Georgia’s political future came into focus Tuesday night as voters narrowed crowded primary races down to six major contenders in two of the state’s most consequential races.  Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones and billionaire dark horse candidate Rick Jackson advanced to a runoff election to decide the Republican nominee for governor. Meanwhile, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms emerged victorious on the Democrat side, setting up a competitive election to succeed Republican Governor Brian Kemp. Republican Congressman Mike Collins and former University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley also advanced to a runoff to determine who will challenge incumbent Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff in November.  Georgia is expected to be one of the most-watched battleground states heading into the 2026 midterms, with national implications for both parties. Jones, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump and one of Georgia’s most recognizable conservative figures, entered the race with significant momentum after securing the president’s endorsement. As lieutenant governor, Jones championed lower taxes, increased funding for the education system, and supported law enforcement. Billionaire Rick Jackson spent more than $83 million of his own fortune on the race, vastly outspending the other GOP candidates. Jackson, who made his fortune as a healthcare executive, framed his campaign around government accountability and spending reform.  “Work brings dignity, purpose, and independence. If you want to sit on your butt, binge-watching Netflix and eating Cheetos, do it with your own money,” he said during the campaign. Despite Jackson’s massive spending advantage, Jones received the endorsement of President Trump, leaving the race neck-and-neck. The runoff election will now decide who advances to the general election against Bottoms.  Bottoms, who rose to national prominence during her tenure as Atlanta mayor, positioned herself as the establishment Democrat in the governor’s race. Backed by major Democrat donors and party operatives, Bottoms ran on expanding healthcare, protecting abortion, and increasing government investment in social programs. Her nomination sets her up for her first attempt to win a statewide general election after she served as a senior adviser in the Biden White House following her departure from City Hall. As mayor, Bottoms oversaw Atlanta during the COVID pandemic and the riots that followed the death of George Floyd. She has been staunchly opposed to President Trump, whom she has described as “a madman in the White House.” Bottoms eliminated cash bail requirements for several offenses and pushed policies that restrict police from pursuing misdemeanor suspects.  On the Senate side, the Republican race in Georgia could become one of the most expensive and nationally significant contests in the country.  Collins, a conservative congressman and trucking business owner, campaigned as a pro-Trump outsider focused on border security, economic growth, and rolling back Biden-era policies. Dooley decided to get involved after becoming frustrated with “congressional gridlock and a failure to service the public.” The primary will determine who will face Ossoff, one of the Democrats’ highest-profile incumbents.  Ossoff narrowly won his Senate seat in the 2021 runoff elections, which temporarily gave Democrats control of the Senate. With Georgia serving as a swing state in recent elections, both parties are expected to pour significant resources into the race ahead of November. 

“The View” co-hosts Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin blew a gasket on Tuesday’s show, reacting to President Donald Trump reducing the cost of hundreds of prescription drugs for Americans. Behar and Hostin railed about drugs being added to the federal government’s direct-to-consumer drug site, called TrumpRx, which now boasts more than 600 drugs. The pair claimed that Trump had bad intentions, thereby discounting the achievement. “First of all, you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas,” Behar said. “Once Trump puts his name on prescriptions, we’re all going to die, okay? He put his name on the Trump Shuttle, the Trump Vodka, Trump University, the Trump Hotel, and my favorite, the casinos that all went bankrupt.” Hostin said she was in complete agreement with Behar. She called Trump a “failed businessman” and bizarrely excoriated the president for saying he wanted to make Americans “wealthy.” Trump “didn’t say ‘healthy,'” Hostin reasoned. “This is not a well-intentioned person,” she claimed. “He is not doing this out of the goodness of his heart!” The peculiar take landed the pair at odds with some of their fellow leftist hosts. Sara Haines, for example, praised the price drop for Americans, even if she dislikes Trump. “This helps people,” she said. “People who are literally suffering from illness and cannot pay for their medicine.” In return, Hostin called her “so naive.” Alyssa Farah Griffin also pushed back on the naysayers. “A medication I had to take for IVF is a tenth of the price on TrumpRx,” she explained. “Whatever, it’s tacky that his name is on it,” Farah Griffin continued. “The average family, one third of Americans cut back on essential foods and utilities to be able to cover their prescription drug costs.” “You’re not going to convince me that, just because Trump is involved, we should be like, ‘Screw it, don’t bring down prescription drugs,'” she added. WATCH:

