5-year-old boy with special needs charged with felony assault — parents 'punch the bully back' with lawsuit



The parents of a 5-year-old boy with autism who had been charged with felony assault in Tennessee have filed a lawsuit after a school administrator refused to back down.

The boy had been enrolled at Sumner County’s H.B. Williams Elementary School in the kindergarten class, and school officials were made aware of his special needs.

'Resorting to legal actions to punish parents for the actions of a 5-year-old child who still needs those supports — that’s just not the way to go.'

The parents said they asked for behavioral support and federal law requires schools to provide extra resources, but the school officials refused and said they would gather their own evidence, according to the lawsuit.

The school agreed to providing an aide after several behavioral incidents involving pushing, shoving, and throwing objects at other children.

The parents said the support came too late.

"When you don’t provide those supports, you can deny rights not only to the child with a disability, but you can risk harming other children," said Justin Gilbert, the attorney for the family. "It’s a key reminder that there are broad consequences to not providing supports and interventions and paraprofessional roles and special education."

The child was charged with felony aggravated assault by a school resource officer, but a judge rejected the charges in court in April. He said the child was not competent to stand trial.

Then two of the parents of the boy's classmates filed their own petitions to charge the child. One of those parents is a Sumner County high school assistant principal.

Gilbert described the case as a "little bit unusual."

One of the petitions was dropped, but the other by the school official moved forward.

The plaintiffs called the motion "pure vengeance" against the parents and the child.

"Resorting to legal actions to punish parents for the actions of a 5-year-old child who still needs those supports — that’s just not the way to go," Gilbert added.

RELATED: 2nd grader with horrible injuries dropped off at school — cops say stepmother tortured her

The parents are now suing the district for allegedly violating the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as other federal statues.

"Sometimes you need to stand up for your kids," Gilbert added. "Sometimes you need to punch the bully back in the mouth, and that’s what the parents are doing here."

WKRN-TV reached out to Sumner County Schools, the Sumner County district attorney, and the assistant principal for comment.

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My eating disorder got questions. My gender identity got answers.



As the buzz of summer winds down, back-to-school season offers families a fresh start. Kids return to routines and extracurriculars. Moms like me return to schedules, snacks, playdates, forms, and the peculiar relief of getting everyone back on a calendar.

Before we get buried in backpacks and lunch boxes, though, parents need to brace for something harder: our children's mental health.

Our children need adults willing to talk with them, challenge them when necessary, and remain present when the conversation gets uncomfortable.

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation described Oregon as an epicenter of pediatric gender medicine, with diagnoses of gender dysphoria and use of cross-sex hormones among minors rising sharply in recent years. Oregon has only about 1% of the nation’s teenagers, yet its clinics reportedly accounted for roughly 7% of gender-related mastectomies performed on teenage girls from 2019 through 2023.

Those numbers are shocking. But behind every one is a child. I was one of those children not very long ago.

When I was 16, I found Tumblr communities full of girls who sounded just like me. They were uncomfortable in their bodies. They struggled with anxiety, depression, isolation, and the feeling that they did not fit. Their stories felt eerily familiar. We fed off one another's pain until many of us came to believe that being transgender explained it — and that changing our bodies might cure our mental distress.

I was already battling anorexia. I hated myself and hated the body I saw in the mirror. That is why the contrast in how adults treated my two forms of distress still haunts me.

When I told doctors and therapists that I was starving myself because I saw myself as overweight, they did not affirm that perception. They treated it as something to question and work through. But when I said my breasts made me uncomfortable, my gender distress was not challenged in the same way. I was told that transition could be the answer. No questions, no pushback.

Looking back, I was not born in the wrong body. I was a hurting teenager looking for belonging, certainty, and an explanation for my pain.

The reality is that adolescence itself is full of unstable explanations. Teenagers are awkward, lonely, impulsive, anxious, obsessive, and desperate to belong. They compare themselves with peers, test identities, reject identities, and search for language that makes their discomfort intelligible. Sometimes the first explanation that feels coherent is not the right one.

