Category: Blaze Media
Mississippi Delta sheriffs and officers arrested over alleged Mexican drug cartel bribery scheme
More than a dozen law enforcement officials in the Mississippi Delta area were charged by the Department of Justice for allegedly accepting bribes from what they believed to be members of a Mexican drug cartel.
U.S. Attorney Clay Joyner said at a news conference Thursday that the DOJ secured indictments against 20 people, including two elected sheriffs as well as 14 current or former law enforcement officers. The investigation was conducted over several years.
‘The law must apply equally to everyone regardless of the title or position they hold. Know that if you betray the people’s trust in Mississippi, you will face consequences.’
“We’re here today to talk about some incredibly serious allegations that mark a very — it’s just a monumental betrayal of public trust,” said Joyner. Law enforcement officers and their accomplices allegedly provided safe passage to people they believed were drug traffickers in exchange for money. They were allegedly led to believe they were helping transport 25 kilograms of cocaine. “They are also indicted for related firearms offenses and, of course, individual counts related to specific runs throughout the Mississippi Delta,” he added.
Washington County Sheriff Milton Gaston and Humphreys County Sheriff Bruce Williams were among those arrested.
“Law enforcement is only effective when the community they protect can trust the law enforcement officers are honestly serving the community’s interests,” said FBI Special Agent Robert Eikhoff. “This type of corruption strikes at the heart of the community.”
Some of the alleged bribes ranged between $20,000 and $37,000, according to prosecutors.
RELATED: Four Toledo City Council members, all Democrats, arrested by FBI on bribery charges
Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves released a statement about the indictments.
“The law must apply equally to everyone regardless of the title or position they hold,” Reeves wrote. “Know that if you betray the people’s trust in Mississippi, you will face consequences.”
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Tylenol manufacturer bought despite lawsuit, months of scrutiny by Trump administration
Kenvue, which has been under increased scrutiny recently after the Trump administration alleged a link between Tylenol and autism, is being acquired by Kimberly-Clark in a multibillion-dollar deal.
According to a Monday press release, Kimberly-Clark will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Kenvue common stock in a cash and stock transaction that values Kenvue at approximately $48.7 billion.
Just last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Kenvue and its former parent company, Johnson & Johnson.
“We are excited to bring together two iconic companies to create a global health and wellness leader,” said Mike Hsu, Kimberly-Clark chairman and chief executive officer.
“We look forward to working with the Kenvue team to bring these companies together and are confident that we will drive significant value for our combined shareholders,” Hsu continued.
“Our combination with Kimberly-Clark unites two highly complementary portfolios filled with iconic, beloved brands and everyday essentials that people trust and count on throughout their lives,” said Kirk Perry, chief executive officer of Kenvue.
RELATED: Headaches continue for Tylenol brand as Texas AG files lawsuit over alleged autism link
Photo by Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for Kenvue
Kenvue, however, has increasingly been viewed as a liability as allegations of a link between prenatal use of Tylenol and autism have been leveled by members of the Trump administration and other leaders.
Just last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Kenvue and its former parent company, Johnson & Johnson.
Paxton said, “Johnson & Johnson attempted to escape responsibility by illegally offloading their liability onto a different company,” apparently referring to Kenvue.
Kimberly-Clark’s current portfolio — which includes well-known brands such as Huggies, Kleenex, Scott, Kotex, Cottonelle, Poise, Depend, Andrex, Pull-Ups, and Goodnites — will combine with Kenvue, which produces brands including Aveeno, Band-Aid, Johnson’s, Listerine, Neutrogena, and, of course, Tylenol.
The Associated Press reported that Kimberly-Clark shares dropped 15% before the market open and Kenvue’s stock rose more than 20%.
Blaze News reached out to Kimberly-Clark for comment but did not receive a response.
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Rapper thanks Trump for defending Nigerian Christians; president threatens to ‘completely wipe out’ their jihadi attackers
Nigeria is a fast-growing country with an estimated population of over 239 million. According to the CIA Worldbook’s 2018 estimate, roughly 53.5% of the Nigerian population is Muslim and roughly 45.9% of the population is Christian.
