Woman Accused Of Trying To Kill Trump Now Walks Free Days After Third Assassination Attempt
'Surely a sniper with a terminal illness cannot be a big ask'
West Virginia Republicans are betraying their voters for AI special interests
There is a reason why most red-state Republican leaders fail to reflect the political values of their constituents. They represent the special interests they work for rather than the whole of the people.
Nowhere is this more evident than with the ravaging of West Virginia by generative AI data centers, promoted by people like House of Delegates Speaker Roger Hanshaw, who legally represents special interest groups fighting poor, local communities in court.
The same man who was instrumental in stripping localities of their ability to block data centers is now representing the people behind those data centers in court.
Remember the provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 that originally attempted to strip all state and local governments of any ability to block data centers from being built? Well, last year, West Virginia enacted just such a ban at the state level. Hanshaw shepherded HB 2014 to Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s desk.
Among many special tax and regulatory favors offered to data centers, this bill removed local jurisdiction over the siting, zoning, and operating of certified high-impact data centers and microgrids.
Thus, companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI could work with state politicians bought into their pay-for-play and force their way into any community. And what better person to be fighting for them than the speaker of the House?
While serving as speaker, Hanshaw filed a notice of appearance in the appeal to the Department of Evironmental Protection’s Air Quality Board on behalf of his client MGS CNP1 LLC, which is an affiliate of Houston-based Fidelis New Energy working on a data center project in Mason County.
This was in the middle of the session and just one week after the state House of Delegates passed legislation making it easier for these projects to obtain certification with the Department of Commerce.
Then, just two days after the session ended, Hanshaw took on a case through his work at Bowles Rice for Fundamental Data, the company working on powering the data center bonanza in Tucker County.
So the same man who was instrumental in stripping localities of their ability to block data centers is now representing the people behind those data centers in court against local community groups appealing the DEP’s permit issuance.
It was the Tucker County fight that led me to speak out nationally against this mindless business model of raping red-state land, power, and water for a form of generative AI that serves nothing but chatslop and the surveillance state.
Last August, I vacationed in Tucker County, home to the gorgeous Blackwater Falls State Park and Canaan Valley. A county that voted for Trump by a 50-vote margin, these people are the forgotten men that MAGA was supposed to represent.
RELATED: How to power the AI race without losing control
I spoke with several locals who were irate beyond words about the injustice occurring in a state with barely any Democrat elected officials.
What’s worse is that West Virginia is also being violated with endless transmission lines to power the blue-state “data center alley” in northern Virginia. According to a report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysts, West Virginia energy consumers will be expected to pay $572 million in higher rates to fund the rope to hang themselves.
What is so offensive is that these projects are not even creating jobs. According to the February JOLT report from BLS, construction remains in the greatest recession since the Great Recession, despite these so-called data center projects. Oracle, which is at the center of the cloud computing in the data centers, is laying off 18% of its workforce.
Shockingly, Henshaw and his minions attempted to pass even greater handouts for data centers offered to no other industry, in addition to what was in HB 2014.
This session, they introduced SB 623, which offered a complete property tax exemption and sales tax exemption on all data center equipment. They also introduced HB 4013, which would have created a new tax credit available to data centers to offset all state income, sales/use, franchise, and payroll withholding taxes based on capital investments, construction costs, and wages.
How many jobs did they have to create to qualify? Just 10! Which, of course, is a tacit admission that these behemoths don’t create many jobs, despite their enormous footprint, cost, and consumption of power.
In other words, Agenda 2030 is being fulfilled right under our noses in a state where Republicans control both houses of the legislature with 32-2 and 91-9 majorities.
What West Virginia, with its mind-numbing GOP majorities, shows is that the lack of conservative outcomes under GOP control is not due to a lack of power or votes but too much access to money and special interests.
Want a machine gun? These states might soon make buying one easier
Republican lawmakers in West Virginia and Kentucky are working on making it easier for Americans to acquire fully automatic firearms — a move that might catch on in other red states.
Machine guns — defined by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives as a firearm that can fire "automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger" — are heavily regulated in the United States.
