This really isn’t complicated.

Excerpts short story collection Read an Excerpt From Hellions by Julia Elliott A story collection that blends folklore, fairy tales, Southern Gothic, and horror By Julia Elliott | Published on February 12, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share the short story “The Maiden” from Julia Elliott’s Hellions, a brand new collection reveling in the collision of the familiar with the wildly surreal—publishing with Tin House on April 15th. In a plague-stricken medieval convent, a nun works on a forbidden mystic manuscript. In rural South Carolina, an alligator named Dragon becomes a beloved pet for a precocious, tough-talking twelve-year-old. During a long, muggy July, an adolescent girl finds unexpected power as her family obsesses over the horror film The Exorcist. On the outskirts of a Southern college town, a young woman resists the tyranny of a shape-shifting older professor as she develops her own sorceress skills. And at a feminist art colony in the North Carolina mountains, a group of mothers contends with the supernatural talents their children have picked up from a pair of mysterious orphans who live in the woods.With exuberance, ferocity, and astounding imagination, Julia Elliott’s Hellions jumps from the occult to the comic, from the horrific to the wondrous, in eleven stories of earthbound characters who long for the otherworldly. The Maiden Our parents said the Watts were lunatics for putting a trampoline in their backyard, out behind their garage full of souped-up dirt bikes, in the tiny meadow still strewn with their dead horse’s droppings, out where a honey locust had just burst into bloom. We didn’t believe it until we saw it: hoisted by silver tubing, its round nylon bounce mat glimmering like a black lagoon in the endless summer light. We watched from the woods the first day of its glory, the Watts boys kickboxing in the air, performing backflips, torpedoing their agile bodies off the side and landing like Olympians in the long grass. Our parents said we’d knock out our teeth, break our necks, paralyze ourselves. Our parents said we’d suffer concussions, bashed noses, ruptured organs, broken limbs. But how could we resist the miracle of fake flight, the mockery of gravity’s law? How could we resist the cool kids that gathered each day in the fragrant shade of the honey locust, jocks in jogging shorts and suntanned cheerleaders showing off their new curves? The girls bounced and laughed and danced in the air. The girls did slo-mo flips and gymnastics stunts, ballet leaps and jazz-dance moves—all except the girl we called Cujo, a stunted, breastless bitter thing—freckled, redheaded, bony as a shad. When she looked us over with her weird bulging eyes, we felt a burn in our guts, as though her gaze had lasered though skin and muscle to singe our organs, changing us from the inside out. Cujo crept in the shade. Cujo mumbled foreign words—curses, we suspected, for she came from North Augusta, from Irish Travellers, people said. Her parents made dulcimers for a living and didn’t go to church. When Troy Hutto attempted a crash dive and fractured his femur, we spotted Cujo crouched under the trampoline, scratching in the dirt with a stick. When Tammy Day dislocated her elbow on the metal rim, we saw Cujo up in the honey locust, sprinkling leaf confetti onto the mat. When Chip Watts, King of the Air, piked off the tramp and landed on a brick that had not been there the day before, Cujo ate a fucking acorn (three separate kids witnessed her shelling it), hexing Chip, who spent the next three weeks earthbound and hobbling on a sprained ankle. Though we whispered of banishing Cujo from the Watts property, we got the creepy feeling she could hear us plotting. What if she went apeshit and telekinetic, tossing our helpless bodies around like dolls? Truth told, the accidents could have been much worse, leaving us mangled and tragic, as our parents feared, so we let the freak lurk, let her stare with her weird gray eyes, pace and mutter and gaze up at the sky as though communicating with aliens beyond the clouds. We scrounged up good-luck charms to protect ourselves—rabbit feet, heirloom jewels, possum penile bones—and carried on with our business, always conscious of the darkness radiating from Cujo’s small spotted body. The day Chip Watts stepped back on the trampoline, Cujo emerged from the woods with a garter snake wrapped around her left wrist. At first, we thought it was a plastic toy, but when she crept near, we saw it slithering, saw her whispering to the serpent, saw her snickering as though the reptile had hissed some irresistible joke. When Chip started with a fliffis, we held our breath, imagining him bashing his head on the T-junction, but he went right to a Randy and ended his routine with a perfect Miller Plus. Cujo be damned, he leapt from the tramp with an axe kick, falling right into the arms of Tammy Day, who rewarded him with a kiss. As cicadas pulsed in the July heat, the kiss went on and on, making us tingle with lust-tinged shame. Though we should’ve slunk home, leaving the couple to their private passions, we couldn’t pull our eyes away from the storied quarterback and his head-cheerleader love, young and easy under the locust boughs. That’s why nobody saw Cujo mount the tramp. That’s why nobody witnessed her first few stunts. After the lovers parted and wiped their beslobbered mouths, we turned to the trampoline just in time to catch Cujo backflipping over a locust branch. Landing with ease, she launched an effortless quadriffi, a stunt that even Chip hadn’t mastered, each somersault more elegant than the last, her body lithe as a lemur’s, her face glowing with an uncanny beauty we’d never seen. When she straddle-jumped off the mat and landed in the grass, the loveliness drained from her body. She was Cujo again, speckled and smirking, her eyes too big for her head. She hightailed it toward the woods, leaving us shaken. “What the hell?” said Tammy Day. “Where did she learn how to do that?” Buy the Book Hellions Julia Elliott Buy Book Hellions Julia Elliott Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Like a rose blooming in time-lapse video, a boil sprouted on the tip of Tammy’s nose. As warm wind blew through the yard, pustulous acne erupted on the head cheerleader’s face. “What?” Tammy scratched her nose. Wendy Dyches handed her a compact. When Tammy opened the small round mirror and beheld her affliction, she wailed, crumpled, and wept. Refusing to speak to us, she shielded her face with her hands. “Maybe it’s the heat,” said Wendy. “Hives, scabies, or poison oak. Got to be some logical explanation.” But we knew Cujo had cursed Tammy. Fearing some contagion, we backed away from the sobbing, zitty girl. Our sense of reality forever fucked, we gazed at the sky. Beholding convoluted clouds that evoked airbrushed paintings of the apocalypse, we half expected Jesus to whizz down in a flying saucer and summon the chosen among us. A gust of strong wind blustered through, along with ethereal yellow light, but a storm didn’t erupt. After Mrs. Watts called her boys in for supper, other kids drifted home, leaving just the two of us, Joe and Glen, sitting on the trampoline, discussing the day in hushed tones. We decided we needed to see Cujo in her natural habitat, see if she had a trampoline in her backyard. We waited until dark and then set off through the woods, winding toward the place where Cujo’s dank split-level perched on a ravine above boggy land. When old Miss Emily died there in 1982, her family found possums nesting in the living room, mushrooms growing in damp shag carpet, the furniture velvety with mold. The house sat empty for five years before Cujo’s family moved in: her dulcimer-making parents, her three younger brothers who spoke a secret language that nobody but Cujo could understand. When we crossed the creek, we spotted the house. The split-level, covered in wisteria, seemed to float in a bubble of light, a dwelling that existed outside of time. Clutching at exposed roots, we climbed up the eroded hill, at last reaching a chain-link fence. In the overgrown yard, Cujo’s small, pale dad strummed a dulcimer, his bald head glossy in the porch light. Cujo’s skinny mom emerged from the darkness, swaying in a white nightgown, standing a full head taller than Cujo’s father. The couple yodeled eerie harmonies, a song that made us forget why we had come. “Kyarn!” yelled a child, jarring us from our trance. Wielding spiked sticks, Cujo’s three brothers, none of them older than ten, rushed toward us—tiny wincing boys with dark hair, dressed in cutoff shorts. “What’s the fuss?” cried Cujo’s dad. “Sorry foons!” the boys yelled, climbing the chain-link fence. We bolted, going the wrong way, running so far that we came out where Pocotaligo Road turned to dirt, a hundred dogs losing their shit at Country Canine Academy. Though we never got used to Cujo’s stunts, we relaxed into the wonder of it all, the mid-July heat lulling us into a stupor, a fever dream of shrieking insects and eternally grumbling thunder. We learned to watch for the moment when Cujo lapsed into beauty, high in the air, her face