RELATED: Detransitioner sues Oregon gender clinics for ‘abhorrent misdiagnosis’ that ‘mutilated’ her body

Image source: YouTube video screenshot

Across the country — consider states such as New Mexico, where schools have adopted policies accommodating students' asserted gender identities — vulnerable children can encounter adults who treat social transition as an appropriate response before parents even understand what is happening.

That should terrify parents, especially when gender distress appears alongside trauma, autism, depression, eating disorders, or a simple discomfort with narrow stereotypes about what girls and boys are supposed to be. Those possibilities should be explored, not hurried past.

Previous generations of girls were told, directly and indirectly, that happiness required becoming impossibly thin. Today, some distressed girls encounter a different promise: Maybe the body itself is the problem. The common thread is not merely social media or “woke” politics. It is vulnerability.

That’s why therapy should help a young person untangle difficult emotions, not merely supply a label for them. “Why do you feel this way?” and “What name and pronouns would you like me to use?” are not interchangeable questions. One opens an inquiry. The other can foreclose it.

As another school year begins, parents should remember that adolescence has always been messy. Teenagers feel awkward and lonely. They try things, fail at things, discover new passions, abandon old ones, experiment with style and music, and slowly begin to understand who they are. That process can continue well beyond high school.

RELATED: The right has a blind spot about young women

Blaze Media Illustration

Our children do not need adults who immediately affirm every explanation they discover online. They need adults willing to talk with them, challenge them when necessary, and remain present when the conversation gets uncomfortable.

Use the dinner table. Talk about your own failures and insecurities. Tell them what helped and what you wish you had understood sooner. Get them outside. A scraped knee from the monkey bars is often healthier than another four hours alone with an algorithm.

Most of all, do not surrender the hard conversations to strangers, schools, influencers, or online communities. Do not let someone else take the reins of your child's life while you are still trying to figure out what happened.

The best back-to-school supply we can give our kids is not another lesson in identity. It is the reassurance that they do not have to change their bodies, their appearance, or every uncomfortable feeling in order to belong.

Leaked Fauci diary reignites COVID outrage: ‘Everything he’s done to a beagle should be done to him’



For years, critics of Anthony Fauci argued that the nation’s top public health official knew more about COVID-19’s origins than he was willing to admit — and now the release of his diary proves they were right.

And Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been all over it.

“Senator Rand Paul has also been very into this. In fact, he took a beating multiple times in hearings where, you know, look, he was just quite clearly right when he was describing things like gain-of-function research,” BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere comments.

And both Stu and co-host Dave Landau support Paul in his fight to bring down the man who led Americans astray, as they believe what he did to the country was unforgivable.

“Fauci made it so kids couldn’t socialize for two years, which means he figured out a whole new way to cause autism without even using a vaccine, and then he was forcing vaccines,” Dave says.


“If you were in the Northeast, I mean, your kids didn’t go to school for up to a year and a half,” Stu agrees.

Dave admits that he has “hate for this guy for what he did to this country” that can’t be faked.

“Like, I f**king hate this guy. I’m sorry, I really do. I really think everything he’s done to a beagle should be done to him and on public TV,” he says, referencing the fatal experiments Fauci carried out on Beagles.

“I hate him,” he adds.

And Paul clearly does too.

In a thread on X, he wrote: “My investigation uncovered that Anthony Fauci kept a diary. What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”

On January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote: “Now we know that the market was not the source. It was the amplifier.”

“He believes the wet market is not the source of this and then goes on for as long as I can remember saying up until now that there was natural origin and that’s where it came from,” Stu explains.

“I believe it was called the Wuhan COVID-19 lab,” Dave adds.

“They’re like, ‘No, somebody ate a bat sandwich four doors down.’ And you’re like, ‘Right, but where was it near?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, it’s certainly not near the Fauci-made-this-disease lab,’” he continues.

In another diary entry from February 1, 2020, Fauci admitted that only 2 out of 12 scientists on a call believed the virus was natural.

“The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible,” he wrote.

“The lab leak theory. That’s what it is,” Stu says.

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'Trust your instincts': Our journey parenting a child with autism



As parents who raised a child with autism, BlazeTV host Ron Simmons and his wife, Lisa Simmons, understand the realities of raising a child on the spectrum — and they know what to look for and what advice to take.

