Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos ripped into many of the policies on the left in a recent interview that was clipped widely on social media.

Bezos took aim at schemes to raise taxes on the wealthy and advocated lower taxes on Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder. He made the comments from the factory floor of his Blue Origin aerospace company during an interview on “Squawk Box” with CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin released Wednesday.

‘We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology!’

When pressed on the issue of taxes, Bezos said half of Americans shouldn’t pay federal income taxes at all. He cited the example of a theoretical nurse in Queens who earns $75,000 a year and pays about $12,000 in federal income taxes.

“People talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes? At all,” he said.

“Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes? That’s $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything. And by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3% of the taxes,” Bezos added.

“It’s only 3%. We can find 3%. It’s a small amount of money for the government,” he continued. “And the more I thought about it, to me it’s kind of absurd that we’re doing this. You know, we shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology! It really makes no sense!”

Bezos said it was fine to debate what the wealthy should pay in taxes but went on to accuse politicians of distracting voters by vilifying the wealthy. He added that politicians were ignoring the root problems causing inflation and other economic problems.

“If you’re really being honest about it, we don’t have a revenue problem in this country. We already have the most progressive tax system in the world,” Bezos said. “The top 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of all tax revenue, the bottom half pay only 3%, and I think it should be zero.”

“We actually have a spending problem,” he added and cited the $44,000 that is spent on every child in the New York City school system with worse outcomes than other cities.

“If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system,” Bezos joked, “packages would take six weeks to arrive, we would charge you a $100 delivery fee, and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item in it!”

Sorkin didn’t laugh.

“That’s a skills issue!” Bezos added. “It’s just competence.”

RELATED: Leftists lose their minds after Jeff Bezos announces new direction for WaPo in favor of freedom

Bezos also argued that the government could double the taxes he pays and it wouldn’t help the theoretical nurse in Queens because government spending is so out of control.

“You can’t connect those two things, not logically,” he said.

The entire segment on taxes with Bezos can be viewed on CNBC’s YouTube channel.

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​Federal income taxes, Government spending, Jeff bezos, New york city, Politics, Tax system 

Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck is sounding the alarm over what he sees as a cultural road map America could soon follow if conservatives fail to maintain the momentum of the Trump era.

“If we don’t get a Marco Rubio, or whoever is running and is the candidate, in line with what Donald Trump is doing right now — if we don’t get that, we’re going to be back here with a vengeance,” Beck warned.

“We’ll be right behind you,” he tells Peter McIlvenna.

McIlvenna, who grew up in Northern Ireland as well as in the Republic of Ireland in Dublin and Limerick, tells Glenn that he’s right — and that the cities there are “not Irish at all.”

“Ireland is an interesting test case, going from probably the most staunchly Christian Catholic country to now the most liberal country. What happened on the abortion laws was unbelievable. The rush to same-sex marriage so quick,” he explains.

“Part of that was the sex scandals that were in the Catholic Church were then used to destroy any remnant of Christianity within the country. Instead of saying ‘this is happening in parts of Church; we need to address it,’ the Church was decimated,” he continues.

The hypocrisy, McIlvenna points out, is when you point out that Islam has the same problems — or worse — the response is that it’s “a few bad apples.”

“It was a concerted attack on the Church, destroying the Church’s role as a guiding light for Irish society to now being dismissed and ridiculed and rejected,” he explains.

But it’s not just Ireland. The decline of Christianity and embrace of Islam are happening all over the United Kingdom.

“Islam presents itself as dominant and gives them an identity. And I think that’s the thing we are lacking as a nation. We don’t know our identity,” he says. “We have ripped out Christianity from the nation.”

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​Abortion laws, America, Blaze media, Blaze media cofounder, Blaze news, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Blaze podcast network, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Candidate, Catholic church, Christianity, Conservatives, Decline of christianity, Donald trump, Dublin, Embrace of islam, Glenn beck, Hypocrisy, Ireland, Islam, Marco rubio, Northern ireland, Republic, Same sex marriage, Sex scandals, The blaze, The glenn beck program, Trump era, United kingdom 

Ukrainian military hardware appears to have once again endangered the people of a NATO member nation.

Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal announced on Tuesday that “a drone entering Estonian airspace was detected quickly and shot down over Southern Estonia by a NATO Air Policing fighter jet.”

‘These trajectories have to be as far from the NATO territory as possible.’

