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The campaign of Abdul El-Sayed distanced itself from bizarre comments by a campaign aide comparing an innocuously patriotic ad from Mike Rogers to a Ku Klux Klan cross burning.The ad showed Rogers riding in a bright red antique Ford truck with two U.S. flags flapping behind as the song "American Ride" by Toby Keith plays.'Is it your official campaign position that old Ford pickups are akin to the KKK?' "Gotta love this American Ride! There’s no better way to do the Woodward Dream Cruise!" Rogers wrote in the social media post.While most Americans would likely approve of the video, El-Sayed aide Mason Pressler said it reminded him of a racist KKK demonstration."Mike Rogers’ campaign has the aesthetics of a 1960s white flight suburb and a KKK cross burning," the political manager posted on social media.The Rogers campaign seized on the comment to slam El-Sayed."Is it your official campaign position that old Ford pickups are akin to the KKK? That's the statement your staff is making," the campaign responded on social media.In an email to Fox News, El-Sayed's communications director, Roxie Richner, cited a caveat on Pressler's social media profile saying his posts were his opinions only and not representative of the views of the campaign. The Democrat is the first Muslim to be nominated for a seat in the U.S. Senate but has been plagued by the far-left comments and associations unearthed from his past.RELATED: VIDEO: Socialist New York lawmaker gets absolutely TORCHED for claiming theft is caused by poverty El-Sayed argued that the Second Amendment needed to be revoked and compared President Donald Trump to Osama bin Laden. He's also publicly palled around with extremist Hasan Piker, who said America deserved the 9/11 terror attacks and has advocated for violence in the name of communism. While El-Sayed winning the Democrat nomination in Michigan is seen as a victory for the far-left fringe of the party, others point to polling that showed the progressive did not compete as well against Rogers as the establishment candidate he defeated.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Sadly, the people who want to see the United States destroyed don’t just live outside our borders.“There's a lot of people in the United States that would also love to see us fail,” says BlazeTV host Nick Freitas.When people think of America’s enemies within, George Soros is often the first person who comes to mind — and for good reason. The “philanthropist” has funneled tens of billions of dollars into radical left-wing causes that weaken law and order, national sovereignty, and traditional Western institutions.But Freitas says there’s another American who trumps even the mighty Soros. According to DataRepublican, Neville Roy Singham — the American multimillionaire software entrepreneur who sold his company in 2017 before relocating to China — “funneled $278 MILLION into a network of ~2,000 organizations that push pro-China, anti-American propaganda across five continents.”Even though Singham has funneled far less money into destructive causes than Soros, his open Marxist ideology and close alignment with the Chinese Communist Party make him, according to Freitas and co-host Christian Hines, number one on the list of America's fifth columnists.Singham, says Hines, is “a just full-blown Marxist in bed with the CCP and is funding effectively an entire propaganda campaign to destroy the United States from within and huge wedge issues in America in order to agitate for leftist causes.”“He’s not a progressive. He’s a communist,” he declares.To show just how extreme Singham is, Freitas points to a video of him speaking at a conference he co-sponsored in Shanghai in November 2025 — an event that had the blessing of the Chinese Communist Party. At the conference, the American-born Singham released a 172-page report claiming the United States and the West did not win World War II — the Soviet Union and China did — and that it was a “fascist lie” for the West to take credit.He went on to say that if people want the new world order proposed by President Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, they must undo the “ideological damage” caused by the Western story of World War II.To hear more, watch the video above.“Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK40 for $40 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