Senate Democrats are inviting an anti-gambling activist who was disbarred after stealing nearly $2 million from clients to finance his own gambling habit, still owes nearly all that money, and appears to falsely represent himself as a therapist, to testify on integrity in sports.  Harry Levant, a self-styled gambling addiction expert who has become the go-to expert for the campaign against legalized betting, is a Democrat witness for a congressional hearing to weigh the social costs of legalized sports betting. Levant’s own history, however, raises serious questions about whether he belongs in front of Congress as a neutral authority at all. Levant, now director of gambling policy at the Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI), has become a favored media source for outlets eager to highlight the dangers of online wagering. He has appeared in major national publications and alongside lawmakers pushing federal restrictions on sports betting, often presenting himself as a reformed addict turned counselor and public health advocate. But Levant’s public rehabilitation story omits a key fact: he is a disbarred former attorney who pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $2 million from his own legal clients to finance his gambling addiction. His victims reportedly included a family member and a double amputee.  “My world crumbled in May of 2014 when I was informed that all my money no longer existed,” a victim of Levant told a judge. “I will never forgive Mr. Levant for what he has done to me. He needs to be punished and pay for what he has done.” Though he avoided prison after facing dozens of criminal charges, court records reviewed by The Daily Wire show he still owes roughly $1.9 million in restitution more than a decade later. Public records indicate he has maintained access to high-end housing while making only minimal monthly payments to the victims he defrauded. At the current payment rate ordered by the court, full repayment would take 316 years. Levant now publicly markets himself as a “therapist” and “gambling counselor,” offering in-person services in Philadelphia and telehealth sessions online. Yet available state licensing databases in both Pennsylvania and Massachusetts do not appear to show an active professional counseling license under his name.  In a phone interview, Levant said he doesn’t run a therapy practice. “I host a coaching program, not a therapy practice. I host group coaching,” Levant said. “If someone in the group needs therapy, I refer them to a licensed therapist.” Despite this, Levant’s website still describes him as a “mental health therapist” and contains a page titled “Therapy,” where he says, “I offer a comprehensive approach to therapy,” invites visitors to “become a patient,” and advertises “in-person services in the Philadelphia area and virtual telehealth services for all ages.” Levant added that he is “very upfront” that his use of the title “Dr.” refers to his doctorate in law and public policy from Northeastern University, which is consistent with his public biography. Levant also said he continues his “restitution payment each month,” but did not comment on the amount. He remains under court-ordered restitution stemming from the theft case and said he is “in full compliance with those obligations,” according to an email from PHAI Executive Director Mark Gottlieb, who described himself as Levant’s supervisor.  Gottlieb wrote to The Daily Wire to “memorialize” Levant’s answers in his phone interview with The Daily Wire, emphasizing the organization’s awareness of the questions surrounding his criminal history’s pertinence on his current work. Regarding the “therapy” claims, Gottlieb said he stopped treating patients after moving to Massachusetts because he would need new state licensure to continue practicing there. Gottlieb said PHAI had kept Levant “very very busy” and that he had not yet completed that licensing process, adding, “I’m quite sure he will be treating individual patients again soon.”  He said Levant had been treating patients in Pennsylvania through mid-2025 at Ethos Treatment, but  That history matters because Levant is not merely a recovering addict sharing a personal testimony. He is now positioned as an expert witness before the United States Senate while simultaneously helping build a legal and political campaign against the sports betting industry that could generate significant financial benefit for his organization and its allies. Levant and colleagues at PHAI recently incorporated a nonprofit called Families and Friends of Gamblers, which seems to be laying the groundwork for mass litigation against gambling companies. The model resembles the public-health litigation strategy used against “Big Tobacco” in the 1990s — not coincidentally, one of Levant’s close collaborators, Richard Daynard, helped architect that litigation.  If successful, the effort could create an enormous legal payday for the advocacy ecosystem Levant now inhabits. That creates an obvious conflict: the same man testifying before lawmakers about the alleged public harms of sports betting is also involved in efforts that may directly profit from expanded legal action against the industry. None of this means Congress should ignore the issue of gambling addiction, but it does raise a straightforward question: why is the Senate relying on a witness whose professional brand, political advocacy, and personal financial interests all depend on portraying sports betting as a national crisis — and one whose own past includes defrauding vulnerable people to sustain the very addiction he now monetizes as an expert?

