John Cleese must feel very lonely.

Not only is the Monty Python alum virtually alone in calling out the inconvenient ills of British society, but he rarely gets support from his fellow stars.

It’s climate change alarmism run wild, a shocking project from an actor who aggressively avoids political hot takes.

Cowards, the lot of ’em.

Now, things could be getting serious. A British Muslim group has reported Cleese to the authorities for his “anti-Islamic” comments. It’s not funny. Just ask Graham Linehan. The British comic/writer got arrested last year for his thoughts on transgenderism.

Will Cleese be next? Just know that if he’s sent to the hoosegow, free speech “warriors” like Jimmy Kimmel and Howard Stern will remain whisper-silent …

Woody’s buzz

Woody Allen is heading back to work at the age of 90.

The quasi-canceled auteur is prepping his next film, a story he describes as “a comedy with romance, intrigue, and infidelity.”

The more things change, right?

Except some things have changed for Allen. A-listers now flee his projects, fearful of the MeToo blowback. Did Allen inappropriately touch his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow many years ago? For a while, Hollywood shrugged off the accusations. Then, after the #MeToo revolution, “name” stars stopped working with him.

There’s an easy fix for him. All he needs to do is shout, “Free Palestine,” and he could be back in the industry’s good graces again …

Green party

Hulk still mad!

Mark Ruffalo has been obsessed with the Paramount/Warner Bros. merger for some time. “Merger bad!” he cried from every possible venue.

Now, with the deal close to fruition, he’s still sounding off.

“This merger will stifle creativity, weaken free speech, and cost people their jobs — it is a bad deal for this country and should never have been approved.”

Huh. We don’t remember Ruffalo tearing his trousers over Disney’s acquisition of Fox, or the rampant attacks on free speech during the woke era …

Hulk hypocrite!

RELATED: ‘View’ host questions Patrick Clancy’s divorce: ‘You know, in sickness and in health’

Lou Rocco/Boston Globe/Getty Images

S is for ‘socialism’

Jon Stewart is getting a tad touchy.

The far-Left “Daily Show” host has been kissing up to socialists for quite a while now. Watching him lob softballs at Zohran Mamdani gave us one undeniable thought. “Get a room.”

Now, he’s recoiling at being labeled a socialist.

And, you know, now the buzzword on, on the right is, oh, so you’re, you know, you want socialism. Well, no, I want to stop privatizing things that don’t work well in a market system like health care, like Medicare, like all those things that are getting ruined by privatization and insurance, and all those different markets and rebalance so that labor gets a fairer shake.”

Fair shake? He blasts income inequality and is a millionaire many times over. And if George Soros graced his Comedy Central studio, he would ask even more gentle questions than the ones that greeted Mamdani.

If you don’t want the “S” label on your jersey, Jon, maybe ask a tough question or two of the next DSA member who enters your studio …

Goofy ‘Globes’

There’s plenty to laugh at regarding the annual Golden Globes gala. The awards remain in the shadow of the Academy Awards, for starters. Nominees are known to hit the bar, and hard, between announcements. Plus, unusual nominees and bizarre categories are still the norm.

Now this.

“Obsession,” the year’s most unlikely blockbuster, will compete for Globe honors in the Comedy/Musical category. The horror film isn’t remotely funny, beyond some gallows humor that runs through many a horror tale. And if there was a musical number between star Inde Navarrette’s murderous rages, we missed it.

As long as the Globes cling to such insane categories, they will remain a punching bag for all things Hollywood …

‘Digger’ in deep

Steven Spielberg famously praised Tom Cruise for “saving” Hollywood with “Top Gun: Maverick.” The blockbuster coaxed moviegoers back to theaters after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, Cruise may be an anchor around the neck of a major movie studio.

Warner Bros., about to be gobbled up by Paramount, spent a reported $180 million on Cruise’s new film, “Digger.” The black comedy casts Cruise as a Southern oil tycoon whose drilling station sparks an ecological panic.

