear everything Bailey did in his room. Bailey further alleged that the amplifier gave him “splitting headaches.”

Bailey also referred to an “anti-recording” device that “blocks out sound from [Earl’s] end upstairs,” as well as some sort of “X-ray”-like device that allowed Earl to learn Bailey’s passwords.

“So there’s a thing. It slides — it’s four wheels. Because you can hear it up on the roof, you know. When you walk, you can hear footsteps, right? Or you can slide it throughout the house,” Bailey said of the “X-ray” machine.

Bailey indicated that both the “anti-recording” and the “X-ray”-like device seemingly interfered with his ability to document Earl’s antics. At least one of Earl’s alleged devices sometimes caused the house to “shake,” Bailey claimed, though it is unclear which one.

While Earl “appears to be in face fine,” he’s actually “very, very manipulative,” Bailey insisted.

Bailey also claimed to Officer Hughes that Earl had confessed to putting “poison” in Bailey’s drinks and threatened to put other drugs in them as well.

Bailey even claimed that some of Earl’s threats were sexual in nature. “I’m going to screw my wife and make you die from masturbation,” Bailey recalled Earl saying.

That particular night, Earl made other sexually explicit comments, Bailey claimed. “Basically he was saying, ‘F**k you! I hate you! Suck my c**k!'” Bailey said.

“So many messed up stuff. This guy is [a] lunatic,” Bailey insisted.

‘I don’t have schizophrenia or anything like that.’

Bailey later flipped through his phone, showing Officer Anderson a long list of apparent recordings as well as images and videos that Anderson indicated Bailey had taken of himself earlier that morning. Anderson then confirmed to Hughes that he saw nothing on Bailey’s phone to substantiate claims of a “disturbance.”

For his part, Earl denied making any threats, brandishing any weapon, or even engaging in any kind of argument with Bailey before he went to bed that night. “Absolutely nothing like that has happened,” Earl told Hughes.

Earl’s wife, wearing a bathrobe and carrying a child, confirmed to Anderson that there had been no “disturbance” and that her husband had been sleeping next to her all night. “I would have known if he left,” she added.

Throughout his conversations with the cops, Bailey repeatedly requested that they search the Earls’ apartment for evidence to back up his claims, alleging that Joseph Earl posed a threat to the other tenants in the home, but the officers declined. “It really doesn’t work that way,” Anderson replied. “There’s not even enough probable cause for us to apply for a warrant,” noted Hughes.

The bodycam videos, both about 20 minutes in length, conclude with Officer Hughes advising everyone to go to bed and explaining to Bailey that there is “no evidence” to corroborate his story.

RELATED: Trans-identifying man sentenced for brutal murder of his parents

‘A 96 ISSUE’: Bailey’s stability questioned

Police reports confirm that officials suspected Bailey of experiencing some kind of mental health episode from the start. Bailey called St. George police at 3:23 a.m. that day, the call report showed, and by 3:29, the dispatcher had already described him as “SOUNDING MORE AND MORE 96.”

Hughes, who first made contact with Bailey at 3:30 a.m. and exited Bailey’s residence at 3:50 a.m., reported to dispatch at 3:54 a.m. that “THIS WILL BE A 96 ISSUE.”

“96” is code for a “mental subject.”

Officer Hughes likewise admitted to Earl that Bailey’s statements and behaviors suggested that “there’s obviously something going on mentally. I just don’t know exactly what it is.”

In his incident report, Hughes documented that he asked Bailey whether he had “any mental illnesses” but that Bailey “denied having any.”

Audio redactions in the bodycam footage make it impossible to confirm Hughes’ claim of asking Bailey about “any” mental illness, but Bailey told the officers at 3:48 a.m., “I don’t have schizophrenia or anything like that.”

Bailey did tell Anderson that he identifies as “transgender” and began transitioning four years prior. Bailey also suggested that his gender identity could be a possible reason for Earl’s alleged animosity.