Lisa explains that kids on the spectrum “tend to be more what we call ‘floppy,’” due to a lack of muscle tone, and usually hit developmental milestones a little later.

“Their fine motor skills are just delayed,” she says.

However, Lisa points out that none of these characteristics mean an autism diagnosis is in the child’s future.

“You could just have, you know, a learning difference, and that’s not autism. So autism has been sort of broadly defined these days,” she explains.


This is why she believes the best piece of advice to give parents is to “trust your instincts.”

“If you think something’s wrong, there probably is something wrong,” she says.

“And just because your doctor says it’s not doesn’t mean that that’s true. And it’s nothing against doctors,” Ron chimes in.

“When you leave the doctor’s office, when you leave the therapist's office, they’re not thinking about your child. As wonderful as they might be, you’re the one that’s thinking about your child, and you’re the one that has to be the greatest advocate,” he continues.

And the same goes for when a doctor might diagnose the child and claim the child will never be able to participate in certain activities.

“Yes, they’ve had maybe more education than you’ve had. They’ve had maybe more experience working with these kids than you have, but you know your child, and you know your ability to work with your own child,” Lisa explains, noting that a doctor told her that her son would never be able to ride a bike.

“We got that bicycle, put the training wheels on it, propped the training wheels up on bricks. So it was like a stationary bike, and I held his feet on the pedals, and we did that until he got muscle memory in his legs,” she says.

Soon her son was riding a two-wheeler without training wheels and even joined a rollerblading hockey team.

“So, you know,” Lisa says, “don’t just take the first answer.”

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Your Medicaid Taxes Paid For An Autism Therapy Exec’s $2.5M Beach Home

In too many cases, autism therapy is at best a joke designed to bilk money out of Medicaid and at worst a danger to the patients themselves.

Gavin Newsom’s California is looting Medicaid in broad daylight



The last month has brought renewed attention to crime lords allegedly stealing $3.5 billion from California’s hospice system. Congress and the Trump administration are investigating, and rightly so. The dying deserve dignity, not to have their safety net looted.

But hospice is not the only target — and not every thief wears a ski mask.

The federal government does not have to accept California’s bookkeeping tricks.

Across California, politicians and their allies exploit Medicaid — a federal program meant to help the poor — to paper over budget holes they created. They do it through a bureaucratic “shell game” that shifts billions while patients and taxpayers pick up the tab.

The mechanism is called an intergovernmental transfer. Local public providers or government agencies spend Medicaid funds. The state then counts that spending as its own and uses it to draw matching federal dollars. When that money arrives, the state sends it back to the same providers as higher reimbursements. Those providers end up receiving more than they originally spent, even though the state did not put up additional state funds.

This scheme has driven ambulance reimbursements into the stratosphere.

Between 2022 and 2024, the cost of publicly funded ambulances in California soared from $339 to $1,168 per trip. The state now asks for 2026 reimbursements to rise to more than $1,600. That increase means more than $1,200 per ambulance ride that does not go to patient care. It pads the state’s books and props up obligations like California’s failing pension system.

This is not a straightforward street scam. It is worse: legalized looting with official letterhead.

Families pay the price. Patients pay the price. Honest providers pay the price.

Imagine what that extra $1,200 per ride could do if it went where Medicaid dollars are supposed to go: patient care, staffing, equipment, response times. Now imagine what happens when ambulance companies that are not connected to the right politicians cannot compete and start shutting down. When that happens, the people harmed will not be the insiders who designed the system. It will be the sick, the poor, and the vulnerable.

I know what it means to depend on a functioning safety net.

My brother has level 3 autism spectrum disorder — the most severe diagnosis. He is nonverbal. He cannot feed himself, dress himself, or use the bathroom without help. My parents cannot leave him home alone because he can wander into danger. Keeping him safe requires 24-hour supervision.

My parents knew what that meant. They also knew they wanted him at home, not in an institution.

Medicaid and In-Home Supportive Services, which helps cover the cost of at-home care, made that possible. Those programs kept our family together. They gave my parents a way to provide love and stability that no facility can replicate.

It has still been hard. The work never ends.