surging with light, her hair a streak of fire, freckles glittering like flecks of copper on her skin. Perhaps the light that filtered through the honey locust tricked us. Perhaps ecstasy transformed the girl from within. Maybe distance and movement blurred her features as she catapulted and triple-flipped and performed grand jetés and cabrioles. Still, we braced ourselves for her landings. The second she touched earth, her ugliness surged back, and she hustled away, tittering and graceless. She kept to the margins, that weird zone between woods and yard, watching—waiting for her curses to take effect. As long as we were respectful, and Cujo got her time in the air, her curses were harmless, a mild nuisance—like Tammy Day’s acne (which cleared up the next day), Marty Cope’s flatulence (nothing he hadn’t suffered before), and Crystal Goodings’s hiccups (which lasted until sunset)—curses so mild we wondered if we were imagining them. But then, one hot, gusty afternoon, a clutch of girls sniggered as Cujo lost her footing while mounting the tramp. Cujo jerked her head around and glared at the girls. Cujo murmured strange words. Nodding, clenching her fists, she stepped to the center of the mat. Dark clouds thickened above her as she warmed up with pikes and pucks. And then she went full-on whirling dervish, spinning and flipping so fast we couldn’t keep track of her tricks. As thunder boomed and lightning jagged, Cujo bounced higher than we’d ever seen her go, disappearing into the honey locust branches. And then she swan dove so quick we knew she’d break her skinny neck. But she touched down with a handstand and springboarded off the tramp, her skin flaring yellow the second she landed in the grass. Cujo groaned and rolled her bloodshot eyes. Snot ran from her nose. Heaving, she staggered off into the woods. As the downpour came, we made a run for the garage, relishing the dim light and the warm proximity of other bodies. Wendy Dyches sat on the chest freezer, chatting with her two best friends. But then she screeched and spat something into her hand. In her open palm, she displayed a molar with long bloody roots. Of the three girls who had laughed at Cujo, Wendy had been the boldest, releasing a cackle that had made her body shake. While Tina Platts had tittered into her fist, shy May Mood had merely snorted and smiled. Now Tina scratched her head, groaning as fistfuls of hair came loose from her scalp. We backed away from the afflicted girls, watching as bald spots appeared in Tina’s dark hairdo. We thought May might escape unscathed, but soon she was whimpering. She stared at us with puffy eyes, her lids festering with multiple styes. “We’ve got to do something,” cried Hope Crews. “Can’t let that little freak dog us.” A hush settled over us as we watched Hope, waiting for her to spit out teeth, lapse into baldness, or break out in leprous sores. Hope examined her slender arms and touched her cat-shaped face, testing for curses. When nothing happened, she strode to the center of the carport. “Everybody has a weakness,” said Hope. “We’ve just got to figure out Cujo’s.” Glen Cook stepped forth. In a quavering voice, he told the crowd the story of our excursion, how we’d ventured through the woods to Cujo’s home, finding no trampoline in her yard, only her yodeling parents and her younger brothers, who’d wielded homemade spears. “But we didn’t see Cujo,” said Glen. “You didn’t look hard enough,” said Hope. “She was probably floating right over you like a vampire child.” After the other kids went home for supper, Hope lingered in the yard with us—Glen, Joe, and Crystal Gooding—setting up a secret rendezvous, vowing to solve the mystery of Cujo’s powers once and for all. The muggy night smelled like boiled cabbage. The moon was a piddling thing, stars swarming above the field where the four of us—Glen, Hope, Crystal, and Joe—met up. We had flashlights and binoculars, knives and BB guns, orange pocket Bibles handed out by Gideons at Tillman Middle School. We took the shortcut through the woods, following Toadstone Creek down into the flood zone where Cujo’s split-level hovered above the ravine in an eerie orb of lamplight. As we climbed the hill, we heard bewitching singing, like something from beyond the moon. And then we saw her bouncing on a mini-tramp, her hair aflame around the pale shimmer of her face, her eyes flashing silver sparks. We couldn’t bring ourselves to call her Cujo in this form, the name Marty Cope had given her on the Tillman playground the time she nabbed our football—the time we cornered her behind the jungle gym. Snarling, she’d bared her crooked teeth. And Marty had forever branded her with the name of a murderous, rabid dog. This creature that bounced slowly, performing languid stunts, was not Cujo. This being that sang in a timeless voice was not Cujo. Stunned, watching the girl hover in the rich night air, we couldn’t recall her real name. Though we’d seen flickers of her beauty in the Watts backyard, she’d moved too quickly there for us to focus, to suck in her loveliness with our eyes and fill our bodies with it, charging our very marrow with light. Who knows how long we stood there, mouths slack, lulled by her music, yoked together by the inexplicable vision before us? When the brothers came yowling out into the yard, their sister ceased to sing, but still she bounced, luminous, sustaining states of unnatural buoyancy. The brothers whirled around her, lashing at her ankles with their spears. The brothers lunged and gibbered. They pulled fistfuls of powder from pouches strapped to their belts and flung it into their sister’s face, causing her to sneeze, stumble, and fall into the grass. When she stood up, her skin crinkled, and her lovely lean form became bony and crooked. Her hair turned gray and thin. “Hag!” the brothers yowled, dancing around a tiny crone. The crone’s hair floated away like ash, leaving her bald, her scalp scaly and faintly blue. She spat out teeth. She shrank several inches. We feared she’d shrivel to skin and bones. But then, in a blink, she was Cujo again, freckled and pubescent, snarling and cursing. The brothers climbed the fence and fled to the woods, running right past us, out to a flat stump, where they began pounding objects with rocks. We showed up the next afternoon as the others did, stood around watching Chip do warm-up jumps. Everybody seemed restless, disturbed by the absence of Wendy, Tina, and May, watching the woods for the appearance of Cujo. Wendy, kids whispered, had been rushed to Dr. Burroughs, a dentist who assured her parents that X-rays revealed a mouthful of healthy teeth, though it was crucial that the girl be fitted with an implant to replace the missing molar. Doctor Pendarvis had informed May’s parents that though her styes were unusually numerous, they fell within the range of normality and would take at least a week to heal. Tina’s dermatologist, who babbled vaguely of hormonal shifts, teen stress, junk food, and trichotillomania, could not predict when her hair might grow back, though he assured the girl’s parents that her follicles were not dead. At the height of afternoon, cicadas pulsing in the muggy air, Cujo came staggering from the woods. Bent and scowling, she looked even punier than she usually did. She had gray streaks in her hair, bags under her eyes, lines around her mouth. Mumbling to herself, she lurked in the shade of the honey locust, glaring at Tammy Day, who bounced idly on the trampoline, attempting the occasional straddle-jump. When Tammy finally saw Cujo skulking in the shadows, she hurried to the edge of the mat, climbed down carefully, and slipped behind her posse of girlfriends. Cujo climbed the tramp, muttering as she scrambled over the edge. She stood wincing in the circle of blackness, a small, scrunched creature, her eyes squinting in concentration. We didn’t realize we were holding our breath until she started jumping, two-foot tucks that any four-year-old could manage, not her usual starting fare. When she pulled off a pike jump, we relaxed, waiting for her to launch a backflip and then leap into her otherworldly form. But Cujo fell flat on her bony ass—a spot drop, we thought, even though she never messed with such trifling stunts. Cujo crumpled and moaned. Grunting, she heaved herself up, tottered to the trampoline’s edge, and tumbled into the long grass. As the girl writhed and whimpered on the ground, Tammy Day sashayed forth, walking with the same hip-sway her beautician mother had perfected. With a flourish, Tammy kicked Cujo in the ribs, making the girl go limp—playing possum, we hoped. “That’s what you get for messing with Tammy Day,” said Tammy. “My granny told me to tell you that, you freakish devil child.” Tammy stood triumphant over the fallen girl, her glorious hairdo, shellacked with Aqua Net, glinting in the sun. We pictured Tammy’s granny hunched in the back room of Delilah’s Salon, her jet-black beehive sitting crooked on her skull. The old woman, who’d started Delilah’s back in the fifties, now told futures by flipping through a Bible at random, pronouncing fates in hifalutin King James while Tammy’s mom did hair. We wondered if the old lady had