If the Earls harbored any trans-related animus against Bailey, they did not show it during their conversations with police. The Earls always referred to Bailey with female pronouns and indicated that they were mainly frustrated that Bailey frequently woke up their children and that he fabricated a story about their family and posted it to Facebook.

Throughout their appearances on the bodycam footage, the Earls seem calm and direct, just bewildered about being woken up in the middle of the night and about Bailey’s accusations against Joseph.

Joseph Earl and the woman believed to be his wife did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

At one point, Bailey did suggest that he suffered from self-loathing and that he admitted as much within earshot of Earl. “I kept complaining to myself that I didn’t like myself,” Bailey claimed to Officer Anderson. Bailey indicated that this alleged admission may have stoked Earl’s ire.

Bailey also admitted that he hadn’t been “feeling very well lately,” though he attributed that malaise to the “poison” Earl had allegedly given him.

It is unclear whether Bailey ever moved out of the residence he shared with the Earls and where he may have gone if he did.

‘Guilty and mentally ill’: Bailey’s murderous rampage

Less than two weeks after this encounter with police, Bailey shot and killed his father, 70-year-old Joseph Bailey, and his mother, 69-year-old Gail Bailey, in their home in Washington City, Utah. He also shot through a bedroom door where his brother and sister-in-law had barricaded themselves, though the couple were able to flee to safety.

Following his arrest, Bailey reportedly told investigators: “I would do it again. I hate them.”

In November 2025, Bailey, now 30, pled “guilty and mentally ill” to two counts of aggravated murder and one count of aggravated assault. He was sentenced to consecutive sentences of 25 years to life plus up to an additional five years for the assault.

At the sentencing hearing, Bailey’s attorney, Ryan Stout, claimed that Bailey had been diagnosed with a bevy of mental illnesses: autism, psychosis, schizophrenia, ADHD, and OCD.

Dustin Bailey — one of Mia’s brothers though not the one victimized in the attack — spoke at the hearing, reaffirming the family’s support for “LGBTQ rights” and seemingly blaming some of Mia’s mental spiral on cross-sex hormones.

“Providing powerful hormones to a person in a psychiatric crisis without proper psychiatric safeguards is not affirming care. It is reckless. … It acted as an accelerant, intensifying instability, impairing judgment, and compounding risk. That failure harmed Mia, and it endangered our parents,” Dustin said.

Mia Bailey, who claims to have converted to Islam, is currently housed at the Utah State Correctional Facility in Salt Lake City, which has separate buildings for men and women. Blaze News reached out to the Utah Department of Corrections to verify whether he is housed with male inmates but did not receive a response.

The St. George incident report and call report both list Bailey’s sex as male.

Washington City, Utah, is also the hometown of Tyler Robinson, accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk in September. Robinson’s alleged romantic partner, Lance Twiggs, reportedly identifies as transgender.

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​Mia bailey, Transgender, St. george, Utah, Washington city, Politics 

A man called police to report that home intruders had killed his fiancée and her two sons, but Michigan police arrested him for allegedly murdering them all.

Charles Broomfield, 44, reported the shooting at about 8:30 a.m. on Jan. 27 at the home on Worden Street SE, according to the Grand Rapids Police Department. He was arrested two days later.

‘She’s one of the best things that ever happened to me out of any woman, girl I’ve ever been with.’

In an interview with WOOD-TV from the Kent County jail, Broomfield said he saw red and then “snapped” that day.

He claimed that his fiancée, Jacqueline Neill, told him to move out of their home, and he grew so angry that one of his personalities took over.

Broomfield said he met Neill on the Tinder app and had known her for eight years. They had a son together five years ago, and she brought two sons, 15-year-old Cameron Kilpatrick and 13-year-old Michael Kilpatrick, into the family, along with two daughters.

“She’s one of the best things that ever happened to me out of any woman, girl I’ve ever been with,” he told WOOD.

