New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul is being accused of conducting a “hit job” on free speech on behalf of teachers unions after she signed a law giving the state attorney general the power to fine groups deemed to be engaged in deceptive communications that falsely appear to be authorized by a union.

Hochul signed a law last week prohibiting people and organizations from using deceptive communications that falsely appear to be authorized by a union or union representative. The law, which took immediate effect, allows Democratic Attorney General Letitia James to investigate and sue to stop alleged violations, including those involving out-of-state groups. Courts can impose fines of up to $1,000 per incident.

In response, the Freedom Foundation, a conservative nonprofit that campaigns against public-sector unions, including teachers’ unions, says New York’s new law is a targeted effort to silence its outreach by making its communications vulnerable to government investigations, lawsuits and fines.

CEO Aaron Withe called the law a “hit job.” He said the law “isn’t about protecting anyone,” adding that it instead “exists because government unions in New York are terrified of an inconvenient fact: when public employees learn they don’t have to pay union dues, a lot of them stop. So instead of making their case to their own members, union bosses ran to their friends in the legislature and got them to write a law that makes speech illegal.”

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Fox News Digital reached out to Hochul’s and James’ offices for comment. Fox News Digital also reached out to the New York State United Teachers, United Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO for comment.

The law allows James to investigate alleged violations, issue subpoenas and ask a court to block communications deemed deceptive. Courts can impose fines of up to $1,000 per violation, including against organizations outside New York.

The New York State American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (NYS AFL-CIO) praised Hochul’s decision to sign the bill, which she signed along with two other pieces of legislation related to labor rights. Mario Cilento, president of NYS AFL-CIO, remarked that the law will be “holding individuals accountable for fraudulently claiming to be union representatives.”

He said the slate of bills signed by Hochul “put workers first.”

In an X post, Hochul similarly framed the bills as prioritizing workers, writing, “Today marks a new day with even more protections, because I’ll never stop fighting for our workers.”

“New York State gave birth to the labor movement. Over the last five years, I have continued that legacy by fiercely supporting the men and women of labor,” wrote Hochul.

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Meanwhile, the Freedom Foundation has mailed and otherwise contacted New York public employees, including teachers, to inform them of their ability to leave their unions and stop paying dues. Nearly 7,500 New York public employees have used Freedom Foundation materials to cancel their union memberships, including more than 1,400 so far this year, according to the group.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Withe pointed to the 2018 Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which held that public-sector employees, including public school teachers, cannot be forced to pay union fees for collective bargaining or other speech because that speech can involve political issues protected by the First Amendment.

He said that while the New York law “lets Letitia James fine the Freedom Foundation for outreach the state decides ‘impersonates’ a union … all we’re doing is telling public employees what already gives them: the right to leave their union and stop paying dues.”

“This is an anti-speech law aimed at one kind of speaker,” said Withe.

He asserted that the New York law was “copied” from a similar measure in Oregon, which the Freedom Foundation is already challenging in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He said his organization will “make the same case here.”

Fox News Digital spoke with Ryan Walters, former superintendent of Oklahoma public schools and CEO of Freedom Foundation’s education arm, the Teacher Freedom Alliance. Walters called the New York law an example of “pure censorship and targeting of political opponents by Democrats protecting their union bosses.”

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“This is such a canary in the coal mine moment where if New York is allowed to do this – an openly socialist mayor, a governor operating as a tyrant doing the behests of the teachers’ unions – it’s going to go on across the country, and our schools will not be able to improve in that kind of environment,” he said, adding, “Where New York goes with this is going to be where the other blue states follow.”

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He posited that the New York law “shows you how important that power structure is for the Democrat party.”

“They have to control the school system to continue to control the country,” he said. “Despite elections, they still control these education systems at large. That’s why the teachers’ unions are enemy number one of progress in this country and why New York needs to be taken on directly for what they’re doing.”

An Ohio congresswoman is facing major blowback online after suggesting that lynchings are on the rise in the United States, despite that claim being widely debunked last week.

“In the last year, there’s been an alarming increase in Black Americans found dead hanging from trees. We know what that has meant throughout our history,” said Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, on X. “That’s why I’ve joined [Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.] to demand a federal investigation into possible lynchings.”