RELATED: Dr. Oz exposes alleged fraud in Los Angeles — so Gavin Newsom calls for investigation into his ‘racially charged’ claims

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

My brother’s diagnosis hit my parents like a crisis. They answered with courage. They had more lucrative opportunities elsewhere, but they stayed with the Army because it was the only employer that could guarantee my brother’s access to health care.

We are a military family. We understand service and sacrifice. We also understand the moral bargain behind safety-net programs: Taxpayers step up so that families in crisis do not collapse.

That bargain fails when politicians treat Medicaid as a slush fund.

These financial shell games cost taxpayers billions and create nightmares for families like mine who follow the rules. This is not robbing Peter to pay Paul. This is robbing Peter and leaving Paul on the street.

Americans should be sickened by the heartlessness of anyone who steals from programs designed to serve the vulnerable — whether the thieves are organized crime syndicates or the well-connected insiders who know how to work California’s bureaucracy. Hospice exists so that people can die with dignity. Ambulances exist to get patients to care quickly. Neither exists to generate money for the state and its chosen beneficiaries.

Here is the good news: Congress and the Trump administration have started digging into hospice abuse. The bad news is that those investigations and policy changes can take years.

Ending Medicaid ambulance intergovernmental transfer abuse could be done in a matter of days.

The federal government does not have to accept California’s bookkeeping tricks. President Trump can direct federal agencies to stop approving these inflated reimbursement schemes and demand reforms that put patients first. One signature could force California to stop gaming Medicaid and start serving the people the program was built to help.

Anti-ICE Agitator Died Near Autism Center Charged In Alleged $14 Million Somali Fraud Scheme

The death of an anti-ICE agitator in Minneapolis this past weekend occurred right near an 'autism clinic' at the center of a $14 million Somali fraud scheme.

'Ripped the camera out of my hand': Minneapolis cops shrug after Nick Sortor claims 'Somali thugs' rob him, drag him by car



Independent conservative journalist Nick Sortor has in recent weeks shone an unflattering light on the thuggery of anti-ICE rioters and imported grifters in Minneapolis.

The efficacy of his reportage — which led on Thursday to at least one arrest — appears to have made him a prime target for radicals who have circulated his image for street-identification purposes, mobbed his vehicle, and attacked another journalist whom they mistook for Sortor.

'At least Minneapolis Police haven't erroneously arrested me ... yet.'

Sortor shared footage taken by fellow journalist Cam Higby on Sunday revealing the latest lengths radicals have gone to stop him: stealing his camera and dragging him down the sidewalk.

"A group of Somali thugs just ROBBED me of my $1,000 camera in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis," Sortor indicated in a Sunday evening X post. "Then they DRAGGED ME DOWN THE STREET as my hand got trapped in their door handle."

Footage of the incident shows a black-clad woman wearing a face covering approach Sortor's vehicle on the driver's side, grab the journalist's camera through his open window, and take off running.

RELATED: 'You are on notice!' Don Lemon backs anti-ICE radicals who stormed Saint Paul church — but DOJ vows reckoning

Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

In the video, Sortor — who told Blaze News the "Somali thief reached IN to my vehicle and ripped the camera out of my hand, breaking the wrist strap" — quickly exits the vehicle and chases the woman on foot.

"The Somali mob then ran interference for them as I tried getting it back, giving the thief time to flee," said Sortor.

Video confirms that while attempting to capture the apparent thief — who climbed into a red Kia — Sortor is obstructed by multiple shrieking onlookers and then nearly tackled to the ground by a black male wearing a mask.

Sortor appears to get his hand stuck in the door handle of the fleeing suspect's vehicle such that when it accelerates down the sidewalk, the journalist is dragged alongside it for a considerable distance.

After the suspect flees the scene, a shaken up and bloodied Sortor tells his associate, "They just stole my camera."

Women in face coverings and other apparent critics of Sortor encircle the journalist as he makes his way back to his vehicle, ordering him to leave. One of the women admits on camera that they followed Sortor to the scene.

Footage shows a Minneapolis police officer telling the journalist after the incident that he should leave the area and that individuals were calling the department to accuse Sortor of harassment.

"We don't need this stuff to keep happening," says the officer. "This level of hostility, obviously, it's not going away."

