A former manager of a McDonald’s restaurant allegedly posted a video of herself “contaminating” french fries on social media and now faces prison time.

Kaylie Santos, 22, of Southbridge, Massachusetts, was arrested for the video that went viral on Facebook that showed two workers participating in the alleged contamination.

The video apparently showed Santos shoving the fries into her mouth before placing them in the fries carton.

Santos was apparently targeting her ex-girlfriend, who went through the drive-through of the restaurant on April 8, according to investigators. The video apparently showed Santos shoving the fries into her mouth before placing them in the fries carton.

“She wants french fries today, right?” Santos is heard saying, according to police.

Investigators also were able to obtain surveillance video from the store showing that she spit into the carton of fries.

When they interviewed the alleged victim, she said that she had ordered two sodas but that Santos gave her a bag of fries too. She didn’t think anything of it and ate the fries.

She also claimed that Santos had been harassing her and the customer’s new partner.

Santos faces one count of giving a person food “containing a foreign substance, which was intended or might reasonably be expected to cause injury.”

Investigators said they tracked down the victim by searching the license plate on the video from the drive-through.

WBZ-TV reported that the video on Facebook garnered tens of thousands of views.

RELATED: Grade school janitor contaminated children’s food with his bodily fluids and posted on social media, New Jersey police say

The owners of the restaurant said they were cooperating with police and that they had obtained a no-trespass notice against the former manager.

“The actions of these individuals are unacceptable and do not reflect our organization’s food safety standards or values,” they said. “The well-being and safety of our Southbridge community remains our top priority, and we are taking swift, appropriate actions.”

Entry-level McDonald’s managers make about $48,000, while general managers can make up to $90,000 in that part of the country.

A poll of Americans found that McDonald’s french fries blew away the competition for most popular fries among fast food restaurants.

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​Contaminated food, French fries, Mcdonalds, Viral video, Crime 

The U.S. House of Representatives will soon vote on a housing bill that supposedly addresses the nation’s very real affordability crisis and, even more important, lets politicians claim they are doing something about it.

The Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act in March by an 89-10 vote. Democrats backed it almost unanimously, and all but one of the no votes came from Republicans, even though President Donald Trump pushed hard for the bill.

States have the right to be stupid or smart. The federal government has no constitutional authority to make that choice for them.

One provision separates the Senate and House versions, and it matters a great deal.

The Senate bill would require investors who own more than 350 single-family rental properties to sell the excess after seven years. It exempts large institutional investors that build or buy new single-family homes for the rental market, but even they would have to sell those properties to individual homeowners after seven years.

The House bill drops that provision. That may be its best feature.

The Senate’s ownership cap is not only arbitrary and unfair; it is economically backward. Driving investors out of the market would raise prices, not lower them. It would shrink the pool of potential investors, reduce incentives to build and maintain housing, and leave buyers competing for a smaller supply of homes.

Those effects would push housing prices higher.

The only Democrat to vote against the Senate bill, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, blasted the seven-year forced-sale provision on the floor, calling it “bananas” and “a very bizarre thing” to restrict ownership by businesses other than hedge funds. The bill “demonize[s] people who want to build rental housing,” Schatz said.

He was right. The Senate version would do serious damage to housing supply. As Schatz put it, “This is positively Soviet.”

The two versions reflect sharply opposing views not only of housing, but of markets and government power in general. The real question is whether housing unaffordability reflects a “market failure” requiring federal and state correction, or whether markets work best when government limits itself to preventing force and fraud.

RELATED: When your ‘rich’ neighbor can’t afford furniture

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Today’s housing crisis is not a market failure. It is the product of government interference.

As I explain in my new Heartland Institute policy study, “Housing Affordability: America’s Short-Term Crisis and Long-Term Problem,” the immediate affordability crunch began with the rapid rise in federal spending starting in January 2021. The Federal Reserve accommodated that spending by expanding the money supply, helping ignite inflation across the economy.

Housing prices rose sharply and crossed into statistical unaffordability in May 2021. They then surged further as inflation spread throughout the economy. The Federal Reserve later raised interest rates to contain the damage, which only made housing less affordable as mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen since the early 1980s.

At the same time, the country was already suffering from years of weak housing-stock growth after the 2008 financial crisis, another disaster created by the federal government and the Fed. Add a rapidly rising population driven by mass immigration, along with Millennials and then Gen Z entering prime homebuying years, and a long-running squeeze turns into a full-scale crisis.

That is the mess Congress and Trump now want to address.

Their answer is to tweak some federal regulations in the hope of encouraging more construction. That may help at the margins. It will not do much to expand supply, and it will do nothing to address the inflation that turned a difficult market into a crisis.

As I write in the policy study, “The solution to the inflation-inflicted affordability problem is significant cuts in federal spending,” though such cuts appear to have little political support.