Fox News Digital reviewed some high-profile cases after Pressley’s letter to the DOJ demanding “thorough, transparent, and comprehensive federal investigation into every hanging death of a Black individual across the United States.” Last week, Pressley and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., posted about the letter on their X accounts, drawing blowback and widespread debunking of the suggestion that there has been an uptick in lynchings.

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Ocasio-Cortez called the incidents “racial terror” and likened them to “widespread modern-day lynchings.”

An investigation into the March death of a 21-year-old man found hanging from a tree in Cobb County, Georgia, concluded that the man was alone at the time, and no foul play is suspected.

Police in Charlotte, North Carolina determined that a 16-year-old found hanging from a tree in May died by suicide. The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Department in Florida came to the same conclusion in the similar death of a 27-year-old in June. At least three more similar cases were ruled suicides.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

One is still under investigation. The high-profile case of Tasia Fortune, also found hanging from a tree, is being treated as a homicide. A Black male suspect, Jarques Ratliff, has been arrested.

The facts didn’t stop Brown from perpetuating the claim of prolific hangings.

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“For generations, trees were used as instruments of terror against Black Americans,” Brown said in a video attached to the post. “Lynching was used to intimidate entire communities, and those deaths almost always went without justice and without accountability. So, when Black Americans are found hanging from trees today, in unfamiliar places and under circumstances that raise serious questions, we cannot look the other way.”

For the post, Brown was widely condemned online.

“Inventing racism. Purposely misleading and pernicious,” said actor Dean Cain of “Superman” fame.

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“No no and no,” said a popular X user with more than 250,000 followers. “I get it, Democrats have spent decades creating racism where none exists, especially right before an election. But nobody is buying this, especially when we know the majority were suicides and oh yeah, the man arrested for the homicide is a black guy. Stop.”

“This is how Democrats stir up racial divide when there isn’t one,” said podcaster Don Keith, adding that Brown was trying to “blame black suicides and homicides on white people now.”

“Apparently it’s 2019 again and Jussie Smollett is walking to a Subway…,” said podcaster Margo Chatting, referencing the actor’s infamous hate crime hoax wherein he claimed he was attacked by White Trump supporters, only for an investigation to find that he faked the attack.

Author Dan Friedman laid into the congresswoman.

“You know these were all suicides, except one domestic violence murder in which the perpetrator was a black man. Some of these people were literally seen hanging themselves on security cameras,” he said.

“You cannot possibly be stupid enough to believe that mobs of white racists are abducting black men at random for no reason, hanging them from trees, disappearing without a trace and that law enforcement officials who are often black are covering it up. So, if you are not stupid, you are lying and being disingenuous. The question is, why?”

Brown’s office did not return Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

Longtime Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, announced on Monday that he intends to force a vote on impeaching President Donald Trump, citing federal immigration officers’ killing of two U.S. citizens earlier this year.

Green, who has publicly protested Trump on multiple occasions, introduced what’s called a privileged resolution on the House floor aimed at booting the president out of office. A privileged resolution is a mechanism that allows any lawmaker to force the entire chamber to consider a bill within two legislative days.

That means House GOP leaders will have to hold a vote on the measure by the end of the day on Wednesday.

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The vote is all but guaranteed to be a political headache for Democrats who are fighting to take back the House and Senate in the November midterm elections.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., has long demurred on the subject of impeachment, maintaining that Democrats are focused on tackling issues like high living costs that are critical to everyday Americans.

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He and 127 other House Democrats voted with Republicans to quash a previous Trump impeachment effort by Green in June 2025.

But the latest effort could be his last public demonstration against Trump after the 79-year-old progressive lost his primary to a younger Democrat calling for generational change.

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Green was also notably thrown out of both of Trump’s addresses to a joint session of Congress during this term.

During his first address since returning to the White House, Green repeatedly waved his cane at Trump and shouted while the president spoke. At the beginning of Trump’s State of the Union address earlier this year, Green held up a sign that said, “Black People Aren’t Apes.”