Despite being over 100 million strong, Nigeria’s Christian population faces brutal persecution at the hands of radical Muslim groups.
President Donald Trump, who vowed ahead of the 2024 election to “protect persecuted Christians,” made abundantly clear over the weekend that those now savaging the followers of Christ in Nigeria may soon reap the whirlwind, courtesy of the U.S. military.
While the Nigerian regime has decried Trump’s efforts to prevent further bloodshed, others have celebrated the American president’s interest in resolving yet another conflict — including Trinidadian rapper Nicki Minaj, who thanked Trump and his team on Saturday.
Background
The Christian persecution watchdog Open Doors now ranks Nigeria as the seventh-worst place for Christians in the world, noting that “Christians are particularly at risk from targeted attacks by Islamist militants, including Fulani fighters, Boko Haram and ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province).”
According to the watchdog, over 4,100 Christians were killed for their faith between October 2022 and September 2023 alone — an average of 11 Christians slaughtered every day. During that same period studied by Open Doors, over 3,300 Nigerian Christians were abducted. The situation appears to have grown more dire in the years since.
RELATED: Nigerian Christians are being murdered by Islamic radicals. This congressman has had enough.
Photo by OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT/AFP via Getty Images
A report issued in August by the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law indicated that Fulani fighters and other jihadists massacred over 7,000 Christians in the first seven months of this year.
While some academics have warned against grouping the mass-killing Fulani herder-militant groups with other Islamist outfits targeting Christians — claiming their attacks are instead driven by economics or climate — the Fulani attacks appear to have a religious motive as well.
Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern and a leading expert on religious persecution, told Blaze News earlier this year that like Boko Haram, the Fulani militants, a group of traditionally nomadic cattle herders seeking greater grazing lands for their livestock, “are also driven by Islam’s practice of using violence to subjugate territories to Islam. In fact, the Fulanis are the driving force behind radical Islam’s massive land-grab of a huge swath of Africa known as the Sahel. They are motivated by a desire to rebuild a caliphate they had built in the 1700s and 1800s.”
The persecution of Christians by the Fulani militants and other radical Muslim groups has reportedly worsened since Bola Ahmed Tinubu became Nigeria’s president in 2023.
Taking action
Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) and other lawmakers, confronted with indications that the situation is worsening for Nigeria’s Christians, have called on the Trump administration to take action.
“Since Boko Haram’s insurgency in 2009, more than 50,000 Christians have been murdered and more than 5 million have been displaced. Just this year, a priest was kidnapped and murdered on Ash Wednesday. 54 Christians were martyred on Palm Sunday,” Moore noted early last month. “At least 250 priests have been attacked or killed in the last decade. More than 19,000 churches have been attacked or destroyed since 2009 — averaging three per day.”
Moore, who indicated that elements of the Nigerian regime have reportedly been involved in recent anti-Christian attacks, asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to designate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern. Evidently the administration similarly feels strongly about the matter.
‘If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet.’
President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he was applying the designation and asked Reps. Moore and Tom Cole (R-Okla.) along with the House Appropriations Committee to immediately look into the matter.
“Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter,” wrote Trump. “I am hereby making Nigeria a ‘COUNTRY OF PARTICULAR CONCERN’ — But that is the least of it. When Christians, or any such group, is slaughtered like is happening in Nigeria (3,100 versus 4,476 Worldwide), something must be done!”
The CPC designation is applied under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 to nations engaged in severe violations of religious freedom. The designation can carry with it significant economic and diplomatic consequences.
Nigeria was previously slapped with the designation by the first Trump administration in 2020, but this was subsequently lifted by the Biden administration.
RELATED: Bill Maher’s shocking defense of Christians — and what it reveals
Aftermath of a terrorist attack on a Catholic Church in southwest Nigeria. AFP/Getty Images
Nicki Minaj was among those who celebrated Trump’s decision, stating, “Reading this made me feel a deep sense of gratitude. We live in a country where we can freely worship God.”
“No group should ever be persecuted for practicing their religion,” said the rapper.
