A plot to attack the UFC Freedom 250 event on Sunday was thwarted by the FBI and supporting law enforcement agencies, according to FBI Director Kash Patel.

“On June 10, FBI and our law enforcement partners became aware of a potential threat to the UFC America 250 event in Washington, D.C. involving individuals outside of the National Capital Region — and thanks to the rapid action of this FBI, our partners, and the [Department of Justice in a multi-state operation], multiple individuals are now in custody and allegedly planned attacks were stopped cold,” Patel wrote in an X post Tuesday.

‘We got to tell everybody to tone it down.’

Officials claimed the plot included employing drones with explosive capabilities to target surrounding buildings, prompting event attendees to flee toward a team of snipers, according to Fox News. Between the crowds on the South Lawn and the Ellipse, approximately 90,000 gathered in the area to watch the event.

The attackers then allegedly planned to rush the White House gate.

Fox News also reported that a suspect allegedly revealed the targets to be “billionaires,” “capitalist elites,” and politicians with funding from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Signal chats obtained by the FBI allegedly featured “pre-operational activity” discussed among a network of 23 people. Five people are in custody, Fox News reported.

In a statement on X, Secret Service Director Sean Curran said, “The U.S. Secret Service worked closely with the FBI throughout this investigation. In the days leading up to this weekend, our special agents, mission support personnel, and technical security teams worked around the clock to identify those responsible and hold them accountable.”

Curran added, “Equally important to our protective mission is ensuring accountability through the justice system.”

RELATED: ‘I prayed so much for this’ — Justin Gaethje’s UFC victory speech perfectly captures American spirit

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

When Trump was asked about the alleged attack at the G7 summit in France, he responded, “I haven’t heard of it,” adding, “The attack that I watched was the fighters.”

On “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning, Vice President JD Vance said, “This is what happens when people turn the rhetoric up so loud that disagreeing with somebody is a cause for violence.

“We got to tell everybody to tone it down.”

“Everybody has a role to cut this stuff out, but I think a lot of my Democratic colleagues in Washington have got to look themselves in the mirror and say, why is so much of this political violence coming from our side of the spectrum?” Vance also said.

The UFC Freedom 250 event featured 14 fighters from a range of countries on the White House South Lawn on June 14, the same day as Flag Day and Trump’s 80th birthday.

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​Fbi, Law enforcement agencies, Politics, Ufc, White house, Kash patel 

One day, not long ago — no one can recall exactly when — AI dropped from the sky, a deus ex machina springing fully formed from the head of, well, maybe its own head.

Or so it seems.

The context around the technology matters even more than the content.

In reality, AI’s origin story runs much deeper. So does the backlash against it. Both look stranger than they are because our shared memory of the recent past keeps shrinking.

AI has been a long time coming. In the mid-20th century, when human imagination still outran human and machine memory, artists produced vivid narratives about supercomputers and superintelligence. Scientists and engineers did the same, especially after World War II. Go back and read atomic-age Vannevar Bush, who mentored the namesake of Anthropic’s Claude, and the surprise is not that AI arrived. The surprise is that it took so long.

So why has AI produced such powerful future shock?

Not long ago, Americans rushed to embrace new technology. Yes, we were naïve about social media. We underestimated how people and governments would peep into our personal cyberspace. But when social media exposed our own questionable collective character, the reaction was not fury. Troubled? Yes. Shocked? No.

Even now, despite evidence that smartphones have entrenched bad habits and unhealthy temptations, we broadly regard the phone-and-app ecosystem as manageable. The trade-offs seem worth the bother if we clean up our act and make responsible choices.

AI is different. For millions participating in the backlash, AI differs from smartphones and social media not merely in power and scope, but in perceived injustice. Smartphones may rot our brains slowly. According to the backlash, even moderate AI use will swiftly destroy society.

The history we long to forget

Left-wing critics describe this destruction in terms of justice and the human nature Marx called our “species being.” Right-wing critics reach for the language of spiritual illness and stolen souls. The claim remains roughly the same: AI uniquely threatens our humanity, so the conversation about how to respond need not account for anything else.

Introduce any complicating factor outside AI and its creators, and critics may accuse you of distraction, dissembling, excuse-making, or apologizing for a permanent underclass — perhaps even human extinction.

I understand why so many people are so freaked out and so unwilling to pull focus away from AI. But the biggest reason lies outside AI and the AI debate.

Look at the arc Americans traveled with smartphones and social media. These transformative technologies became ubiquitous around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Thanks to “innovative” monetary policy and frantic institutional improvisation, the world avoided penury, and technological development kept moving along its established trajectory.

