Category: Blaze Media
‘It’s a death sentence’: Former Republican senator reveals tragic cancer diagnosis
Former Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska announced his terminal diagnosis on Tuesday.
The tragic news was shared in a post on X, where Sasse conceded that he is “gonna die.” Sasse revealed his diagnosis is metastasized stage-four pancreatic cancer, but in the same breath proclaimed his deep faith and hope in Christ.
‘The process of dying is still something to be lived.’
“This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die,” Sasse wrote. “Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.”
“I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers,” Sasse added. “As one of them put it, ‘Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.’ Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all.
RELATED: Republican senator announces retirement, citing exhaustion: ‘I feel like a sprinter in a marathon’
Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images
In the message, Sasse reflected on his many personal and professional accomplishments throughout his 53 years of life, expressing deep gratitude and admiration for his family. Sasse also wrote about the difficulty of navigating tragedy during Christmas, which he described as “a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.”
“Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in),” Sasse said.
“Nope — often we lazily say ‘hope’ when what we mean is ‘optimism.’ To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son.”
RELATED: ‘Unnecessary and protracted’: Elise Stefanik drops out of New York governor’s race
Photo by HANNAH MCKAY/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
In addition to leaning on God and his family, Sasse said he will pursue medical intervention.
“Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived,” Sasse said. “We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.”
“But for now, as our family faces the reality of treatments, but more importantly as we celebrate Christmas, we wish you peace: ‘The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. … For to us a son is given (Isaiah 9).”
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Glenn Beck: I wish I had realized THIS about Christmas much EARLIER
If you’re a parent, you may have wandered into the stage of life where all of your children are no longer gathered around your Christmas tree on Christmas morning — and Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck is no stranger to this stage.
“You pine for the days when we were all together,” Glenn says, before recalling his best and worst Christmases.
“I remember I was broke, dead broke. Stu, he was, like, 18 years old, and he’s living in an apartment. He’s got a nicer apartment than I did. We lived in the same complex. I was, like, 35 or 40. And I just was completely broke,” Glenn recalls.
“I was with my daughter, and we were in a CVS, and she was there by the cash register, and there was this little ornament. … It was a little teeny tree ornament. And she’s like, ‘Oh, that is so nice.’ And she was little little. And I thought, ‘Oh.’ … It just broke my heart because all I could think of is, ‘I can’t even afford that. I’m such a loser as a dad,’” he continues.
However, this was not Glenn’s worst Christmas.
“My worst Christmas was the first time I had real success, and I decided, I’m going to buy everything I ever have ever wanted for my kids. And literally the boxes were almost up to my waist. I mean, I had all the kids and all the presents and everything you could possibly want,” Glenn explains.
“And it was so empty. That was my worst Christmas. And my kids never talk about that Christmas. Never,” he says.
“Somewhere along the line, we let that lie creep in, and we bought into it — the lie that says what I give is what you’re worth. That lie is absolute poison, and it’s absolutely not true,” he continues.
“You think that your kids are counting boxes, and quite honestly, teenage years, they might be. They might be. But they grow out of those. You just put up with the teenage years. They’re coming. They suck. They go away. They’re not counting boxes; they’re not looking at labels. … They’re counting on you,” he adds.
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BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales catches woke radicals spewing nonsense outside AmFest
With America Fest coming to a close just days before Christmas, woke protesters showed no signs of taking a hiatus to celebrate the holiday. BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales went into the fray outside AmFest and came back with some footage of the nonsense the protesters were spewing.
While Gonzales interviewed multiple leftists outside the AmFest venue, one woman stole the show.
‘It’s just signs with really mean words on them and brain-dead individuals holding them, not able to back it up.’
The woman mocked Jesus Christ, shouted about explicit sexual acts with children around, and mocked Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk.
At one point, Gonzales and the protester wearing the “Deport Melania” hat began arguing about whether there were children present, given that the protester was shouting and blasting explicit music.
“Oh, I’m so upset. There’s all these kids. You guys, there’s no kids. There’s no children here — unless you’re talking about the one I haven’t aborted yet! Am I right? Am I right?” she laughed.
