Last month, American rapper Afroman (real name Joseph Edgar Foreman) won a defamation lawsuit against Ohio sheriff’s deputies who raided his home in 2022. Acting on a tip about drugs and kidnapping, the deputies kicked down his door with guns drawn, ransacked the house, and seized some cash — all captured on his home security cameras.

No drugs or evidence was found, and no charges were filed. Afroman then turned the raid footage into viral parody videos, including the hit “Lemon Pound Cake,” which prompted the deputies to sue him for defamation. On March 18, an Ohio jury ruled in his favor on the grounds of free speech.

Now he joins Matt Kibbe, BlazeTV host of “Kibbe on Liberty” to discuss the raid, the lawsuit, and what the victory means for free speech in America.

Afroman, who’s currently on tour, says that the incident with the Ohio deputies has turned out to be “a blessing in disguise,” as people have been showing their support like never before.

“We got way more people than I usually have, and man, you can feel it. I’’s something new in the air. Man, I’m back like Tina Turner after ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It,’” he laughed.

But before the victory, life was feeling dark, he admits.

“You start questioning your manhood when people come to where your family live and they kick the place in. … It’s outrageous for people to come to your house and tear it up — especially when they got all their information wrong,” he tells Kibbe.

Even after the cops found nothing in Afroman’s home, the arrogance and ill will they carried into the raid lingered throughout the lawsuit, he recounted. “They were unapologetic and sarcastic and kind of delighting in the fact that they did vandalize my property.”

The trial, he says, was “set up in the police officers’ favor.”

“They dismissed my claims before I even went to court, so I was just in court to discuss how much money I was going to pay, you know, the vandals and thieves,” he recounts, adding that the warrant used to access his home had many “flaws,” but the court refused to address it.

However, Afroman nonetheless won the case. The jury ruled that his videos, which he says he made to help “pay for the damages” caused by the deputies, were protected under his free speech rights.

“Ultimately, in a nutshell, the police officers lost the case, and freedom of speech prevails in America,” he says triumphantly.

But freedom of speech wasn’t the end of Afroman’s victory. The lawsuit ended up drawing unprecedented attention to his album and music videos.

“[Those cops] did more for my social media in three days than I could do for myself in 15 years,” he says, noting that he gained “800,000 followers” in a matter of days because of the lawsuit.

But the biggest victory remains the protection of the First Amendment.

“Some countries, you can’t say nothing. You got to shut up. You can’t speak out against the government. … But one of the beautiful things about America is, you know, you can speak,” he says.

“So, thank God I have it, and it’s the one thing that brought me justice.”

To hear the full interview, 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.

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Public distrust of AI platforms has reached an all-time high, especially when it comes to users’ private data. Not only are people leery of the AI platforms themselves, but they’re also concerned over how the government can access and use this information. Until recently, AI development felt like the Wild West, with little regulation to get in the way of supposed innovation. That’s all about to change, however, with a brand-new federal bill based on the big national framework Trump rolled out in advance.

The study

In late March, cybersecurity software company Malwarebytes conducted a survey among its newsletter readers, asking them to share their thoughts on AI and user privacy. After collecting 1,200 responses, the results were clear: A staggering 90% of readers simply don’t trust AI with their data.

There are a lot of good things in the bill, but it falls short in other key areas.

One of the main distrust drivers stems from fears of “personal data being used inappropriately” by both corporations and the government. Recent large data breaches that put user credentials directly on the dark web, along with commercial surveillance campaigns, have further contributed to the problem.

To combat the distrust, users have turned to privacy tools, such as VPNs, ad blockers, and identity theft protection services. However, these only go so far when AI platforms can circumvent the usual digital defense mechanisms to learn more about your online presence than it was ever meant to know.

The only firm solution to assuage public distrust is to give the AI companies some legal guardrails to ensure that they don’t overstep the rights and security of the people, with the majority of respondents agreeing that they “support national laws regulating how companies can collect, store, share, or use our personal data.”

