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"I'm lucky to be alive," 77-year-old Herb Freeborn told WPVI-TV in the wake of a brutal, unprovoked attack he suffered just after noon Wednesday in Ridley Township, Pennsylvania, while he was riding his e-bike. Ridley Township is just under 30 minutes southwest of Philadelphia.'I ain't used to people helping me like that, you know.'Freeborn told the station he was waiting to cross Chester Pike in the Crum Lynne section when a male approached him from behind and began punching him.Surveillance video shows the suspect crossing through traffic and heading toward the victim before the attack, WPVI said."This guy came up behind me, started punching me and punching me," Freeborn recalled to the station.WPVI asked him if the suspect said anything during the attack, but Freeborn said, "No, didn't say nothing, just came up to me and started hitting me."The station said Freeborn suffered injuries to his eye and face.RELATED: Laughing 'piece of s**t' thug caught on video punching victim in face as pair pass each other in Philly crosswalk Surveillance video shows Freeborn managing to run from the attacker, WPVI reported.At that point, one might expect the suspect to make off with the victim's e-bike — but he didn't.The station said the suspect actually threw Freeborn's e-bike and walked away.Surveillance video also captured a bystander — Danny Doyle — stepping in to help, WPVI noted.Doyle told the station he saw the incident and went to assist Freeborn, grabbing the victim's e-bike and checking on his condition."At first I thought he was stealing his bike; that's why I went and grabbed it for him," Doyle recalled to WPVI.Freeborn told the station that Doyle's actions meant a lot to him: "I want to thank him very, very much. I appreciate everything he done for me."The elderly man then added a gut-wrenching admission WPVI: "I ain't used to people helping me like that, you know."Ridley Township police released surveillance photos of the suspect and announced just before 4 p.m. Wednesday that he had been taken into custody.Police on Friday didn’t immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for more information about the arrested suspect."If he did it to me, why wouldn't he do it to somebody else?" Freeborn asked the station.Commenters under the police department's Facebook post about the incident didn't hold back:"Typical coward. Prey on the elderly. Not surprised," one user stated."Piece of s**t," another commenter declared. "I hope they find out what he did when he goes to jail, and those boys stomp him out for it.""Like why WTF," another user wrote."Always carry ... end them," another commenter suggested.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The results of the midterm elections are clear; their meaning is not. The blue tsunami apparently has not budged either of the dominant intellectual factions on the right. The so-called “doomers” see fresh support for their conviction that the republic is sliding more or less inexorably into ruin. The more conventional old guard, who find such talk alarming, continue to insist that “you win some, you lose some” and that Republicans will live to fight another day.What makes the current political scene so perplexing is that both sides can point to certain undeniable facts to support their position. The United States is, for now, neither all one thing nor all the other. James Madison’s Constitution, though beaten and bruised, is still functioning, according to the conventionalists. American politics remains fundamentally “normal.” To what degree the ruling class actually believes in or cares about the various oppressed classes it purports to champion is an open question.In reply, the pessimistic wing accuses the “normie-cons” of naivete and complacency. The original Constitution, they argue, has by now been almost entirely pushed aside by a new, second Constitution, based on a new understanding of justice and human nature and fanatically devoted to implementing the ideological left’s agenda.It is hard to deny that virtually all aspects of our public life have become distorted and dysfunctional in a way the founders would hardly recognize. Yet the old guard does seem to be correct to insist that elections — the most important safeguard of popular consent — are still respected by both sides, however tenuously.Despite a few vocal outliers and occasionally heated rhetoric, both parties have grudgingly accepted the results of the last several voting cycles, if not in equal measure. (It is worth noting that during Joe Biden’s entire four-year term, no one from the allegedly extreme party of gun violence tried to assassinate him.) Presumably, this will still hold in two years, even if — as seems quite possible now — the Democrats not only maintain significant majorities in both chambers of Congress, but take control of the White House as well. That, oddly enough, could represent a notable return to something very traditional and normal in American politics: the “realigning election.”Until a few decades ago, the regularity of realigning elections had been such a reliable feature of American history that political scientists had come to treat the phenomenon as almost an iron law. Beginning in 1800, the American people seemed to prefer that one party hold authoritative control of the federal government for a full generation or so, at which point they decisively switched their allegiance to the other party. Thus, Republicans and Democrats essentially traded control over the national government every few decades: in 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, and then, perhaps, in 1968 or ’72 — but this is where things took a turn.In an essay titled “Political Parties, the Constitution, and the Future of