The protester demanded that the cameraman pan around, and at least one kid was in the vicinity.
RELATED: Allie Beth Stuckey delivers bold speech at TPUSA AmericaFest: ‘Truth divides’
Concerned by this performance, Gonzales asked the woman several times if she was on drugs.
Gonzales also interviewed a man wearing a mask, sunglasses, bucket hat, and gloves who was carrying an American flag and a megaphone.
However, he refused to speak with Gonzales directly. Rather, to her disgust, he appears to have said, “I really love how Charlie Kirk hasn’t said anything racist in 90 days.”
“Are you happy with Charlie Kirk’s assassination? Cracking jokes? What is a racist thing that Charlie Kirk has said?”
He didn’t have an answer.
“Nothing,” Gonzales said. “Not a thing. These people have nothing. They stand here with their big signs and their big megaphones and they shout these tropes, and then when I ask them to explain themselves, they never can.”
Gonzales also got footage of a man in a giraffe costume singing a rendition of “YMCA” that changed the lyrics to say “f**k ICE,” among other mostly inaudible phrases.
The giraffe suit-wearing man was surrounded by other protesters, some carrying signs that said, for example, “Turning Point + Biggs = White Supremacy,” and “No Christo-Fascist Bulls**t Here.”
“Biggs” appears to refer to Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), a featured AmFest speaker.
Gonzales tried one more time to talk to another person with a megaphone and a sign that said, “Stop the Nazi S**t.” Once again, the protester couldn’t, or wouldn’t, provide an explanation. Instead, she just played what sounded like a police siren to drown out the interviewer.
Over the sound of the siren, Gonzales said, “It’s so crazy. They come here with these signs, and they have nothing to back it up. They don’t know what they mean. They can’t explain them. They can’t define them. It’s just signs with really mean words on them and brain-dead individuals holding them, not able to back it up.”
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GOP lawmaker who ousted Liz Cheney launches Senate bid following another Republican retirement
Republican Rep. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming is setting her sights on higher office as the 2026 primaries continue to take shape.
Hageman has served her district as an ally to President Donald Trump after kicking off a political career in the nation’s capital by ousting former Rep. Liz Cheney in the 2022 Republican primary. Cheney was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 melee, resulting in a landslide defeat the following election cycle.
‘We must keep up this fight.’
Hageman is now pursuing the U.S. Senate after Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming announced her retirement on Friday.
“Wyoming is a beautiful state, but our people matter the most,” Hageman said in her campaign announcement. “Our faith, our family, our community, and our county. That’s what we care about. That’s what we fight for.”
RELATED: Republican senator announces retirement, citing exhaustion: ‘I feel like a sprinter in a marathon’
David Williams/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Hageman pointed to the massive energy contributions Wyoming has made to the country, fueling the exponential improvement in technology and quality of life for Americans across the country. Hageman vowed to protect the energy industry and the working class, touting Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act she helped pass in Congress.
“We must keep up this fight, and that’s why today, I’m announcing my campaign for United States Senate,” Hageman said. “This fight is about making sure the next century sees the advancements of the last while protecting our culture and our way of life.”
RELATED: ‘Unnecessary and protracted’: Elise Stefanik drops out of New York governor’s race
Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
“We must dedicate ourselves to ensuring that the next 100 years is the next great American century. Wyoming is critical for achieving that goal.”
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‘Stone cold LOSER’ George Conway mounts New York congressional run — as a Democrat
Virulent Trump critic George Conway III has filed to run as a Democrat for Rep. Jerry Nadler’s seat in New York, Federal Election Commission records show.
The supposedly conservative lawyer’s decision to turn his coat fully inside-out has been years in the making.
Conway, the ex-husband of former Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway, turned sour after failing to seize an opportunity to serve in the first Trump administration’s Justice Department.
‘It’s time to lay it all on the line.’
While Conway said that he changed his mind and withdrew his name from consideration to run the civil division of the DOJ in 2017 after Trump canned then-FBI Director James Comey, Trump claimed that Conway was “VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted.”
