Basketball Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal returned to his alma mater over the weekend, delivering a colorful, energetic commencement address to Louisiana State University’s graduating class of 2026. Speaking from the perspective of an elder statesman offering sage advice to the next generation, O’Neal — who dominated the collegiate ranks at LSU before embarking on one of the most physically imposing careers in NBA history — implored the “youngsters” to embrace resilience and integrity as they step into the world. O’Neal, who famously earned his bachelor’s degree from LSU in 2000 after leaving early for the NBA, opened with his trademark humor, saying: I’m not going to be long because I know you guys are hungry, because I’m hungry as hell. I was tricked. I was bamboozled this morning. They told me to arrive at 7:30. And three hours later, I received something that had nothing in it. Last time I sat this long, I was sitting on the toilet after I had some bad chimichanga from TJ Ribs. Turning serious, he expressed immense pride in the graduates and laid out five core pillars for their future success: never stop learning, use failure as motivation, prioritize character over resumes, stay curious in a “weird world,” and celebrate milestones while continuously striving ahead. “There’s a small percentage of people that accomplish things on the first try,” he declared. “Most of us regular people have to go again, again, again, and again. So again, before you succeed, you must first learn to fail. … Your character will take you further than your resume. Continue to be kind; continue to be humble. Continue to help those in need.” In a classic lighter moment, he also urged graduates to buy his “Shaq-A-Licious” gummies at 7-Eleven. The massive center’s perspective is backed by a resume legendary in American sports. Long before he was a four-time NBA champion, O’Neal entirely transformed the LSU basketball program under coach Dale Brown from 1989 to 1992. Over 90 collegiate games, the powerhouse center averaged an astonishing 21.6 points, 13.5 rebounds, and 4.6 blocks per game, shooting 61% from the field. A two-time consensus First-Team All-American and two-time SEC Player of the Year, O’Neal set an NCAA Tournament record by blocking 11 shots in a single game against BYU in 1992. After the Orlando Magic selected him as the No. 1 overall pick in the 1992 NBA draft, Shaq won Rookie of the Year and famously shattered multiple backboard supports. O’Neal soon ascended to absolute league dominance. He signed with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1996 and eventually formed a legendary dynasty with Kobe Bryant and coach Phil Jackson. O’Neal led the Lakers to a historic “three-peat” of NBA championships from 2000 to 2002, capturing Finals MVP honors in all three instances. His 1999–2000 campaign stands as one of the greatest individual seasons in sports history, missing out on a unanimous regular-season MVP by just a single vote. O’Neal later secured a fourth championship ring with Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat in 2006 before concluding his 19-year journey with veteran stints in Phoenix, Cleveland, and Boston. He retired in 2011 with 28,596 points and 13,099 rebounds, earning a spot on the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team. Concluding his commencement address in Baton Rouge, the legendary big man led the arena in a roaring chant of “We did it,” reminding the graduates of their shared achievement. “I do not want you going home and saying I graduated with Shaq,” O’Neal told the crowd. “I want you to say Shaq graduated with me.”

Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak is set to testify before a Senate panel this week after his scoop on Ohio’s Medicaid payment system triggered renewed scrutiny from Republican lawmakers over government waste and fraud. Rosiak, whose recent “Medicaid Millionaires” series uncovered what he described as billions in questionable taxpayer-funded home health payments using newly released federal billing data, is scheduled to appear before a panel convened by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), the longtime Republican watchdog who has made rooting out federal waste, fraud, and abuse a signature issue. The hearing is expected to feature testimony not only on Ohio’s Medicaid system, but on broader failures in state-administered welfare programs that rely heavily on federal dollars. Rosiak’s reporting generated national attention after detailing how hundreds of little-known home health companies clustered in the Columbus area, many receiving millions in taxpayer reimbursements for loosely defined “personal services” such as homemaking, companionship, and conversation. The series also highlighted that providers appeared to operate out of near-empty office buildings while billing Medicaid enormous sums. Joining Rosiak on the Republican witness list are two Minnesota whistleblowers who raised alarms about fraud inside that state’s Department of Human Services. Faye Bernstein, a longtime DHS contract specialist and compliance officer, is expected to testify that she faced retaliation after flagging contracting practices she believed created serious risks for fraud. Bernstein has said DHS officials removed her from her workplace and barred her from department property after she challenged leadership over compliance failures. Also scheduled to testify is Jay Swanson, a retired investigator who spent years probing Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program. Swanson has claimed that beginning in 2014, he uncovered an extensive fraud scheme involving childcare reimbursements that may have exceeded $100 million annually. According to Swanson, the scheme involved a network of daycare operations run by Somali immigrants. Swanson has further alleged that his warnings were met not with enforcement action but institutional resistance, including efforts to suppress his findings and restructure his office to limit investigations. Democrats will call Donald Sherman, the head of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, as their witness, setting up a partisan clash over how best to tackle fraud in public programs while preserving social safety nets. The hearing marks a major escalation for Rosiak’s Ohio investigation, which has already prompted public reactions from Vice President JD Vance and Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy. Both Republicans said they would look into potential abuse following The Daily Wire series, which found that Ohio’s Medicaid waiver system created a vast, lightly monitored industry built around billing taxpayers for in-home services that are difficult to verify. For Republicans, the hearing offers a chance to frame state welfare fraud as emblematic of a broader federal spending crisis. Democrats will likely attempt to make the hearing a battleground over whether investigators are unfairly targeting immigrant communities while seeking cuts to entitlement programs. A hearing date has been set for Wednesday, with testimony expected to center on whether federal and state agencies failed to detect — or ignored warnings about — fraud schemes that whistleblowers say operated in plain sight for years. Rosiak will also testify in Columbus, Ohio, on Tuesday before state lawmakers about his investigative findings. While in Ohio, he’ll appear at an anti-fraud event alongside Ramaswamy.