Many Americans surely spent more time online as economic slack and stagnation spread after the crisis. Yet that shock was nothing like the blow that came during the COVID lockdowns.

Over those two decades, America’s fundamentals became dangerously unsound. Governance embraced can-kicking, corruption, patronage, fraud, and self-dealing legerdemain that cooked the country as much as it cooked the books. But the populist backlash — as veterans of Occupy Wall Street, the Ron Paul “rEVOLution,” or the Bernie Bro movement will remember — remained contained and controlled.

RELATED: There’s a surprising fix for our AI oversight anarchy

sonmez karakurt/iStock/Getty Images

At least until Trump came along.

Even during Trump’s first term, few Americans felt like sitting ducks in the shadow of cataclysm. Times were tough, the middle class felt squeezed, and the dollar didn’t go as far. But those pressures had become baseline dynamics — the same problem set Ross Perot once explained with his chicken-foot pointer in populist third-party infomercials.

The lockdown era obliterated that holding pattern. It also wiped out many people’s ability to process the new normal. The socioeconomic malaise accelerated into territory so unsustainable that people simply stopped trying to understand it.

They blocked it out like an event too awful to remain in our memory.

Runaway inflation. Church closures. Rising living costs. Soaring entry costs for upward mobility. Devalued savings. Exhausted savings. The mathematical impossibility of building a middle-class life across family, education, and wealth formation within the given number of workweeks in a year.

That was the comprehensive catastrophe.

And it unfolded before robust AI asserted itself on the social scene.

Rebirth and return

That means we cannot understand the AI backlash unless we recognize that the context around the technology matters even more than the content.

For many millions across the political spectrum, the American dream was already destroyed before they could form real judgments about AI. In a national atmosphere of spiritual sickness, financial insolvency, economic weakness, and social disintegration, AI appeared as the final blow — especially as AI leaders themselves forecast the end of paychecks, jobs, careers, and perhaps humanity itself.

Deep down, many Americans feel that the habits, institutions, and confidence that might have allowed them to participate fruitfully in the AI era were stripped away years ago. AI seems big, alien, and wrong. Worse, it seems forced on them at a moment of unprecedented weakness, after any hope of recovery has already vanished.

Because they now feel they can fight the “clankers” and their makers in a way they cannot fight their own downward mobility and immiseration, AI has become the perfect scapegoat.

And that is the danger.

Killing AI will not regrow our spiritual and social roots. In fact, our structural situation has deteriorated so badly that leaning harder on the machines than we otherwise would may now be necessary.

We need a financial reboot. We need to dismantle the governance system that sucked us dry. We need to shift from overextended sole superpower to sustainable civilization-state fast enough to avoid the geopolitical spike pit between those two conditions.

Without those urgent needs, we would have more time and room to maneuver on AI. But we do need those things, and we do not have much choice or time — at least not if we want to hold the country together long enough to give Americans back the freedom to regrow their spiritual and social shoots.

The real way. The slow way. The human way.

Treating AI as the ultimate scapegoat for all our ills will distort and delay that process. Treating AI as the ultimate savior will derail and damage us in the opposite direction.

Nor will the fantasy of curing our national trauma by using AI to solve all human problems restore American life as a challenge worth living. Our new technology can be much more, and much less, than a replacement plan for people reduced to polyp status.

That is the opening for a constructive approach to AI that most of us can ultimately live with.

​Ai, Artificial intelligence, Civilization, Human nature, Humanity, Opinion & analysis, Social media, Soul, Technology 

If Prime Minister Mark Carney has is way, logging on to social media in Canada may one day require more than a password.

Critics say the Liberal Party’s latest legislation is a backdoor attempt to normalize digital ID while creating a powerful new bureaucracy to police online speech.

Platforms that fail to comply could face fines of up to $10 million and an additional penalty of 3% of global revenue.

This is but the latest step in a years-long campaign to expand government oversight of the internet that began under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and appears to be accelerating under Carney.

Harm’s way

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, would prohibit anyone under the age of 16 from using social media platforms. To enforce that restriction, users would have to verify their age online, prompting concerns that Canadians could ultimately be required to use digital ID or comparable age-verification systems simply to access social media.

The bill also establishes broad categories of prohibited “harmful content.” Platforms that fail to comply could face fines of up to $10 million and an additional penalty of 3% of global revenue. Those companies may in turn seek to shift liability onto individual livestreamers and content creators, creating what this reporter has previously described as “trickle-down censorship.”

It remains unclear whether Bill C-34 is intended to replace the Trudeau government’s proposed Online Harms Act or simply add another layer to Canada’s growing regime of internet regulation.