Trump added that Conway was a “stone cold LOSER.”
Over the years, Conway grew increasingly antagonistic toward the president, ranting about Trump on cable news and attacking him in the pages of liberal publications.
Two years after weeping with joy in his MAGA hat over Trump’s 2016 win, Conway said in an interview, “I don’t feel comfortable being a Republican any more.”
The following year, he co-founded the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project with a handful of former Republican operatives, including Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt, Reed Galen, and John Weaver, who allegedly had a habit of sexually harassing young men online.
RELATED: Why Democrats fear this midterm more than Republicans do
George Conway bloviating on CNN. Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images
According to a Dec. 17, 2019, op-ed that Conway co-authored with Weaver and the other Lincoln Project co-founders, the aim of the group was to “stem the damage [Trump] and his followers are doing to the rule of law, the Constitution, and the American character.”
With this aim in mind, the Lincoln Project proceeded to stage a white supremacy rally, bankrolled efforts to torpedo Trump-aligned Republicans, and churned out pro-Kamala Harris content such as the recent “Be a Man, Vote for a Woman” ad.
Although Conway stepped away from the Lincoln Project in 2020, he did not give up his fixation with Trump.
Last year, he supported Kamala Harris’ failed presidential campaign and launched a six-figure ad campaign hoping to dissuade Americans from voting for Trump.
After spending years throwing his money and hopes after losers and lost causes, Conway has decided to throw his hat in the ring.
In the first post on his new Substack page, Conway noted, “I’m going into the arena. I’ve already put my money where my mouth is, but now it’s time to lay it all on the line. It’s time to defeat Trumpism once and for all.”
“We need Democrats to take over Congress — and not just any Democrats, but the most fearless and relentless ones,” wrote Conway.
While New York’s 12th Congressional District is a safe blue seat, Conway is hardly the only Democrat hoping to make it his own. Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of President John F. Kennedy; New York Assemblyman Micah Lasher (D); Democratic Socialist gun critic Cameron Kasky; and former Clinton White House fellow Jami Floyd are among the Democrat candidates presently in the running.
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Your laptop is about to become a casualty of the AI grift
Welcome to the techno-feudal state, where citizens are forced to underwrite unnecessary and harmful technology at the expense of the technology they actually need.
The economic story of 2025 is the government-driven build-out of hyperscale AI data centers — sold as innovation, justified as national strategy, and pursued in service of cloud-based chatbot slop and expanded surveillance. This build-out is consuming land, food, water, and energy at enormous scale. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright bluntly put it, “It takes massive amounts of electricity to generate intelligence. The more energy invested, the more intelligence produced.”
Shortages will hit consumers hard in the coming year.
That framing ignores what is being sacrificed — and distorted — in the process.
Beyond the destruction of rural communities and the strain placed on national energy capacity, government favoritism toward AI infrastructure is warping markets. Capital that once sustained the hardware and software ecosystem of the digital economy is being siphoned into subsidized “AI factories,” chasing artificial general intelligence instead of cheaper, more efficient investments in narrow AI.
Thanks to fiscal, monetary, tax, and regulatory favoritism, the result is free chatbot slop and an increasingly scarce, expensive supply of laptops, phones, and consumer hardware.
Subsidies break the market
For decades, consumer electronics stood as one of the greatest deflationary success stories in modern economics. Unlike health care or education — both heavily monopolized by government — the computer industry operated with relatively little distortion. From December 1997 to August 2015, the CPI for “personal computers and peripheral equipment” fell 96%. Over that same period, medical care, housing, and food costs rose between 80% and 200%.
That era is ending.
AI data centers are now crowding out consumer electronics. Major manufacturers such as Dell and Samsung are scaling back or discontinuing entire product lines because they can no longer secure components diverted to AI chip production.
Prices for phones and laptops are rising sharply. Jobs tied to consumer electronics — especially the remaining U.S.-based assembly operations — are being squeezed out in favor of data center hardware that benefits a narrow set of firms.