“Numerous countries all around the world are being affected by this horror & it’s dangerous to pretend we don’t notice. Thank you to The President & his team for taking this seriously. God bless every persecuted Christian. Let’s remember to lift them up in prayer.”
Republican Reps. Moore, Cole, and Mario Díaz-Balart (Fla.) noted in a joint statement, “With President Trump announcing he will be redesignating Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern, the United States is making clear in one resolute voice: religious persecution will not be tolerated. The scourge of anti-Christian violence and oppression of other religious minorities by radical Islamic terrorists is an affront to religious freedom. This is a critical step in mobilizing leadership and attention to confront evil extremism.”
Just in case the designation wasn’t enough, Trump threatened a military intervention in the event that the Nigerian regime fails to protect Christians.
“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Saturday evening.
“I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!” added the president.
Fresh off blowing an apparent narco-trafficking vessel to smithereens, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth confirmed the Department of War was “preparing for action.”
The promise of a reckoning clearly made officials over in the Nigerian capital of Abuja nervous.
President Tinubu rushed out a statement on Saturday claiming that his nation “stands firmly as a democracy governed by constitutional guarantees of religious liberty.
“The characterization of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality, nor does it take into consideration the consistent and sincere efforts of the government to safeguard freedom of religion and beliefs for all Nigerians,” wrote Tinubu. “Religious freedom and tolerance have been a core tenet of our collective identity and shall always remain so. Nigeria opposes religious persecution and does not encourage it.”
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Vibe shift: No rap in the Top 40 for the first time since 1989
Kendrick Lamar’s song “Luther” has just dropped out of the Billboard Top 40, making it the first time in 35 years hip-hop is not represented on the coveted list of music.
And BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock could not be happier.
“I just want to praise Jesus for that miracle, I just want to thank God for making this happen, and I hope that hip-hop music, the current form of it, never reappears in the top 40. I think it’s an indication once again that there is a cultural shift, a vibe shift, going on in America,” Whitlock explains.
“Are we reading too much into it, or this an indication that the world is healing and people are coming out of the demonic cult of hip-hop music?” Whitlock asks his panel.
“It’s an excellent sign,” BlazeTV contributor Chad O. Jackson says.
“And I think it’s high time that something like this occurs,” he adds.
However, BlazeTV contributors Shemeka Michelle and Virgil Walker are admittedly “cynical” when it comes to it being a good sign.
“I’m happy to see that, you know, hip-hop is taking a nose dive, especially in its current iteration. You know, we grew up, Jason, in the ’80s and understood kind of the old school hip-hop, kind of the golden era of hip-hop. Then soon after that, the ‘90s came along, and we got gangster rap, and that became the new cool,” Walker says.
“If you didn’t have enough profane words in your content, if you didn’t have enough sexualizing of women in your content, you weren’t going to be a hit. And that’s only amplified over the course of the last 20 years since 2000,” he continues.
“I think it’s wonderful that for at least a moment, at least a minute, at least a point in time, we’re not going to be bombarded with that kind of crash chaos … but my thought process, kind of like Shemeka said, is that, you know, we’re gonna have to give this a few weeks or so to see if it doesn’t show up again,” he says.
“So I anticipate it’ll make a rise again,” he adds.
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Democrat-induced shutdown poised to break record as key programs lapse
The Democrat-induced government shutdown is set to break the record for the longest shutdown in history.
Senate Democrats blocked the GOP’s clean funding resolution on September 30, initiating the government shutdown on October 1. Over a month has passed since then, with the shutdown inching toward the 35-day record after over a dozen failed Senate votes.
‘REPUBLICANS, BE TOUGH AND SMART!’
If this streak of failed votes continues through midnight Wednesday as expected, the government shutdown will have surpassed the previous record-holding 35-day shutdown from President Donald Trump’s first term.
Although neither party has indicated that a deal is on the horizon, Trump has urged Republicans to deploy the nuclear option to bring the shutdown to a close.