American Politics,” Charles Kesler notes that realigning elections consistently allowed the American people to choose between two “well-developed interpretations” of the Constitution: “a more democratic or a more republican view.” “The former view emphasized popular sovereignty, the latter popular responsibility.”RELATED: Trump conquered the Republican Party. What a waste of a victory. Brendan SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty ImagesParties competed to prove their fidelity to the Constitution, each grudgingly conceding the legitimacy of the other(s), but insisting on its own superior credentials — and thus its right to define what was common ground, and what was forbidden, in public life.In practice, these boundaries were set by the majority party, but the fight was always over who would get to set them — whose view of the Constitution would prevail. When the competing views became sufficiently discordant, the American people faced a critical election whose consequences might include the overturn of the existing majority party, and the establishment of a new one.Such realigning elections are rare but revealing: They set the grounds of electoral competition for the next generation or two, and renew the nation’s dedication to the moral and political goals of republicanism proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and incorporated in the Constitution. Thus America’s party system reflected the continuing vitality of the Constitution, and presupposed a healthy respect and even reverence for it.Kesler notes that this regular process seems to have stalled in the 1980s. The Reagan revolution ought to have solidified Nixon’s 1972 landslide re-election and inaugurated a generation of Republican dominance. But by this point, the federal government itself had become a significant — perhaps the most significant — faction in American politics. The will of the voters now had to contend with the will of the bureaucracy. As a result, Kesler notes, the United States has “tilted away from elective representation and party politics and towards new, non-elective and non-deliberative modes of representation.” Consent steadily yielded to the benevolent administration of scientific experts.Picking up on this theme, the late Angelo Codevilla, another great Claremont scholar, noted in 2020 that the institutional changes wrought by the second Constitution have been driven by a potent intellectual critique that guided “the campaigns for social improvement into which Progressives have led the American people ever since the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s.”The ruling class chided Americans for insufficient commitment to education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health, as well as for oppressing women, and, above all, for racism. The campaigns for remedying these conditions have been based on propositions advanced by the most highly credentialed persons in America — experts certified by the U.S. government, whom the media treated as truth-telling scientists, their opponents as enemies of the people.RELATED: The day after tomorrow: A new GOP Tom Brenner/Getty ImagesNot surprisingly, this ostensibly moral agenda coincided very nicely with the political and economic interests of the ruling class, which appointed itself the guardian of the progressive second Constitution. To what degree the ruling class actually believes in or cares about the various oppressed classes it purports to champion is an open question. As Codevilla perceptively emphasizes, its disdain for traditional, working-class voters is evident; the desire to actually improve life for the American citizenry is less clear. If this were nothing more than hypocrisy, it would hardly matter.But the political problem, not just for the left but for America, is that the ideological cart to which the ruling class hitched its pursuit of power — the postmodern crusades for sexual liberation, racial grievances, and the autonomy of the uninhibited self — turns out to be rather difficult to manage. The radical vanguard that supplies the Democrats with energy, zeal, and fashionable cachet, what Codevilla calls the “intersectional” component of the left, believes (not without good reason) that it is in charge. This makes for an uneasy coalition. “For most ruling class notables,” Codevilla observes, “enjoying and parceling out victory’s prerogatives is the revolution’s point.”They would prefer to suppress the deplorables while minimizing disruption of the economy and avoiding violence. For these chiefs, rubbing the deplorables’ faces in excrement is mostly an instrument of conflict. But for the intersectionals, it is the revolution’s very objective, its driving logic. For them, vengeance is electoral victory’s foremost prerogative. Determined as the chiefs may be that the intersectional tail must not wag the revolutionary dog, the fact is that each and every part of the intersectional coalition sees itself as the dog.The crucial question in 2028 and beyond will be: Who is really the top dog in the ruling class?A few days ago, National Review’s Dan McLaughlin — hardly a MAGA extremist — tweeted, “I understand entirely the instinct to teach the House GOP a lesson. But if you punish the Senate GOP, it will be 6 years before they can do anything about it. And we can lose the Republic before then.” If this week’s midterm elections does indeed foretell a critical realignment to the left in 2028, it will mean not six but at least 30 years of unchallenged dominance by the Democrats — with very little assurance that the neoliberal oligarchs will be able to moderate the intersectional fanatics. That might be enough to make even the most complacent “normie-con” blanch.Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.