In the high-stakes race for AI supremacy, America cannot afford to be outmaneuvered. The threat posed by China’s accelerating AI capabilities demands a holistic, robust strategic response. The question is not whether America should beat China, but whether it should adopt a strategy of diffusion, abundance, and national strength, or outsource that strategy to a single company. Demanding that we trust Anthropic’s judgment, adopt their safety regime, and treat their corporate interests as synonymous with the national interest is as narrow as it is undemocratic. Anthropic’s latest policy paper, cloaked in the guise of national security analysis, does exactly this, revealing a self-serving agenda: manipulating genuine geopolitical risks to justify regulations that would cement the company’s own market dominance. The company’s core bet is that the United States must first establish a strong domestic AI safety regime, then, on that basis, negotiate against China. In this telling, America wins through frontier AI being governed through strict regulatory red tape. This isn’t just hypothetical; we have seen this in their own lobbying at the state and federal level for testing mandates, compute controls, reporting requirements, and institutionalized oversight. In their playbook, once the U.S. builds this regulatory thicket that only Anthropic can navigate, Anthropic…I mean, America, will be in a position to stand up to China. This Anthropic playbook frames the U.S.-China AI competition across four fronts — intelligence, domestic adoption, global distribution, and resilience. They declare that intelligence is the decisive factor. This framing is no neutral assessment. It is a calculated effort to elevate the very capabilities that Anthropic already claims to excel in: closed, frontier systems powered by massive compute clusters and proprietary safety processes. The company conveniently ignores that China is rapidly closing the gap with recent breakthroughs, or that half of the world’s AI researchers are in China. The underlying logic is clear: if intelligence is supreme, then the ones building the most advanced closed models become the globe’s indispensable champions, requiring protection and deferential regulation. Yet their own analysis undermines this premise. A few lines later, they admit, “intelligence alone is not sufficient.” China can overcome an intelligence deficit through faster, cheaper, and more globally distributed deployment of “good enough” AI. The problem is that most enterprises don’t need the absolute cutting edge; they need solutions that solve their problems at a price they can afford, with the flexibility to customize and deploy as needed. A model delivering 80% of frontier capability at 20% of the cost will capture far more market share than one offering marginal improvements at premium prices. This is the genuine Chinese threat, not surpassing America at the bleeding edge, but flooding global markets with “good enough” AI that becomes the default choice for businesses, developers, and governments worldwide. Anthropic’s dismissal of China’s open-weight models as currently lagging in adoption reveals a dangerous blindness to the dynamics of market disruption. Yes, American closed frontier models lead today. Enterprises are paying real money for our leading systems. But corporate leaders are already looking at their AI bills and asking hard questions. The value is real, but so is the cost. If an enterprise can get much of the same value from an open model at a fraction of the price, that option becomes attractive very quickly. The company’s treatment of open-source AI development reveals its true agenda. They warn that Chinese labs release dual-use capable models as open weights, allowing users to strip away safety guardrails. This concern has merit, but Anthropic’s implied solution is to restrict open-source AI development broadly. This would devastate American startups, universities, and small businesses while conveniently protecting their market position. Anthropic uses export controls as a rhetorical cudgel to justify a broader regulatory framework that would entrench its own position. The same pattern appears in Anthropic’s solutions. Close loopholes in export controls? Fine. Strengthen enforcement against chip smuggling, foreign data center workarounds, and unlawful diversion? Yes. Defend American models from distillation attacks? Absolutely. However, what American policymaker or serious U.S. lab is “allowing” China to steal capabilities? Export controls and anti-distillation defenses can be tools, not a full strategy. They may slow China in the short term but, as we have seen in the telecommunications industry, they alone cannot make the world dependent on American technology. These controls will not create global developer loyalty. They cannot ensure that enterprises, governments, and startups choose American AI over cheaper Chinese alternatives. In the long term, if we follow Anthropic’s prescription, this approach can backfire. Accelerating China’s drive for self-sufficiency, inspiring a parallel chip ecosystem, and pushing global markets toward non-American alternatives. The goal should be for