When asked how his treatment by radicals and police in Minnesota has compared with his treatment in Portland, Sortor told Blaze News, "Much like Portland Police, Minneapolis Police submit to the mob and have been completely neutered by the left-wing government out here. However at least Minneapolis Police haven't erroneously arrested me ... yet."

Sortor was arrested when covering an anti-ICE demonstration on Oct. 2 in Portland, Oregon. After determining that it couldn't make a disorderly conduct charge stick, the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office declined to pursue the case. Sortor indicated last month that he plans to sue the City of Portland for allegedly violating his civil rights when targeting and arresting him.

Sleuths have alleged that the vehicle in which the suspect fled the scene is registered to an individual whose address is listed as the SpectrumWorks Center in Spring Lake Park, Minnesota. Blaze News was unable to reach the autism support center for comment.

Cam Higby noted that "it's the owner of the vehicle who's address is allegedly the autism center. The robber may have hopped in someone else's vehicle."

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Sara Gonzales rips new autistic Barbie doll: ‘We need to end DEI in toys’



Mattel released a Barbie doll this past week that has sparked an important discussion about what representation looks like in doll form — and why a pretty girl wearing headphones and a cute outfit might not be representative of a severe autism diagnosis, or why we shouldn’t be celebrating something we can try to understand and prevent.

“President Trump ended DEI in the government, and I was really, really, glad about that, but it appears there was more work to be done. We need to end the DEI in toys,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”

In Mattel’s press release on the new Barbie doll, it writes, “The autistic Barbie doll features elbow and wrist articulation, enabling stimming, hand flapping, and other hand gestures that some members of the autistic community use to process sensory information or express excitement.”


It also writes that her eyes are “shifted slightly to the side, which reflects how some members of the autistic community may avoid direct eye contact.”

“I’m not making fun of people with autism. I actually think it’s terrible. And I’ve done a lot to try to help get us to the place where we can figure out what is causing autism, but we are at this weird place where the left is like, ‘Actually it’s great if people are autistic. Actually I love that my family member’s autistic. I hope we get more autistic people,’” Gonzales comments.

“I want to solve what’s happening to people. I want to solve why so many people are being diagnosed with autism, why so many people can’t make direct eye contact, why so many people need noise-canceling headphones,” she continues.

“It's absurd. It’s absolutely absurd,” she adds.

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How Leland Vittert went from social outcast to network TV



When NewsNation reporter Leland Vittert was diagnosed with autism as a child, his father did not treat it as a disability but rather a tool to be sharpened — and Vittert believes this was a huge factor when it came to finding success as an adult.

And while Vittert credits his upbringing for his ability to overcome adversity, it was his college experience that led him to realize he needed to change, not the world.

“I think college was the first time I started realizing that I needed to change, right? Because my dad spent, you know, all those nights that I was so upset saying, ‘Look, when you get older, the same qualities that are making you ostracized and bullied and having all these issues are the qualities that’s going to make you successful later in life,’” Vittert tells Stuckey.

“He was correct in many ways. He did not tell me in eighth grade that an eighth grade middle school classroom is great training for a Washington newsroom, which would later turn out to be very true. Still is,” he continues.


His dad often told him a story about being blackballed from all the fraternities while he was in college.

“He never got a bid at any one of the fraternities that was on campus. And it was a way of sort of explaining to me, right, that he understood the isolation. He understood what I was going through. And the same thing happened to me,” Vittert tells Stuckey.

Vittert was told that he wasn’t getting a bid and called his dad that night.

“It’s snowing at Northwestern, bitterly cold. Tears are freezing on my face. And I called my dad. I said, 'I’m just like you.' And then I said to dad, I said, ‘I need to understand that it may not just be everybody else. I’m going to have to change.’ And that really became the college experience,” he explains.

“To me, going to college wasn’t really about learning economics, which I majored in, or journalism, which journalism school is pretty useless. But it was about learning as a person and trying to put all of those lessons that my dad taught me into effect,” he continues.

Vittert found that with hard work, he was able to channel who he was into what he wanted to be — and he found that journalism was one of those industries “that just yield to hard work.”

“If you just work hard and outwork everybody, that is of enormous value in journalism,” he says.

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