It’s climate change alarmism run wild, a shocking project from an actor who aggressively avoids political hot takes.

The film is getting some awful reviews, deservedly so, and could lose Warner Bros. millions.

How many? The conservative estimate is at least $100 million. Crunch the numbers on a cocktail napkin, and you might want to double that figure. “Digger” is looking at a $12 million opening, at best.

Once word of mouth kicks in, it’s good night, Gracie.

Did Hollywood’s onetime savior just dig an iconic studio’s grave?

​Warner bros, Climate change alarmism, Tom cruise, Islam, John cleese, Hollywood, Entertainment, Movies, Digger, Paramount, Mark ruffalo, Lifestyle, Woody allen, Jon stewart, Zohran mamdani, The daily show, Socialism, Toto recall 

As voting day approaches quickly, BlazeTV host Steve Deace believes Republicans are making a critical mistake: focusing too much on what they’re for and not enough on who they’re running against.

Laying out what he calls a political survival strategy, Deace urges GOP candidates at every level to embrace far more aggressive campaign messaging.

“The biggest strength we have is who we’re running against,” Deace explains, noting that this “is what the strategic plan should be.”

“I’m looking at what’s been used against me in the past and done so successfully and can I emulate it in a way that doesn’t violate my own worldview?” he says, “And in this case, the answer is yes. We’re not going to bear false witness.”

“We don’t have to, like they do calling us Nazis, but we’re just going to say they’re anti-American communists. We’re going to try to drive turnout down,” he adds.

While he admits that may sound “cynical,” he doesn’t care.

“I like my way of winning better than your way of losing,” he says.

“Drive down turnout. This is what they did in 2022. Drive down normie turnout because … basically every normie voter is going to just assume they’re voting against us. Our margins with normies are like minus 30 or something,” he continues.

Deace says that the Republican Party needs to assume that these “normies” will be “voting against us.”

“Drive down as much of that normie vote as you can,” he explains. “Make the environment as negative and toxic as you can.”

This strategy is one of survival, and Deace concludes it with three parts: “Drive down normie turnout, heighten the negative messaging on who our opponents really are, and try to heal the fractures within our coalition as best we can by what people are actually united against, rather than trying to message to them things they’re never going to be united for.”

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve’s take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Steve deace, Midterms, Election, Republicans, Democrats, Messaging, Strategy, Voting, Blazetv show 

On May 13, 2026, CIA senior operations officer James Erdman III appeared under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He was testifying despite his agency’s objections.

Erdman had recently led an investigation for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s “Director’s Initiatives Group” into COVID-19 origins, anomalous health incidents, and UFOs. What he told the senators was explosive.

‘We just want to clear the air. We did not take back documents.’

“Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional,” Erdman testified. He said Fauci had steered the intelligence community’s COVID-origins analysis by supplying “a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts,” several of whom co-wrote the paper dismissing the lab-leak theory.

Inside the CIA, Erdman said, six of the seven technical experts involved in a COVID relook favored a lab-leak conclusion. Management changed the assessment anyway in what he called a “middle-of-the-night anonymous rewrite.”

Then came the allegation that set House members on fire.

“The CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of DIG personnel, their investigations, and contact with whistleblowers,” Erdman said. “When the DIG ceased operations, the CIA took back 40 boxes of JFK and MK-Ultra files being processed for declassification by DNI Gabbard.”

Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) read aloud a statement the CIA had just released calling the hearing “dishonest political theater.” Then he turned to Erdman. “I have years and years and years of built-up frustration of agencies like the CIA, Department of Justice, the FBI, HHS, snubbing our oversight, giving us the big middle finger,” Johnson said.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), chairwoman of the House declassification task force, called the episode “an internal coup.” She and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) took to social media demanding that the files be returned. Within a day, the CIA invited them to headquarters.