powers, wondered if Cujo suffered from a double curse. When Tammy’s friends crowded in, we feared they’d maul Cujo, but the girls just stood behind Tammy, glaring and radiating hatred. At last, Cujo lifted her head, gazing at the long stretch between herself and the woods. At last, she rose, crooked and swaying. As she stumbled away, we stood in silence, listening to her bones creak, sighing when she disappeared into the trees. The next day, when Cujo failed to creep from the woods at her usual time, Tammy Day stepped simpering onto the trampoline. She did a double-back somi, landing in pirouette pose. Laughing with full-throated ease, she twirled and swished, her limbs golden, her feathered hair shining with blond highlights. Chip Watts scrambled onto the mat, slipped his arm around her waist, and gracefully lowered her into a dip. For hours the couple cavorted, pawing at each other as they leapt and flipped, leaning in for kisses, showing off their perfect bods. They were King and Queen of Summer again, showing off in the air, leaving the rest of us earthbound. The fools among us cheered them on, leering slavishly in the heat, charged with vicarious glory. Enveloped smugly within a bubble of secret knowledge, the four of us—Glen, Hope, Crystal, and Joe—slunk off to the shade. We were the only ones who’d glimpsed the heights of Cujo’s beauty and the depths of her hideousness, her vulnerability to the people who knew her best, her abrupt morphing into miniature hagdom. Speaking in low tones, we wondered what powers she possessed. Her rapid balding, tooth loss, and bodily shrinkage embodied the horrors of annihilation. When her freckled teen form surged back, it had seemed extra juicy and potent, almost pretty by comparison—the very essence of human life. When we finally got our turns on the trampoline, we felt strangely deflated, as though our stunts had no meaning without Cujo there. Soon it started drizzling, as though the sun had eyes only for Tammy and Chip, and the Watts boys’ mom declared the trampoline too wet for jumping. The four of us drifted toward the woods again. We found the footpath Cujo took through the forest, a trail so light it might’ve been made by bobcats. We wove deeper into the trees than we’d ever gone, finding a dim swampy floodplain loud with frogs. Vines swaddled the trees. In a clearing, cabbage-like plants clustered around a pool of water. We stood around the tiny pond, watching weeds waver from obscure currents. Speaking again of Cujo, we wondered if we could help her somehow, wondered if we could find her brothers and take their magic pouches away. We all admitted we hated Chip and Tammy, that we wanted to see them curse-stricken and staggering in the July heat, bereft of beauty, unable to escape gravity’s grip. A mourning dove called. A tree frog barked. And then we saw her—the girl, pale as a sand bass, sunk in the pool’s depths. “Drowned,” Glen rasped. As though awakened, the girl whooshed up through the water in a rage, clawing at air, screaming words we didn’t understand. Her eyes looked filmy, and she didn’t seem to see us as she staggered down a forest path, bumping into trees. Though we tailed her through the woods, we couldn’t keep up. Soon her house appeared, perched above the gulley, and we climbed up the eroded terrain. But when we reached the top, the fence was gone. We found no split-level house—only a bald hill littered with broken bricks. “Cujo,” we called, ashamed we didn’t know the girl’s true name, something lovely and old-fashioned, we guessed, like Guinevere or Christabel. “The Maiden,” whispered Glen, and the name stuck. The four of us—Glen, Hope, Crystal, and Joe—stopped hanging out by the trampoline. We spent our afternoons searching for the Maiden, vowing we’d vanquish her brothers and release her from their spell. We mused as always on the riddle of her address—level when approached from the front, perched on a hill when glimpsed from the deepest part of the swamp. When climbing from the south side of the woods, we always found a scraggly hill. When climbing from the north side, we sometimes found her house, blocked off by a chain-link fence, though we never saw a single soul in the yard. One long hot Saturday, we walked down Wisteria Way, the crumbling asphalt road that led to the vine-smothered split-level where Miss Emily had died in 1982. We found no cars in the driveway, no action in the overgrown yard. Though we banged the brass knocker and pounded the peeling front door with our fists, nobody answered. Nobody stirred inside the house. When we slipped into the yard from the side, we found ourselves in the woods again, winding down toward swampy land, no house in sight. “Lost,” mused Hope, as we walked in circles, the soles of our sneakers caked with black mud. That’s when Glen and Crystal found the pool again, concealed by a scrim of dead leaves that we brushed away with our hands, marveling at the coldness of the water. Hunkering around the tiny pond, we gazed into its dark depths, detecting wavering weeds and tiny silver minnows. The forest breathed around us, frogs and insects throbbing. We gasped when we spotted her—the Maiden sleeping at the bottom of the pool, pale as a ghost salamander, her skin translucent and faintly aglow. She had not been there two seconds before—the girl we’d seen bouncing on the mini-tramp, the girl whose singing made us stare too long at the moon. Perhaps she’d floated up from deeper depths. Perhaps she glowed sometimes, and other times stayed dark. Maybe she flickered in and out of our plane of existence, surging in from another dimension, the fourth or the fifth—we could never remember the differences between the two. We discussed these theories later that night. But in the woods, we stayed quiet, focusing on the wonder of her face. We didn’t want to wake her again, send her blind and reeling through the swamp. When the woods went dark and chuck-will’s-widows called, a light flashed on at the top of the hill. We again saw Cujo’s split-level, which seemed to float in the trees. Returning our gaze to the pool, we found only darkness—no gleaming Maiden sleeping in the silt. We took a long foot trail up the other side of the hill, catching glimpses of the old brick house, but we couldn’t access it from the woods, no matter how many paths we tried. Exhausted, we found ourselves on Pocotaligo Road again, farther away than before, out near the Pentecostal Holiness Church. July was almost over, and we stalked the woods with desperate ferocity, sweating in the muggy heat, longing for the feel of cool water, pining for the sight of the celestial Maiden submerged in the depths of an uncanny pool. Doubting our vision, we compared notes, bickering about trivial details—the length of her hair, the shape of her lips, the intensity of her luminescence. “Maybe it’s all just tricks,” said Glen. “Her family a bunch of shifty travelers.” Disgusted by this thought, we took the shortest path up the hill, discovering, once more, eroded terrain and scattered bricks. “Sick and tired of this,” hissed Crystal, kicking a brick. We were sick and tired of our shit town. Sick and tired of Chip and Tammy lording it over everybody. Sick and tired of the endless summer day breathing down our necks like a panting dog. The Maiden had given us a glimpse of otherworldly possibilities, and now we couldn’t find her. “I say we sneak in,” said Crystal. “You mean break in,” said Hope. “Semantics,” said Crystal, a vocabulary word the rest of us didn’t know. We didn’t ask what semantics meant. We followed Crystal down the path to Wisteria Way. Finding no cars in the driveway, we climbed the familiar front stoop with its lichen-covered brick and rusted screen door. We knocked and waited, listening for the rustle of humans inside. And then Crystal tried the knob. “Unlocked,” she whispered. We crept into a shadowy living room decorated with orange shag carpet and lime brocade drapes. A white baby grand piano stood in a far corner, surrounded by piles of books. The house smelled of mold and rat piss, the windows sealed with electrical tape. On the wall was an oil painting of Miss Emily’s only son, immortalized in his pug-nosed, towheaded toddler form, the boy who’d grown up to become a playboy podiatrist in Atlanta. We found boxes of dishes in the kitchen, a naked mattress in the master bedroom, a plastic stool in a stained pink bathtub. We tested the switches for electricity, the faucets for running water, finding neither. “She doesn’t live here,” said Glen, his voice hoarse with despair. We exited by the sliding-glass door, finding ourselves in the overgrown backyard we’d viewed from the other side of the chain-link fence. On a rusted iron garden table, we found a dulcimer, rain-warped and lacking strings. “Miss Emily,” Crystal reminded us, “was a music teacher.” “Right,” said Hope. “But Cujo’s parents make dulcimers. We saw them singing that night.” This dulcimer had been rotting for at least a decade—its wood splintery, furred with yellow fungus. “Wishful thinking,” said Crystal, striding off toward the gate that led to the road. “I’m done.” The rest of us climbed the fence and descended into forest gloom. We stumbled