The bill

A new federal bill proposed by Senator Marsha Blackburn aims to bridge the gap between AI’s fast-paced development and shielding the public from emerging dangers brought on by these rapidly evolving platforms. Dubbed the Trump America AI Act, the bill will codify President Trump’s previously touted National AI Legislative Framework by focusing on two major goals: protection and empowerment of the following:

1. Protections for children

AI developers are required to “prevent and mitigate foreseeable harm to users” with an emphasis on protecting the data, mental health, and safety of minors. AI developers can also be held legally accountable for any damage done by a failure to comply.

Pro: AI providers would be immediately responsible for their chatbots encouraging and even coaching young and vulnerable people on how to take their own lives.Con: AI developers will need a way to verify the age of their users, potentially leading to the mass collection of user IDs, resulting in a digital database. Also, while the bill protects minors’ user data, adults are exempt, failing to solve the concerns expressed in Malwarebytes’ survey.

2. Protections for communities

U.S. companies across all industries, as well as federal agencies, must send quarterly reports to the Department of Labor that detail AI-related impacts on the workforce, including job layoffs and displacements. Data centers are also barred from siphoning energy resources from communities and driving up prices.

Pro: As AI-driven layoffs have already begun, this is a good first step to highlight how AI realistically affects the unemployment rate.Con: Although companies must report AI-related job losses, the bill doesn’t prevent the displacement of employees outright. Companies can still fire employees en masse in a way that would cripple the workforce, impact the economy, and drive the U.S. toward forced universal basic income.

RELATED: Elon Musk’s Terafab is coming, and you’re not ready

onurdongel/Getty Images

3. Protections for intellectual property

AI companies are prohibited from feeding their LLMs with copyrighted materials, including books, movies, music, and more. Under the bill, AI is excluded from fair use under the Copyright Act.

Pro: Content creators no longer have to worry about their creative catalogs being stolen, uploaded, copied, and remixed into new bodies of work when prompted by users on any given platform. They retain full ownership of their content without threat of subjugation.Con: A lack of copyrighted information could lead to gaps in AI platforms’ knowledge graphs, potentially slowing or even stifling development.

4. Protections for conservatives

AI companies are banned from injecting woke ideologies into their large language models, and AI chatbots are no longer allowed to express biases against conservative ideas and values, all of which will be verified through third-party audits.

Pro: Despite efforts to attract support on the right, many Big Tech giants are still dominated by left-wing elites. These safeguards will ensure that their personal and factional beliefs don’t poison the datasets behind their platforms, instead aiming to support truth and facts.Con: The bill isn’t specific enough in defining the woke ideas, political biases, and discrimination it aims to prevent. Unless the bill intends to leave a loophole for the left to exploit, these exact parameters need to be spelled out, lest they be left open to interpretation.

5. Protections for innovation

One of President Trump’s biggest AI goals is to secure America’s place as the global leader in AI technology. As such, this bill encourages partnerships between the government, businesses, and education to accelerate research and development with limited barriers to the infrastructure needed for rapid growth.

Pro: This piece of the bill ultimately centralizes the resources underpinning the United States’ AI development, including computing power, datasets, and advanced infrastructure. By combining the knowledge and experience of multiple groups across various expertise with the best technology available, our AI program will theoretically evolve even faster than it already has over the last several years.Con: Centralized AI development that happens too quickly could potentially lead to developmental mistakes with big consequences, such as launching untested models that underperform, building agents that aren’t fully capable of completing the jobs they’re designed to do, and even causing economic instability should an AI bot or agent run rogue within critical infrastructure, such as businesses, medical facilities, and even military applications.

History in the making

This is a unique time in history. Society has never witnessed a more disruptive technology than generative artificial intelligence, and it takes a lot of watching, waiting, debating, and legislating to get the regulations right for a piece of tech that will touch nearly every facet of modern life.