On May 14, Burlison and Luna stood before the Memorial Wall at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, its 141 stars carved into white marble for officers who died in the line of duty.

They had surrendered their phones. No aides were allowed, no notepads, no recording devices. If anyone later disputed what was said, there would be no way to prove it.

They were led up an elevator to the top floor and through narrow, winding hallways. Burlison was struck by how ordinary it felt: a sterile cubicle farm straight out of a “Dilbert” cartoon.

The meeting was supposed to be with CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Instead, they were met by the agency’s archivist, a woman in her late 50s who oversaw two football fields’ worth of paper files.

RELATED: Fauci’s agency backed an experiment aerosolizing lethal Ebola — then he panicked about what it exposed about vaccination

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Ratcliffe, they were told, was “out of pocket.” They later learned he was in Cuba.

“We just want to clear the air,” the archivist began. “We did not take back documents.”

In the CIA’s telling, when President Trump ordered the JFK records released, Gabbard’s team showed up unannounced and demanded them. The CIA objected to the files leaving in the team’s personal cars and insisted on moving them in its own secure vans.

About 300 boxes were handed over, the CIA said, while 42 were at another location being processed. When those were ready, according to the agency, it notified the DNI’s office.

Burlison saw the irony. The CIA was telling the office that oversees it that it could not be trusted with the files.

“You do recognize that there’s a point of friction between the CIA and the ODNI,” he told them, “and there’s a reason ODNI came in without informing you that they were coming? There’s clearly a level of mistrust between the two organizations.”

RELATED: Deep-staters at FBI framed Trump firing Comey as a Russian op — then apparently worked to cover their tracks

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

They acknowledged it. They also agreed that the CIA spokesperson’s public attacks were unacceptable.

“The way they conducted themselves in the meeting was almost like they were a kid caught doing something wrong,” Burlison told me afterward, “and were profusely apologetic, and desperately trying to figure out, ‘How do we de-escalate the situation?'”

Burlison left without a clear answer about what was in those 42 boxes or whether the CIA had pulled them before Gabbard’s team could review them. The CIA also said there were 11 more boxes the DNI would never be allowed to see because they contained tradecraft secrets.

He wasn’t interested in de-escalating.

Two and a half months later, Luna told me the CIA had located the files and placed them in line for declassification.

But it took a whistleblower defying his own agency, a Senate subpoena, and two members of Congress walking into Langley to get there.

If the task force doesn’t survive November, who will make that walk next time?

Editor’s note: This article is excerpted from “Book of Secrets: Congress Tries to Find the Truth About the Deep State,” by Kent Heckenlively (Permuted Press).

​Anna paulina luna, Cia, Covid19, Eric burlison, Fbi, Homeland security, Odni, Opinion & analysis, Ron johnson, Senate, Tulsi gabbard, Whistleblower, Jfk files, Mk ultra 

AI is coming for our jobs. It may even come for our lives. At least, that’s the assumption increasingly baked into modern life. We’re told machines will soon diagnose our illnesses, program our software, drive our cars, and leave millions of humans wondering what, exactly, they’re still good for.

What if that assumption is badly wrong?

Alejandro Rodriguez, a 20-year-old with a 4.5 GPA who spent his formative years in gifted and talented programs, certainly believes it is. By the conventional American definition of success, he was exactly the sort of kid who should have been pushed toward a four-year college. Instead, he chose technical school and trained to become a Porsche technician. His decision points to something the AI panic often overlooks. There is still an enormous number of things humans need to know how to do in the real world, and they can’t be done with a prompt. They require skill, judgment, patience, and the ability to do something useful with your hands.

The deeper problem is not AI itself. Instead, it is the growing belief that everything humans learn will eventually become worthless. That mindset is pure poison. If young people assume AI will eventually do every meaningful task, why bother learning carpentry, mechanics, welding, electrical work, cooking, nursing, or other practical skills? Why even bother getting out of bed in the morning? The irony is impossible to ignore. The more people believe humans are obsolete, the less capable humans become.