Hate reach

Meanwhile, Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, awaits final approval before becoming law — a step widely expected to proceed without difficulty. The legislation expands Canada’s hate speech laws and removes the long-standing defense for good-faith religious expression in certain criminal hate speech cases, raising alarms among civil liberties advocates and religious freedom groups.

The earlier Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) never became law after Parliament dissolved before it could be passed. Even so, it remains one of the most alarming assaults on free expression ever proposed in Canada.

Among its most controversial provisions, the bill would have allowed courts to impose preventive peace bonds — including curfews, travel restrictions, electronic monitoring, and even house arrest — on people who had not been convicted or even accused of a hate crime, but who authorities feared might commit one in the future. In other words, Canadians could have had their liberty restricted not for something they had done, but for something the government believed they might do.

Pre-crime division

The legislation also would have revived Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, exposing citizens to steep civil penalties for certain forms of online expression, and expanded hate-related penalties elsewhere in Canadian law. It is little wonder that critics denounced the proposal as a form of “thought crime” or “pre-crime” legislation — a dramatic departure from the traditional principle that people should be punished for their actions, not for what governments fear they may think, say, or do.

Bill C-34 identifies seven categories of prohibited “harmful content”:

Intimate content communicated without consent.Content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor.Content that induces a child to harm himself.Content used to bully a child.Content that foments hatred.Content that incites violence.Terrorism or violent extremism content.

Notably, the legislation does not define “hatred,” even as it devotes extensive language to defining “terrorism” and “violent extremism” as politically, religiously, or ideologically motivated acts intended to intimidate the public or undermine institutions or social stability.

The bill would also establish a digital safety commissioner, a position critics say could function as a de facto national internet censor with sweeping authority to assess and enforce rules governing online content.

RELATED: Canada-US coalition emerges against Mark Carney’s surveillance bill

JCCF board member John Robson. David Krayden

‘Blank check’

Among the organizations condemning the legislation is the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

“Greater transparency and accountability from tech companies is long overdue. But that must come through clear, targeted rules, not sweeping obligations and an open-ended government authority over any regulated service,” said Howard Sapers, the association’s executive director. “A blank check for federal power is the wrong answer to a real problem.”

“Bill C-34 introduces obligations which are so alarmingly broad that providers of regulated services will be tempted to over-comply at the expense of users’ freedom of expression and privacy rights,” Sapers added.

Another Carney government proposal, Bill C-22, would require technology companies to disclose user communications when requested by federal authorities or Canadian law enforcement agencies, potentially overriding their own privacy commitments.

Two Republican members of Congress have also raised concerns about the legislation. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-Fla.) have written to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree warning that Bill C-22 could threaten privacy rights in both Canada and the United States.

​Social media, Mark carney, Censorship, Free speech, Justin trudeau, Hate crime, Digital id, Canada, Civil liberties, Jim jordan, Brian mast, Lifestyle, Culture, Letter from canada 

A Nevada woman jailed in Mexico is expected to be extradited to the United States to face additional charges for allegedly using dating apps to prey on older men. Federal authorities say the woman drugged, robbed, and killed her victims in twisted romance schemes.

The FBI’s Las Vegas Division issued a bulletin in February 2025 about 44-year-old Aurora Phelps, who also went by the names of Aurora Alvarez, Aurora Flores, and Aurora Velasco.

‘Drop the case, or I will kill you.’

The FBI said Phelps “met individuals online or exploited those known to her in order to steal their personal information” between approximately 2019 and 2022.

“Mrs. Phelps then used this information to fraudulently access their bank, Social Security, or retirement accounts,” the statement read.

“It is believed Mrs. Phelps would sometimes drug her victims without their knowledge to obtain this information,” the FBI added. “Mrs. Phelps primarily targeted elderly men; however, she was known to target all age groups as well as women.”

KTLA-TV reported that Phelps — a dual U.S.-Mexico citizen — targeted at least 11 individuals on both sides of the border.

One of Phelps’ alleged victims reportedly was Robert Erbach, a 67-year-old American retiree who lived in Guadalajara, Mexico.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the pair connected on the Tinder dating app — Phelps under the username “Sissy” — and met at a casino that Erbach frequented in Guadalajara, according to his friends.

Friends said Erbach invited Phelps to the Hard Rock Hotel in Guadalajara to see a friend’s rock band perform in December 2021.

The Times said that “it was the last time Erbach was seen alive.”

U.S. and Mexican court records revealed that Phelps drove Erbach’s white BMW SUV to Las Vegas, where she used his personal documents to open a Wells Fargo account under his name.