This is policy-driven distortion, not organic market evolution.
Through initiatives like Stargate and hundreds of billions in capital pushed toward data center expansion, the government has created incentives for companies to abandon consumer hardware in favor of AI infrastructure. The result is shortages that will hit consumers hard in the coming year.
Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are retooling factories to prioritize AI-grade silicon for data centers instead of personal devices. DRAM production is being routed almost entirely toward servers because it is far more profitable to leverage $40,000 AI chips than $500-$800 laptops. In the fourth quarter of 2025, contract prices for certain 16GB DDR5 chips rose nearly 300% as supply was diverted. Dell and Lenovo have already imposed 15%-30% price hikes on PCs, citing insatiable AI-sector demand.
The chip crunch
The situation is deteriorating quickly. DRAM inventory levels are down 80% year over year, with just three weeks of supply on hand — down from 9.5 weeks in July. SK Hynix expects shortages to persist through late 2027. Samsung has announced it is effectively out of inventory and has more than doubled DDR5 contract prices to roughly $19-$20 per unit. DDR5 is now standard across new consumer and commercial desktops and laptops, including Apple MacBooks.
Samsung has also signaled it may exit the SSD market altogether, deeming it insufficiently glamorous compared with subsidized data center investments. Nvidia has warned it may cut RTX 50 series production by up to 40%, a move that would drive up the cost of entry-level gaming systems.
Shrinkflation is next. Before the data center bubble, the market was approaching a baseline of 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSDs for entry-level laptops. As memory is diverted to enterprise customers, manufacturers will revert to 8GB systems with slower storage to keep prices under $999 — ironically rendering those machines incapable of running the very AI applications they’re working on.
Real innovation sidelined
The damage extends beyond prices. Research and development in conventional computing are already suffering. Investment in efficient CPUs, affordable networking equipment, edge computing, and quantum-adjacent technologies has slowed as capital and talent are pulled into AI accelerators.
This is precisely backward. Narrow AI — focused on real-world tasks like logistics, agriculture, port management, and manufacturing — is where genuine productivity gains lie. China understands this and is investing accordingly. The United States is not. Instead, firms like Roomba, which experimented with practical autonomy, are collapsing — only to be acquired by the Chinese!
This is not a free market. Between tax incentives, regulatory favoritism, land-use carve-outs, capital subsidies, and artificially suppressed interest rates, the government has created an arms race for a data center bubble China itself is not pursuing. Each round of monetary easing inflates the same firms’ valuations, enabling further speculative investment divorced from consumer need.
RELATED: China’s AI strategy could turn Americans into data mines
Grafissimo via iStock/Getty Images
Hype over utility
As Charles Hugh Smith recently noted, expanding credit boosts asset prices, which then serve as collateral for still more leverage — allowing capital-rich firms to outbid everyone else while hollowing out the broader economy.
The pattern is familiar. Consider the Ford plant in Glendale, Kentucky, where 1,600 workers were laid off after the collapse of government-favored electric vehicle investments. That facility is now being retooled to produce batteries for data centers. When one subsidy collapses, another replaces it.
We are trading convention for speculation. Conventional technology — reliable hardware, the internet, mobile computing — delivers proven, measurable utility. The current investment surge into artificial general intelligence is based on hypothetical future returns propped up by state power.
The good old laptop is becoming collateral damage in what may prove to be the largest government-induced tech bubble yet.
Activist Obama judge throws lifeline to deported Venezuelan gangsters
President Donald Trump issued a proclamation on March 15 invoking the Alien Enemies Act and declaring that Tren de Aragua is “a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization” aligned with the Venezuelan Maduro regime that “is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.”
Within hours of invoking the AEA, the Trump administration deported over 130 suspected Venezuelan gangsters — many of whom were credibly accused of murder, robbery, rape, and other crimes — to El Salvador, where they were placed in a Salvadoran prison for terrorists.