A cultural correction

America spent decades telling smart kids that success meant sitting at a desk in a fancy office, filling out spreadsheets until their mid-60s. Now tech executives are shipping code designed to render those exact spreadsheet-fillers redundant. A cultural correction is under way. Being able to rebuild a blown engine, wire a high-voltage circuit, repair a factory line, or build a house has real value because some things still have to be done by human beings.

AI will eliminate or transform some jobs. That is true. Yet a huge canyon separates a software model generating text from a physical entity that replaces millions of workers navigating unpredictable, real-world environments. A chatbot can generate a textbook explanation of a Porsche’s dual-clutch transmission. The chatbot cannot crawl onto a cold concrete floor on a Tuesday morning to replace the clutch pack.

Certain tech prophets display a peculiar brand of fatalism. They demand that humans accept the swift death of their own relevance as an act of faith. This doctrine breeds its own fulfillment. Tell an entire generation that their talents are dead on arrival, and they stop pursuing difficult trades. When the nation runs out of people who can fix a broken water main, the technocrats blame automated progress rather than the cultural disdain that killed off the workforce.

RELATED: Our military turns off this invasive smartphone feature. So should you.

Thx4Stock/Getty images

America suffers from a competence famine. The economy needs citizens who can execute physical tasks correctly. Someone has to run the copper pipe, construct the frame, mend the bone, operate the lathe, and keep the power grid online. Software models function exceptionally well in environments made purely of data. The physical world remains stubbornly physical.

Rodriguez isn’t alone in obliterating America’s long-standing myth. A growing wave of high schoolers like him are drawing headlines of their own. “Elijah Rios won’t graduate from high school until next year, but he already has a job offer,” the Wall Street Journal recently reported, “one that pays $68,000 a year.” His Catholic high school in Philadelphia partners with companies looking for recruits before they even graduate. The Journal has been tracking such companies’ struggles to find hires from the typical job pools for years. Last year, Missouri senior Jenna Smith, with a 3.98 GPA and National Honor Society participation at Francis Howell High, chose to become a welder like her grandfather.

Guidance counselors and, often, parents can be slow to go along with the shifting tides. They have long treated technical trades as a consolation prize for academic failures. High marks meant a liberal arts degree, followed by 40 years of answering emails.

But high intelligence has zero natural connection to desktop work. A student can master advanced calculus and still prefer the immediate reality of a machine shop.

Competence or bust

The classic path — straight A’s leading to a university degree leading to an entry-level cubicle — is breaking at the midpoint. Automated systems are devouring the very administrative roles that university graduates relied on to pay off their student debt. Higher education still serves a clear purpose for specialized fields. But the blanket belief that a four-year degree represents the sole respectable entrance into adulthood no longer holds.

In a world made of bits, AI rules supreme. Silicon Valley coders write scripts that spit out screenplays and analyze legal contracts in seconds. Outside the server farm, rain leaks through roof shingles. Electrical transformers blow out during winter storms. Hydraulic lines rupture on garbage trucks. Millions of daily crises require spatial reasoning and fingers and thumbs.

Predicting the labor market in 2045 remains a fool’s game. AI could reshape whole industries before Christmas, or it could hit insurmountable barriers regarding energy consumption, hardware limits, and regulatory lawsuits. Betting a career on doom-mongering from software salesmen is a terrible strategy. Personal responsibility demands building actual competence that holds value on any given afternoon.

America spent half a century celebrating corporate credentials and bureaucratic titles, while ignoring the dignity of skilled craftsmanship. Rodriguez picked a difficult trade. He mastered the mechanics and built a career. His smartest observation was entirely practical: These skills guarantee employment for the foreseeable future and perhaps the entirety of his working life.