The long-term solution is straightforward: Build more houses.

Here again, government is the main obstacle. Zoning restrictions, taxes, overregulation, rent control, urban-growth boundaries, land rationing, impact fees, excessive building-code requirements, and countless other local barriers have choked construction and sales.

Those policies mostly come from states and localities. The federal government, however, encourages them through housing and urban-development spending.

RELATED: Trump needs to denounce the Dignity Act

Alex WROBLEWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Both versions of the current bill try to reduce some of that federal encouragement of excessive state and local regulation. That is the right direction because under the Constitution, housing regulation belongs to the states.

States have the right to be stupid or smart. The federal government has no constitutional authority to make that choice for them. Congress and presidents have usurped that authority for decades and should relinquish it entirely.

The proper remedy is simple: The federal government should confine itself to the powers the Constitution actually grants. That would mean no federal spending on housing at all.

Such a change would end Washington’s manipulation of the housing market, a game that always favors major players and hurts ordinary people. It would also reduce federal spending and ease inflationary pressure.

Both versions of the bill include a provision blocking the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency through 2030. That is a good provision, though House fiscal conservatives wanted a permanent ban. They were right.

In practical economic terms, the solution to the housing crisis is simple: Build more homes and stop inflating the currency. Politically, however, that solution remains unlikely.

To Congress and the president, the bill’s most important function is political. It will do little to calm public anxiety about housing affordability, but it will let politicians say they acted. In Washington, that usually matters more, and costs much less, than doing something useful.

​Soviet, Congress, Senate, Democrats, Affordability, Constitution, Trump, Road to housing act, Opinion & analysis, Housing crisis 

The artificial intelligence boom has become one of the biggest engines of the American economy. It has also triggered a growing backlash against the data centers that make the boom possible. Tech moguls have rushed to build giant warehouses packed with the computing power needed to run AI systems, but they have done almost nothing to explain to ordinary Americans why those facilities deserve so much land, water, electricity, and political favoritism.

That failure should have created an obvious opening for libertarians. Governments shower data-center projects with subsidies, wield eminent domain to seize land, and help politically connected corporations reshape local communities in the name of technological progress. A coherent libertarian response would attack the merger of state power and corporate power.

The first great use of AI will not be liberation. It will be surveillance and control.

Instead, many libertarians have chosen to cheer the expansion without asking what the technology will be used for or whom it will serve. Their quasi-religious loyalty to capital has pushed them into another foolish position and exposed the danger of turning an economic theory into a full worldview.

The tech elite insist that AI will revolutionize the world, but they have done almost nothing to tell average people how their own lives will improve. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs spin wild stories about superhuman intelligence and the automation of tens of millions of jobs. That does not sound like a sales pitch. It sounds like the setup for a science-fiction dystopia. The one concrete justification they offer is strategic: AI will supposedly define the future of warfare, and America must stay ahead of China.

That argument would carry more weight if the same people pushing AI were not also so committed to building the kind of technology most likely to be used against Americans. They are not preparing some noble shield for the republic. They are building tools that can make the United States look a lot more like the techno-authoritarian China they claim to fear.

Data centers consume staggering amounts of electricity, sometimes drawing as much power as a moderate-sized city. They also use enormous volumes of water, create nonstop noise, and disfigure the landscape. Developers have found ways to soften some of those costs by building new power infrastructure and improving cooling efficiency, but none of the problems have been solved. In the meantime, local communities absorb the burden.

The economic case is weak as well. Data centers create construction jobs while they are being built, but once construction ends, they employ surprisingly few people. Governments usually justify subsidies by promising long-term economic activity and job growth. In the case of data centers, corporations collect the incentives while communities get very little in return.

A sane political movement would notice that. Many libertarians have not. Instead of challenging subsidies and land seizures, they have fought to champion the projects. Nick Gillespie of Reason recently posted a chart showing that almond farms use far more water than AI data centers. Almonds are notoriously inefficient in water use, and agriculture probably does consume more water overall.

But the comparison gives away the problem. People eat food. AI, at least so far, mostly offers job displacement and surveillance.

RELATED: Your enemies aren’t mentally ill. They apparently just want to kill you.

Blaze Media Illustration

Libertarianism grew, in part, out of the Austrian school of economics, which is useful for understanding markets. It was never meant to serve as a complete theory of human life. Like Marxists, however, many libertarians have turned an economic framework into a totalizing ideology. Free markets, contract law, and voluntary exchange become an all-encompassing lens through which everything must be judged. Once that happens, it becomes difficult to see anything that does not show up in GDP.

The real question is not how much of a resource gets spent, but for what purpose. Most people would not give up a hand to save a cockroach. Most would give up their lives to save a child. On paper, preserving the cockroach may look like the more efficient transaction. Only a lunatic would fail to understand why no sane person would ever choose it over the child.