While such weapons can be privately owned, Americans are greatly limited in what they can buy and must jump through numerous hoops to seal the deal.
'This is our constitutional right.'
Per the Firearm Owners' Protection Act, civilians are barred from possessing a machine gun manufactured after May 19, 1986. Limited supply means a higher price — Silencer Central says that prospective buyers should expect to spend a minimum of $6,000 to $10,000.
Interested American buyers at least 21 years of age, neither a felon nor a fugitive, and living in a state without a machine gun ban must pass an AFT background check, pay a one-time $200 transfer tax, and get approval from the government in order to take possession. Once those hurdles are cleared, they can take the machine gun home but fire it only on closed target ranges.
In West Virginia, Republican state Sens. Chris Rose and Zack Maynard recently introduced legislation that would establish within the West Virginia State Police an office of public defense that would oversee the procurement and sale of machine guns to "qualified members of the public," namely any citizen presently eligible to purchase and possess firearms under West Virginia and federal law.
The Cowboy State Daily reported that the new office would be authorized to transfer newer machine guns to state residents.
Blaze News has reached out to state Sen. Rose for clarification about whether out-of-state American citizens would be able to acquire a machine gun from the proposed authority.
RELATED: Virginians oppose Richmond's war on the Second Amendment: Poll
The preamble of the bill states both that "the Framers understood the Second Amendment to guarantee armament parity between the American citizen and government infantryman" and that "it is in the public interest of the State of West Virginia and its people that American citizens be armed and better able to assist in the defense of the State, and to resist tyranny, using bearable firearms commonly used in modern warfare."
The legislation would ensure that machine guns made available to citizens in the state through the proposed office would "be the same as, or of like kind to, those machineguns currently in use by law enforcement or the United States Armed Forces, and shall include but not be limited to AR-15/M16-platform, M249-type, and MP5-type Machineguns."
Kentucky state Rep. TJ Roberts (R) has introduced a nearly identical bill that would create a sub-office within the Kentucky State Police to acquire and transfer guns to qualified Kentuckians.
Roberts stated on X, "Law-abiding Kentuckians should be able to own any type of firearm they choose (including machine guns), as this is our constitutional right."
The Kentucky version specifies that a "qualified person" is "a person who is eligible to purchase and possess firearms under Kentucky and federal law." In Kentucky, out-of-state residents who are U.S. citizens have the right to purchase firearms.
Mark Jones, the national director of Gun Owners of America — the organization that authored the bill — told Cowboy State Daily that similar legislation is "doable in Wyoming" and that a Wyoming version of the bill might be introduced next year.
"Prior to the session, I had discussions about it with Wyoming legislators, but we didn’t have enough time to draft a bill," Jones said. "We decided to focus on the four major (gun-related) bills that are now poised to pass in 2026 and reconsider the 1071 concept next year."
While recognizing this legal approach as workable, George Mocsary, a law professor at the University of Wyoming and director of the school's Firearms Research Center, told the Cowboy State Daily that Congress might intervene and overturn the proposed law if passed.
He noted, however, "If it works, I could totally see it catching on, particularly here in Wyoming, and with our northern neighbors in Montana."
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Peaceful ICE Arrest Of 650 Aliens In West Virginia Proves Dems Are Manufacturing Chaos In Minnesota
Tim Walz and many other Democrats in Minnesota bear heavy responsibility for the deaths of two Minnesotans and for putting the lives of federal law enforcement at risk.'That would have to apply across the board': LGBT radicals panic as SCOTUS signals win for girls' sports
Just six months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law banning sex-rejecting genital mutilations and puberty blockers for minors, the high court's questions and remarks during oral arguments on Tuesday regarding two cases concerning men competing on girls' and women's sports teams in Idaho and West Virginia signal that gender ideologues are set to lose more ground.
Background
Twenty-seven states have passed laws and/or regulations prohibiting males from participating in girls' or women's sports.
West Virginia, for example, enacted the Save Women's Sports Act in 2021, requiring public school and collegiate sports teams to require athletes to participate on teams corresponding with their sex.
Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 15-year-old male transvestite in West Virginia who has pretended to be a girl since the third grade and taken puberty blockers, sued the state's board of education as well as other officials, claiming that his exclusion from girls' sports violated both Title IX and the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause.
This case, West Virginia v. B.P.J., has been kicked through the courts and is now before the Supreme Court.
The other case taken up by the high court on Tuesday, Little v. Hecox, is highly similar.
RELATED: 'Incredible victory': Federal judge prohibits trans-related grooming efforts in California schools
Lindsay Hecox, a 24-year-old male student at Boise State University who took cross-sex hormones for only one year, wanted to join the women's cross-country team, where his male physiology would serve as a tremendous advantage over his female competitors. He was unable to join the women's team on account of Idaho's Fairness in Women's Sports Act, which banned male transvestites from competing on female athletic teams.
Like the transvestite student in West Virginia, Hecox sued, claiming the Idaho law violated his constitutional rights.
Both cases were brought to the Supreme Court by the two states' Republican attorneys general with attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom.
'If we adopted that, that would have to apply across the board.'
"Men cannot become women; their biological differences are scientifically clear. And no ideological arguments attempting to justify allowing males to enter female sports can stand against this truth," stated ADF president and chief counsel Kristen Waggoner.
The possibility that the SCOTUS will rule again against gender ideology has LGBT radicals panicking.
For instance, Erin Reed, the boyfriend of cross-dressing Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D), wrote that "depending on how the Court rules, these cases could reshape the legal framework governing transgender rights for an entire generation."
The Human Rights Campaign wailed: "As transgender youth continue to face numerous targeted attacks from health care to education, these cases mark another key moment in the fight against anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination that could have implications beyond the sports world."
GLAAD previously stated: "Similar to misleading narratives about bathrooms and other single-sex spaces, propagating inflammatory scenarios about transgender women and girls participating in sports has become a common tactic in broader attacks on trans rights and equality."
Conservative majority signal victory for sanity
In Hecox, liberal justices raised questions about whether the case might be moot because of the transvestic student's claim that he won't attempt to compete in collegiate women's sports again; whether transvestic men with low testosterone levels might qualify as a sub-class deserving of a legal carve-out; and whether the Supreme Court could decide that while most men have an unfair advantage in women's sports, the transvestite in this particular case does not.
Idaho Solicitor General Alan Hurst argued in turn that the case wasn't moot, as Hecox has time left to change his mind about future participation; that it "will always be possible to carve the class down further"; and that an exception would not be administrable as it'd be invasive, requiring ongoing testosterone monitoring of the athlete.
Hurst — who on multiple occasions attempted to help remedy Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's confusion — later emphasized in his rebuttal that male athletes pose a threat to women's sports, citing a 2024 U.N. special rapporteur report that indicated that "over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports" as the result of male interlopers.
"Idaho's law classifies on the basis of sex because sex is what matters in sports," Hurst said. "It correlates strongly with countless athletic advantages like size, muscle mass, bone mass, and heart and lung capacity."
RELATED: 'Not medicine — it's malpractice': Trump HHS buries child sex-change regime with damning report
The conservative justices appeared to take Hurst's point to heart and signaled skepticism about the arguments alternatively advanced by Hecox's lawyer Kathleen Harnett against the Idaho law.
In addition to noting that the Idaho legislation is not discriminatory against all trans-identifying people as it does not bar women from men's sports but only men — who enjoy physical advantages over women — from women's sports, Justice Amy Coney Barrett alluded to scientific evidence indicating that testosterone is not the only advantage enjoyed by male athletes.
On theme, Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked, "Why would we, at this point, jump in and try to constitutionalize a rule for the whole country" while there remains scientific uncertainty and "strong assertions of equality on both sides?"
Kavanaugh, who has coached his daughters' sports teams, also raised concerns about whether allowing "transgender girls to participate will reverse" the "inspiring" success of girls' separate sports over the past five decades.
While Justice Neil Gorsuch asked whether trans-identifying individuals should be considered a "quasi-suspect" class entitled to a higher standard of scrutiny on account of their alleged history of discrimination, he appeared unconvinced by the argument that excluding boys from girls' sports is a form of unconstitutional sex discrimination.