Michal thanked Estonia’s “NATO allies, the Romanian Air Force, and the fighter pilots who carried out this mission with professionalism and precision,” adding that “NATO is vigilant, prepared, and capable of acting rapidly when needed.”

Hanno Pevkur, the defense minister for the Baltic nation of 1.36 million souls, confirmed that a Romanian Air Force F-16 pilot participating in a training flight shot down the drone using a single missile. The remains of the drone crashed several hundred meters away from a residential building in the Central Estonian town of Põltsamaa.

A resident told state media that he saw two fighter jets soar overhead, then heard a loud bang.

“There was a loud blast, and I saw the drone falling from the sky,” said the witness. “As it was already close to the ground, I heard another blast.”

It’s presently unclear whether the drone was carrying any warheads.

Heorhii Tykhyi, a spokesperson for Ukraine, apologized to Estonia “for such unintended incidents,” reported DW.

RELATED: Killer drones have conquered the skies. Can we ever be safe again?

Sergei SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images

The Estonian Defense Forces claimed that the Ukrainian drone stole into Estonian airspace “under the conditions of heavy electronic warfare, including GPS spoofing and jamming, by Russia.”

Defense Minister Pevkur said in an interview with Estonian Public Broadcasting that Ukrainian officials — who do not have permission to use Estonian airspace — “have indeed apologized, but they have also reaffirmed that they are doing everything on their part to ensure that these drones do not enter NATO airspace.”

Pevkur expressed some frustration with Kyiv, telling the Associated Press, “We’ve said to the Ukrainians all the time that if you’re attacking Russian positions or Russian targets, then these trajectories have to be as far from the NATO territory as possible.”

The Estonian Internal Security Service has launched a criminal investigation into the aerial intrusion.

In recent months, numerous Ukrainian military drones have entered the airspace of friendly neighboring countries.

A pair of Ukrainian drones entered Estonian and Latvian airspace on March 25, for example. One of the drones struck Estonia’s Auvere power ⁠station and the other crash-landed. Officials suggested that the drones were supposed to be part of a Ukrainian attack on Russia.

Days later, two drones entered Finnish airspace, then crashed near the city of Kouvola. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo told his country’s state media that the drones appeared to be of Ukrainian origin.

Earlier this month, two more Ukrainian drones strayed into NATO airspace, crashing ultimately on Latvian soil. Reuters reported that one of the drones exploded at an oil storage facility, damaging four tanks.

Drones aren’t the only unwanted surprises Ukraine had sent into NATO’s back yard.

A S-300 air defense missile landed in Poland on Nov. 15, 2022, rocking the village of Przewodów and killing two farm workers.

Ukrainian officials and numerous media outlets — including the Associated Press, CNN, CBS News, and Fox News — rushed to suggest that the explosion was the handiwork of the Russians, which would have been sufficient to trigger articles 4 and 5 of the NATO charter, potentially putting the U.S. into direct conflict with the nuclear power.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president whose term officially ended in May 2024, said in the wake of the deadly explosion, “Russian missiles hit Poland, the territory of our friendly country. People died.”

The Polish and American governments rejected the suggestion that Russia fired the missile, noting instead that it was likely a Ukrainian missile that had accidentally been lobbed into a NATO country.

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister at the time, called the claim that the explosion was caused by Ukraine a “conspiracy theory.”

Polish investigators, denied any relevant intelligence from Kyiv, later claimed that the missile was fired by Ukraine. The particular missile that landed in Przewodów has a maximum range of 56 miles, and Russian forces were nowhere near close enough to land the shot.

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​Drones, Electronic warfare, Estonia, Europe, Explosion, Missiles, Russia, Ukraine, War, Politics, Zelenskyy 

The U.S. Department of Justice says Cuban ex-dictator Raul Castro has been indicted on charges related to the shooting down of two planes in international waters.

Castro, 94, ruled over the communist government in the island nation until 2018 after his brother, revolutionary icon Fidel Castro, passed over control in 2008 over his health issues. Fidel Castro died in 2016 at the age of 90.

‘If you kill Americans, we will pursue you. No matter who you are. No matter what title you hold.’

In an indictment unsealed Wednesday, the U.S. government charged that the surviving Castro should be held criminally responsible for the deaths of American citizens.

On Feb. 24, 1996, the Cuban government fired upon and shot down two unarmed U.S. civilian aircraft, killing four Americans who were on a rescue mission, according to the indictment.