However, they disagreed on how to raise the children and got into an argument just days after moving into the home on Worden.

“I remember the night before like it was f**king yesterday,” he said.

“We were just being petty towards each other,” he added.

He said he had woken up early that morning to shovel snow but that Neill told him it was over and he needed to move out.

“Something inside me just seen red,” he added. “Snapped, I just snapped. I blacked out, couldn’t think of nothing.”

He admitted to shooting Neill and her two sons to death.

“A monster who don’t give a f**k, don’t have no remorse, will not cry, does not care. I was crying,” he added.

Police said that Broomfield confessed after they noticed inconsistencies in his story. He now claims that he is suffering with numerous personalities that he has named.

“I am battling demons, like I said. Chuckie, Charlay, Charlie, Charles — all had something going on and whatever and whatnot. Chaz was just chillin’, and it’s like, I know I’m not a bad guy,” he added.

Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker believes Broomfield is trying to set up an insanity defense and said that he doesn’t buy it. When WOOD confronted Broomfield with the suggestion, he denied it.

Broomfield is being held on three charges of premeditated murder and gun charges.

RELATED: Teens’ story claiming they were attacked unravels after cops find their damning video posted to social media, police say

He went on to offer an apology for the family of his alleged victims.

“Basically none of this was supposed to happen. Period,” he continued. “And I’m sorry to all of them.”

The Grand Rapids community held a vigil for the victims that included Neill’s sister Joanne Elzinga.

“Jacqueline and Cameron and Michael were an important part of all of our lives, and we’re going to do our best to begin patching up the holes that they left,” she said.

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​Charles broomfield murder, Grand rapids triple murder, Crime, Man murders fiancee and sons, Man murders tinder fiancee 

The Washington Post just laid off more than 300 employees — roughly 30% of its newsroom — cutting back sports, local coverage, international reporting, and books. The paper has shed staff before, including a reduction in 2025 and voluntary buyouts, as losses piled up. Reports put the Post’s losses at $177 million over the past two years, with annual deficits topping $100 million since 2023.

Predictably, fired staffers and their allies blame owner Jeff Bezos for refusing to write blank checks indefinitely. They want the world’s fourth-richest man to underwrite their failing business model forever.

Downsizing isn’t a tragedy. It’s a market verdict.

But that’s not the story. The Post didn’t collapse because Bezos got cheap. It collapsed because its newsroom got ideological — and readers stopped trusting it.

The Post built its modern reputation on tough reporting and institutional seriousness. Then its editors and writers started injecting personal politics into straight news, smuggling advocacy into headlines, and treating dissent as moral failure. That approach earned applause inside the Beltway, but it bled credibility outside it. Readers left. Subscribers disappeared. Revenue followed.

Immigration coverage captures the pattern.

In 2018, the Post ran a story headlined “How Trump is changing the face of legal immigration.” The piece claimed an 81% drop in arrivals from Muslim-majority countries and a 12% overall decline in legal immigration, framing the change as a deliberate demographic overhaul. The story leaned on cherry-picked State Department numbers that covered only part of the admissions system while ignoring other federal data. The paper dressed activism up as analysis and called it news.

That same year, the Post published “U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question,” implying a broad campaign of anti-Hispanic discrimination. The story suggested “hundreds, possibly thousands” faced baseless fraud accusations tied to midwife-assisted births.

The piece ignored the long history of documented fraud in those cases and left readers with a clear impression: The Trump administration targeted Hispanics. In fact, denial rates actually fell under Trump — from 35.9% in 2015 to 25.8% in 2018. The Post later appended an editor’s note acknowledging errors challenged by the State Department. That kind of walk-back never repairs the original damage.

In 2024, the habit remained. The Post accused Republicans of “misleading ads” about the border while soft-pedaling the scale and timing of the Biden-era surge. It scolded language choices, such as “illegals” and “harsher,” framed enforcement as cruelty, and applied different standards depending on which party spoke.