around the woods looking for the pool, knowing we wouldn’t find it. Over the next few weeks, the Maiden became a hazy memory, and we wondered if we’d been fooled by an illusion, a mannequin or doll immersed in water, Cujo concealed in a pile of leaves, rising so fast she tricked us. We wondered if her trampoline stunts seemed spectacular only because we didn’t expect much from the strange, ugly girl. Every time Glen uttered the words the Maiden, his voice all whiny and wistful, Crystal sneered: “You mean Cujo?” The last Saturday before school started, we went to the Watts place for their annual catfish stew party, keeping our distance from the drunken adults, who gabbed about their boring lives as tall, potbellied Mr. Watts manned his propane cooker, scarlet-faced, stirring an eighty-quart aluminum pot that bubbled with his pungent specialty: catfish nibbles and potatoes simmered in tomato sauce and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom, spiced with generous splashes of Worcestershire and Texas Pete, flavored with fried hog jowl and served over rice. Mr. Watts had spent the summer catching enormous bottom-feeding catfish, stashing them in his chest freezer, and now the big day was upon us, a scorcher to beat all scorchers. The air smelled of pond funk and burnt Crisco. The birds sounded hoarse, and dying cicadas buzzed in the parched yellow grass. The four of us joined the teens that thronged around the trampoline, watching the lesser jocks and cheerleaders perform the prelude to Chip and Tammy’s new routine, a number they’d been practicing for weeks. Kids whispered that they’d perform a strip tease in the air. Kids whispered that they’d consulted the Kama Sutra, that they’d mime intricate sex acts from heights of twenty feet. Heshers and skags who’d already graduated rolled up to the spectacle in Firebird Trans Ams and Camaro V8s—long-haired dudes who blew their cash on cars, bad boys accompanied by underage girls in acid-washed miniskirts. This crowd pulled Millers from mini-coolers and smoked Marlboro Reds right out in the open, getting glares from Mrs. Watts, who was up to her elbows in hush-puppy dough. Teens sipped beer from Solo cups. Teens slipped behind the shed to smoke and make out. Heat-stunned and tipsy, teens ate fishy slop from paper plates that soon turned grease-soaked and floppy. We all watched Chip and Tammy hold court under a beach umbrella, at ease with the world, as though they’d never tasted Cujo’s curses, as though they’d never been bested and never would be. Summer’s royals lolling in lounge chairs, stretching their sun-bronzed limbs, they’d reign at Swamp Fox High just as they had at Tillman Middle. It was half past two o’clock, and Chip and Tammy lingered over their dessert, feeding each other banana pudding, toying with our expectations, chilling as though they hadn’t been dreaming of the glory of this day. By the time they approached the trampoline, there was a dangerous charge in the air, too many kids crowding in, older heshers mingling with teens, drunk adults screeching cheers from the patio. The sky looked green-tinged, the clouds jaundiced. Weed smoke wafted from obscure sources. Somewhere in the distance, a chain saw started up. That’s when Cujo skittered out from the woods, so fast she blurred, so fast that nobody saw her except us—Glen, Hope, Crystal, and Joe. Everybody else had their eyes on Chip and Tammy, who stood frozen in the middle of the trampoline as the opening keyboard riff from Europe’s “The Final Countdown” blared from a boom box. Cujo scurried behind the azalea hedge. When the drums kicked in, Chip and Tammy popped into action with a triffis for each of them, performed simultaneously, landing with doggy drops. When they rebounded with Axl Rose snake-dance moves, Cujo came screaming from the shrubs—freaky teeth bared, fists clenched, thin red hair streaming. From a distance of six feet, she leapt onto the tramp, popped Chip in the neck with a front kick and Tammy in the face with a side, knocking them both off the mat, sending them rolling into the overgrown grass. The collective murmur of the entranced crowd resembled a distant rumble of thunder. Cujo stood still, psyching herself up for her first jump—her eyes closed, her goblin face scrunched in concentration. For a second her homeliness seemed to condense, as though to fuel the marvelous stunts to come. And then she was airborne, her body curled in the turns of a perfect quadriffi, soaring higher with each flip. By the time she reached her fourth salto, she’d shaken off her earthly form, morphing into a being of movement and light. She was the Maiden, lunar-skinned and silver-eyed, her hair a flurry of flames. The adults went stiff and silent on the patio, frozen with beer cans in their hands, their mouths open mid-sentence. Chip and Tammy sat up in the grass, dull-eyed, their faces slack. The other kids, who’d never really seen the Maiden, stood stunned and panting in the heat. The heshers lost their cool-dude vibes as wonder overtook them. The Maiden touched down and sprang into a double quadriffi, spiraling past the highest branches of the honey locust. And then she swan dove, a fiery streak plummeting. Just when we thought she’d crash, she veered upward and hovered above the trampoline, three sets of dragonfly wings fluttering on her back. Except for the two glossy orbs that spun in her eye sockets, her face was blank—no mouth, no nose. But then a fang-fringed orifice opened near her chin. The sounds of flutes and chimes floated out, high and sharp in the bright air. That’s when Chip and Tammy stood up and started twitching. At first, we thought the Maiden had cursed them with run-of-the mill seizures. But then we noticed they jerked in sync, contracting into terrifying rigidity and then going limp, their faces slack and expressionless. With each move, Chip and Tammy lapsed into intensifying ugliness—gargoyle-faced and scaly-skinned, bat-eared and dog-snouted. Their hair was greasy and matted. Their eyes glistered a sick snot green. Long gray tongues flopped from their mouths. Though we’d never been able to see it before, this repulsiveness had always been inside them. The other teens stood spellbound, unable to speak. The adults remained frozen on the patio, all except Mr. Watts, who, hexed by Cujo, sprang into action, amping the heat on his propane cooker and whistling an intricate tune beyond his normal capabilities. As Chip and Tammy danced spastically around the yard, Mr. Watts added items to his stew, throwing in whatever was at hand—beer cans, Solo cups, flip-flops, and sunglasses—filling the air with the apocalyptic stench of molten plastic. We four—Glen, Hope, Crystal, and Joe—were the only ones the Maiden hadn’t hexed, the only people who served as true witnesses to whatever the hell was going on. The Maiden was an angel of death, we hoped, there to reveal dark truths and announce the day of reckoning—insect plagues, blood rain, meteor showers, and wormwood-tainted water. We scanned the clouds for swarms of angels, pop-eyed with fury, shrieking at decibels that would bust our eardrums. We hoped the Maiden would sweep us up into some frenzy, whisk us away to an otherworldly locale where she, reverted to her comely form, would crown us as chosen. After all, we were the ones who understood her true beauty, the ones who’d searched for her in the forest, the ones who’d found her sleeping in the bottom of the pool. We were the ones who’d plotted to thwart her brothers, who seemed hell-bent on destroying her. But the sky didn’t erupt into apocalyptic havoc. Mr. Watts sat down in his lawn chair, by all appearances a normal man exhausted from outdoor cooking. He dozed off, his head slumped forward. Chip and Tammy fell to their knees, ecstatic looks on their hideous faces. The other teens turned away from the Maiden. Only the four of us—Glen, Hope, Crystal, and Joe—kept our eyes locked on the terrifying but eerily beautiful image of her true form—wings, whirling eyes, and glittering, exquisite teeth. We secretly longed to be devoured, chewed up, and incorporated into the body of the Maiden—anything to escape the future that awaited us in this shit town. How could we return to our paltry lives after witnessing her glory? How could we face the indignities that awaited us at Swamp Fox High, where monsters like Chip and Tammy reigned? When a hundred smoke-blue songbirds stirred in the honey locust and started twittering, we four reached for the Maiden, extending our arms like toddlers. But the Maiden didn’t pick us up. She whirred in circles, up past the highest branches, and darted off into infinite space. Sighing, we hoped she’d return to gravity’s clutch, touching down upon the bounce mat as she always did, springing into the grass, lapsing back into flesh and blood. But the Maiden shrank to a fleck and passed into distant clouds, twinkling with pink light as she vanished from our world. Copyright © 2025 by Julia Elliott. Reprinted with permission from Tin House. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Hellions</i> by Julia Elliott appeared first on Reactor.