The Trump America AI Act is merely a launch pad — a starting point — that will guide America’s future of AI research, development, and execution for decades to come. There are a lot of good things in the bill, but it falls short in other key areas:

It doesn’t protect adult users’ privacy, especially in terms of user data and surveillance.It doesn’t protect human workers from mass layoffs and unemployment.It indirectly encourages a digital ID database for age verification with no clear guidelines on how IDs should be gathered, stored, or deleted.

That said, AI regulation has to start somewhere, and the Trump America AI Act is still in its infancy. There will be opportunities to amend the bill as it moves through the legislative process. For now, this version offers a solid foundation for governing the AI tech of tomorrow.

​Tech 

Some people flippantly dismiss psychics and mediums, believing their powers to be fake or that they have scientific explanations.

But Rick Burgess, BlazeTV host of the spiritual warfare podcast “Strange Encounters,” argues otherwise. Not only are these kinds of supernatural powers real, they’re “extremely dangerous.”

While he acknowledges the “charlatans” who just scam people for profit, Rick argues that a lot of psychics and mediums are indeed tapping into genuine power — just not the good kind.

“There are people who do have power,” but “this power is not of God,” he says.

“Tarot cards, crystal balls, palm readings … leaves from tea … this stuff is dangerous. This is witchcraft.”

To engage with any of these occult items or practices has one of two results, Rick warns: You’re either going to be “scammed,” or you’re going to have “very dangerous strange encounters” with demons.

To illustrate the latter, Rick reads from Acts 16, which documents Paul and Silas’ encounter with a slave girl who had a “spirit of divination” that gave her real (and lucrative) fortune-telling powers.

When the girl sees Paul and Silas, she immediately cries out, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.” She continues doing this until Paul becomes “greatly annoyed” and finally forces the demon into submission, stating, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!”

The girl’s owners were furious because when the demon departed, so did her powers and thus their income.

Rick uses this passage as proof that the powers of divination are not only real, they are sourced exclusively from the demonic.

When “somebody claims they have some kind of power, your best case scenario is that they’re just a scam artist,” he says. “That’s the best case because then you just wasted your time and you wasted your money. The worst case is they actually have power.”

“If they do, it is not of God, and you shouldn’t have anything to do with it,” he warns.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Rick Burgess?

To enjoy more bold talk and big laughs, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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For all the infighting over the current and future direction of the Trump coalition, one thing stands above all else as the biggest threat.

It’s not the podcasters and corporate media talking heads arguing over foreign policy. It’s not tax rates or farm policies. It’s not even the social issues that have been flash points on the right in recent decades. It is the issue of immigration, specifically deportation.

It’s shaping up to be a classic standoff between monied special interests and the liberal Republicans they sponsor versus everyday Americans.

Representatives Maria Salazar (R-Fla.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) have started what hopefully will be a short but politically violent war by once again raising the specter of mass amnesty for illegal aliens via their Spanish-language-titled Dignidad Act.

There is nothing new under the sun, so much like every other failed Republican-led amnesty push, their chief sales pitch has been that the Dignidad Act is not amnesty, despite the plain language offering amnesty to more than ten million illegal aliens, by conservative estimates.

Salazar’s sales pitch, which you can see in full, occurred at the deep state’s consensus manufacturing plant, the Brookings Institute.

Rep. Salazar employed a rhetorical device of speaking to imaginary illegal alien friends and asking them if they would accept a new legal status of dignity that would allow them to remain in the United States and enjoy a litany of legal benefits.

To no one’s surprise, they would welcome this opportunity. Salazar also employed the classic trope of challenging the audience regarding who else would clean the toilets or pick the jalapenos, hopefully separate tasks.

While the bill enjoys 20 other Republican co-sponsors, Rep. Mike Lawler leads the pack in hawking this awful amnesty bill. In a heated interview with Laura Ingraham, Lawler attempted to make the case that the amnesty bill is not amnesty, because the status quo is.

While it is true that lack of enforcement of the current laws amounts to de facto amnesty, the solution is to actually enforce the law at scale with the money Congress gave President Trump to carry out his promise of mass deportation.