RELATED: Trump urges Senate to deploy the ‘Nuclear Option’ on filibuster
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
“TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, NOT JUST FOR THE SHUTDOWN, BUT FOR EVERYTHING ELSE,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “WE WILL GET ALL OF OUR COMMON SENSE POLICIES APPROVED (VOTER ID, ANYONE?) AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! REMEMBER, THE DEMOCRATS WILL DO IT IMMEDIATELY, AS SOON AS THEY GET THE CHANCE. OUR DOING IT WILL NOT GIVE THEM THE CHANCE.”
“REPUBLICANS, BE TOUGH AND SMART! THE DEMS ARE CRAZED LUNATICS, THEY WILL NOT OPEN UP OUR COUNTRY NO MATTER HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE IRREPARABLY HARMED!”
Trump’s calls to eliminate the filibuster would allow Republicans to pass their funding bill with a simple majority as opposed to the 60-vote threshold currently in place. Only three Democrats have consistently crossed the aisle and voted with Republicans to reopen the government, falling short of the 60 votes needed.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, an institutionalist, has always been against eliminating the filibuster. Despite pressure from the president, Thune maintains that his “position on the importance of the legislative filibuster is unchanged.”
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
While Congress shows no signs of progress, millions of Americans lost key government benefits like food assistance programs that lapsed over the weekend. Programs like SNAP affect citizens across the country, but Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins is taking the opportunity to clean house, ensuring illegal aliens are not taking advantage of the program.
“I’m glad to see the Trump administration is working to get to the bottom of why 41 million people are on SNAP and why this program exploded on Joe Biden’s watch,” said Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has repeatedly voted with Democrats against the funding bill, in a post on X. “It’s time to root out the waste, fraud, and abuse.”
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2 more staffers ditch Graham Platner’s troubled Senate campaign amid Nazi, communism scandals
Graham Platner, a 41-year-old oyster farmer and Marine veteran, announced on Aug. 19 that he was running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate in Maine. His stated objective was to challenge the “oligarchy,” meaning both the Democrat establishment and the Republican incumbent, Sen. Susan Collins.
At the outset, Platner’s campaign appeared to have incredible momentum. The leftist candidate raised several million dollars in a matter of weeks, managed to land endorsements from current lawmakers including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M), and struck a chord with locals, as reflected in early polls indicating that he had a sizeable lead over Democrat Gov. Janet Mills.
Platner’s campaign has, however, encountered a massive and potentially insurmountable obstacle: his radical past.
‘Platner is not a victim of opposition research. … Accountability does not exist in playing the victim of your own behavior.’
In the wake of damning revelations about the leftist candidate’s social media posts and his newly concealed tattoo of a skull image similar to that popularized by Adolf Hitler’s SS elite Nazi guard, at least four key staffers have jumped ship.
The latest individuals to call it quits are the campaign’s national finance director, Ronald Holmes, and its treasurer, Victoria Perrone.
Holmes, a Democrat operative who previously served as finance director on New York Democrat Rep. Josh Riley’s congressional campaign, resigned on Friday, suggesting that Platner’s campaign no longer met his “standards.”
RELATED: Here are the 4 Republicans who betrayed Trump AGAIN, joining Democrats to undermine the MAGA agenda
Graham Platner. Photo by Sophie Park/Getty Images
“I joined this campaign because I believed in building something different — a campaign of fresh energy, integrity, and reform-minded thinking in a political system that often resists exactly those things,” Holmes wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “Somewhere along the way, I began to feel that my professional standards as a campaign professional no longer fully aligned with those of the campaign.”
A campaign spokesperson told Politico, “Ron helped the campaign reach out to big-dollar donors, and we appreciated his efforts. But the reality is our campaign’s fundraising success has come largely from small-dollar donors.”
“Nearly 90% of what we’ve raised has come from small-dollar donations and online donors, which has been and [continues] to be run by our digital fundraising director,” added the spokesperson.
Timothy Facciola of the Judge Street Journal on Substack revealed on Sunday that Holmes wasn’t the only Platner staffer to pack it in last week.
Citing a Federal Election Commission form that was filed on Friday as well as an unnamed source said to be familiar with the matter, Facciola reported that Perrone, the president and founder of the consulting firm Spruce Street Compliance, resigned as treasurer on Tuesday.