This isn’t just an immigration problem. It’s a newsroom culture problem.

RELATED: Bernie Sanders gets obliterated online for dragging Melania into left-wing criticism of WaPo layoffs

Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The Post’s rush to judgment during the Nicholas Sandmann incident in 2019 showed how quickly narrative can replace verification. The paper treated a Kentucky teenager as a national symbol of Trump-era racism based on a misleading clip, then watched the fuller video upend the story. The Post paid an undisclosed settlement. The reputational hit lingered.

That pattern — moral certainty first, facts later — has infected much of corporate media. CNN, the New York Times, and their peers keep hemorrhaging trust because they keep selling ideology as “objective” reporting. They blur the line between news and opinion, then act shocked when audiences treat them as partisan actors.

That distortion carries consequences beyond subscriptions. When media outlets portray immigration enforcement as inherently malicious and frame routine operations as persecution, they turn policy disagreement into moral panic. They train audiences to view law enforcement as an occupying force. That mindset fuels the kind of street-level provocation that turns tense encounters into tragedy.

Journalism carries a sacred obligation: Tell the truth plainly, verify before amplifying, and separate reporting from activism. Too many at the Post treated that obligation as optional. The audience noticed. Circulation reportedly plummeted to about 97,000 daily in 2025. Financial losses followed.

Downsizing isn’t a tragedy. It’s a market verdict.

If the Washington Post wants to survive, it must rediscover objectivity — or keep shrinking until only its own employees bother to read it.

​Opinion & analysis, Washington post, Jeff bezos, Democracy, Media bias, Corporate media, Leftists, Amazon, First amendment, Billionaires, Immigration, Facts 

Conspiracy theories continue to swirl around Jeffery Epstein’s controversial death. Many are unwilling to accept the FBI’s official ruling that the convicted sex offender committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019.

The most widespread theory is that Epstein, believed by many to be a keeper of dark secrets, was murdered.

Now, however, another conspiracy theory is ramping up. In the wake of the Department of Justice’s publication last month of over 3 million additional pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images from the Jeffrey Epstein files — some of which provided more insight into the event of his death — a new wave of online speculation has surged.

According to this hypothesis, which is fueled by unsubstantiated viral claims and AI-doctored photos on social media, Epstein is alive and well and living in Israel.

To gauge how many people were entertaining this theory, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) conducted his own experiment by posting a poll on X inviting users to vote on which Epstein outcome they believe is true. The responses, of which there were nearly 150,000, were telling:

During a recent interview with Massie, Matt Kibbe, BlazeTV host of “Kibbe on Liberty,” asked the Kentucky congressman to share his thoughts on the poll’s results.

“Three percent of the 147,000 people who took this poll think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself,” Massie says.

“Forty-some percent said that he’s still alive, and 30-some percent say that he’s dead, but he was murdered,” he adds, calling these numbers “surprising.”

Massie notes that he included the fourth option — “just show the results” — because some people fear that “Mossad might be watching the traffic on that poll.”

The ultimate question, he says, is: “Is [Epstein] the kind of guy who thought he was cornered and there was no way out?”

“I don’t think so,” Massie says. “Like, Jeffrey Epstein, to me, seemed like the kind of guy who was just waiting for them to come and unlock the key and take him back to one of his mansions.”

“He knew, just like with the first conviction, he just would have to wait for a while and play his cards right, and I think he was that arrogant,” he adds. “That kind of arrogance is built because you got away with it before, and then you got away with it a thousand times, and you got so much dirt. He’s probably thinking, ‘If I can get back to my hard drive, this is all over with.’”

Kibbe wonders if perhaps Epstein was secreted away, not necessarily because of the “dirt” he had on others, but rather because he was “indispensable.”

“He was the guy that fixed problems for this elite class of financiers and politicians,” he says.