“For the first time in nearly 70 years, senior leadership of the Cuban regime has been charged in the United States for alleged acts of violence resulting in the deaths of American citizens,” reads a statement from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“President Trump and this Justice Department are committed to restoring a simple principle: if you kill Americans, we will pursue you. No matter who you are. No matter what title you hold.”

The four Americans were working with Hermanos al Rescate, or Brothers to the Rescue, a humanitarian operation that sought to aid Cubans trying to flee the communist regime.

The DOJ alleges that the organization was infiltrated by communist agents who provided information to the Cuban military in order to plan the attack on the planes.

The indictment alleges charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, two counts of destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder.

In addition to Castro, the indictment also names five other Cuban officials who are allegedly partly responsible for killing the Americans.

RELATED: ‘I can do anything I want with it’: Trump confirms he’s eying another country for the ‘taking’

The U.S. nationals killed in the operation were Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales.

“For 30 years these families have waited for answers — and this FBI never forgot,” FBI Director Kash Patel said. “We will continue working with our Justice Department partners to bring to justice those who attacked our civilians.”

The defendants face a maximum penalty of death or life imprisonment on the murder and conspiracy charges if convicted, the DOJ said.

In response to the indictment, current Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez claimed in Spanish: “On February 24, 1996, Cuba acted in legitimate self-defense within its jurisdictional waters, following repeated and dangerous violations of our airspace by notorious terrorists — a fact of which the U.S. administration at the time was alerted on more than a dozen occasions, yet it ignored the warnings and allowed those violations to continue.”

Whether Castro and the other defendants will be extradited to the United States to face the charges is unclear. Blanche said of Castro: “There was a warrant issued for his arrest. So we expect that he will show up here, by his own will or by another way.”

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​Communist regime, Raul castro, Communist cuba, Doj indictment, Politics 

BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock is sounding off on what he believes is one of the most revealing stories in modern sports: the Dallas Wings’ recent draft decision.

According to Whitlock, the WNBA team prioritized cultural narratives and personal relationships over talent, as the LGBTQ agenda appears to always outweigh merit these days.

“This should have been the biggest story in sports because it helps you understand just how fake and gay everything is in the sports world and who is actually controlling the sports world,” Whitlock explains.

“The Dallas Wings drafted Paige Buecker’s girlfriend, number one overall, over Olivia Miles,” he says.

“Azzi Fudd is Paige Buecker’s college girlfriend and current girlfriend,” he continues, pointing out the “organization’s run so unprofessionally” and is “dominated by the alphabet mafia and the LGBTQIA+.”

“This is the equivalent of them drafting Azzi Fudd to satisfy Paige Bueckers and this gay love affair between these two and their promotion of this alphabet mafia LGBTQ agenda. They’re so invested and deep off into that, that they would pass up a far superior player who could help them win a championship so they would stay on narrative,” he says.

“And the media isn’t allowed to discuss this,” he adds.

Whitlock believes Miles is the “far superior player,” and calls the draft pick “the equivalent of the Portland Trailblazers taking Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan.”

“If we weren’t all living in fear of the alphabet mafia, if fake and gay wasn’t dominating all of the sports world and all of America, you’d think that would be a story,” he adds.

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​Alphabet mafia, Azzi fudd, Blazetv host, Championship, Dallas wings, Fearless, Fearless with jason whitlock, Jason whitlock, Jason whitlock harmony, Lgbtq agenda, Lgbtqia, Media, Michael jordan, Olivia miles, Paige beckers, Paige beckers girlfriend, Portland trailblazers, Sam buoie, Sports world, Wnba team 

Former President Barack Obama’s latest appearance on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show had it all, from thinly veiled critiques aimed at the current presidency and the Republican Party to alien skepticism.

And BlazeTV host Pat Gray wasn’t impressed, pointing out that the applause throughout the interview sounded “fake.”

“I’ve never seen that in an interview with the president before,” he notes.

In the interview, Obama told Colbert that “the presidential center is nonpartisan” before immediately pivoting to concerns about Republicans and Donald Trump.

“The reason I want to mention that is because I’m worried about the Republican Party, not just the Democratic Party,” Obama told Colbert, while Gray listens and scoffs.

“When I was president, people would ask me, ‘Well, what change would you like to see in Washington?’” Obama told Colbert. “I’d say, ‘I’d love a loyal opposition. I’d love a Republican Party that was conservative in some ways, that didn’t agree with me on a whole bunch of stuff, but believed in rule of law.’”

“We’re going to have to do some work to return to this basic norm, and we probably now have to codify it,” he explained. “The White House shouldn’t be able to direct the attorney general to go around prosecuting whoever.”