At the AI Action Summit in Paris on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance articulated a positive vision for American leadership in technology—one that is more innovative than the European Union’s, more aligned with American values than Big Tech’s, and more impervious to the Chinese Communist Party. Addressing these three audiences, Vance put their artificial intelligence mismanagement on notice. The European Union Vance’s message to Europe was clear: Replace a regressive overemphasis on AI safety with a focus on AI opportunity. “This doesn’t mean … that all concerns about safety go out the window,” he acknowledged, but that excessive risk-aversion stifles innovation and fuels ideological censorship. Vance cited the EU’s Digital Services Act as a prime example, imposing sweeping censorship under the guise of protecting against misinformation. He likewise criticized the General Data Protection Regulation for failing to shield small firms from crushing compliance costs. True AI progress, he argued, requires resisting the impulse to overregulate, allowing innovators to experiment, incentivizing companies to invest in research and development, and building the energy infrastructure necessary to scale compute. America’s “open regulatory environment,” he emphasized, is the foundation of its AI dominance. Big Tech Before entering politics, Vance described Big Tech as “fundamentally parasitic” to the broader economy. As vice president, he has put these companies “on notice.” Yet in Paris, his critique of Big Tech wasn’t another attack. Instead, it was a directive. “What excites me most about AI is that it is grounded in the real and physical economy,” he noted, underscoring AI’s potential to revitalize domestic energy and manufacturing, industries that “depend on those who work with their hands.” He rebuked AI leaders for speaking about “replacing workers,” arguing that such language frames people as expendable with automation, rather than as beneficiaries of greater worker productivity. “With greater productivity,” he asserted, workers should expect “higher wages, better benefits, and safer, more prosperous communities.” He also warned against incumbents using regulation to freeze out competition, pledging that the Trump administration would “keep Big Tech, ‘little tech,’ and all other developers on a level playing field.” The vice president’s comments to Silicon Valley are an open hand: Accept and align with American values—or ignore and invite judgment. The Chinese Communist Party With China’s DeepSeek’s suspicious development and TikTok’s potential ban dominating headlines, Vance was able to take aim at Beijing’s subversion of American technology without even mentioning China by name. “Hostile foreign adversaries have weaponized AI software to rewrite history, surveil users, and censor speech … . [They] have stolen and used AI to strengthen their military intelligence and surveillance capabilities, capture foreign data, and create propaganda to undermine other nations’ national security.” His message was blunt: We will block you. “Full stop.” As President Trump’s new broker for a clean TikTok divestment from China, Vance is no doubt being closely heeded in Beijing. One Message The vice president delivered one common message to Europe, Silicon Valley, and China: “The United States of America is the leader in AI and our administration plans to keep it that way.” Vance’s vision—to out-innovate “safety first” nations, align AI production with American values, and thwart foreign exploitation of AI—is the most coherent and forward-looking tech policy platform we have ever seen from an administration. The post Vance Outlines an Open, Forward-Looking AI Agenda appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump, quite sensibly, paused some federal spending programs to see whether they are lawful and advance America’s interests, which he had promised voters he would do. That temporary delay, however, set off a firestorm among the liberal states and organizations that, as recent disclosures have revealed, have benefited immensely and unjustifiably from the government’s largesse. Some states and the District of Columbia convinced a federal district judge to temporarily block Trump’s spending pause, arguing (quite hyperbolically) that the pause would irreparably harm “the social fabric of life” in their jurisdictions. In just a few days, and without full briefs from the parties, Chief Judge John McConnell of the District of Rhode Island concluded that this spending pause was unlawful, because no statute authorizes the president to delay the disbursement of congressionally appropriated funds, the pause was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act, and it is unconstitutional because Congress has the spending power, not the president. On Jan. 31, McConnell ordered the Trump administration not to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” any grants to the states “except on the basis of the applicable authorizing statutes.” McConnell also seemed to extend his order beyond the states that sued and barred the administration from pausing any “federal financial assistance programs” that the administration had previously paused. The order is not an exemplar of clarity, so McConnell’s precise intent is unknowable. A few days later, the states filed an emergency motion complaining, among other things, that the administration was still pausing the distribution of grants to certain nonparties to their suit, like Brown University and the University of Washington. Just three days after that, and again without full briefing, McConnell granted the motion and clarified that he did, indeed, mean to stop the administration from “any federal funding pause.” His order applied not only to any recipient of federal funds (not just the states that sued), but it also prevented all departments, agencies, and institutes within the federal government from pausing funding as well (even if they had not been sued). Trump responded by saying that, “When a president can’t look for fraud and waste and abuse, we don’t have a country anymore.” Much of what the Department of Government Efficiency has revealed about government spending during just its first few weeks investigating the government’s books underscores his point. Besides $100 million for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from the Department of Education, DOGE has found that the United States Agency for International Development has spent millions on “LGBTQI+” in Guatemala and Serbia, a DEI musical in Ireland, a “transgender” opera in Colombia, and “transgender” comic books in Peru. It has sent hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza and the West Bank without any assurance that it would be kept from Hamas terrorists, hundreds of millions to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (which unleashed COVID-19 on the world), and hundreds of millions to Afghanistan and into the hands of the Taliban. Domestically, the federal government has funneled billions to left-wing causes with minimal oversight and no accountability to the American voters. But McConnell has shielded these grants from the president’s review. As Vice President JD Vance commented, “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” He has a point. The administration immediately appealed, and that appeal is pending. In the interim, Trump indicated that he will comply with the court’s order but added that what McConnell has “done is he’s slowed down momentum [which] gives crooked people more time to cover up the books.” There’s a lot wrong with what McConnell has done, to put it mildly. A swift rebuke from an appellate court is due. Begin with the standard that he applied to the states’ request for an emergency injunction. Emergency injunctions are dramatic remedies that, as the Supreme Court cautions, should not be readily granted. Judges don’t have the time to consider the issues in detail, and an emergency injunction wrongly given can impose major hardship on a defendant, even the federal government, because funds improperly disbursed and spent might be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to claw back. While it is true that an injunction wrongly denied also can impose serious hardship on a plaintiff, the balance that the Supreme Court has struck is to put the burden of persuasion on plaintiffs. They must show that they are likely to win when the court considers the issues fully and that they are likely to suffer irreparable harm in the meantime. The defendant does not have to prove anything. The defendant is entitled to a presumption of lawfulness and regularity until the plaintiff carries its burden by proving otherwise. And yet, McConnell said that he would assume “the worst-case scenario” about Trump’s spending pause. Why? Because McConnell found the pause “broad” and “ambiguous.” But nothing in Supreme Court case law creates a “breadth and ambiguity” exception to the usual process for getting an emergency injunction. That was mistake No. 1. There is, however, a “breadth” limitation on McConnell’s injunction power. McConnell claimed the power to extend his injunction from the plaintiff states to nonparties to the suit. But this is far more power than