Massie acknowledges this possibility, recalling Epstein’s advice to former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak: “Think of all the people who owe you something, and then start from there.”

“Those were his words to Ehud Barak. That’s what he had to be thinking in the jail cell,” he says.

While Massie initially thought the FBI’s suicide conclusion was “reasonable and plausible,” now that the released files show “the full color of who he was and the kinds of things he did and what he got away with,” he rejects that ruling.

“I’m not in that 3%,” he says.

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Matt Kibbe?

To enjoy more of Matt’s liberty-defending stance as he gets in the face of the fake news establishment, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Kibbe on liberty, Matt kibbe, Thomas massie, Blazetv, Blaze media, Epstein still alive, Epstein death, Epstein files, Epstein files controversy 

The latest partial government shutdown has ended, and two facts stand out: Washington will keep spending like a drunken sailor, and Republicans squandered their cleanest leverage point to rein it in.

Start with the number that matters: The House approved $1.25 trillion in additional discretionary appropriations. That decision pushes the annual deficit toward $1.75 trillion. Republicans voted for it, complained about it, and then acted surprised that the spending binge continued.

If Republicans keep missing moments like this one, investors will keep moving into gold and silver, not out of ideology, but out of self-preservation.

The shutdown fight should have forced a trade. Democrats focused on cutting Department of Homeland Security funding. Republicans had options beyond folding. They could have demanded real cuts elsewhere, then used Democrats’ own political pain points to make the deal stick.

One obvious target sat in plain sight. The Trump administration proposed a 50% cut to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That should thrill the MAHA crowd. Democrats hate what they call ICE “overreach.” Republicans despise what they view as CDC mission creep and pandemic-era abuses.

Congress could have paired both cuts and sold it as a reset: trim enforcement and trim the public health bureaucracy, then avoid another shutdown. Democrats could claim restraint at the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans could claim restraint at the CDC. Taxpayers would finally get something besides another blank check.

Instead, Republicans let the moment pass, and voters got another spending package.

Don’t expect the next round to improve. Markets already read Washington’s behavior as a warning label. Gold and silver prices sit at record highs because investors smell what Congress refuses to admit: Deficits at this scale produce either inflation, higher taxes, or both.

Central banks have acted on that judgment for years. They have moved away from dollars and Treasuries and into gold. Poland’s central bank led global gold purchases in October and November last year. That shift isn’t a protest from adversaries alone. It reflects a broader conclusion, from allies and rivals alike, that Washington keeps making promises it cannot afford to keep.

RELATED: Congress needs to go big or go home

Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images

The trend looks set to continue. Goldman Sachs expects central banks to buy roughly 60 metric tons of gold per month in the year ahead. Retail demand is rising too. Gold-backed exchange-traded funds reportedly absorbed about 800 metric tons in 2025 as investors searched for an asset that doesn’t depend on congressional self-control.

Frederic Panizzutti of Numismatica Genevensis explains the appeal plainly: Gold’s simplicity attracts buyers “as geopolitics and geoeconomics have become more complicated.”

Americans across the political spectrum want to abolish wasteful agencies. Congress won’t do it. Fine. Then at least cut budgets hard enough to prove lawmakers can say no to constituencies, lobbyists, and the permanent bureaucracies that treat every crisis as a looting opportunity.

Washington’s real problem isn’t a lack of authority. It’s a lack of restraint. Entitlement growth, debt service, and a bipartisan appetite for militarized foreign policy push the country toward instability at home and abroad. Politicians focus on the next election and leave the bill to the next generation.

If Republicans keep missing moments like this one, the dollar’s erosion will accelerate. Investors will keep moving into gold and silver, not out of ideology, but out of self-preservation.

​Gold, Republicans, Democrats, Spending bill, Dhs, House republicans, Ice, Cdc, Economy, Markets, Opinion & analysis, Homeland security, Congress, Partial government shutdown