“The idea is that the attorney general is the people’s lawyer, it’s not the president’s consigliere, right?” Obama asks.

Obama went on to explain that “we can’t overcome the politicization of the criminal justice system” to another round of “fake” applause.

Colbert then asked Obama about aliens, to which Obama replied that for the people “that still think that we’ve got little green men underground somewhere,” there’s no need to speculate because “the government is terrible at keeping secrets.”

“This idea of conspiracy theories, if there were aliens or alien spaceships or anything under the control of the United States government that we knew about, seen, photographs, what have you, I promise you, some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with one of the aliens and sent it to his girlfriend,” he said.

“Do you wish they were real?” Colbert asked Obama.

“I actually do,” he responded.

Executive producer Keith Malinak isn’t buying it, commenting, “Never denied it.”

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​Alien skepticism, Aliens, Attorney general, Blaze media, Blaze news, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Blaze podcast network, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Blazetv host, Conspiracy, Conspiracy theories, Criminal justice system, Democratic party, Denial, Donald trump, Fake applause, Former president barack obama, Keith malinak, Little green men, Nonpartisan, Pat gray, Republican party, Rule of law, Stephen colbert, The blaze, United states government, Pat gray unleashed 

Barney Frank, the powerful former Massachusetts congressman who left his imposing stamp on the nation’s financial system, has died at age 86, according to family.

Frank was the first member of Congress to be openly gay, and he used his platform to push the Democratic Party to the left on LGBTQ+ issues before the term “LGBTQ+” even existed.

‘Most Democrats agree with me,’ said Frank. ‘But they’ve been intimidated out of saying so.’

After the great global financial meltdown in 2008, Frank was the architect of new regulations on the banking industry to limit its financial risk and prevent future implosions. The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill bears his name as well as the name of former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.).

That bill also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was pushed by Elizabeth Warren before she ran for the U.S. Senate. The agency purports to protect consumers but has been criticized by Republicans for supporting liberal policies.

Frank was an icon in LGBTQ+ circles for coming out as gay in 1987 at a time when the homosexual community was being besieged by the AIDS epidemic. He said he regretted not coming out earlier.

In 2012, he also became the first sitting member of Congress to be in a same-sex marriage.

In his later years, he used his prominent influence to push the Democratic Party against extremist positions into more centrist policies. His final book, “The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy,” opposes the current Democratic “vote-repelling platform” that includes open borders, defunding the police, and the “rule of the pronoun police,” surprisingly.

“I know most Democrats agree with me,” Frank said in a recent interview via Zoom with the Atlantic. “But they’ve been intimidated out of saying so.”

The book is scheduled to be released in September.

Frank was an outspoken and cunning thorn in the side of his Republican political opponents.

Many Democratic figures are paying their respects to Frank after his passing.

“Barney Frank was an exceptional legislator, whose name is synonymous with the strongest consumer financial protections in history and whose advocacy helped forge a fairer future for all of our children,” said former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Working families in Massachusetts and beyond lost an iconic champion today.”

RELATED: Barney Frank, creator of Dodd-Frank Act, refutes Dems blaming Trump for bank collapses

“In the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Barney Frank was the gravelly-voiced, smart-as-a-whip congressman who fought hard to get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over the finish line,” wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

“His one-liners were wicked and wickedly funny. Barney delivered for working people, and the world is a poorer place without him,” she added.

Frank’s sister confirmed to CNN that he died.

“He was a wonderful brother. I was lucky to be his sister. I will miss him,” she said.

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​Barney frank, Democratic party, Global financial meltdown, Nancy pelosi, Politics, Lgbtq 

Consider a small military drone, electrically powered, commercially sourced, guided by GPS and a cellular link and the patience of whoever is holding the controller. The drone costs around $500. The missile sent to destroy it costs $2 million. This is, at the moment, the defining arithmetic of modern air defense, and the people responsible for solving it are very aware that they have not yet done so.

We have been in similar situations before. When the first aircraft appeared over battlefields in 1914, artillery was quickly tilted toward the sky. In World War II, barrage balloons forced attackers higher, degrading their accuracy, channeling them into envelopes where radar and gunfire could find them. Radar transformed air defense by making detection a network rather than a pair of eyes. Each new threat produced a new institution for managing it, and each institution carried within it a theory of the sky as a space to be controlled, parsed, and made legible.

This is a consumer-electronics model applied to weapons procurement.