A group of rowdy young people flung chairs and threw punches in a Washington, D.C., Chipotle on Saturday night, just one day after U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro vowed to crack down on parents who allow their kids to run wild through the streets. The chaos in D.C.’s Navy Yard was captured on camera by a news crew and posted to social media on Sunday. Footage shows at least eight people engaged in a full-blown brawl in the restaurant, with some of the culprits picking up chairs and slamming them into other fighters. Girls were heard screaming in the background, and Chipotle workers watched the fight from behind the counter. Massive brawl broke out Friday night at a Chipotle in the Navy Yard area. pic.twitter.com/xqZTliXWvK — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) May 17, 2026 The brawl took place just across the street from a large gathering of juveniles in a grassy area. Officers with the Metropolitan Police Department eventually arrived on the scene and arrested at least one person who was part of the teen gathering, ABC 7 News reported. A man who lives in Navy Yard told ABC 7 News that the violent teen gatherings have become “routine on Saturdays and Friday nights.” “It’s not shocking anymore, since this has become routine on Saturdays and Friday nights, but it’s disappointing to know this is still happening,” Ken Ledet said on Sunday. “I actually come to this Chipotle at least three or four times a week, so thankfully I didn’t come here last night.” Teen takeovers are plaguing Democrat-run cities across the country, including the nation’s capital. On Friday, Pirro held a press conference to address the growing issue in Washington, D.C., and issued a warning to parents. “Starting today, my office will prosecute parents under D.C.’s curfew law,” Pirro said. “If the evidence shows the parent knew or should have known or permitted or failed to prevent participation, we are going to charge them,” she continued, adding, “If you drop your kid off and you fail to supervise them, or you let them skip school to join the chaos, you are going to face fines, court ordered classes, and possible jail time.” The D.C. city council recently voted to extend the police chief’s power to impose an 8:00 p.m. curfew for kids under 18 in certain areas. Navy Yard has become a top spot for teens to meet on the weekends in gatherings that often turn violent. D.C. also has an 11:00 p.m. citywide curfew for juveniles on week nights and a midnight curfew on weekends.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is waging a war against faith, a war that it could win if we don’t wake up and start fighting. With everything we have. And this is a war that China must lose. Because what China is doing — what we are permitting China to do — brings back chilling memories of the Holocaust. The campaign was fought for many years on the local level. Now it is coordinated at the very top of the Chinese government and with the kind of technology that should make all of us terrified. Not just on a moral level. Because we care about the Chinese believers who are the victims of horrifying persecution today. We should be terrified because China’s war on faith can come here. To the United States. I can make the case that it already has. The Chinese have taken the war to authoritarian countries like Iran and Nicaragua, where surveillance technology enables the persecution of Muslims who object to Islamist repression of women and Catholic priests who offer a creed different from Marxism. The CCP is also winning here, in free capitalist America, where two huge businesses, Hollywood and the National Basketball Association, have become willing enforcers of Chinese censorship. Censorship that has shielded China’s crimes against humanity — the internment of hundreds of thousands, forced abortion and sterilization, organ harvesting from living victims — from international notice and protest. The movie industry is in bed with the Chinese because it often relies on the Asian market to make a profit. The NBA’s star players sell shoes in China. How hypocritical it was several years ago when these incredibly well-paid athletes never uttered a negative word about what was going on in China, while often condemning our own society. Only one player has called out the Chinese Communists — Enes Kanter Freedom, the third overall pick in the 2011 NBA Draft, whose story I tell in this book. He no longer plays in the league, and that’s because he had the audacity to speak out against China’s oppression. Yes, Black Lives Matter, but what about Chinese lives? Don’t they matter, too? Look, I’m as fervent a believer in the capitalist system as the next guy, siding with big business throughout my years as a congressman, senator, and governor. That does not mean, however, that we should be doing business with everyone. Certainly not with a regime that