In July, the administration had Venezuelan deportees who were imprisoned at the Terrorism Confinement Center repatriated to Venezuela, where they were welcomed home by Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
‘Chief Judge Boasberg has compromised the impartiality of the judiciary.’
U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, the Obama appointee who tried unsuccessfully to stop the illegal aliens’ March 15 removal from the U.S., certified the Venezuelan deportees as a class on Monday and ordered the administration to offer them legal relief abroad, though stopping short of ordering their return to the United States.
“The Court finds that the only remedy that would give effect to its granting of Plaintiffs’ Motion would be to order the Government to undo the effects of their unlawful removal by facilitating a meaningful opportunity to contest their designation and the Proclamation’s validity,” wrote Boasberg.
“Otherwise, a finding of unlawful removal would be meaningless for Plaintiffs, who have already been sent back to Venezuela against their wishes and without due process.”
RELATED: Judges break the law to stop Trump from enforcing it
Accused gangster at the Counter Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.
“Expedited removal cannot be allowed to render this relief toothless,” continued the activist judge. “If secretly spiriting individuals to another country were enough to neuter the Great Writ, then ‘the Government could snatch anyone off the street, turn him over to a foreign country, and then effectively foreclose any corrective course of action.'”
Boasberg — the activist judge who helped the Biden FBI spy on Republican lawmakers’ phone records, ordered in August the release of a woman accused of repeatedly threatening Trump’s life, and mandated a right to Medicaid for able-bodied adults without work requirements — gave the government a deadline of Jan. 5 to “submit its proposal either to facilitate the return of Plaintiffs to the United States or to otherwise provide them with hearings that satisfy the requirements of due process.”
The Obama judge indicated that the Venezuelans needn’t demonstrate that the president’s AEA invocation was unlawful but rather that their designation as alien enemies was incorrect.
“The merits of Plaintiffs’ due-process claim are easily resolved,” he wrote. “Even if the AEA was properly invoked as a general matter, it is beyond cavil that designated ‘alien enemies’ under that act must be afforded some process to contest their designation. … Here, Plaintiffs received none.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the suspected foreign gangsters, said in a statement, “This administration cannot escape judicial scrutiny of its policies, which has been its goal all along.”
The ACLU noted further that “this is an important ruling for these men who were tortured, and for the rule of law.”
Blaze News has reached out to the White House for comment.
Rob Luther, a professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, said in response to the ruling, “I predict that in 2026, Judge Boasberg will make history as the 16th judge impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives.”
Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) introduced articles of impeachment against Boasberg on Nov. 4, stating, “Chief Judge Boasberg has compromised the impartiality of the judiciary and created a constitutional crisis.”
A simple majority is needed to pass articles of impeachment for a judge in the House, where Republicans hold a slim majority.
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Beloved elderly fire department member mauled to death by pack of pit bull-mix dogs; owner charged with murder, animal abuse
An elderly fire department member was mauled to death by a pack of dogs in North Carolina, according to authorities. Now a dog owner has been charged with murder, and the pit bull-mixes involved in the dog attack reportedly have been euthanized.
The Davidson County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that deputies were dispatched to a residence around 7:43 p.m. Nov. 18.
‘He was deeply loved, and his absence has left a pain that words cannot fully express.’
Deputies discovered 73-year-old Michael Bodenheimer “lying deceased in the front yard of the residence.”
Police said Bodenheimer had “sustained severe injuries and was beyond the possibility of life-saving intervention.”
“Preliminary findings at the scene indicated that his injuries were consistent with an attack by a large pack of canines,” the sheriff’s office stated.
Officers tracked down a “pack of aggressive canines” at a property nearby, and members of the Davidson County Animal Control captured 17 dogs, identified as “pit bull-mixed breeds.”
The animals were euthanized, and necropsies were conducted.
According to WBTV-TV, officers claimed that 56-year-old owner Elaina Bryant of Thomasville let the dogs run loose at night, and they “lived in feces without food.” Citing the arrest warrant, the station added that the dogs were underweight and had not received vaccinations or veterinary care.
The indictment alleges the dogs were left without fresh water and adequate shelter.