American models and our computing capacity advantage to become the global standard. A policy that walls off markets without an affirmative diffusion strategy will enable our adversaries to fill the vacuum, and the U.S. loses influence over critical infrastructure. Maybe that is what Anthropic wants. The stakes in the AI race are too high for such transparent self-interest. Policymakers must look past the veneer of national security analysis and scrutinize whose interests are truly being served. The future of American innovation and global competitiveness hangs in the balance. Allowing one company’s corporate strategy to define the rules of the game would be a strategic catastrophe. *** Nathan Leamer is the executive director of Build American AI and a former policy advisor to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** She’s southern, stylish, and downright sensational. Ella Langley made history Sunday night, sweeping the 2026 Academy of Country Music Awards with a whopping seven pieces of hardware, marking a win in every category in which she was nominated. The 27-year-old Alabama native is arguably the hottest name in country music right now. Her hit “Choosin’ Texas,” which won song and single of the year, holds the record for the most weeks at No. 1 on the all-genre Hot 100 by a female country artist. She broke the record set by Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” in 2012. The smash hit also crushed every country chart by being the only country song by a woman to hit No. 1 on the Hot 100, Hot Country, and Country Airplay charts all at the same time. With records like that, it could be hard to be humble, but the one thing keeping Langley level-headed is her faith. “All I gotta say is thank you God for putting me in a room with these three people right here,” Langley said after winning the award for Song of the Year with “Choosin’ Texas.” (The three people she was referring to are her co-writers on the song.) She would return to the stage several times throughout the nearly three-hour award show for performances and more accolades, but when she took home the biggest honor of the night, she once again stopped to thank the man upstairs. “Thank you, Jesus, for letting me do this for a living,” Langley said on stage after winning Female Artist of the Year. In the same speech, she openly talked about her struggles the morning of the award show and how praying helped calm her. “Today I was having a strange day,” she said. “I don’t know what it is about awards. I walked right into Lainey [Wilson]’s room, and I just got emotional, and she hugged me, wrapped me up, and started praying for me.” In a world of award shows where faith is rarely mentioned, Langley’s language stood out. But her relationship with God is something she doesn’t shy away from in her speeches or her music. In fact, on her sophomore album “Dandelion,” released last month, she sings explicitly about her faith. The track “Speaking Terms” is not about an on-again, off-again romantic relationship, but instead a relationship with God. It eloquently depicts someone who doesn’t talk to God as much as she did as a child, opening up with the line, “I used to kneel beside my bed at night when I was small. It was easy as breathing, believing wasn’t hard at all. I knew that you were there close as my next prayer.” The chorus focuses on reconnecting with God: “I’m waiting on a whisper, just something to confirm that you and me are still on speaking terms.” Another song on Langley’s new album that has a faith focus is “Loving Life Again,” which the chart-topper wrote after spending some time reading her Bible back in Alabama last year. “The last year of my life, 2025, is when it really got intense for me a little,” Langley told a concert crowd back in March of this year. “So I took a couple weeks off. I cancelled everything that I had … I got to spend two weeks sitting there with my mom and my daddy. I got to read my Bible and be next to my family in a way that I hadn’t gotten to do since I was 18 years old.” Shortly after that message to fans at a show, Langley shared an Easter message to her nearly 4 million followers. On top of a video of her singing “Because He Lives” on her Instagram story, she wrote: “Even though I’ve been a believer in Christ my whole life, my relationship with Him has changed drastically over the last year,” she said. “I started to have ‘faith.’ I started to view the days we have been given as a gift instead of a chore. I am so grateful for a God who leads with love and compassion. Thank you Jesus for giving me a way to spend eternity with you. I hope everyone had a great day. Happy Easter!” While her faith was strengthened this last year, the “Dandelion” singer grew up in a small Baptist church just south of Montgomery, Alabama, where she sang before she knew how to read. “I sang at church a lot. I learned how to read from singing hymnals,” she told Theo Von on the “This Past Weekend” podcast. Her family recognized back then that Langley had a talent, and the practice she got in the pews every Sunday prepared her voice for a career in music. But her faith is what keeps her grounded as her skill and popularity grow.