the Constitution gives to federal judges. As we have argued elsewhere, no law gives federal judges the power to issue “universal” relief or “nationwide injunctions.” That is, however, what McConnell has done. And in so doing, he has claimed for himself the power to set nationwide policy, which the Constitution denies to his branch of government. That was mistake No. 2. On either of those bases, the injunction ought to be vacated. But there is more. Consider next how the court reframed the issue to knock down a straw man. The administration’s temporary pause is just that—a temporary pause. But the court consistently recharacterizes it as a “unilateral suspension,” the imposition of “certain conditions” on funding, a “refusal to disburse” funds, and an “indefinite pause.” At least once, the judge puts “pause” in quotations marks to reveal that he doesn’t believe that the pause is, in fact, a pause at all. But again, the plaintiffs have the burden, and they offered no evidence suggesting that the temporary pause is something else. In other words, the plaintiffs had the burden of proving that any injury from the delayed receipt of federal funds was irreparable, and (other than the case of federal disaster relief) the district court did not specify how that was true. That was mistake No. 3. Timing provides two more problems for McConnell. McConnell claims that the pause violates the Administrative Procedure Act, which prohibits “final” federal agency actions that are “arbitrary and capricious.” How can a temporary pause be a final action? The district court did not say. The court did not point to any statement by the relevant agencies that the action was final, and McConnell did not explain why that was true despite the agency’s failure to admit it. Mistake No. 4. In addition, his conclusion that the pause violates Congress’ appropriations is highly questionable. For starters, Congress did not direct the president to direct his executive agencies to disburse these funds to particular entities by a date certain within the current fiscal year. Moreover, there is a strong argument to be made, and which the administration has already indicated it intends to raise, that Article II of the Constitution vests the president with implied power to impound funds that have been appropriated and that the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which restricted a president’s ability to impound funds, is unconstitutional. Consider the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by then-President Joe Biden, which is the source of many of the grants the plaintiffs complain about. A quick review of the appropriations in that 725-page act reveals that the appropriations are authorized to be disbursed by the executive through the end of the fiscal year. The government’s fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, which means that even a seven-month-long pause would still be within the law. In other words, the plaintiffs have cited no constitutional requirement that federal agencies are to distribute the Inflation Reduction Act funds immediately or on any particular date prior to the end of the current federal fiscal year. The agencies, therefore, would be acting lawfully if they distributed the assigned funds in a lump sum on the last day of the fiscal year. While that might be inefficient (and a bit tacky), it would not be unlawful. And if the administration ultimately prevails in its argument that the president has the constitutional authority to impound funds, he would be acting lawfully if ultimately disburses only some, or none, of the assigned funds. Put simply, the power of appropriation has long been understood to be the power to place a ceiling on executive spending, not a floor. Therefore, it cannot be true that a pause in February violates the law. Mistake No. 5. Two other factors are relevant in this regard. One is that the federal government is now operating under a continuing appropriations resolution that will expire in March 2025. The second is that Congress and the executive branch are currently considering whether to pass a budget reconciliation bill that could repeal funding provisions in current laws where the funds have not yet been disbursed. No one has a constitutional right to receive federal funds for any purpose—even for medical care—so Congress or the president could end up deciding not to disburse funds that were previously appropriated. That is a political issue to be resolved by the executive and legislative branches, not by a single federal judge sitting in Rhode Island. McConnell made another egregious error. He assumed, without explanation, that the president has no power to pause spending unless some federal law allows him to do so. But when Congress gives power to the executive branch, especially with no deadline other than “the end of the fiscal year,” it necessarily implies a grant of some discretion. What’s more, each branch of our government has a duty to consider the constitutionality of its actions, even when it wields power delegated to it by another branch. In that regard, the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice asserted in 1988 that “there may be instances in which [the President] may impound even in the face of a Congressional mandate to spend.” Trump, for example, has a duty to make sure that none of the funds Congress has given him to disburse are spent on the sort of unconstitutional, racially discriminatory programs that were so popular with the Biden administration. A temporary pause is the only way that a president could conduct that necessary review to ensure taxpayer funds are not being unconstitutionally spent. For example, it has long been public knowledge that the federal government gives billions to universities that racially segregate dorms, graduation ceremonies, and student resources. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, meanwhile, has already uncovered more than $100 million of Department of Education grants for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, many of which tend to be racially discriminatory, in violation of federal civil rights statutes and the Constitution. The government cannot lawfully continue giving such grants, and the president would be fully justified in withholding such funds. As constitutional law professor John Yoo writes, “Presidents since the time of Thomas Jefferson have refused to carry out appropriations,” and “the constitutionality of such impoundments depends utterly on the reason.” At a bare minimum, Congress cannot escape constitutional limits on its spending power by passing the buck to the president because, as the Supreme Court has said many times, “What cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.” There are reasonable arguments that the president’s power to impound funding goes even further, but McConnell did not consider any of them. Emergency appeals are appropriate—including, if necessary, a petition to the Supreme Court for relief. And it would be appropriate to aggressively lobby Congress to make it clear that, whatever the state of Supreme Court precedent is, Congress intends to give the president discretion over at least some sorts of spending. There is much to criticize in the district court’s ruling and little to defend it. The injunction ought to be quickly and roundly reversed. The post Judge’s Order Blocking Trump’s Spending Pause Should Be Quickly Set Aside on Appeal appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. As European leaders scramble to shield their economies from impending US tariffs, the UK’s Labour government appears ready to make significant concessions. Facing the risk of economic fallout, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration has reportedly signaled to Washington that it is open to revising the controversial and dangerous Online Safety Act — legislation critics have described as an aggressive censorship regime. The Act, which gives UK regulators the power to fine tech companies for failing to remove vaguely defined “harmful content,” has been a major point of contention between the two allies and has become a major threat to free speech online. The Trump administration has been especially vocal in its opposition, viewing the law as an affront to free speech and a potential financial burden on US tech giants. According to The Telegraph: “Downing Street is willing to renegotiate elements of the Act in order to strike a trade deal, should it be raised by the US, The Telegraph understands. The law has been heavily criticized by free speech advocates and economists, who argue its broad provisions to tackle harmful online content could lead to excessive censorship and deter investment from American tech giants.” The Online Safety Act arms UK media regulator Ofcom with sweeping new authority over social media platforms, enabling the imposition of multimillion-pound fines for failing to police content according to government directives. While supporters claim the law is necessary to protect users, critics argue that its vague wording and punitive approach encourage preemptive censorship — where platforms remove lawful content simply to avoid regulatory