is waging a war against religion and conducting genocide against the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, the members of Falun Gong, and the Buddhists in Tibet — and persecuting Christians who refuse to put the CCP above the Bible. With their relentless pursuit of the almighty dollar and cheap products, a number of American businesses are acting as accomplices. U.S. companies’ investment in China, as of 2025, totaled $127 billion. That’s billion with a B. Those companies include Apple, BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, and Tesla. Here’s a quote attributed to Karl Marx: “We will hang the capitalists with the rope they sell us.” China has been waging this war — in one form or another, against one religion or another — for nearly eighty years, since 1949, when Mao Zedong defeated the Nationalist forces, and Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan. Today, the war on faith is being fought more aggressively than ever by a government led by a Mao-like dictator, Xi Jinping. Let me share with you a few examples of what China has been doing: Pressuring Christians to replace pictures of Jesus with posters of Xi Jinping Arresting priests who do not acknowledge the Chinese Communist Party as the ultimate authority. Catholic bishops in China are in prison or have disappeared, or live under house arrest or surveillance Detaining Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic group who live in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, in concentration camps — at least one with a crematorium attached, as Ethan Gutmann, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, reported to Congress in 2022 Harvesting organs from prisoners who are still alive — both Uyghurs and practitioners of Falun Gong — to support the country’s billion-dollar organ export industry Subjecting Uyghurs to pregnancy tests, forced intrauterine devices, and forced abortions Demolishing sacred religious sites. Chinese authorities destroyed five thousand mosques over a single three-month period, and 97% of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries are now gone Forcing teachers to give up Christian beliefs and practices Time is not on our side. Every day, innocent people in China are being imprisoned, tortured, raped. Killed. These people of faith are similar to the Jewish refuseniks of the 1970s and ’80s (so named because the Soviet Union refused their request to emigrate to Israel), incredibly brave souls such as Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in a Siberian prison. While small in number, they challenged the legitimacy of the Russian Communist regime and helped crush the Soviet Union. Or, as President Ronald Reagan rightly put it, “the Evil Empire.” Some of these men and women have suffered for years behind bars, others enduring physical torture. They lost family members and friends and were subjected to unimaginable assaults on their privacy and their personal integrity. Every story demonstrates the cruelty of the regime that poses the greatest threat to freedom in our lifetime. Even greater than the Soviet Union during the Cold War, something I never thought was possible. But none of this horrific persecution deterred them from fighting for their right, and the rights of others, to practice their faith. The war is being conducted by the CCP, not by the Chinese people themselves, whom I have admired since my first visit in 1985 (my wife Mary and I are blessed to have a brilliant daughter adopted from China), and led by Xi Jinping, the president of China since 2013 and general secretary of the Communist Party since 2012. It reminds me of the Soviet Union at its worst and even of the Holocaust. In fact, the CCP has killed more of its own people than any regime in history — more than Adolf Hitler’s Germany or Joseph Stalin’s Russia. By far. Let that sink in for a little bit. For the longest time, I could not understand how so much of the civilized world, armed with overwhelming evidence from eyewitnesses, could be silent while Hitler’s Third Reich carried out the Final Solution against the Jews of Europe. Now I understand. I understand too well. Because it is happening again, before our very eyes — in the twenty-first century, no less, in a world where everyone has a smartphone, with access to the facts and the pictures at their fingertips. Facts and pictures from three genocides that China has perpetrated: Uyghurs with shaved heads loaded on trains to concentration camps, Tibetan Buddhist monks in chains, the face of a thirty-seven-year-old woman burned with electric batons for practicing Falun Gong. The consequences for freedom everywhere — and that includes the United States of America — will be dire if we fail to act. I pray that it is not already too late. Adapted from: China’s War on Faith by Sam Brownback (Author), Michael Arkush. Republic Book Publishers.