Chief Justice John Roberts pressed Harnett on whether she was challenging the distinction between boys and girls or seeking an exception to the biological definition of girls, and expressed skepticism about the possibility of such an exception.
Roberts appeared concerned about the broader ramifications of permitting exceptions to the definition of girl for a sliver minority of challengers, noting that "if we adopted that, that would have to apply across the board and not simply to the area of athletics."
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
'Shut the f**k up': White House hammers New Yorker writer for trivializing National Guard members' sacrifice
Two West Virginia National Guardsmen patrolling the national capital were shot the day before Thanksgiving, allegedly by a 29-year-old Afghan national who Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem indicated "was one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States under Operation Allies Welcome on September 8, 2021, under the Biden Administration."
While 24-year-old U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe is reportedly still fighting for his life, Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom succumbed to her wounds on Thursday evening.
"My baby girl has passed to glory," the fallen guardsman's father, Gary Beckstrom, noted in a Facebook post on Thursday. "... This has been a horrible tragedy."
'Apologize and repent.'
Amid the general outpouring of prayers and support for the victims and their families, the New Yorker magazine's chief Washington correspondent, Jane Mayer, decided to publicly trivialize the military members' sacrifice.
"This is so tragic, so unnecessary, these poor guardsmen should never have been deployed," wrote Mayer. "I live in DC and watched as they had virtually nothing to do but pick up trash. It was a political show and at what a cost."
Mayer's apparent suggestion that the National Guardsman who died and others overseeing a historic and transformative decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C., were glorified garbage pickers did not go over well with the American people and their White House.
White House communications director Steven Cheung, responding on X from his official account, wrote, "Jane, respectfully, shut the f**k up for trying to politicize this tragedy.
"They were protecting DC and trying to make the nation's capital safer," continued Cheung. "People like you who engage in ghoulish behavior lose all credibility. Not like you had any to begin with."
The official White House rapid response account similarly castigated the liberal journalist, writing, "You sick, disgusting ghoul. Two of these heroes were just SHOT IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. The Guard has saved countless lives — backed up by evidence (which you’re clearly too stupid to notice). They are American patriots."
In August, President Donald Trump federalized the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., and deployed the National Guard there in order to "re-establish law, order, and public safety" to a city that had a higher violent crime, murder, and robbery rate than all 50 states.
D.C. immediately witnessed a dramatic drop in crime.
There was a 44% decrease in violent crime in the first three weeks of the anti-crime initiative when compared to the same stretch the previous year and a 27% drop in crime from Aug. 11 through Oct. 15 relative to the same period in 2024. In addition to saving lives, the reduction in crime led to savings of over $450 million as of Nov. 4, according to the America First Policy Institute.
The White House was not alone in its disgust over Mayer's remarks.
Georgia Rep. Mike Collins (R) responded, "Apologize and repent."
"Stop supporting the murder of American soldiers," wrote BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) wrote, "All these sick people on the Left do is blame the victims. I’m thankful for our guardsmen and praying for them and their families as they keep protecting the peace."
While others similarly bashed Mayer over her rush to politicize the attack on the guardsmen by a suspect apparently imported by the Biden administration, some critics refuted the New Yorker writer's narrative by providing accounts of critical actions taken by the National Guard in the District of Columbia.
— (@)
For instance, Wallace White, a reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation, noted, "On my walk back from work a few weeks back, a man was dangling off the ledge of the metro tracks at Farragut West clearly trying to commit suicide by train. If two national guardsmen weren’t there at the time, he’d be dead. These people are heroes."
Logan Dobson, vice president of the political advertising agency Targeted Victory, noted that he lives in D.C. and that the city is safer thanks to the National Guard, adding on the basis of murder statistics, "Dozens of Washingtonians are alive today that wouldn't be if not for the Guard."
When confronted by Dobson with evidence of the drop in crime following the National Guard's deployment to D.C., Mayer said, "I've covered crime in Washington since 1981- let's skip the mansplaining. You can play with the stats but homicides were dropping before the troops got here."
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Today's top stories
www.theblaze.com
thefederalist.com
www.theblaze.com