punishment. President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has intensified scrutiny of the law. The president, who has been highly critical of social media censorship, has surrounded himself with influential voices in the tech world, including Elon Musk, whose platform, X, is already preparing to challenge Ofcom’s authority. “Another source close to the Trump’s (sic) administration suggested the act was viewed as ‘Orwellian’ in the US and could become a flashpoint in negotiations. ‘To many people that are currently in power, they feel the United Kingdom has become a dystopian, Orwellian place where people have to keep silent about things that aren’t fashionable,’ they said. ‘The administration hate it [Online Safety Act]. Congress has been saying that [it is a concern] ever since it was enacted. Those in the administration are saying the exact same thing.’” Musk has publicly condemned the Act, and with Ofcom set to gain new enforcement powers in March, tensions between US tech firms and the UK government are likely to escalate. The entrepreneur recently welcomed Trump’s presidency as a potential counterweight to the UK’s regulatory crackdown. Free speech advocates on both sides of the Atlantic have long warned that Britain’s approach to online regulation represents a stark departure from the First Amendment protections enjoyed in the US. The Free Speech Union and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argue that the law’s restrictions on “harmful but legal” speech will lead to widespread content suppression, limiting open debate and investigative journalism. Lord Young of Acton, the founder of the Free Speech Union, underscored the looming confrontation between UK regulators and US tech leaders: “If that happens, Trump will side with his tech bros and tell Sir Keir that if he wants a trade deal, he’ll call off his dogs.” Labour has previously doubled down on online regulation, with its election manifesto promising additional measures to “keep everyone safe online.” However, in the face of potential US trade repercussions, the government’s stance appears to be softening. From Washington’s perspective, the Online Safety Act has become an obstacle to trade negotiations, raising concerns that UK regulatory overreach could deter American investment. Andrew Hale, a trade policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, confirmed that this issue has been a recurring theme in discussions with US officials. “Every meeting I have to discuss trade policy with people either in the administration or Congress, they always raise that. They say, ‘This is a huge roadblock’.” With Ofcom’s enforcement powers set to take effect soon, Britain faces a fundamental choice: cling to its stringent online censorship policies or prioritize economic cooperation with the US. The decision could shape the future of free speech in the UK for years to come. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Could Weaken Online Censorship Law To Avoid US Trade Battle appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

You Will NOT Believe How Feds Process Retirement Papers

Just because Caryn Elaine Johnson, who does by the fake name Whoopi Goldberg, was 69 years old and Joy Behar was 82 years old, didn’t mean they were above acting like juvenile bullies. The oldest members of ABC’s Cackling Coven, The View kicked off Wednesday’s show by taking swings at Elon Musk’s 4-year-old son, mocking and bullying him for his name: “X.” At no point did any of the other cast members intervene on behalf of the child. Instead, one of them blamed Musk for South African apartheid. Looking to start the show’s Hot Topics segment with Musk’s Oval Office press conference about the activities of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from yesterday, things were immediately derailed by Behar targeting Musk’s son, who was in attendance. Goldberg joined in and scolded people for mocking their names when Musk’s son was named “X”: GOLDBERG: Yeah. So yesterday Elon Musk took his son X to a press conference -- JOY BEHAR: X? GOLDBERG: I did not name the child. [Laughter] BEHAR: That’s the kid’s name? GOLDBERG: And I don't want to hear any more mess about our names, okay? Okay? With Goldberg mockingly calling him “little X,” despite him being older than his father’s acquisition and rebranding of the social media network, Behar jabbed that he had a sibling called “Instagram.” Co-host Sara Haines spoke up but only to note that Musk didn’t own Instagram. “I know,” Behar huffed.     Later in the segment, staunchly racist Asuncion Cummings Hostin, who goes by the fake name Sunny, attacked Musk for having the audacity as a naturalized American citizen to be a champion for American democracy. Despite Musk being a child at the time, Hostin blamed Musk for South African apartheid and seemed to suggest it was still active: And what is rich to me again he is not elected and he is talking about our American democracy. A man who grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era benefited from apartheid. And apartheid is the very antithesis to our American democracy because in South Africa today, there is let's see 81 percent of South Africa's population are black Africans, yet, only four percent of those black Africans own the land. So, this is what we're -- this is the person that's supposed to be teaching us about democracy. Musk was born on June 28, 1971 and apartheid ended on May 4, 1990, so Musk was still 18 at the time (he became an American citizen in 2002). Obviously he was too young to have had an influence, but then again The View had just shown that attacking kids was not off limits to them. And Hostin also seemed to be ignorant enough to think it was still going on, or perhaps she wanted the government to steal the land from the whites. It’s also worth the reminder that Hostin’s family were prolific Spanish slave-owners. They actually fled across the Atlantic Ocean in an attempt to out run the abolition of slavery. The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read: ABC’s The View February 12, 2025 11:02:33 a.m. Eastern WHOOPI GOLDBERG: Yeah. So yesterday Elon Musk took his son X to a press conference -- JOY BEHAR: X? GOLDBERG: I did not name the child. [Laughter] BEHAR: That’s the kid’s name? GOLDBERG: And I don't want to hear any more mess about our names, okay? Okay? Anyhoo, he took little X -- BEHAR: Sorry. And little Instagram. SARA HAINES: He doesn't own Instagram. GOLDBERG: He doesn’t own Instagram. BEHAR: I know. GOLDBERG: He just took X with him to a press conference in the Oval Office to defend himself against critics who say he should not have the power to gut the federal agency. (…) 11:04:11 a.m. Eastern GOLDBERG: Okay, just before we even say anything, I want to say over the last decade, last ten years Musk's company SpaceX and Tesla were awarded at least 18 billion in federal contracts according to spending data and since the president's election, his net worth has increased 64 billion or nearly 25 percent. So, yeah, I'm going to say, you want to cut something, cut some of the stuff you're taking out. [Applause] SUNNY HOSTIN: Yeah. GOLDBERG: Because, you know, I get that there's fat everywhere and, yes, we'd all like to see less of it but what you're doing is a lot more than just cutting fat. You're giving people information that they should not have because they're not the people whose information it is. And nobody elected you! That's the part. That's the part. [Applause] HOSTIN: That's the main part. You know Whoopi, to your point – To your point Whoopi, about all these government contracts, the billions of dollars that his companies have, his six companies have with the U.S. Government. What is also very interesting is, the cutting that he has done with the federal agencies, those very same agencies have 32 continuing investigations, complaints, or enforcement actions against his companies. Those are the agencies and the people that he is cutting, so he is all of it is inuring to his benefit. And what is rich to me again he is not elected and he is talking about our American democracy. A man who grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era benefited from apartheid. And apartheid is the very antithesis to our American democracy because in South Africa today, there is let's see 81 percent of South Africa's population are black Africans, yet, only four percent of those black Africans own the land. So, this is what we're -- this is the person that's supposed to be teaching us about democracy. (…)

