Category: Daily Caller
ROOKE: Gavin Newsom Talking About ‘Godson’ Proves He’s Not Qualified For Anything
‘if you are governing for a radical, often violent minority, that is disqualifying’
If Time Magazine Weren’t So Corrupt, It Would Have Made Charlie Kirk Person Of The Year
TIME could have used the credibility that choosing him would have helped restore.
Atlanta homeowner shoots 2 juveniles who were taking packages from his porch, police say
An Atlanta homeowner shot two juveniles who were taking packages from his porch Thursday afternoon, police said.
Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum told WXIA-TV that officers responded around 3:30 p.m. to the 800 block of Celeste Lane in the Mays neighborhood, which is part of the Villages of Cascade complex, after reports of shots fired. The townhomes are down the street from a high school, the station said.
‘At that exact moment, was he realistically and reasonably under an apparent threat?’
WXIA said a 15-year-old was shot in the foot while a second juvenile was taken to a hospital in critical condition. Police told the station late Thursday night that he made it through surgery and is expected to survive. WXIA said in its video report that the second juvenile was shot in the arm.
Schierbaum told the station that investigators determined the two juveniles were taking packages from a townhome when the homeowner came outside and opened fire.
The homeowner was taken to police headquarters for questioning, WXIA said, and officers executed a search warrant at the residence as part of the ongoing investigation.
“That search warrant is allowing us to gather evidence, is allowing us to gain clarity,” Schierbaum added to the station.
The chief also noted to WXIA: “The Atlanta Police Department takes gun violence very seriously. It’s been the charge of Mayor [Andre] Dickens to address gun violence in our city; that’s why you see a robust response. But anytime a child is injured in our city, we really take that seriously. And we want to make sure we know what’s happening as individuals being held accountable.”
RELATED: Texas homeowner shoots and kills man trying to steal his car, police say
The station added that the shooting is stirring debate over the use of deadly force to protect property.
Atlanta criminal defense attorney Joshua Schiffer, who is not affiliated with the case, told WXIA that people in Georgia have the right to protect themselves and their property, but deadly force must be justified.
“Were these two young men on the doorstep acting in a violent or threatening manner, or were they running away? What juncture did the homeowner decide to discharge their personal weapon using deadly force, and were they justified? That’s going to depend on the facts,” Schiffer told the station. “At that exact moment, was he realistically and reasonably under an apparent threat?”
Police added to WXIA that charges, if any, will depend on evidence and witness statements gathered as part of its investigation.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
This Supreme Court case could reverse a century of bureaucratic overreach
Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?
This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.
A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.
That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”
Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.
If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.
A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.
The founders warned us
The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.
That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.
So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?
Not-so-expert advice
Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.
The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.
The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.
And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.
If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.
That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.
A republic no more?
A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.
We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.
And the people become spectators of their own government.
RELATED: Judges break the law to stop Trump from enforcing it
Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images
The path forward
Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.
No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.
The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.
This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.
That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.
When Bernie Sanders and I agree on AI, America had better pay attention
Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned recently in the London Guardian that artificial intelligence “is getting far too little discussion in Congress, the media, and within the general population” despite the speed at which it is developing. “That has got to change.”
To my surprise, as a conservative advocate of limited government and free markets, I agree completely.
AI is neither a left nor a right issue. It is a human issue that will decide who holds power in the decades ahead and whether individuals retain sovereignty.
As I read Sanders’ piece, I kept thinking, “This sounds like something I could have written!” That alone should tell us something. If two people who disagree on almost everything else see the same dangers emerging from artificial intelligence, then maybe we can set aside the usual partisan divides and confront a problem that will touch every American.
Different policies, same fears
I’ve worked in the policy world for more than a decade, and it’s fair to say Bernie Sanders and I have opposed each other in nearly every major fight. I’ve pushed back against his single-payer health care plans. I’ve worked to stop his Green New Deal agenda. On economic policy, Sanders has long stood for the exact opposite of the free-market principles I believe make prosperity possible.
That’s why reading his AI op-ed felt almost jarring. Time after time, his concerns mirrored my own.
Sanders warned about the unprecedented power Silicon Valley elites now wield over this transformational technology. As someone who spent years battling Big Tech censorship, I share his alarm over unaccountable tech oligarchs shaping information, culture, and political discourse.
He points to forecasts showing AI-driven automation could displace nearly 100 million American jobs in the coming decade. I helped Glenn Beck write “Dark Future: Uncovering the Great Reset’s Terrifying Next Phase” in 2023, where we raised the exact same red flag, that rapid automation could destabilize the workforce faster than society can adapt.
Sanders highlights how AI threatens privacy, civil liberties, and personal autonomy. These are concerns I write and speak about constantly. Sanders notes that AI isn’t just changing industry; it’s reshaping the human condition, foreign policy, and even the structure of democratic life. On all of this, he is correct.
