Edwin Díaz, the $69 million closer for the Los Angeles Dodgers, has been linked to an alleged illegal cockfighting operation in his native Puerto Rico, according to a report by USA Today. The report, published Friday, tied Díaz to the federally banned blood sport through social media advertisements and promotional materials posted by cockfighting organizations on the island, including graphics showing the three-time All-Star in his Dodgers uniform promoting tournament events. One post reportedly advertised a “tribute” to Díaz, describing him as both a Puerto Rican sports hero and an active cockfighter. The controversy deepened after a March interview with Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día resurfaced in which Díaz openly discussed his family’s participation in cockfighting events. According to the outlet, Díaz said his family entered four roosters into a recent tournament and described cockfighting as a hobby he had followed since childhood. “It’s a pastime I’ve followed since I was a child,” Díaz reportedly said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.” https://t.co/8yHIUOYXfE pic.twitter.com/OOUCaIo3Lg — Underdog MLB (@UnderdogMLB) May 15, 2026 Cockfighting has deep historical roots in Puerto Rico, where some residents continue to defend it as a cultural tradition dating back centuries. But that defense has not carried legal weight for years. The practice has been illegal in all U.S. states and territories since 2019, when a federal ban took effect. The Supreme Court later declined to hear a challenge that would have carved out an exception for Puerto Rico. Federal law makes participation in a cockfight punishable by up to five years in prison and fines, while knowingly attending as a spectator can carry criminal penalties. No charges have been announced against Díaz, and neither the Dodgers nor his representatives responded publicly to the report as of Friday. The report also mentioned several other prominent Puerto Rican athletes, including champion jockey brothers José Ortiz and Irad Ortiz Jr., who were allegedly photographed at cockfighting venues and appeared in videos tied to betting activity. Díaz’s younger brother, Alexis Díaz, was also named in social media posts promoting the same events. For Major League Baseball, the allegations could present an off-field distraction involving a high-profile reliever. MLB’s personal conduct policy gives it broad discretion to investigate players for conduct deemed damaging to the sport, even absent criminal charges. The timing is also awkward for Díaz personally. The veteran reliever, who signed a lucrative offseason deal with Los Angeles, is currently sidelined with an elbow injury after a rough start to the season, adding another layer of scrutiny to what was expected to be a routine rehabilitation. 

Democrats are up in arms over a decision by the Virginia Supreme Court that overturns their attempt to gerrymander the commonwealth’s Republican voters to the brink of oblivion. Virginia is considered a purple state where Kamala Harris won against Donald Trump by only about six percent of the voters, many of whom simply thought having an idiot president with a lunatic cackle might be the funnier choice. But the gerrymander would have changed the commonwealth’s districts from a representative six blue versus five red, to an admittedly hilarious but totally unfair ten blue districts versus one red. The lone Republican district would be ringed in by high walls topped with barbed wire, while all voting booths would be located in the blue districts. The court ruled that the ballot measure allowing the change violated procedural rules laid out in the Virginia Constitution under its “Don’t be a Schmuck” clause, which requires laws to be written by people who are not schmucks or can at least pretend not to be schmucks for ten straight minutes or, if that’s too much to ask, can at least ACT like they’re not schmucks for ten minutes even though everyone knows they are. In a frantic group phone call among some of the Democratic Party’s top schmucks, schmucks from around the country expressed their concern at the court’s decision. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a huge schmuck, said the Virginia Court’s move was part of a nationwide conspiracy against the Democrat party. The schmuck said: “First, the Supreme Court tells us we can’t gerrymander by race, so black people will be allowed to share districts with white people. That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to put a stop to since the Republicans won the Civil War. If voters stopped voting for skin color and started passing judgment on policies, the Democratic Party would cease to exist. Next, the Virginia Supreme Court says we’re violating the rule of law, and I’m, like, ‘What? What the hell are they even talking about?’ And now, Republicans in Congress want to require voters to have picture identification, which would limit the electorate to living people who actually exist. That’s a blatant attempt to disenfranchise imaginary Democrats across and under this great nation. And the only reason the Republicans haven’t been able to pass a voter ID law supported by 84 percent of the people is that none of them realize yet that their Senate Leader, John Thune, passed away last August. They think he’s just totally ineffective. Wait till they find out we propped him up in his seat and had him embalmed!”  As the group phone call continued, the Democrats started to strategize how to overturn the court’s decision. One idea was to lower the required retirement age of Virginia judges from the current 73 years old to two, so that the present judges would have to step down and could be replaced by judges who don’t know what’s in the Constitution and are dependent on others to feed them, either because they’re only two years old or just because they’re Democrats, I’m not sure which. Another idea was to wait till election night, pretend there were water main leaks in voting venues, stop the count, then smuggle in boxes of fake ballots, and get The New York Times to run articles claiming it was the least corrupt election ever. But that idea was ultimately rejected, because Democrats felt no one would fall for such a silly trick twice. Finally, Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones, a stupid schmuck, tried to file a motion to overturn the Virginia Court’s ruling to the United States Supreme Court. Jones wrote the motion — and God help me, I am not making this part up — he wrote the motion in which the speaker of the “Virgnia” House of Delegates, appealed against a State “Sentator” and then he filed the misspelt motion with the VIRGINIA Supreme Court instead of the United States Supreme Court, which has no jurisdiction in the matter anyway. When told he should have used a hot little item called spellcheck to help him write the motion, Attorney General Jones remarked, “Oh good, there’s nothing I like better than a hot check. Maybe I can sentate her some flounders and show her around Virgnia.”