Surveillance video the FBI obtained captured Phelps using a Wells Fargo ATM to make cash withdrawals with Erbach’s debit card. Phelps drained $50,500 from two of his bank accounts, according to the FBI.

In January 2022, Erbach’s son received a text message from his father’s phone written in broken English, the Times reported.

According to the FBI, one of messages said Erbach was moving to Quito, Ecuador, and ordered the son to tell family and police to halt any searches for him.

Prosecutors said there were attempts to redirect Erbach’s pension payments, but they were unsuccessful because a verified signature was required.

Two days after Erbach’s rendezvous with Phelps at the casino, the unidentified body of a man with no identification reportedly was found along a road near Guadalajara. Authorities said the man died from asphyxiation.

It was later revealed that the deceased man was Erbach, according to Newsweek.

In addition, the Times reported that Phelps met a 69-year-old divorced expat from the United States who had a “thriving practice” in Guadalajara. She allegedly met the chiropractor on Tinder in May 2022 and called herself “Sisy.”

According to court testimony, Phelps and the chiropractor went to a restaurant where he ordered a chocolate milkshake. The pair went to a hotel after the restaurant, according to the Times.

At the hotel, they allegedly had drinks, and the chiropractor passed out.

Phelps testified that the chiropractor had gotten drunk, but police later concluded he had consumed 1,000 milligrams of Valium “most likely added to his drink or the unattended milkshake,” the Times reported.

When the chiropractor regained consciousness, he reportedly asked Phelps to take him back to his home.

According to the Times, a surveillance camera at the house showed the chiropractor barely able to walk outside, and he “fell by the front door, cracked his head on the concrete and began bleeding.”

The chiropractor’s live-in maid reportedly drew a bath to try to help him wake up.

The Times reported that the maid became suspicious after Phelps told her she was the landlord and that the maid “should consider herself fired.”

‘She truly believes her lies.’

The maid allegedly called Carmen Garduño — a clinic employee who had worked with the chiropractor for 13 years. Court testimony said Garduño grew suspicious when the maid said the chiropractor appeared drunk, as Garduño said she had never seen him drink alcohol.

Garduño rushed to the house where she found the “pale” chiropractor unconscious in the bathtub, breathing heavily and wearing his doctor’s scrubs backward, according to the Times.

“He was practically absorbing his lips into his mouth,” Garduño said in court.

Garduño said she began performing CPR on the chiropractor, and then he vomited, and his breathing steadied, but he remained unresponsive.

When police arrived at the home, Phelps told officers she was the chiropractor’s fiancée, court records show.

The Times reported that the chiropractor “would remain unconscious for nearly a week.”

Once the chiropractor recovered, he reportedly filed a report against Phelps with the Jalisco state police. The chiropractor claimed Phelps stole approximately $25,000 in cash, electronics, and jewelry, including his wedding ring.

A Jalisco state judge issued an arrest warrant for Phelps for aggravated theft.

The Times reported that the chiropractor then received a call — and the voice on the other end of the line was one he did not recognize. The paper said a man speaking in a thick Mexican accent told him, “Drop the case, or I will kill you.”

The chiropractor reportedly ceased pressing his case.

An FBI investigation connected the death of Erbach to the alleged drugging of the chiropractor, the Times reported. FBI agents informed the chiropractor that the threatening call was made by Phelps using a voice-altering app.

The chiropractor agreed to cooperate with authorities and file a separate civil lawsuit against Phelps, according to the Times.

RELATED: He led cops to a dismembered body — now he’s charged with murder along with two others

The FBI said a month later, Phelps met Miguel Carrillo — a dual Mexican-U.S. citizen — in Chapala, near Guadalajara.

The Times reported Carillo days later was found dead in an abandoned lot, and his car was found outside a bank — and his bank account was drained.

In November 2022, Phelps reportedly used the Plenty of Fish dating app to meet John Wiens — a 78-year-old divorced and retired mechanical engineer living in Las Vegas.

Wiens’ son allegedly was unable to connect with his father.

“Stranger still, his Facebook profile now featured a picture of Wiens photoshopped into a city in Brazil,” the Times said.

The son told Mexican investigators he received a text message from his father’s phone that said he had moved to Brazil, which was odd since Wiens did not speak Portuguese.

A neighbor purportedly noticed the front door open at Wiens’ home, but he was nowhere to be found.

The Times said Wiens’ dog was left alone with no food or water, plus there were “feces everywhere.”

The son reportedly traveled from California to his father’s house, obtained his dad’s laptop, and was able to access his dad’s email account.