Somebody needs to remind former Vice President Kamala Harris of her own wisdom: “Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context in which you are in.” Because it seems she has forgotten that context entirely. Harris may have lost both the Electoral College and the popular vote, performed horrendously in every swing state, and campaigned with all the intellectual rigor of a drunken stupor — but a woman of her talents refuses to sit idle. She’s already back at it, hosting “bad ideas only brainstorms” on the “Win With Black Women” podcast. Not to be confused with their adversarial counterpart, “Losing With Annoying Women,” otherwise known as The View. On Thursday’s episode, Harris literally hosted, in her own words, a “no bad ideas brainstorm,” in which every single idea was a steaming pile of constitutional malpractice designed to rig the system, because her party cannot win fair and square. Her three “novel” proposals, which have been trotted out by every radical Democrat in the country already, were to abolish the Electoral College, expand the Supreme Court, and grant statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, all to “fight fire with fire” and “neutralize these red states from cheating.” I laughed, but the frightening reality is that many people think this sounds not just fine, but necessary. A righteous effort to wrest power from the evil, fascist, bigoted, racist Republicans. It is not normal. It is dangerous and historically illiterate. The Electoral College was clearly not covered properly in grade school or at university, because many self-described “educated Democrats” — including Minnesota Governor Tim Walz — don’t seem to understand the purpose of it at all. The Founders established it to protect smaller states from being dominated by high-population urban centers. By having electors meet in their respective states to vote on behalf of their people, the mechanism ensures the president is elected by a coalition of states, keeping this a federalist republic. We are a republic, not a pure democracy, precisely so California and New York cannot steamroll Wyoming and North Dakota every four years. Without it, tyrannical majorities and wannabe presidents like Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would barnstorm Los Angeles, Chicago, and the Acela Corridor while ignoring the rest of the map. Clinton thought she didn’t have to campaign in Wisconsin. She lost 10 electoral votes because of it. Harris thought she could win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin with a coastal, big-city progressive playbook and lost every single one of them because of it. The problem is not the system. The problem is they cannot sell their agenda to enough states. Then Harris confirmed her IQ is somewhere south of room temperature when she expressed her desire to expand the Supreme Court — aka: Court-packing. A similar authoritarian power grab was attempted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, and even his own party rejected the banana-republic scheme. Can you imagine if President Donald Trump said he would abolish the Electoral College? The media moguls would have shaved their heads in anti-authoritarian solidarity within minutes. The Court has nine justices because Congress set it that way in 1869, to establish independence, stability, and protection from the kind of naked partisan manipulation that had turned it into a political football for decades prior. Harris and her cadre of angry partisans have been seething since Dobbs and continue to get struck down by the current Supreme Court because they continue doing illegal things. Instead of campaigning on popular policy, delivering results, and appointing justices when vacancies arise, their solution is to bypass those pesky checks and balances entirely. Stuffing the bench with 13 or 15 partisan hacks to rubber-stamp their agenda the minute they have the chance. The Democratic Machine team is openly admitting they will turn our independent judiciary into a Democratic super-legislature. This “genius” politicking would backfire, as every other partisan power grab has, and the next Republican wave would pack it right back, to 17 or 19 justices, and so on and so forth, destroying the Court’s legitimacy. As James Madison warned in Federalist 47: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Politics is a game. Instead of playing to win, Democrats are simply trying to break the referee. They’re also trying to add more players to their side of the field. The game is roughly even right now, but Harris and her fellow coconuts don’t like it even. That’s why they’re seriously pushing statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico, all in an effort, per Harris, to “neutralize these red states from cheating.” You know what would prevent cheating? Ceasing mail-in ballots, requiring voter-ID, not lying about the “freeness” and “fairness” of your elections via gerrymandering 50% of voters out of existence. But they hate that idea! Cheating would be subverting our Founders’ wishes by granting statehood to D.C., which was deliberately designed as a federal district, not a state, precisely to avoid creating a permanent swamp of congressional power brokers beholden to one party. It’s already 90% Democrat. Granting it statehood would hand Democrats two more senators and a House seat overnight. That’s not democracy. That’s pure power consolidation. Puerto Rico, the homeland of South America’s baddest bunny, is a welfare magnet propped up by federal transfers, with English as a non-dominant language, and their own referendums on statehood have been dismal with low turnout and mixed results. Forcing it to become America’s 51st state wouldn’t expand the map; it would expand the entitlement tab and deliver a couple more reliable electoral votes to the Left. So much democracy. Which, if you haven’t already heard, is a newer concept created and perfected “by black Americans.” But red states simply existing and growing in population because of low taxes, limited government, and deregulation? That’s cheating. The Left has tried impeaching, imprisoning, and indicting President Donald Trump. They have weaponized the IRS and DOJ against Christians and conservatives, control Hollywood, the corporate media, and universities, censor conservative voices through Big Tech, and have imposed top-down government control everywhere they can reach. Brainstorming how to abolish the Electoral College, pack the Supreme Court, lower the voting age, import millions of illegal aliens, and add two new Democratic states is not brainstorming. It is a coordinated effort to end the republic. As Benjamin Franklin warned, we can only keep it “if we can keep it.” The Left is telling us exactly what they will do the moment they have the chance. This is why they have spent years dehumanizing, delegitimizing, and degrading their opponents, so that when the unconstitutional seizure comes, they can call it necessary. Protective. A heroic effort to save Americans from evil Republicans. President Barack Obama claims he wished conservatives respected the rule of law. Meanwhile, Democrats chip away at every constitutional guardrail, day after day. The silver lining: while the Republican bench stacks up with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Democrats are giving us a preview of their 2028 primary. If Harris, fresh off her latest word salad, is the best they’ve got? Americans can expect to keep their constitutional republic a little while longer.