Lawler stepped on the logical rake with Ingraham when he tried to pump up his enforcement credentials by focusing on criminals and on the ludicrous suggestion that the Department of Homeland Security is able to vet the entirety of the illegal population for amnesty.

On the first point, he said that “if you have committed a crime, you should be removed from the country, period.” What that means in practical terms is that by his argument, only some 500,000 to 800,000, by estimates of the Trump administration, would be in that definitional category.

What he ignores is that illegal presence in the United States is itself a crime, along with the variety of other identity and immigration-related crimes that illegal aliens routinely commit.

As a legal matter, there is no such thing as his small category of “criminal illegal,” and even taking him at his intended policy point of focusing on successfully charged criminals, he is arguing that amnesty should be given to this category so long as an additional crime has not been committed.

This is what I like to call the “one-murder” policy, where liberals argue that illegal immigrants should be allowed to violate our immigration laws until the point at which they create an angel family by killing someone. That is a suicidal immigration policy.

RELATED: My friend survived the Global War on Terror. Leftist immigration policies got him killed.

Kendall Warner/The Virginian-Pilot/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

Lawler then goes on to argue that his amnesty wouldn’t apply to those who entered during the Biden administration. Ingraham challenges him on how the DHS would prove that, at a scale of over ten million, in addition to proving that illegal aliens have maintained continued presence in the United States during their period of being illegally present in the United States.

To put it mildly, he had no answer when pressed by Ingraham multiple times on how the DHS would go about that.

She pressed for a single consideration or qualification that an immigration official would use to determine continual presence. After a non-response, Lawler settled on “you have to be able to meet the qualifications.” Ingraham asked again, “What is the qualification?” Lawler said, “They are going to make the determination as they always have, based on the current structure and guidelines.”

If your head is spinning because of this, it’s okay because it didn’t make any sense. I’ll make it simple: Some Republicans, particularly those who see the big dollar signs of special interest donors who can fund a tight race, are willing to sell an unpopular policy through a left-coded emotional argument.

I would put Mike Lawler in that category. As for Maria Salazar, she is a true believer.

You don’t go on stage at Brookings, put a foreign-language name on a piece of legislation, and deploy emotional arguments centered around the well-being of illegal aliens unless you’re a true believer and, to an extent, acting as an ethnic lobbyist trying to advance the interests of a foreign group in the United States.

The good news is that the majority of the country still believes that people who are in the country illegally should be deported. Those numbers skyrocket for Trump voters and are a key plank of the playbook for the newly formed Mass Deportation Coalition, of which I am a part

The backlash on the Dignidad Act, Salazar, and Lawler has been swift and severe. It’s shaping up to be a classic standoff between monied special interests and the liberal Republicans they sponsor versus everyday Americans.

RELATED: This Supreme Court case could decide the future of American citizenship

Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty Images

Social media has been lit up with fury and ratios, and most elected Republicans have denounced the futile amnesty effort as a complete rejection of why Republicans are in power right now.

Rising star Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) perhaps put it best when he said that the bill was “mass amnesty” and “a terrible betrayal of our voters” and that he “wanted dignity for Americans — the people whose interests we represent.”

There remains one area of creeping concern: The White House hasn’t exactly made the administration’s position clear, aside from Vice President Vance, who has been continually vocal about opposing amnesty in any form.

Lawler and Salazar retain endorsements from President Trump, and recent confusion about the commitment to the mass deportation agenda can give rise to reasonable suspicion that this amnesty talk is allowed, if not tacitly approved.

Now is the time for continued clarity from those who decide Republican elections: Republican voters. They have made their voices heard with this recent flash point of mass amnesty. The path ahead means not just playing defense against amnesty demands but raising the bar for what is required on the mass deportation front.

These votes will need to see large increases in the deportation numbers, to at least 1 million in 2026, which would be an increase over last year of about three times. The numbers will ultimately tell the story above the politics.

Getting commas in the deportation numbers will maintain the coalition, and it may turn out that it is far more important for keeping power in Washington than it is to keep Lawler and Salazar inside the coalition, even as they seek to tear it apart.

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