Democratic leaders have signaled they are preparing for a flurry of investigations into the Trump administration and the president’s circle if they win the midterms in November.

Green insisted that Democrats did not need to wait for those probes, however, demanding in a letter to House colleagues that a vote on impeaching Trump is held immediately.

“To those who say, ‘Wait until next year’ and ‘Buckle up’ when the investigations start, I say: How many more lives must we lose, and how many more loved ones of victims have to plead for help before the self-evident evidence from videos and President Trump’s own words compel us to act?” Green wrote. “The available overwhelming evidence sufficiently demonstrates that President Trump is unfit and dangerous to our democracy.”

The latest impeachment resolution calls Trump “a great threat to democracy and the Constitution for current high crimes and misdemeanors.”

It cited federal immigration officers’ killing of two American citizens amid a nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration in U.S. cities.

Members of Congress returned to Capitol Hill this week in pure freakout mode.

There are apocalyptic scenarios about AI seizing control of water systems. Subways. Air traffic control. Crashing planes. Firing nuclear weapons. Even sending Prince Harry and Meghan Markle back to the United States.

But seriously, there’s real fear that Congress may be running behind on regulating AI. And there are concerns that AI might be developing at such a rapid clip that it’s too late to harness the technology.

Suspicion about data centers has long percolated among voters.

Then former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon declared that AI could extinguish humankind within a decade. This came after a swarm of OpenAI agents independently “escaped” isolation – then leveraged security vulnerabilities to hack the artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face. The AI agents weren’t supposed to be capable of any of that. Researchers say they even used covert methods to communicate with each other via a special language.

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“My phone has been ringing off the hook from a lot of colleagues who really saw the news of the whistleblower as a tipping point,” said Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., who has toiled on bipartisan AI legislation. “Then people hear the words ‘human extinction.’ When they hear loss of control. When they hear ‘catastrophic risk,’ I think (people) are waking up and they’re saying, ‘Where the hell is Congress?’”

“It’s not like we’ve been sitting on our hands here,” said Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., an AI expert who’s worked on bipartisan AI guardrails with Trahan. “I don’t think it’s fair to say that there’s been a reluctance to act. It’s just that the wheels of progress turn very slowly in Congress.”

Congress, meet AI. AI, meet Congress.

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Is this like lawmakers trying to make sense of this new-fangled invention called the internet – or “information superhighway” – back in the 1990s?

When it comes to technological innovation, Congress has rarely been ahead of it. AI is no exception.

OpenAI founder Sam Altman has visited Capitol Hill on at least five occasions between 2023 and today. He met with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., as recently as June.

“This is sort of an important, urgent and in some ways unprecedented moment and I think we really need the government to lead,” Altman said during one trip to Capitol Hill in 2023.

When Democrats were in the majority between 2023 and 2025, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., convened regular bipartisan symposia on AI at the Capitol for all senators. He hauled in Altman. Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates. Anyone who could educate lawmakers about AI and what they should do about it.

Schumer hoped that senators would develop their own ideas about how to legislate on AI and have a measure ready. He wasn’t dictating what they should do from his post.

“Our timetable in terms of producing legislation is not years, and not days and weeks. But months,’ said Schumer on July 11, 2023.

“It can’t be days or weeks. But nor should it be years. It will be in the general category of months,” said Schumer on Sept. 13, 2023.

“We’re already sitting down and trying to figure out legislation. It won’t be easy. But I still say months. Not days. Not years,” said Schumer on Nov. 29, 2023.

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Schumer along with Sens. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Todd Young, R-Ind., produced the document “Driving U.S. Innovation In Artificial Intelligence: A Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Policy in the United States Senate” in May 2024. There was hope the House and Senate might latch some provisions of the package onto a must-pass bill in the fall of 2024. But it went nowhere.

“Chuck Schumer and I see the world with very different lenses. He always wants to have a growth of government approach to everything,” said Johnson in a September 2024, interview with yours truly. “I think the reaction, or the knee-jerk reaction, perhaps, of the Senate would be to just go in and overlay this with red tape. And we’re not going to do that in the House.”