When a Democratic Socialist and a free-market conservative diagnose the same disease, it usually means the symptoms are too obvious to ignore.
Where we might differ
While Sanders and I share almost identical fears about AI, I suspect we would quickly diverge on the solutions. In his op-ed, he offers no real policy prescriptions at all. Instead, he simply says, “Congress must act now.” Act how? Sanders never says. And to be fair, that ambiguity is a dilemma I recognize.
As someone who argues consistently for limited government, I’m reluctant to call for new regulations. History shows that sweeping, top-down interventions usually create more problems than they solve. Yet AI poses a challenge unlike anything we’ve seen before — one that neither the market nor Congress can responsibly ignore.
RELATED: Shock poll: America’s youth want socialism on autopilot — literally
Photo by Cesc Maymo/Getty Images
When Sanders says, “Congress must act,” does he want sweeping, heavy-handed regulations that freeze innovation? Does he envision embedding ESG-style subjective metrics into AI systems, politicizing them further? Does he want to codify conformity to European Union AI regulations?
We cannot allow a handful of corporations or governments to embed their subjective values into systems that increasingly manipulate our decisions, influence our communications, and deter our autonomy.
The nonnegotiables
Instead of vague calls for Congress to “do something,” we need a clear framework rooted in enduring American principles.
AI systems (especially those deployed across major sectors) must be built with hard, nonnegotiable safeguards that protect the individual from both corporate and governmental overreach.
This means embedding constitutional values into AI design, enshrining guarantees for free speech, due process, privacy, and equal treatment. It means ensuring transparency around how these systems operate and what data they collect.
This also means preventing ideological influence, whether from Beijing, Silicon Valley, or Washington, D.C., by insisting on objectivity, neutrality, and accountability.
These principles should not be considered partisan. They are the guardrails, rooted in the Constitution, which protect us from any institution, public or private, that seeks too much power.
And that is why the overlap between Sanders’ concerns and mine matters so much. AI is neither a left nor a right issue. It is a human issue that will decide who holds power in the decades ahead and whether individuals retain sovereignty.
If Bernie Sanders and I both see the same storm gathering on the horizon, perhaps it’s time the rest of the country looks up and recognizes the clouds for what they are.
Now is the moment for Americans, across parties and philosophies, to insist that AI strengthen liberty rather than erode it. If we fail to set those boundaries today, we may soon find that the most important choices about our future are no longer made by people at all.
UP, UP, AND AWAY! Trump Celebrates Stock Market’s All-Time Highs, ‘I Am Doing a Great Job’
The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 ripped to new all-time highs on Thursday as Wall Street rotated out of overheated tech names and into stocks poised to win from a strengthening U.
Second grand jury declines to indict Letitia James
A federal grand jury refused to indict Letitia James on mortgage charges after the Dept. of Justice refiled the case against the New York attorney general.
James had been accused of making false statements on mortgage documents in order to obtain favorable financial terms and had the charges dismissed from a different grand jury.
‘Everyone is trying to MAKE NEW YORK GREAT AGAIN, and it can never be done with this wacky crook in office.’
Prosecutors said James claimed a home purchased in 2020 to be a second home instead of an investment property, which would have allowed her to save about $19,000 in interest payments. She has denied all wrongdoing.
The prior charges were dismissed on the basis that the administration had unlawfully appointed the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia.
“This unprecedented rejection makes even clearer that this case should never have seen the light of day,” said Abbe Lowell, an attorney representing James.
“Career prosecutors who knew better refused to bring it, and now two different grand juries in two different cities have refused to allow these baseless charges to be brought,” he added. “Any further attempt to revive these discredited charges would be a mockery of our system of justice.
President Donald Trump has called for James to resign over the allegations.
“Letitia James, a totally corrupt politician, should resign from her position as New York State Attorney General, IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote on social media. “Everyone is trying to MAKE NEW YORK GREAT AGAIN, and it can never be done with this wacky crook in office.”
RELATED: Letitia James gives unhinged rant after court hearing for bank fraud allegations
James successfully convicted the president of lying about the values of his real estate holdings in order to secure favorable bank terms. He was ordered to pay nearly half a billion dollars in the civil fraud judgment, but the fine was struck down by a New York state appeals court in August.
The attorney general’s office signaled that it intended to file an appeal in the case.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Geminid Meteor Shower: Here’s What To Know And How You Can See Highly Anticipated Event
North American stargazers can catch the peak of the Geminid meteor shower during the night of Dec. 13
Newt Gingrich Pinpoints Exact Date Next Year When He Says Americans Will Feel ‘Trump Boom’
‘biggest issues in the economy aren’t groceries’