“The inbox was crammed with orders from Christian Dior, Gucci, and other designer brands for women’s apparel,” the Times said. “The purchases were sent to Phelps’ Las Vegas home under the name of her daughter or to ‘Abraham Flores,’ the name of her brother.”

Authorities said they discovered Wiens’ minivan at the Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas.

FBI agents obtained surveillance video showing Phelps and Wiens boarding a plane bound for San Diego on Nov. 4, 2022 — just one day after their first date.

The pair reportedly then traveled to Mexico City and checked into a hotel.

The Times said Wiens the next day was found dead in a hotel room bathtub, and an autopsy found he died of a heart attack.

Of 11 possible victims identified so far, three of them were found dead shortly after their encounters with Phelps, according to Spencer Evans, who at that time was a special agent for the FBI Las Vegas Division.

One of the victims spent five days in a coma after Phelps drugged him, Evans said. The Times reported that Phelps allegedly liquidated $3.3 million of the man’s Apple stock and tried to transfer the proceeds to a bank account she controlled.

Mexican authorities arrested Phelps at a Guadalajara bank on Feb. 27, 2023, the Times noted.

The Department of Justice released a statement in February 2025 saying Phelps “has been charged in a 21-count superseding indictment for allegedly luring older men she met through online dating services and stealing their monies for her personal benefit.”

Phelps was charged with one count of kidnapping resulting in death, one count of kidnapping, three counts of identity theft, three counts of mail fraud, six counts of bank fraud, and seven counts of wire fraud.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that a Mexican judge last week sentenced Phelps to 37 years, six months in prison on charges related to the disappearance and death of Erbach.

Sandy Breault, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Las Vegas field office, told Newsweek that Phelps “will be extradited to the U.S.— but no date has been set yet.”

Evans also stated that “once she incapacitated her victims, Phelps stole their cars, accessed their bank and brokerage accounts to withdraw cash, used their credit cards to make a variety of purchases, including luxury retail goods and gold, and even attempted to access their Social Security and retirement accounts.”

Christopher Delzotto, FBI special agent in charge in Las Vegas, said that “the white-collar criminal, especially when it comes to Aurora Phelps, is no different than a violent criminal. They are psychopaths. She truly believes her lies. She visualizes all of this stuff. She believes it. It has become her reality.”

Those with information about Phelps’ alleged romance scams are urged to contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI.

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​Aurora phelps, Elderly men, Extradition, Fbi, Mexico, Murder, Scam, Tinder, United states, Arrest, Crime 

A probationary wildlife biologist for Yosemite National Park lost her job last year after perverting an American landmark in protest of the Trump administration’s reality-affirming policies regarding gender.

Furious over her visitation by consequence for covering the side of El Capitan on May 20, 2025, with a giant trans-activist flag, Shannon Joslin painted herself as a victim and took legal action.

‘You have failed to demonstrate acceptable conduct.’

Joslin, a “nonbinary”-identifying woman, first complained to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, asking it to halt her termination.

When the OSC denied her request, Joslin asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to force the National Park Service to reinstate her; to bar the Trump administration from enforcing park regulations against her for “speech supportive of trans rights”; and to award her damages.

Her case was transferred to a federal court in California, where U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston, a Biden appointee, delivered the LGBT activist some bad news on Friday.

While adopting a sympathetic tone and referring to Joslin using her preferred “they/them” pronouns, Thurston dismissed the LGBT activist’s employment-related claims and requests for relief, explaining that her hands were effectively tied.

“The Court lacks jurisdiction to review Joslin’s termination or to offer any related relief, including a reinstatement,” wrote the Biden judge.

RELATED: Actress Elliot Page mocked ruthlessly after trying to define ‘healthy masculinity’

Heather Diehl/Getty Images

“The government claims for its part that Joslin was fired for reasons that had ‘nothing to do’ with ‘speech,'” wrote Thurston. “But the government has another more fundamental and more persuasive point: Under the laws that Congress has passed, and under the legal precedent that a federal trial court must follow, this court does not have authority to decide whether Joslin was fired for unconstitutional or illegal reasons, nor to block a hypothetical criminal case against them.”

Joslin hatched the idea to rig a flag on El Capitan as a “statement in support of trans people,” then worked with other radicals to “stake out the technical logistics of fixing a sizable flag to the rock face,” according to her original complaint.

She told Climbing.com, “Calling congressmen and writing representatives feels like yelling into the void. We have this f**king microphone that is El Cap.”