Ben Martello — a political strategist who served as an adviser to former Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Mass.) — appears to have stepped into the role.
Blaze News has reached out to Perrone and the Platner campaign for comment.
Perrone, who has been closely involved with Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign, was apparently hired last month to help Platner’s campaign deal with its various scandals.
According to Politico, Perrone was the individual who pressed members of Platner’s campaign team to sign non-disclosure agreements after his Reddit posts came to light — including posts in which he apparently identified as a communist, branded rural white Americans as racists, suggested service members worried about being raped should buy “Kevlar underwear,” and smeared all police officers as “bastards.”
Former state Rep. Genevieve McDonald (D) resigned as political director of Platner’s campaign last month over the posts, noting, “These statements were not known to me when I agreed to join the campaign, and they are not words or values I can stand behind in a candidate for the United States Senate.”
Within days of McDonald’s resignation, footage went viral revealing that Platner had an apparent “totenkopf” tattoo on his chest — the symbol of the SS-Totenkopfverbande, the branch that guarded the Nazi concentration camps.
Amid the fallout over the apparent Nazi tattoo, the Democrat candidate’s longtime friend Kevin Brown similarly jumped ship.
Brown, who took over as Platner’s campaign manager on Oct. 21, announced days later that he was leaving, suggesting that the move was the result of new familial demands on his time.
Brown said in a statement obtained by WGME-TV, “Graham is a dear friend. I started this campaign Tuesday but found out Friday we have a baby on the way.”
“Graham deserves someone who is 100% in on his race, and we want to lean into this new experience as a family, so it was best we step back sooner than later so Graham can get the manager he deserves,” Brown added.
Platner reportedly suggested during a town hall last week that the Democratic Party was the cause of his recent run of bad luck, stating, “I’m running as a Democrat still, despite the fact my party is destroying my life.”
“Platner is not a victim of opposition research. This is what happens when you run for federal office,” Genevieve McDonald said in a recent statement. “People scrutinize everything you’ve ever done. Every word and every action. Accountability does not exist in playing the victim of your own behavior.”
McDonald added, “We should not be having a debate about Nazi symbolism tattooed on the potentially top-ticket Democrat in Maine. The fact we are even willing to entertain it shows desperation within the party, not dedication, and how far we have fallen from rational thought.”
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‘Horror story’: RFK Jr. reveals chilling organ harvesting scandal
A shocking revelation from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has exposed what he calls a “horror story” inside America’s organ donation system.
On a recent segment of Newsmax, RFK Jr. detailed a case in which a woman allegedly awoke while her organs were being harvested and did not live to tell the tale.
“It’s a horror story, and part of it is because of the capture of the agency that was regulating ORR, had a — the board that was actually regulating organ harvesting was overlapping with the contractor that was actually harvesting the organs,” he began.
“I had one instance where a family was waiting at the hospital for the body of their deceased relative. The relative was brought to one of these private organ harvesting centers, awoke while they were harvesting her organs, and then was brought back to the hospital … where she died eventually,” he continued.
“But the family, you know, brought litigation, and that’s the only reason that we learned of this story. We’ve done a complete investigation of that company. We’ve taken the contract away from that company, and we’re reorganizing it so that we will be regulating it and running it directly at HHS and this will never happen again,” he added.
BlazeTV host Pat Gray is astonished.
“That is bizarre. And they did a thorough investigation. Turns out it’s true?” Gray says. “That’s weird.”
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Energy secretary: US weapons tests won’t involve nuclear explosions
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Sunday that the weapons testing that President Trump ordered last week will not include nuclear explosions. “I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests. These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call noncritical explosions,” Wright said on Fox News’s “The Sunday Briefing.” “So…
5 takeaways from Trump’s ‘60 Minutes’ interview
President Trump returned to “60 Minutes” on Sunday for his first sit-down interview with the program and with CBS News since its parent company earlier this year settled a lawsuit with the president. Correspondent Norah O’Donnell sat down with Trump on Friday at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where there was a passing mention of the contentious history between…