Economics helps explain financial exchange, but in its hunger for abstraction, it often strips away the human element that drives actual decisions. Treat almonds and AI as interchangeable “economic activity,” and you erase the context that gives moral meaning to both. That is the error every ideology makes. Grand unified theories comfort the rational mind because they promise predictive clarity. Then they collide with actual human beings living in actual places.

Kevin O’Leary recently went on Tucker Carlson’s podcast to praise the record-setting data center he wants to build in Utah. Carlson pressed him repeatedly to name a job AI would create for ordinary Americans. O’Leary could not identify a single one. He fell back on vague assurances that new technologies always create jobs somewhere in the future. The one benefit he seemed sure about was that AI might help America defend Taiwan in a future war with China. That is a revealing answer to citizens asking how this technology will help their own country.

RELATED: The liberal guide to committing national suicide

Blaze Media Illustration

Many libertarians now seem to support data centers out of sheer loyalty to capital itself. Economic activity becomes an end in itself. Progress, no matter the cost, is presumed to produce more liberty. That is delusional. The first great use of AI will not be liberation. It will be surveillance and control. The same corporate and political class that backed vaccine mandates, digital surveillance, censorship, and biometric passes during COVID is now demanding trust on AI. Nothing in its conduct suggests a change of heart.

Our tech oligarchs lined up with Democrats, outsourced American jobs, embraced censorship, and showed enormous appetite for monitoring the population. They are not trustworthy allies.

The backlash against data centers may lack intellectual polish, but the instinct is sound. The elites driving AI are not on our side, and Americans have no reason to sacrifice their communities, resources, and liberty on behalf of people who plainly intend to use this technology against them.

​Control, Data centers, Elites, Free markets, Kevin oleary, Libertarians, Opinion & analysis, Progress, Surveillance, Tucker carlson, Water usage, Austrian school of economics, Libertarian, Employment, Artificial intelligence, Nick gillespie, Reason, Economics 

James Talarico and Graham Platner are two of the most controversial Democrats running for office this year, but one new ridiculous Democrat star is now joining their ranks — and her name is Shelby Campbell.

Campbell, who is running for Congress in Michigan, is using a different campaigning method.

That is, she’s posting videos of herself twerking on social media.

“She’s 32 years old. She is apparently a law student. She’s a single mom. Gosh, who would have thought the woman twerking on social media would be a single mom? And she has four mug shots on her campaign website,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales explains.

“This is the absolute state of the Democrat Party,” she adds, before playing a TikTok video Campbell posted.

“It’s our time: the wine-mom gang,” Campbell says in the video while dancing around in a big T-shirt and disheveled hair.

“White ladies, I’m glad that we are becoming the enemy to the white man as well. I’m proud of you. Now, let’s get it, girls,” she adds.

But that’s not the worst of it.

“Let me present to you: Shelby Campbell mocking people who pray for child gunshot victims,” Gonzales comments, before playing another clip.

“Sky Daddy, please, please save the children from being shot with guns. Not by reforming the laws, but just by praying to you. Please, Sky Daddy. Dumb. Idiotic,” Campbell says in the video, again looking disheveled.

“At a certain point … we just need to come to terms with the fact that this is their best and brightest,” Gonzales says.

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​Blaze media, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Congress, Democrat, Michigan, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Social media, Twerking, Sara gonzales, Voting 

An analysis of the states that have redrawn congressional districts for partisan advantage found that Republicans are winning the battle.

CBS News elections analyst Anthony Salvanto looked at the midterm elections map with Crystal Ball managing editor Kyle Kondik on Tuesday.

‘My best guess … is a Republican gain of seven seats, but there’s a range on that. It could be a little lower, it could be a lot higher than that.’

Texas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri have redistricted in favor of Republicans and garnered the party between 10 and 16 extra seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Democrats have only been able to gain seats in California and Utah, for a possible gain between four and six seats, according to the analysis.

Overall, Republicans could have as many as 12 extra seats, while Democrats could only whittle down the advantage to four for the Republicans if everything went their way.

In addition, there are three states where efforts are pending and Republicans could pick up more seats. Those are Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

“The argument sort of goes back and forth. Is it maybe nine seats? Is it maybe six seats when this all nets out?” Salvanto said.

According to their analysis, there are only about 16 actual toss-up seats to be determined, and Republicans have an estimated 211 to 208 seat advantage. Whichever party gets to 218 seats will determine control of the House.

“Obviously we got to have the election first to determine what the actual effect of the redistricting was,” Kondik responded. “My best guess … is a Republican gain of seven seats, but there’s a range on that. It could be a little lower, it could be a lot higher than that.”

Salvanto pointed out one possible weakness for Republicans were Hispanics in Texas districts who had moved to the Republican Party in 2024 but may not show up in as significant numbers for the midterms.