WBTV reported that there was an enclosure “infested with fleas and vermin and covered in excrement.” Authorities alleged that the enclosure had not been cleaned in weeks or months, according to the indictment.
Investigators described the dogs as living in “conditions of squalor and starvation,” the indictment said.
An autopsy conducted on Bodenheimer confirmed that he died as a result of injuries sustained in the brutal dog mauling, according to police.
Detectives determined that Bryant owned the dogs involved in the fatal attack. Citing court documents, the Charlotte Observer reported that Bryant lives about half a mile west of Bodenheimer’s home.
The sheriff’s office investigation concluded that Bryant was “grossly negligent in the care and control of the animals.”
Bryant was arrested Dec. 17, and a Davidson County Grand Jury indicted her on one count of second-degree murder and 17 counts of felony animal abuse, WYMY-TV reported.
Bryant is being detained at the Davidson County Detention Center on a $500,000 secured bond set by a Davidson County Superior Court judge.
Her next court date is scheduled for Jan. 5, 2026, in Davidson County Superior Court.
Bodenheimer’s family said in a statement to WYFF-TV, “Our family is heartbroken by the loss of our father. He was deeply loved, and his absence has left a pain that words cannot fully express.”
The family said that they were aware of the charges filed against Bryant.
“We have full confidence in the legal process and will allow it to move forward without further comment,” the family said.
“Our focus remains on honoring our father’s life, his values, and the love he shared with those around him,” the statement read. “We appreciate the support, prayers, and kindness that have been extended to our family during this incredibly difficult time.”
Bodenheimer’s obituary read, “Mike had a generous spirit and faithfully served his community by volunteering with the Fair Grove Fire Department and Friends Disaster Service.”
The fire department said in a statement:
Mike was a long-time member of the Fair Grove Fire Department serving the Fair Grove community for many years. This particular incident involving one of our own has hit the department pretty hard since several of our current members served with him. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends, as well as our own members.
The investigation is ongoing.
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New Jersey nutcase kills man with bow and arrow, then barricades himself in home that bursts into flames, police say
The bizarre chain of events that unfolded Saturday began at about 7 p.m. when police responded to a report of a man who had been shot with a “pointed object” in the city of Kearny.
When they arrived near the intersection of Kearny Avenue and Johnston Avenue, they found a man who had been shot with a bow and arrow and had died as a result of his injuries, according to the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office.
‘I thought he was sleeping. … That’s when I saw the arrow in his back.’
One of the people who saw the man and called police was John Kalicki. He said the man was lying in front of a liquor and grocery store.
“When I first came here, he was laying there, and it sounded like he was snoring,” he said. “I thought he was sleeping. Then, when I came out the second time, he wasn’t snoring or nothing. That’s when I saw the arrow in his back.”
Police identified a suspect who had barricaded himself inside a two-story home on Kearny Avenue.
The standoff lasted into Sunday, with police calling on the SWAT team to try to get him out. Neighbors were told to shelter in place while they negotiated.
“I heard the guy yelling out, ‘I can’t come out!’ or ‘I can’t do that!’ and then they were like, ‘Come out. We’re here to help you,'” said Rebecca Szymanski, who witnessed the incident.
At about 5 in the morning on Sunday, flames broke out at the home, and some of the neighbors were evacuated.
When the suspect finally came out of the home at about 1 p.m., he was armed with knives and was taken into custody.
A family member identified the victim as Pablo Criollo of Harrison. The family set up a GoFundMe account to help them with burial expenses.
RELATED: California pastor arrested in murder-for-hire plot against daughter’s boyfriend, police say
The suspect was identified as 44-year-old Oscar Feijoo, and he faces murder, weapons, and arson charges. Other charges are expected as well.
One of the man’s neighbors, named Anna Christina, said that she had threatened to call police on the man over him throwing rocks into her back yard.
“And one day I say to him, ‘Please don’t do this, because if you do I’m going to call the police,’ and he got mad at me,” she said.