The anti-drone systems of 2026 are the latest iteration of that project. What is different is the low cost of the weapons and the speed at which they adapt.

The defense is a layered architecture. You detect the target through some combination of radar, radio-frequency sensing, electro-optical and infrared cameras, and acoustic arrays. You classify it: Is this a delivery drone, a news crew, an adversary? You track it and assign a response. You fire, jam, send another drone to intercept it, or decide the risk is acceptable and let it pass. None of these steps is simple; the central difficulty is not any single step but the compression of them all into a duration less than that needed by the threat to cover the remaining distance. The military speaks of “shortening the sensor-to-shooter timeline.” Software is now as consequential as hardware, and the human operator is increasingly the bottleneck.

No single sensor works in all conditions. Radar handles range and darkness but struggles in urban clutter. RF sensing identifies control links but fails against autonomous systems. Cameras support discrimination between a civilian quadcopter and a weaponized one, but slow or hovering targets can confuse systems designed to filter out birds and weather. The FAA, in its work on civilian airports, noted persistent difficulty accurately detecting and identifying unmanned systems. Drones are hard to characterize cheaply and reliably in all conditions, and the failure modes differ by sensor type, which is why fusion of all these modalities is now the baseline.

A constellation of weaponry

Electronic warfare remains central, especially near populated areas. However, jamming must be embedded in a wider system. Cannon-based defenses are effective at close range, limited by altitude, ammunition consumption, and line of sight. Missiles extend the coverage envelope, but are not cost-effective against cheap targets. High-energy lasers are precise and cheap per shot, but their per-shot cost understates their required infrastructure. High-power microwaves may affect multiple drones simultaneously but can have collateral effects on friendly systems. No single type of defense is sufficient.

RELATED: Commencement speaker praises AI and globalism — graduates crush her with boos

Phelan M. Ebenhack/Getty Images

Interceptor drones are emerging as an important option. In Ukraine, by late April 2026, drone-on-drone intercepts were accounting for roughly 40% of kills against long-range Shahed-style UAVs, up from around 25% only months earlier. A semi-disposable flying interceptor meets the attacker on more favorable economic terms than a Patriot battery. Ukraine has arrived at this solution through necessity. NATO is watching closely.

The U.S. Army’s acquisition behavior clarifies the current moment. The Government Accountability Office has reported that the Army is not heavily developing some handheld and dismounted counter-drone systems because their effective lifespan is too short. Instead, it procures commercial systems on 24- to 36-month warranty cycles and replaces them with new technology when the warranty expires. This is a consumer-electronics model applied to weapons procurement. The state of the art is a position on a curve, replaced on a schedule.

Anti-drone systems are institutions for managing visibility and turning atmosphere and electromagnetic spectrum into administrable space. The problem they address is continuous classification: who is present in the sky, who is authorized to be there, what signal is being emitted, what level of risk is acceptable. The low-altitude airspace above a military base, a power plant, or a port has become a zone of perpetual interrogation. Every object in it must be accounted for.

The front line is everywhere

Older air defense was organized around a small number of aircraft. The counter-drone problem is about governing a dense environment filled with cheap, abundant objects of ambiguous provenance. Ukraine has formalized this approach: Industrial enterprises there now staff their own air-defense units, equipped with anti-drone gear, coordinated by the Air Force, integrated into the national defense architecture. Anti-drone war runs through factories, logistics networks, and civilian labor. Verified strike videos are fed into battlefield situational-awareness platforms, linked to points-based reward systems, and connected to procurement decisions. Combat becomes a chain of footage, metadata, validation, and supply.

Directed-energy systems remain, despite genuine recent progress, uneven in maturity, burdened by infrastructure requirements, and sensitive to uncontrollable atmospheric conditions. RAND, in its 2025 assessment of directed-energy systems in Ukraine, argued that such systems should not yet be a near-term investment priority. The GAO found that both the Army’s high-energy laser and high-power microwave programs remained in test rather than transitioned to stable programs of record. The leading edge lies in layered integration, rapid refresh cycles, and cost discipline.

What anti-drone technology protects, it also re-describes. The sky becomes a measurable grid of emitters, tracks, altitudes, probabilities, and response options. Defending a perimeter requires continuous visibility over low-altitude airspace. The fog of war is rewritten in code, confidence scores, and fire-authority rules embedded in software that no single operator fully oversees. Adaptation cycles are so fast that sensors, doctrines, and effectors are repeatedly outpaced. Anti-drone war is a struggle for control of a new and changing fog.

​Tech