Wyn Wiley, a drag queen who goes by “Pattie Gonia,” partook in the protest and said in a May 22, 2025, propaganda video featuring clips of Joslin securing the flag, “The Trump administration and transphobes would love to have you believe that being trans is unnatural.”

“Call it a protest; call it a celebration,” continued Wiley. “We are bringing elevation to liberation.”

Months after transforming the rock formation into a “microphone” for gender ideologues, Joslin received notice indicating that she was out of a job effective Aug. 12, 2025.

The letter provided a reminder that the purpose of the two-year trial period — which started for Joslin on Sept. 10, 2023 — is to “determine whether newly appointed Federal employees are suitable for successful service in the areas of conduct and performance.”

“During your trial period, you have failed to demonstrate acceptable conduct,” continued the letter. “Specifically, on or about May 20, 2025, you participated in a small group demonstration in an area outside the designated protest and demonstration area without permit as required by 36 CFR 2.51 and thus circumvented rules applicable to all park visitors.”

Following the dismissal of Joslin’s complaint, the Department of the Interior and the NPS have reissued the statement they provided to Blaze News February: “We take the protection of the park’s resources and the experience of our visitors very seriously and will not tolerate violations of laws and regulations that impact those resources and experiences.”

“Yosemite National Park was designated by Congress to highlight the beautiful natural and cultural features of the area,” continued the statement. “No matter the cause, demonstrating without a permit outside of designated First Amendment areas detracts from the visitor experience and the protection of the park. To safeguard the protection of visitors, visitor experiences, and park resources, many demonstrations require a permit.”

Unable to draw a salary working as an NPS employee in the park, Joslin is attempting to exploit her termination with an agitprop film about the “complicated relationship between wildlife, food systems, and LGBTQ+ rights.”

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​Activist, Biden, California, Court, National park service, Trans, Yosemite, El capitan, Transgender, Flag, Drag queen, Pervert, Politics 

While many on the left have framed the murder of Austin Metcalf and conviction of Karmelo Anthony through the lens of race, BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler argues that the real story is being deliberately ignored.

“There’s a reason the mainstream media doesn’t want you to know the truth, the reality, and the facts. Because if you know what actually happened, you are much less likely to fall for the lies that they’re telling you,” Wheeler says, explaining that what the left refuses to discuss is the element of “black culture” involved in the case.

“What I’m talking about is gang culture and rap culture that has infiltrated and broken black families — a culture that glorifies violence, that dehumanizes people. Young men, young black men specifically, who are raised in broken black families, who don’t have male role models, who instead look to these celebrities, whether it’s gang members for community or rap culture for their idols — they are not being molded from young men into actual men,” she says.

“And nobody wants to say this. It’s unpopular. It’s uncomfortable. You’ll be accused of saying racially charged things,” she explains, “But it’s true. The murder of Austin Metcalf by Karmelo Anthony is also an indictment on wokeness. An indictment of ‘The 1619 Project,’ which told us that America is racist. It’s an indictment on critical race theory.”

“Every politician, every corporation, every celebrity, every leftist influencer, every teacher, every liberal white woman who spews, ‘White privilege,’ and, ‘America is inherently racist,’” she continues, “seeds and feeds this anger and forms this lens through which Karmelo Anthony sees the world.”

And the lens through which he sees the world is one where he believed bringing a knife to a track meet was a good idea.

“It’s not a normal reaction to grab a knife and stab the other person to death,” Wheeler says. “That’s not normal human behavior. The behavior of Karmelo Anthony in the tent, even before he got the knife out of his backpack and stabbed Austin Metcalf to death, that behavior is deliberate.”

Want more from Liz Wheeler?

To enjoy more of Liz’s based commentary, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Liz wheeler, Austin metcalf, Karmelo anthony, Racism, Murder, Leftism, The liz wheeler show 

Forget the final score. The real World Cup upset this summer is how many international fans are discovering that America is, against all odds, kind of great — especially in a “why does this gas station have 40 kinds of jerky and also a Wi-Fi password printed on the receipt” way — and they’re documenting their delightful experiences on social media.

The breakout star of the bunch is a German fan known on X as Freddy who has been chronicling a six-week road trip across the U.S. and Canada, following Germany’s national team, and has picked up hundreds of thousands of followers in his trek.

‘The European mind can’t comprehend this.’

Freddy’s Atlanta stop hit the respectable tourist beats — Stone Mountain, the MLK National Historical Park, some “Stranger Things” filming locations — and then immediately abandoned all dignity for Taco Bell, which he called “the holy land.”

A 1 a.m. Waffle House visit got a perfect 10/10 — food, prices, and staff included.