Hollywood director and producer Adam McKay was very upset with “white liberals” during a recent podcast appearance, a demographic that he would arguably fall into himself. The “Don’t Look Up” director made the comments during a recent episode of the “Urgent Futures” podcast released earlier this week. “We are being hit with the high-grade marketing and no group is worse than white liberals,” McKay said. “I mean, they are the worst. I’ve tried to talk to them about the climate. They are so smug and captured. And it boils down to privilege. I mean, when you talk to white moneyed liberals, they’re getting a lot from this broken system.”  The Hollywood mainstay said he can’t believe anyone is still supporting Democrats, who he deemed too permissive and not radical enough for his taste. “It’s incredible to watch people this far down the road still saying, ‘You gotta stand behind the Democratic Party,’” he added. “The same party that wouldn’t convict Trump of a crime after he told a crowd, ‘Go to the Capitol’ [and] the same party where the previous presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, literally funded Trump’s campaign.”  “At some point, I realized these are bad-faith arguments and conversations,” McKay went on before saying Republicans and Democrats were essentially the same. “Once you kind of flip that switch and realize white liberals are full-on right-wingers and the Republicans are extreme right-wingers, by any international definition of right/left wing, you can’t support a party that doesn’t want universal health care. The Democrats don’t have that in their party platform. Kamala, Hillary never brought it up,” he ranted. “The level of damage those creeps [Bill Clinton and Barack Obama] have done to our country, white liberals don’t even want to hear about it, because it’s inconvenient and unpleasant. So yeah, I almost can say I despise American white liberals. They are the grossest of the gross,” McKay said. McKay, whose credits include “Anchorman” and “Vice,” once considered himself a Democrat. But he announced in November 2024 that he was considering leaving the party after Trump was re-elected. He said he was thinking about joining the Green Party or the Working Families Party, per Variety.

Nineties kids might remember a Michael Keaton movie called Multiplicity, where Keaton creates a machine to make copies of himself that are increasingly, to use a word that’s now marginally acceptable again in social circles, retarded. The Kennedy legacy is currently in a mid-stage Multiplicity plotline thanks to the bizarre New York congressional candidacy of Jack Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s son and John F. Kennedy’s 33-year-old grandson. Phase one of the Multiplicity machine was, of course, John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, who, despite whatever you might think of their politics, were impactful and important Americans, to live forever in the history books. The next generation was JFK, Jr. and RFK, Jr., flawed, charismatic protagonists with mixed legacies. Schlossberg, on the other hand, according to the New York Times, skipped out on the first day of his campaign to take a nap. One departing campaign member called Schlossberg’s efforts a “dollar store flower bouquet.” “The colors might be nice to look at for a few days,” he said, “But since the flowers lack roots, they can’t last very long.” Schlossberg started his campaign when longtime Congressman Jerry Nadler announced his retirement. He did it in the most annoying millennial way possible: touring the country and making a YouTube series out of a van. He called the show “serious — and insane. Just like me.” Insane is right. He’s posted videos of himself dancing shirtless on Instagram, made weird jokes about “having a son” with Usha Vance, and appears to have plagiarized an Instagram live message about the invasion of Venezuela from Massachusetts representative Seth Moulton. There has been massive staff turnover and budgetary disputes. This happens in a lot of inexperienced political campaigns, particularly when they have big budgets and a high Q rating, but anyone who follows the Kennedy mythos can see the warning signs. I watched all of “Love Story,” Ryan Murphy’s occasionally laughable but mostly excellent miniseries about JFK, Jr. and Caroline Bessette’s doomed romance in the 1990s. Jack Schlossberg’s life has eerie parallels to JFK, Jr.’s, though put through the Multiplicity machine to create a very 2026 recipe of confusion and slop. Both JFK, Jr. and Schlossberg have dealt with the truest legacy of the Kennedy family: tragedy and death. JFK had the loss of both his parents, which put him in a weird position of being close to the head of the family. Schlossberg lost his sister Tatiana last year. I won’t mock his grief, but Schlossberg has got to heed the warning signs. Nothing good ever comes from trying to bring back Camelot, which appeared once in the American mist, like Brigadoon, never to return. JFK, Jr. had George Magazine, which, for all its ridiculousness, was a legitimate shot at creating a media empire. Schlossberg, on the other hand, wrote a half dozen freelance articles for Vogue in 2024 and worked for four months for John Kerry, helping to plan a “conference on oceans.” When a debate moderator asked him for accomplishments that would indicate he would be a good congressman, Schlossberg cited his own campaign, saying it “excited people.” “While you may not think that content creation and building a following based on speaking out for what you believe in at a time when others were unwilling, taking on your family members, traveling the country to every single swing state, serving as a delegate at the D.N.C., is an experience, I do,” Mr. Schlossberg told the moderator, according to the New York Times. Jack Schlossberg is playing a dangerous game with the Kennedy Monkey Paw. The good-looking golden boy with an unlimited trust fund never wins in this scenario. We can only hope that we’re already so far down the Multiplicity timeline that this ends in comedy, not tragedy, and that the next generation is so dumb that all they can manage to do is fall down the stairs or back the car into the garage door. *** Neal Pollack is the author of 12 semi-bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction and is a three-time Jeopardy! champion.