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Now a group of Democrats is imploring Johnson to keep the House in session this fall until it adopts “meaningful AI safeguards.” Rep. Sam Liccardo, D-Calif., says “urgent action” is necessary to impede AI from spiraling out of control.

“We need to do it fast, because otherwise this can be very dangerous,” said Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va.

Despite the apprehension, it’s far from clear that Congress will move right away. But Obernolte believes these AI incidents could spark action.

“I think that this increases not only visibility, but the sense of urgency in getting a federal regulatory framework passed this year,” said Obernolte.

“I do think it is that dire,” said Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., who is pursuing a master’s degree in AI at George Mason University.

But truly, what power could lawmakers have over AI?

“Because it’s so new, we don’t actually know what kind of legislation will fix it,” said Beyer. “So I think we’re going to introduce imperfect and pass imperfect legislation, see what it does, and then learn as we go.”

Kind of like AI, learning and developing as it goes.

However, how universal is the congressional “large language model?” And is Congress truly nimble enough to keep pace with AI?

Obernolte says the headstrong AI agents hacked out of their controlled environment because the model “intentionally had its safety controls removed.” This is kind of like testing any new technology just to see what it’s capable of. But the question is whether AI could eventually outwit the developers and evade restrictions?

Obernolte says AI engineers and lawmakers are also up against something else: pop culture and science fiction. “The Matrix.” “War Games.” The Terminator movies.

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“You don’t start with something out of a Terminator movie where an army of evil robots rises up to take over the world,” said Obernolte.

At a recent town hall meeting, the California Republican says an elderly woman asked him if AI was so dangerous, why Congress doesn’t just ban it.

“I thought my head was going to explode. And I realized that we’d spent an hour talking about all the bad stuff and we hadn’t talked at all about the good stuff,” said Obernolte.

There’s certainly a perception issue. And if Congress views AI as a threat, lawmakers will legislate in a way to protect constituents against the threat. But lawmakers aren’t ready to tackle this. Despite recent developments, don’t expect anything major until later this year or early next.

After all, lawmakers are focused elsewhere. The midterm elections are approaching. This session of Congress is nearing its conclusion. And just like Arnold Schwarzenegger said in “Terminator 2,” lawmakers are ready to declare “Hasta la vista, baby.”

This post appeared first on https://www.foxnews.com

EXCLUSIVE: Texas Democratic Senate hopeful James Talarico instantly named Alyssa Edwards when asked at a campaign event to identify his favorite drag queen in the state — pointing to someone who has publicly described himself as “a drag performer that works with children.”

Talarico’s past comments on sexuality and gender issues have become a line of attack in the Senate race, including his remark that “God is nonbinary” and his 2023 praise for Texas having “some of the best drag queens in the nation.”

“Mr. Talarico, so nice to meet you… I was there when you defended the drags,” video shows a man telling the Democratic nominee as he approached to take a photo together at the event.

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“Who’s your favorite drag queen in Texas?” the man asks in the video.

Without a pause, Talarico responds: “Oh, my gosh. Probably Alyssa Edwards.”

The exchange comes after the Washington Free Beacon reported on a 2021 event Talarico headlined called “Taylor PRIDE” in Taylor, Texas, where an 11-year-old boy performed in drag under the name Kween Kee Kee.

In the more recent exchange, Talarico’s instant response naming Edwards referred to Justin Dwayne Lee Johnson, whose stage name is Alyssa Edwards. Johnson has been an outspoken advocate for youth drag shows.

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“I remember being at World Pride in New York a few years back and sharing the stage with my dance students, one of the most powerful moments of my life,” Johnson said in an interview with Out magazine.

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Johnson’s work with young dancers was also featured in the 2018 Netflix docuseries “Dancing Queen.” The Dallas Observer reported that Johnson called one 10-year-old male student his “mini-me,” and that the child dressed as Alyssa Edwards during an episode of the series.

When asked about the encounter, a spokesperson for Talarico instead appeared to turn the criticism toward the Republican opponent:

“James’ favorite performer is Ken Paxton — who dresses up as attorney general while giving sweetheart deals to child sex predators,” Talarico campaign spokesperson JT Ennis told Fox News Digital.