His Wendy’s stop in Tennessee produced the single best exchange of the whole tour. His order somehow came back under the name “John,” and when he posted his haul of burgers and fries, the official Wendy’s account replied with one demanding question: “WHERE IS THE FROSTY.”

He also fit in a Walmart run for water, socks, and USA soccer merch and somehow found time to watch the NBA Finals at Chili’s amid all this.

Before a single World Cup match had kicked off, Freddy watched the War Eagle fly over Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium and called it the most “the European mind can’t comprehend this” moment of his life.

One of Freddy’s posts got enough traction that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy shared it on X, writing: “There’s no better way to see our country than on a road trip! Because to LOVE AMERICA you have to SEE AMERICA.”

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey (R) invited him back for football season. When he posted from the Gulf Coast, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis welcomed him to Florida — but couldn’t let it go that Freddy had called the Gulf “the sea.”

RELATED: ‘I had the right papers’: Somali World Cup referee booted from US gets an answer from the White House

Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images

Freddy is not even the only German on this beat. Finn Agostinelli has been touring Chicago — the Riverwalk, “the Bean,” and a visit to Portillo’s so good that he posted a petition to get one opened back home in Hamburg.

His best moment came at Macy’s, where he had ducked in to find a restroom and instead found himself staring up at an enormous American flag. “I respect how proud Americans are of their country,” he wrote. “Unimaginable back home in Germany.”

Texas, for its part, did not go unnoticed either. A group of Japanese fans told KDFW their assessment of the state in six words: “Texas is good — everything is big.” Which checks out. Everything is bigger in Texas.

And in a tradition that has followed Japan’s national team since its 1998 World Cup debut, Japanese fans were spotted picking up trash in the stands after a 2-2 game against the Netherlands in Dallas, a habit rooted in a saying that a bird leaves no trace when it flies. Stadium staff, presumably, were thrilled — and possibly a little confused.

Meanwhile, a young Swedish fan named Elsa Thora landed in Indianapolis and immediately discovered ranch dressing, which, by the tone of her posts on X, may have been a bigger moment for her than the actual soccer.

“Why did no one tell me ranch sauce is like crack? EUROPE WE NEED RANCH ASAP,” she said.

Elsa screamed at a school bus in Indiana, posted a photo of Twinkies and Combos pretzels with the caption “I feel like I’m in a movie,” and has been working her way through Trader Joe’s ever since.

She also discovered that Amish people are, in fact, real.

Not every discovery has been a hit, though. Elsa also found shampoo locked behind anti-theft barriers at a store, a security measure uncommon in much of Europe, and called it her first negative experience of the trip.

She’s not alone on the friction front. Scottish fan Shaun Cumming arrived in New York after flying from Edinburgh and was blunt about the cost of everything — especially after a $150 Uber ride into Brooklyn.

He also noted to Newsweek that Americans are noticeably more open than people back home.

“People here are very positive, enthusiastic, and they’re not shy at all,” he said. “They will tell you how they feel for good or for bad. And sometimes for British people, it can catch us off guard a little bit.”

Cumming had no complaints about the food. He said American cooking is simply better seasoned than what he’s used to: “Here, you get flavor, you get fed well, they put a lot spices, herbs and seasoning into their food in general, which just makes it really good” — and that the regional variety is what stuck with him most.

RELATED: Trump and Mamdani are on a collision course about ICE at the World Cup

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Underneath all of it is something that keeps surprising people more than the food: the locals.

A tourism expert told Fox News that visitors driving nine hours across Texas are running into “overwhelming American kindness,” often from small-town residents who have no idea why someone with hundreds of thousands of followers just pulled into their gas station.

A New Jersey deli owner gave a couple of British tourists a free lunch, and Alabama firefighters gave other British fans a station tour and sent them off with free gear.

Waffle House has been open at 1 a.m. for 50 years. Buc-ee’s has always been enormous. Ranch dressing has been sitting in American refrigerators, unremarked upon, since before the Reagan administration. Perhaps the deli owner who fed the British tourists wasn’t doing anything he wouldn’t do for a local who looked lost.

What’s new is that someone finally pointed a camera at it.

For years, the conversation about America — at home and abroad — has been almost entirely about Washington: the politics, the division, the sense that the country is somehow failing itself. But that was never the whole country.

The actual texture of American life — the diners, the gas stations, the absurd portion sizes, the stranger who will drive you to a game because your Uber didn’t show — was always there, underneath all of it, completely unaffected by whatever was happening in D.C.

This summer, a few hundred thousand people from somewhere else have seen the real America: big, weird, generous, a little much.