A drunk Ohio couple allegedly forced their way into a cruise ship cabin to attack three people, including striking a 9-year-old child, according to authorities. A cruise passenger said two words to the pair that sent them into a fit of rage, police said.Police said Ohio residents 29-year-old Gannon Jacox and his 28-year-old girlfriend, Brooklyn Hicks, were arrested on Saturday when the cruise ship they were traveling on docked at Port Canaveral – a cruise, cargo, and naval port in Brevard County, Florida.'If you can’t hold your liquor, then you definitely shouldn’t be out in public causing a scene like this and injuring random people, including a child!'Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey announced in a statement on the department's official Facebook page that he believed the incident was fueled by "alcohol combined with an apparent lack of common sense."The pair were "apparently arguing loudly after taking advantage of some adult beverages" during the cruise trip, Ivey said. The statement said a fellow cruise passenger asked them to "quiet down," and Hicks "apparently didn’t like the request, so she decided to go confront them."The statement said Jacox walked over to the squabble and began recording with his cell phone, then instructed his girlfriend to "beat them up!"Police said Jacox and Hicks "pushed" their way into the cruise ship cabin of the alleged victims, where a 9-year-old child was staying.Sheriff Ivey stated that a "fight ensued" and Jacox hit all three people in the room, including a 9-year-old child. "Hicks was just swinging, hoping one would land," Ivey added. Ivey said Jacox suffered a "pretty gross injury to his eye," which was "either caused by one of the victims or friendly fire from the Haymakers his girlfriend was throwing!"The sheriff pointed out, "Thankfully none of the victims were seriously injured in this ridiculous escapade!"Sheriff Ivey added, "So what’s the moral of the story…if you can’t hold your liquor, then you definitely shouldn’t be out in public causing a scene like this and injuring random people, including a child!"Ivey joked, "You know the deal folks, break the law in Brevard County, and I promise you the lodge will have a reservation with your name on it!"RELATED: Mother and her adult son allegedly beat up 65-year-old woman on cruise ship amid argument jgroup via iStock/Getty Images Jacox was arrested and charged with burglary with battery and child abuse without great bodily harm. Meanwhile, Hicks was arrested and charged with burglary with battery and battery-touch/strike.Both suspects were transported and booked into the Brevard County Jail.On Sunday, Jacox was released on a $31,000 bond, jail records show. On Monday, Hicks was released on a $6,000 bond, according to jail records.Jail records show that both suspects are scheduled to appear in court on Sept. 15. Authorities did not name the specific cruise ship where the incident reportedly happened. Citing the Port Canaveral cruise ship schedule for Aug 15, the New York Post reported, "Four cruise ships docked at Port Canaveral on Saturday — Royal Caribbean’s Adventure of the Seas, Disney’s Disney Treasure, and Carnival Cruise Line’s Mardi Gras and Carnival Freedom."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

H.L. Mencken believed in free speech “up to the last limits of the endurable.” Apparently, that makes him a cuck nowadays.Mencken was a self-described “extreme libertarian” with little respect for authority. In 1926, when Boston banned an issue of his magazine, the American Mercury, over a mildly bawdy story called “Hatrack,” Mencken went to Boston, sold a copy himself, and got arrested for his trouble.Are we still rational? Some days I have my doubts.“Hatrack,” by Herbert Asbury — who later gave us “The Gangs of New York” — concerned a prostitute who took her Catholic customers to the Protestant cemetery and her Protestant customers to the Catholic cemetery.Scandalous stuff, once upon a time.Yet as absolutist as he professed to be, Mencken did not believe freedom of speech meant license to say anything to anybody under any circumstances. Although he rejected Catholic doctrine, he told an interviewer he had no right to plant himself outside a cathedral after High Mass and harangue Catholics as they emerged.Write against Catholicism? Sure. Ridicule it? Mencken made a career of worse. But deliberately press his contempt upon people who didn’t ask for it? There he located one of “the last limits of the endurable.”I thought about Mencken’s observation while reading responses to my column last week about Shiloh Hendrix, the Minnesota woman convicted of disorderly conduct after Sharmake Omar followed her with a camera, challenged her to repeat the N-word, and got exactly what he asked for. I say Hendrix behaved badly but Minnesota’s prosecution was needless. Whatever one thinks of the “fighting words” doctrine, her exchange with Omar did not look much like an “imminent breach of the peace.”One reader informed me that I was “100% wrong” because “the founding fathers told you so.”No, they