An Oklahoma pastor claimed to be a part of the notorious MS-13 criminal gang in order to coerce members of his flock to work for him without pay.Elmer Baca Flores, 41, told his church members to quit their jobs and work for him, according to a post from the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.'As parents, we have to be hypervigilant about protecting them. Ninety percent of the time, children are abused by someone they know, love, and trust.' Officers interviewed several people who said their family members had gone to church and didn't come back home. Flores used his influence as a spiritual leader to coerce the members to leave their families.The scheme was first reported after a family told police their daughter had been sexually abused. "One victim told Agents that Flores gave her a test to prove her ability to resist temptation. During this test, the victim was sexually battered by Flores," said Mark Woodward, a public information officer with the OBN."Flores used his influence as a pastor to spiritually coerce the victims by targeting their religious convictions," Woodward added.Flores was arrested in April 2025 and booked on three charges of lewd conduct with a child.Six months later, the charges were amended to include human trafficking for labor and one count of sexual battery.On Tuesday, he was convicted of 13 counts of human trafficking for labor as well as various child sex charges.He was sentenced to 30 years in prison and will have to register as a sex offender. He also faces deportation.He called his church the "Ministerio Levantando Adoradores Para Cristo Inc.," which was based in his home. A sign of the church from a KOCO-TV report indicated that it was Pentecostal.RELATED: Pastor allegedly tried to meet minor for sex — he ran for Congress as a Democrat and was an NAACP leader The OBN said Flores' conviction for human trafficking for forced labor was the first such conviction in the state of Oklahoma."I appreciate the amazing work by our Human Trafficking Unit and the Oklahoma County District Attorney's Office in this landmark case," OBN Director Donnie Anderson said. "And I applaud the bravery of these victims for coming forward to hold their trafficker accountable."Stacy McNeiland, the founder of ROAR at the Care Center, told KOCO that parents need to be vigilant against predators manipulating their children. "As parents, we have to be hypervigilant about protecting them. Ninety percent of the time, children are abused by someone they know, love, and trust,” McNeiland said. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Conservatives get smeared as anti-immigrant, but the truth is simple: They want people who come here legally, respect the process, and actually want to become Americans. Miguel Rojas is exactly that immigrant.BlazeTV host Pat Gray played a clip of the newly retired Dodgers infielder and two-time World Series champion explaining how he approached the U.S. citizenship test he passed last month. When asked by reporters if he was nervous about the test, Rojas didn’t flinch: “No, I wasn’t nervous because I was prepared.”“I felt like I was ready for it. I didn't know what to expect because it's kind of like my first time going into a conference room with an official … but at the end of the day, I knew all the 100 questions, and I knew the answers,” he added confidently.Rojas then expressed pride in becoming an American.“It makes me feel really special, really proud because of my family, because of my kids, because of what I've been doing the last 21 years in this country. This country opened their doors to me to be a professional baseball player, and kind of I took that opportunity as a life opportunity as well, and I don't take it for granted,” he said.He also noted that he was glad that the person who administered his citizenship test didn’t recognize him because he did not want to be shown any “preference.”“Because this process has nothing to do with baseball. I felt like as a citizen, as a human being, I always wanted to be a good person off the field and not let my performance influence anything because we all know how hard this game can be and how high you can be and how low you can be one day,” Rojas explained. “So I don't want to be kind of like judged by my performance on the field. I want to be judged by the person who I am and my preparation.”Pat is delighted by Rojas’ response.“That’s what you like to see is an immigrant who’s doing it the right way, came here legally … appreciates his opportunities here, appreciates the country, loves the country, wants to be a part of it,” he raves.“Doesn’t need an interpreter,” adds co-host Jeffy, highlighting Rojas’ excellent English.“People like that, you welcome with open arms. … It’s great to have you here,” says Pat.To see the clip of Rojas and hear more of Pat and the panel’s commentary, watch the episode above.Want more from Pat Gray?To enjoy more of Pat's biting analysis and signature wit as he restores common sense to a senseless world, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.