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Why Democrats fear this midterm more than Republicans do
Midterm elections usually punish the party in power. Political gravity pulls incumbents downward as voters look for balance. But Donald Trump has never operated according to political gravity. This midterm, following the 2024 realignment that delivered the White House and both chambers of Congress to Republicans, looks less like a second-year slump and more like a referendum on a political transformation without modern precedent.
Rather than a routine evaluation of performance, this election is shaping up as a test of will, an economic reckoning, and a public judgment on the unraveling of the administrative state. The failures of the left — not Republican incumbency — are likely to define the terrain.
Trump remains an engine rather than a liability. Party unity has not looked this solid since the Reagan years. Democrats remain trapped in spectacle and grievance.
At the center of it all sits Trump’s methodical effort to dismantle what many Americans now recognize as an unaccountable fourth branch of government.
What was once dismissed as a conspiracy theory is unfolding openly. Trump and congressional Republicans have made no attempt to conceal the project. They are explaining it step by step: how federal agencies accumulated unchecked authority, how oversight collapsed, and why constitutional balance must be restored. These are not marginal reforms. It’s a structural correction.
The result is an electorate unusually aware of how Washington’s permanent class operates. Americans who lived through Russiagate, the 2020 election controversies, years of politicized investigations, and coordinated censorship no longer view federal reform passively. They see themselves as stakeholders in the rollback of bureaucratic power.
A major shift enabling this moment is the collapse of the Russia narrative. Tulsi Gabbard, once embraced by Democrats before being cast out, has played a central role in dismantling the mythology that sustained years of hysteria. Her critique carries weight precisely because it comes from someone who saw the rot from inside her former party.
With that narrative gone, Democrats have lost their most reliable alibi. They can no longer lean on leaks, innuendo, or intelligence-adjacent smears to explain electoral defeats. In its absence, their messaging has devolved into warnings, moral panic, and emotional appeals. That posture signals weakness, not confidence — a poor place to begin a midterm campaign.
The same dynamic surfaces around election integrity. Voters remember 2020 — not the sanitized version offered by media institutions, but the confusion surrounding rule changes, ballot handling, and emergency measures weaponized for political advantage. Those concerns did not fade. If anything, they hardened.
Republicans tapped into that sentiment in 2022 and expanded it in 2024. Now, as attention turns to foreign interference — particularly China’s digital reach and geopolitical incentives — even skeptics acknowledge that election vulnerabilities are real and unresolved. Republicans benefit because they are the only party willing to confront the problem directly.
RELATED: Buckle up: We are headed for an AI collision with China
wildpixel via iStock/Getty Images
That advantage was built incrementally. While 2022 fell short of a wave, it provided discipline, data, and hard lessons. By 2024, Republicans had unified around priorities that crossed demographic lines: economic recovery, border enforcement, and ending the weaponization of government. The result was not only a presidential victory but unified control of Congress — and margins sturdy enough to govern.
Democrats, by contrast, have lost their taste for prosecutorial theatrics. Years of timed indictments, investigations, and legal spectacle exhausted the public. What once energized the base now appears to be manipulation.
Their federal shutdown was another miscalculation. Instead of appearing principled, Democrats disrupted or financially strained nearly 10 million Americans — federal workers, contractors, and regional industries — in a maneuver widely seen as cynical and purposeless. Voters did not see conviction. They saw political theater staged at their expense.
At the same time, left-wing political violence has become harder to dismiss. From major cities to college campuses, radical unrest is increasingly tolerated by progressive officials. With Republicans governing, the contrast is stark: One party emphasizes order, while the other struggles to contain its most extreme factions. Midterms reward stability. Right now, Republicans own that advantage.
Yes, midterms are usually brutal for incumbents. But this cycle is different. Republicans enter with momentum, cohesion, and a governing agenda aligned with voter concerns. Trump remains an engine rather than a liability. Party unity has not looked this solid since the Reagan years. Democrats remain trapped in spectacle and grievance.
MAGA is no longer an insurgency. It is the governing coalition. This midterm is more likely to ratify that reality than reverse it.