didn’t. Sorry, dude. Not even close.James Madison certainly understood that liberty carries abuses with it. In his “Report of 1800,” attacking the Sedition Act, Madison wrote that “some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing,” especially a free press. Better to tolerate a few “noxious branches” than prune so aggressively that you destroy the good fruit along with the bad.RELATED: Shiloh Hendrix took the bait — prosecutors took it too far maurusone/iStock/Getty ImagesThat is a formidable warning against political censorship. It is not an argument that nothing done with words may ever come within reach of the law.Joseph Story was even more on point. Story was not technically a founder, but Madison appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1811. In his 1833 “Commentaries on the Constitution,” Story considered the proposition that freedom of speech and press meant an absolute right to say or publish anything “without any responsibility, public or private.” He called that “a supposition too wild to be indulged by any rational man.”Are we still rational? Some days I have my doubts.Nor did the Supreme Court in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire simply declare open season on offensive words. The rule the justices upheld applied to words with a “direct tendency to cause acts of violence” by the person to whom they were addressed. The question was not whether somebody’s feelings had been hurt, but whether, in context, the words were likely to provoke an immediate breach of the peace.You may think that rule was wrong. You may think Chaplinsky should be overruled. Fine by me. But it was not a hate-speech law in embryo.Conservatives, of all people, should be capable of making certain distinctions. We are right to oppose political censorship, government pressure on social media companies, and “online safety” schemes — especially Trojan horse laws like Britain’s Online Safety Act and whatever American variants politicians devise — that smuggle censorship into law under the vocabulary of “harm,” “misinformation,” and “protection.”But the answer shouldn’t be to pretend public order no longer matters.We used to understand “ordered liberty.” The adjective was not decorative. A free society protects political dissent, unpopular opinions, vulgarity (to a point), and plenty of behavior decent people would rather not endure. It also recognizes that rights can collide and that threats, intimidation, harassment, breaches of the peace, and invasions of privacy do not become sacred merely because somebody accomplished them with his mouth.Hadley Arkes warned conservatives about precisely this temptation in the Claremont Review of Books. In recoiling from the left’s habit of policing speech according to subjective injury, conservatives risk adopting a relativism of their own: No distinctions. No judgments. Words are words. Speech is speech. Context is irrelevant.That posture may sound wonderfully resolute, but it merely saves us the trouble of thinking. Don’t fall for it.RELATED: Saint Anthony Fauci’s index of forbidden questions Nyia Sissac/Washington Post/Getty ImagesHuman beings use words to persuade, deceive, threaten, provoke, comfort, command, insult, and warn. Threats are words. Extortion is words. Perjury is words. Fraud very often is words. An argument is made with words. So is an epithet. Pretending all of those acts are morally identical does not make us more devoted to liberty. It makes us less capable of judgment.Which brings me back to Shiloh Hendrix. She is a grown woman who behaved badly. Omar followed her with a camera, confronted her, and challenged her to repeat the N-word. He also behaved badly — but she took the bait. He posted the video. She was doxxed, condemned, defended, and turned into a national cause. Then Minnesota prosecuted her.I still think that was needless. Omar wanted a viral video, not a fistfight. He got one, and the internet delivered its judgment with its Customary Restraint and Good Sense™. I still want Hendrix to win her appeal.Arkes emailed me after my first column appeared and put the matter more succinctly: “It’s a matter of context.” Exactly. Thanks, professor!Madison warned against destroying freedom while pruning its noxious branches. Story warned that liberty did not mean immunity from all responsibility. Mencken believed in freedom up to “the last limits of the endurable.” Arkes warns conservatives not to answer left-wing censorship by surrendering moral judgment altogether.Public order requires us to look squarely at what Hendrix did, what Omar did, and what the state did afterward. Making distinctions does not weaken the case for free speech. It is the case for ordered liberty — which we need now more than ever.