Events surrounding Iran’s women’s national soccer team continue to attract global attention. It started when the players refused to sing the national anthem before their opening match against South Korea at the 2026 AFC Women’s Asian Cup in Australia — a silent protest that sparked backlash from Iranian officials, who labeled them "wartime traitors," leading to fears for the women’s safety upon their return.After the team was eliminated from the tournament, tensions escalated dramatically. Several players escaped team monitoring and sought asylum. Australia granted humanitarian visas to several of the players, allowing them to remain permanently.But Glenn Beck says there’s a part two to this tragic story the mainstream media is neglecting: the aftermath in Iran. While some stayed in Australia, several of the players bravely chose to return home.“Those girls now live under a cloud they didn’t create,” Glenn says, “and the authorities are going to ask them questions. Security services are going to conduct interviews that might last hours or days. None of them sang the national anthem, so they’re all traitors to the regime.”And then there’s the families of the players to consider.“Sources say now that in Iran, families find themselves under quiet surveillance. Reports now speculate that some family members may have already been arrested, detained, or questioned,” Glenn says.“Authoritarian systems protect themselves through pressure, and that pressure spreads outward from any act of defiance. One athlete leaves — the regime has to remind everyone else there’s a cost,” he adds.That pressure to maintain control is higher than ever right now as the foundations of the regime begin to falter.“Women are refusing the hijab. Students are marching through the universities. Workers are striking in oil fields and factories, and now athletes, people chosen to represent the nation itself, decide freedom is worth more than the career they were given,” Glenn says.All it takes is “a few people [stepping] outside the lines” for the masses to realize that “the walls surrounding them might not be so permanent after all,” he says.“Young girls all across the country will hear about it for decades. They’ll understand exactly what those players risked and exactly why they did it, and somewhere — maybe among the next generation of women — they’ll decide that life under the Islamic Republic is no longer the only future available. And that is how real change begins,” he adds.To hear more, watch the video above.Want more from Glenn Beck?To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

A police standoff at a children's hospital ended tragically Thursday morning, but new, bizarre details about the story have emerged.Dallas police were conducting an investigation into a man who had an active warrant. They followed him into the parking garage of Children's Health hospital late at night.'He had a gun. He pointed a gun towards officers.'Police say the man, known as Mike King, went into the parking garage, barricaded himself inside a vehicle, and refused to come out. According to Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux, at that time, police used tear gas to get the suspect out of the vehicle."He came out of the vehicle; he had a gun. He pointed a gun towards officers. Officers shot and fired," Comeaux said, per KDFW.SWAT medical services attempted to render aid, but the man was pronounced dead at the scene. The suspect reportedly only displayed his gun but did not fire it, and no officers were injured.It has since been revealed that the man is a longtime member of Texas Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett's security detail, pictured with her at several events.RELATED: Democrats swapped Crockett’s preening for Talarico’s pulpit — and it worked KTVT showed a payment receipt for a "King, Mike" for $340 on March 28, 2025, for "security services," allegedly from Crockett. The outlet also showed several images of King standing near Crockett, seemingly as part of her security detail at several events.The man was wanted by police for impersonating law enforcement officers. He also allegedly drove a replica undercover police vehicle, while using license plates that were allegedly stolen from cars outside a military recruiting office.According to CBS News, Mike King is not the suspect's real name, and he had been using several different aliases while conducting his business, which was called Off Duty Police Services. The online platform connected North Texas police officers with off-duty work. RELATED: ‘An unhealthy obsession’: James Talarico praises trans children as 'perfect' and 'sacred' Photographer: Dylan Hollingsworth/Bloomberg via Getty Images According to CBS News' inside sources, the man also had a previous criminal background.Rep. Crockett's office has declined to comment on multiple reports. Blaze News has requested comment from Crockett. This article will be updated with any applicable responses.Police have not released the man's real name.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