A growing wave of juvenile crime and “teen takeovers” in major Democrat-run cities is prompting renewed scrutiny of leftist policing policies, with critics warning that years of anti-law enforcement rhetoric have created an atmosphere of escalating disorder. The phenomenon has erupted in cities including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in recent months, with incidents often coordinated through TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media platforms. Col. Frank Carpenter, chief of police in Chesterfield County, Virginia, told The New York Post these scenes resemble “The Purge,” a dystopian horror film franchise depicting cities descending into lawlessness. Police sources say that massive groups of teenagers have increasingly overwhelmed officers, shut down public spaces, and engaged in assaults, robberies, vandalism, and shootings. As with Virginia, these incidents are especially concentrated in Democrat-led cities. Chicago, in particular, has emerged as one of the most visible examples. Last week, a silver sedan rammed a Chicago Police Department squad car during a downtown street takeover near Grant Park while crowds of teens surrounded the vehicle, cheering, filming officers on their phones, and pounding on the patrol car’s hood. Just two days later, on Friday, a second takeover erupted on the city’s South Side. In another incident earlier this spring, teens allegedly set vehicles ablaze by igniting fireworks inside them. Similar incidents have recently unfolded in Los Angeles beach communities and Washington, D.C., where viral videos show large crowds overwhelming police presence and turning public areas into chaotic scenes. Though no one was killed, in one Los Angeles-area takeover, gunfire broke out and struck four victims ranging from 17 to 22 years old. In New York City, police arrested a 17-year-old suspect in the fatal stabbing of 39-year-old Leonides Baez near Times Square. According to investigators, the teen allegedly said he was inspired by a TikTok trend known as “messing with crackheads,” in which vulnerable or homeless individuals are harassed for entertainment and online attention. Authorities say several teens approached Baez before he was stabbed to death outside of a restaurant. Critics say the social media component is central to understanding this crime trend. The Wall Street Journal recently characterized many of the incidents as “performative crime,” that is, criminal acts committed for viral attention and social status online. But some analysts argue the deeper causes run far beyond TikTok. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The War on Cops,” said authorities are failing to confront the fact that these crimes are overwhelmingly being carried out by young African Americans and reflect long-term breakdowns in the black family structure. “This is a long-standing problem, and nobody wants to talk about what the causes are,” Mac Donald said during an interview with Morning Wire. “The criminal justice system is terrified, really, to do anything about it.” The extreme nature of the takeovers is prompting Republican leaders to act though. On Friday, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced a significant offensive against the parents of minors participating in these crimes. Pirro pledged to pursue criminal charges against parents who neglect their supervisory duties, warning that such failures could result in substantial financial penalties or incarceration. “If the evidence shows the parent knew or should have known or permitted or failed to prevent participation, we are going to charge them,” Pirro stated, 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.” Another contributing factor Mac Donald pointed to is schools, which she said have historically been reluctant to discipline black students after years of pressure from leftist activists and federal officials who claimed disciplinary disparities were evidence of systemic racism. “Teachers now have been told they can’t do that,” she said, referring to enforcing discipline and behavioral standards in classrooms. She also blamed the lingering effects of the anti-police movement that exploded after the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri, riots and intensified following the death of George Floyd in 2020. “Policing obviously has been under one prolonged assault since the Ferguson riots,” Mac Donald said. “The pressure is on them not to intervene at all because they don’t want another George Floyd riot or Ferguson riot in their city.” The debate has intensified as some blue-city leaders continue pushing policies that restrict law enforcement. Last week, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to curtail “pretextual” traffic stops by the LAPD. The stops are initiated for low-level violations such as broken taillights or expired tags that sometimes lead officers to uncover illegal weapons or narcotics. The city council’s vote is now set to be debated by the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, which has the final say. Meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has previously described aggressive law enforcement approaches as a “sickness” in Chicago that he wanted to “eradicate.” Mac Donald argued that years of political hostility toward proactive policing have worsened violent crime. “There’s nothing more important that the police can do to lower gun crime than these types of investigative stops,” she said. Although officials in cities such as New York and Chicago often point to declining overall crime statistics, Mac Donald said those numbers can obscure broader public disorder. “Murders don’t lie. You can’t hide the bodies,” she said, noting homicide rates remain elevated compared to pre-2020 levels despite recent declines from their peak. Police recruitment has also become increasingly difficult in major urban departments. Mac Donald said cities including Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago remain severely understaffed as officers retire early, leave for red states, or avoid entering the profession altogether. “If current policies continue,” she warned, “people who can leave are going to leave.”