A teenager last week was caught on police video stabbing an officer, who survived the attack. The chief of the Virginia department said Tuesday that if the stab wound had been an inch to the right, it would have been a "different story."Just after 2:30 p.m. Feb. 3, officers responded to the 12800 block of Fair Lakes Parkway in Fair Lakes for a suspicious event, the Fairfax County Police Department said.'The 16-year-old was just swinging that knife,' Davis said, adding that 'if there is a perfect place to be stabbed — if that is a thing — it went in his torso above his vest and under his arm, and it went into muscle, thankfully. Another inch to the right, it would have been a different story.'It was reported that an unknown caller made statements to the police dispatch center that he had killed two people, police said, adding that the claim was later determined to be false.While investigating the incident, the suspect — a 16-year-old male — ran toward an officer and immediately began assaulting him, police said. Image source: Fairfax Co. (Va.) Police Image source: Fairfax Co. (Va.) PoliceDuring the assault, the teen stabbed the officer once in the upper body with a knife and was then taken into custody, police said. Image source: Fairfax Co. (Va.) Police Image source: Fairfax Co. (Va.) PolicePolice Chief Kevin Davis told WRC-TV that no weapons were used on the suspect. The officer was transported to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries and has since been released, police said, adding that it was determined that the stabbing suspect was the individual who called police dispatch with the false claim.Detectives from the department's Major Crimes Bureau have charged the 16-year-old with malicious wounding, and he was in custody, police said. Davis added to WRC that the teen is not being charged as an adult.Davis also told WRC in a Tuesday follow-up interview that things could have been a lot worse for the wounded officer — a six-year veteran who's engaged to another officer on the force."The 16-year-old was just swinging that knife," Davis told the station, adding that "if there is a perfect place to be stabbed — if that is a thing — it went in his torso above his vest and under his arm, and it went into muscle, thankfully. Another inch to the right, it would have been a different story." Image source: Fairfax Co. (Va.) PoliceDetectives are asking for witnesses or anyone with information regarding this incident to call 703-246-7800, option 2, police said, adding that tips can be submitted anonymously through Crime Solvers by phone at 866-411-TIPS (866-411-8477) and online (click HERE). Tipsters can download the "P3 Tips" app “Fairfax Co Crime Solvers," police said.You can view police video of the attack below: Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is tasked with coordinating disaster responses. It's become clear in recent months that behind the scenes, the agency is something of a disaster itself — prioritizing "equity" as its top strategic goal; blowing hundreds of millions of dollars on an emergency food and shelter program for illegal aliens while American citizens struggled; allegedly giving tens of millions of dollars to luxury hotels to house illegal aliens; reportedly denying aid to Americans on the basis of political affiliation; and bungling disaster relief. A recent report from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General revealed that the agency's mismanagement of funds and resources under Biden-nominated FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell is possibly worse than previously imagined. According to DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari — not among the IGs that President Donald Trump has so far chosen to fire — FEMA mismanaged nearly $10 billion in COVID-19 emergency protective measures grants during fiscal years 2020 through 2023. The Jan. 30 report indicated the waste at FEMA was the result in part of the agency "not following established requirements when delivering Public Assistance funding." When it came to a medical staffing grant, for example, "FEMA did not validate the reasonableness of cost estimates provided by the state before obligating funds." FEMA must assess the reasonableness of the estimated costs by reviewing historical documentation, using average area costs, or relying on published cost-estimated services. The report claimed, however, that during the pandemic, the agency didn't bother with proper validation and relied instead on "one sheet of paper with no itemized costs" that "was not prepared by a licensed Professional Engineer or cost-estimated professional" when approving a grant valued at over $1.1 billion. 'FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.' "FEMA's inadequate validation of pre-award costs for the state's medical staffing project contributed to $1.5 billion in funds that could have been put to better use," said the report. "Had the $1.5 billion not been over-obligated to this project, it could have been transferred to the Disaster Relief Fund and made available to provide funding for other disasters." The inspector general noted further that the agency also didn't bother validating the costs submitted for reimbursement on completed projects before shoveling over taxpayer money. Analysts with the IG's office apparently selected a random sample of 20 large projects totaling $58 million "from a universe of 8,420 projects ranging from $131,100 through $100 and reviewed pre-award controls." They ultimately found that six of the 20 completed projects, totaling roughly $33 million, lacked the required documentation to validate "completion of the work and actual costs incurred before project award and reimbursement." FEMA officials were evidently throwing around money without proper confirmation of whether the services were being rendered to eligible participants, whether the jobs were actually getting done, and who if anybody was doing them. The agency's apparent difficulty properly vetting funding to a single state, which the OIG did not name in the report, led to $8.1 billion of spending that the inspector general is now questioning. Former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas complained on Sept. 30 that "FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and what is imminent." It appears that haphazard project approvals and other forms of mismanagement emptied the agency's coffers and put Americans in danger. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Leftists love to clutch their pearls over the illegal immigrants who harvest our crops, but they never want to talk about the ones who commit violent crimes, the ones who peddle drugs throughout the country, or the ones who are just on the taxpayer dole with no intention of ever contributing to the system. “We just let 20 million people in here; 325,000 kids are missing,” and yet Democrats continue to worry about “who’s going to pick the lettuce,” sighs Mark Levin. CNN’s Jake Tapper is one of those liberals. Thankfully, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller didn’t let him get away with perpetuating the narrative that the majority of illegal immigrants are working on farms. Levin plays the clip of Tapper’s humiliating experience being schooled with facts on his own show. “The Department of Agriculture says that between 2020 and 2022, 42% of crop workers were undocumented immigrants,” Tapper began. “How does President Trump make sure that the effort to deport people who are not in this country legally doesn't end up hurting Americans who want safe borders, absolutely, but also don't want to see even more higher prices in groceries?” “I'm sure it's not your position, Jake, you're just asking the question, that we should supply America's food with exploitative illegal alien labor,” Miller said with a not-so-subtle hint of sarcasm. “Only 1% of alien workers in the entire country work in agriculture. The top destination for illegal aliens are large cities like New York, like Los Angeles. ... None of those illegal aliens are doing farm work,” he corrected. When Tapper accused him of changing the subject, Miller only got more lethal: “The illegal aliens [Joe Biden] brought in are from Venezuela, from Haiti, from Nicaragua. They are not doing farm work. They are in our cities collecting welfare. As for the farmers, there is a guest worker program that President Trump supports. Over time, as well, we will transition into automation, so we'll never have to have this conversation ever again.” “But there's no universe in which this nation is going to allow the previous president to flood our nation with millions and millions of illegal aliens who just get to stay here, and we are especially not going to allow a subset of those illegal aliens to rape and murder our citizens, so we are going to unapologetically enforce our immigration laws, and as I'm sure you will celebrate, we are going to unleash the power and might of the U.S. government to eradicate the presence of transnational threats on our soil.” All the while Miller was delivering this epic jeremiad, Tapper’s brows were knitted together; he stacked and re-stacked papers with a painful grimace on his face. Levin can’t help but laugh at how Miller easily obliterated the leftist narrative that all illegal immigrants are farm workers all while hinting at the notion that Tapper supports exploitative illegal alien labor and doesn’t care about the dangers facing American citizens. He then breaks down how most foreigners in our agricultural industry are actually doing work legally via work visas. To hear it, and see the footage of Tapper’s brutal schooling, watch the clip above. Want more from Mark Levin?To enjoy more of "the Great One" — Mark Levin as you've never seen him before — subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.