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​American life, Bucees, Culture, Diners, Florida, Gas station, Nba finals, Netherlands, Taco bell, Texas, Trader joes, Transportation secretary, Washington, Politics 

DEI is not dead. It survives because the left embedded it deep inside institutions, habits, grant programs, training regimes, and professional language. Even when the label changes, the ideology keeps moving.

One of President Donald Trump’s first actions in his second term was an executive order directing the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to eliminate illegal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The order put immediate pressure on organizations that built their funding models around DEI and what they call “victim-centered” ideology.

Democrats have already parroted the brainwashing narrative. If they win the midterms, many will try to turn it into impeachment-palooza and legal warfare.

Those organizations are now fighting back. They are filing lawsuits, mobilizing allies, and defending their grants. A federal court order has complicated the fight by forcing the government to keep funding some of them while litigation continues. In other words, taxpayers are still cutting checks to groups openly hostile to the president and his movement.

The Civil Rights Division should treat this novel doctrine as what it is: DEI with prosecutorial power.

The “victim-centered approach” is a federally funded prosecution doctrine. It carries a badge and wears judicial robes, but it rests on the same power-differential framework that drove DEI through human resources departments, universities, and activist nonprofits. It replaces objective proof with subjective harm and presents ideological assumptions as neutral expertise.

Nearly 12,000 American judges have been trained in this doctrine since 1999. The training does not teach law. It teaches trauma theory, “power and control” wheels, trauma bonding, and coercive-control frameworks imported from activist social work and repackaged as forensic science.

Judges emerge from the program describing themselves as “trauma-informed” members of a new generation of jurists who understand what victims are really experiencing — even when some of those alleged victims insist they were not victimized.

That is ideological preconditioning, not legal education. And the federal government has funded it for 25 years.

One major proponent is Freedom Network USA, an organization that trains law enforcement and certifies victim advocates nationwide. It has sued the Trump administration, arguing that the executive order prevents it from delivering trafficking-victim services because the order restricts words central to its curriculum.

RELATED: Trump’s Justice Department is shining a light on woke universities — finally

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Americans have already seen DEI in schools. They have seen DEI hiring programs raise serious questions about competence in public safety and aviation. The victim-centered approach shows DEI wearing a badge and sitting on the bench.

The left built this machinery for use against communities it has already labeled dangerous, irrational, or cult-like. And the left has made clear that it regards MAGA as a cult and Trump as its leader.

How do we know? Because they told us.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a former impeachment manager, said publicly that he consulted cult experts to help him communicate with Republican colleagues. Hillary Clinton said MAGA supporters may need “formal deprogramming of the cult members.”

Those were not stray comments. They were previews.

Freedom Network USA is one node in a federally funded network of nongovernmental organizations that train law enforcement, write curriculum, and certify judges. These groups are not merely observers of the doctrine. They are its infrastructure. The same political coalition calling MAGA a cult built the legal machinery to act on that belief. Now it is suing the administration to keep the money flowing.

The public can already see how this victim-centered approach may play out in court. The government has relied on “cult expert” Steven Hassan, author of “The Cult of Trump,” to help shape prosecution theories. The Oversight Project has documented Hassan’s ties to Raskin, whom Trump has called on Congress to expel.

Real victims of horrible crimes deserve care and respect from the justice system. That is not in dispute. But this doctrine does not strengthen judicial decency. It undermines it by weakening the protections that should apply to all parties.

RELATED: How to fix the woke teacher problem

H. Rick Bamman/Pioneer Press/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

The victim-centered approach is what MAGA will face if the left regains power. Conservatives will be cast either as brainwashers or as the brainwashed.

Cassidy Hutchinson’s story shows what may come next. Her memoir about her time as a Trump White House staffer makes a specific psychological claim: Loyalty to Trump becomes coercion. Personal devotion becomes proof that a person cannot leave freely. Under the victim-centered approach, and with criminal precedents already in place, that claim no longer remains a social critique. It can become a theory of prosecution.

Democrats have already parroted this brainwashing narrative. If they win the midterms, many will try to turn it into impeachment-palooza and legal warfare. That makes it time to take unserious arguments seriously.

They are telling us what they think of MAGA. They see a web of cults and subcults led by pastors, celebrities, politicians, and activists, all supposedly brainwashing followers to obey Trump.

They will try to draw a web of influence and use the victim-centered approach to build a brainwashing case against Trump and his supporters.

How do we know? Because they told us.

​Democrats, Trump, Dei, Woke, Civil rights division, Freedom network usa, American judges, Maga, Cults, Cult of trump, Radica left, Oversight project, Opinion & analysis