A new paper finds that LLMs bend toward imitation, non-creation, and, despite requests for fresh takes, put out derivative conclusions.The paper has some AI observers surprised, while others scramble for explanations. Simply put, the models trained on finite datasets could not originate anything of their own. Worse, all the models, whatever their external or corporate differences, wound up spewing almost the same results. The differences in input, apparently, made little difference in output.“This research reveals a critical limitation in large language models,” said Yulia Tsvetkov, a lead researcher and author of the study. "Despite their diversity of architectures and training approaches, LLMs produce strikingly homogeneous outputs on open-ended queries, a phenomenon we termed the ‘artificial hivemind.’”The limitations of the LLMs are baked into the facts of silicon and spirit."Hive mind," believe it or not, is being generous. The LLMs cannot synch in the telepathic sense we attribute to honeybees or ants. All they are capable of is recursion, rehashing their inputs. There is no reflection but that which has been entrained to the models. No wonder they all sound the same.The group of researchers working at various academic centers, including the Paul Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford University, trained approximately 70 different LLM models on a dataset they dubbed “INFINITY-CHAT.”The researchers posed 26,000 open-ended questions to the LLMs , breaking out “the different queries that users pose to language models into six high-level categories and 17 fine-grained subcategories such as problem solving or speculative and hypothetical scenarios,” according to their report. “Of the high-level categories, creative content generation (58%) and brainstorming and ideation (15.2%) were among some of the most common — emphasizing users’ reliance on LLMs for direct inspiration and thought.”There’s another disturbing angle we might consider.The limitations of the LLMs are baked into the facts of silicon and spirit. Their limitations are unalterable, and they will never achieve “consciousness,” merely simulating it at most. We shouldn’t expect much in terms of pure creativity. But what about the nutritive and psychic value of the material upon which the models were trained? Is part of the problem highlighted in the "Hivemind" study due to the human-made material upon which they were trained?RELATED: Shock report reveals just how much Gen Zers and Millennials dislike AI Sakorn Sukkasemsakorn/Getty ImagesA particular post on X.com flagged this study. It’s no exaggeration, nor is it meant to disparage the poster, as certainly he is simply following the incentives of our financialized social media conditions, but the post itself reads like LLM-speak. It uses the now-typical “it’s not A, it’s B” turn of phrase so often repeated by AI and those humans interacting with AI.This effect of humans sinking into lexigraphical and semantic patterns displayed by LLMs was highlighted in another recent study, "Homogenizing effect of large language models on creative diversity." “While LLMs can produce creative content that might be as good as or even better than human-created content,” the report surmised, “their widespread use risks reducing creative diversity across groups of people.”Viral catchphrases and shopworn cliches come and go. Not too long ago, you couldn’t turn on the radio or crack a news site without seeing the phrase “it turns out that,” shortly followed by “is a dumpster fire.” We have a dangerous, but also useful, in-built tendency toward imitation. But we have, while LLMs do not, a number of tethers back to reality, back to the visceral and the spiritual.How much of everything we’ve been reading over the last few decades has already been vastly watered down or filtered through, first, the criteria of market competition; second, government coercion and outright censorship; and lastly, through the highly dramatic corporate homogenizing process referred to as consolidation?The alarm surrounding this latest “Hivemind” study will die down. Perhaps the models will be rejiggered to allow for output more convincing to human observers. But the more critical question, concerning how our own deteriorating capacities for discernment may have contributed to the ways these machines were modeled, will remain uncomfortable. We should try to unravel the mysteries of our own recent degeneration by looking at ourselves first.

After CNN botched some recent coverage, BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is enjoying “watching the death spiral that CNN is having to deal with in real time and the ways that they are trying to stay relevant.”“All the cool kids are on Instagram, right? And CNN is like, ‘Oh, oh, hold on a second. Hold on a second. We’re new. We’re hip. We’re cool with the youths. What if we started uploading these totally not staged and impromptu selfie videos,’” Gonzales mocks, before playing a CNN selfie video of Jake Tapper.“See that fancy ceiling? I’m at the House of Representatives. I wanted to show you something. So, in 1890, journalist Charles Kincaid shot and killed, ultimately, Congressman William Taulbee of Kentucky. And right here, you can see the bloodstains,” Tapper said.“That is Jake Tapper. He’s realized, ‘Oh crap, nobody’s watching, and the kids are not watching because everything I do is boring,’” Gonzales comments.“You might think this is a Jake Tapper problem. It’s not. This is apparently CNN’s new strategy across all of their social platforms with all of their anchors,” she adds, before playing a selfie video of CNN anchor Dana Bash.“I just got off the phone with President Trump, who gave himself a 15 out of 10 on how the war is going so far,” Bash said while sitting in her car.“This is not genuine. This is not authentic. This is CNN’s last desperate gasp here, OK? And it’s just not working. It’s not working for you, Dana,” Gonzales says.“Some CNN consultant ... got paid however the hell much money they got paid to be like, ‘OK, hold on. Hold on. I got it. Selfie videos. Selfie videos. That’s going to save you guys,’” Gonzales jokes. “Everyone wants to hear what Jake Tapper thinks while he’s driving down the f**king road.”Want more from Sara Gonzales?To enjoy more of Sara's no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.