RELATED: Utah Supreme Court justice abruptly RESIGNS after accusation involving redistricting attorney

“Just because you change a map to benefit yourself, it’s not necessarily gonna do that,” Kondik added.

“I would specifically look at the Republican redraws because 2026 is gonna stress test those maps in a way that they won’t necessarily be tested for Democrats because this is probably gonna be a Democratic-leaning year.”

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​Control of house, Midterm elections, Redistricting, Republicans, Politics 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has identified 12 possible future outcomes of artificial intelligence — ranging from a perfect utopia to complete human extinction.

BlazeTV host Pat Gray enjoys some of them, while others are deeply unsettling.

“The libertarian utopia: AI brings prosperity and AI-driven automation replaces most human jobs. The AI is vastly more intelligent but does not interfere with humans, leaving them to co-exist in separate zones,” Gray reads.

“The egalitarian utopia,” he continues reading, “AI and robotics lead to extreme abundance. Ownership becomes obsolete because robots produce everything needed, and resources are essentially free.”

“That’s like a ‘Star Trek’ outcome,” he adds.

The next is the “benevolent dictator possibility.”

“A super intelligent AI runs the world, making decisions that are 0% corrupt and perfectly fair,” Gray says, noting that the “first three are pretty decent options.”

However, after those three, the AI starts to get a little more controlling.

“The gatekeeper: A single all-powerful AI controls all technology and prevents humans from developing any other dangerous technologies, ensuring safety at the cost of freedom,” Gray explains, before moving on to the “protector god.”

This AI is “developed specifically to defend humanity, acting as an omnipotent guardian against existential threats.”

One concerning option is the “zookeeper option,” which keeps humans in “a protected, comfortable state similar to a nature reserve.”

Even scarier is the “1984 surveillance state possibility.”

This AI would “create an inescapable totalitarian surveillance state where every action is monitored and dissent is impossible.”

“We’re almost there now,” Gray says, before moving on to the “cyborg enhancement path,” which involves humans integrating “AI directly into their bodies and minds.”

The “self-preservation replacement scenario” follows, where “AI is developed, but its goals diverge from humanity’s, leading to the eradication of humans.”

“Not out of malice, but because humans are in the way of its goals,” Gray says. “Man, I could see that happening.”

Then there is the “apocalyptic future,” which features a “poorly designed super intelligent AI” breaking free and “destroying civilization,” and “the boredom scenario,” where “AI does everything so well that humans lose their sense of purpose.”

The final scenario is the “oops scenario,” where “humans try to create a controlled AI but fail, creating something they cannot understand or control, leading to unpredictable, potentially catastrophic results.”

“So,” Gray says, “there’s a few.”

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​Blaze media, Blaze news, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Blaze podcast network, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Blazetv host, Pat gray unleashed, Surveillance state, The blaze, Artificial intelligence, Mit, Human extinction 

A former pastor known for leading a gay conversion therapy ministry was caught trying to meet what he thought was an underage boy for sex, according to Florida police.

Alan Chambers, 54, allegedly sent lewd messages including sexual photographs to an undercover police officer he believed to be a 14-year-old child.

He apologized to the gay community for ‘years of undue suffering and judgment at the hands of the organization and the church as a whole.’

Prosecutors say Chambers sent the sexually explicit messages via Telegram and Snapchat between February and May while trying to arrange a meetup with the fake underage child.

Chambers allegedly talked about “forbidden love” and sent a photograph that showed a “white [male’s] torso laying in bed where the end of their penis was visible.”

The detective pretending to be a boy said that on April 10, Chambers asked him to take an Uber and meet with him. He also allegedly deleted many of the messages out of fear of getting in trouble.

Chambers made headlines in 2013 when he turned against conversion therapy after admitting that he was attracted to men despite being married to a woman. He also shut down the conversion ministry and said he was going to work to build bridges between Christians and gay people.

He apologized to the gay community for “years of undue suffering and judgment at the hands of the organization and the church as a whole” and said his new ministry would have “peace to be at the forefront of anything we do in the future.”

RELATED: Memphis pastor charged with trafficking and sexual exploitation of a minor — after different pastor at same church convicted

Chambers was arrested on Tuesday during a traffic stop at Aloma Avenue and Strathy Lane.

The man was booked on charges of solicitation of a minor, transmission of harmful material to a minor, and unlawful use of a two-way communication device.

His bond was set at $15,000, and he was ordered to not have any communication with anyone under the age of 18 years old.

“Today our detectives stopped a predator before he had the chance to harm a child. … Parents, please monitor your children’s internet and social media activity — you are the first line of defense,” reads a statement from the Orange County Sheriff’s office.

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​Child sex sting, Solicitation of a minor, Undercover police officer, Politics, Lgbtq