Fear can be healthy, but building your working life around it isn’t. Competence remains the only reliable shelter. Silicon Valley can create a machine that writes a short story about a broken car, but when the head gasket blows on the highway, AI won’t get you off the shoulder. The future belongs to the person holding both the wrench and the ability to use it properly.

​Tech, Auto mechanic, Artificial intelligence 

An 81-year-old delivery driver struggling up a steep flight of stairs with a family’s lost suitcase caught the attention of a woman named Erin Howell — who asked him what he was doing.

The man, Don Johnson, explained that at his age, delivering an airline’s lost luggage to families in the area is the only job he was able to get.

And he needs the money.

“He’s been married to his wife for 57 years,” Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck explains. “Her name is Josephine. Josephine has cancer. Treatments cost what treatments cost. Prescriptions cost more. So for three years, Don has been driving around North Texas delivering other people’s lost luggage to help pay for his wife’s care.”

“And then he drives home to the one thing he cannot afford to lose. For 57 years. A lifetime of knowing which side of the bed she sleeps on, how she takes her coffee, what she’s thinking about before she says it,” he continues.

“This is a man who made a promise in his 20s. He’s still keeping it in his 80s,” he adds.

Erin then posted the doorbell footage she had of Johnson and began a GoFundMe for him and his wife, which went viral.

“And America does what America does when we’re not busy being angry at each other and hating each other. Thousands of strangers gave hundreds of thousands of dollars. … Messages poured in from people who will never ever meet them, over and over, the same words: ‘We’re praying for you,’” Glenn says.

“A local TV crew came out. Don told them he thought he might actually be able to stop working, stay at home, take care of her full-time, and then it fell apart,” he explains, noting that GoFundMe shut down the campaign for unclear reasons.

However, before the campaign was shut down, Josephine sat down with a TV crew.

“She didn’t talk about money. She talked about the strangers who said they were praying for her.

And she said, “I can face it.”

“She said that was the big difference. She called it a joyful feeling. That’s not a woman who got a check,” Glenn says. “That’s a woman who found out she wasn’t alone.”

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Cancer, Don johnson, Glenn beck, Gofundme, Viral, Blazetv show 

Diesel prices are at all-time highs, and panic has set in. Several Republican senators from Midwest farm states in competitive midterm races are calling on the administration to ban diesel exports. Even President Trump expressed support for the proposal. Lawmakers desperately want to curb the pain felt at the pump and throughout the agricultural industry. It’s understandable. But the knee-jerk reaction to “do something” by banning diesel exports is ill advised and would quickly backfire.

Logic might dictate that preventing all diesel from leaving our borders will allow it to fulfill our needs first. It just doesn’t work that way. Petroleum is a global market.

The only way to curtail a diesel surplus would be to cut back on crude altogether, a move that would be economically devastating.

The U.S. fuel network is not set up to distribute gas throughout our country. Nearly 55% of the nation’s refining occurs along the Gulf Coast, producing more than enough diesel for the region. But much of the surplus must be exported, as there are very few avenues to ship it to other domestic markets, like the East and West Coasts, where it is needed. Both those areas rely on imports to satisfy their diesel and other gasoline demands.

The U.S. has too few pipelines and cargo capabilities to transport energy to these locations. And storage is not an option; there is only so much space.

Refineries cannot flip a switch to produce only the diesel needed at a given time. Processing a barrel of crude oil produces certain proportions of gasoline and other distillates (like diesel and jet fuel); refiners are limited in their ability to adjust those proportions.

The only way to curtail a diesel surplus would be to cut back on crude altogether, a move that would be economically devastating.

At a time when we are already experiencing significant gasoline shortages and steep prices, constricting our supply further would only continue to inflate prices. Voters still rate the economy and affordability as their top concern; higher conventional gas prices would increase financial strain on household budgets.

U.S. diesel exports represent roughly 20% of global supply, which means they put downward pressure on global prices. Removing that portion would push those prices up, and the regions that depend on diesel imports — like the East and West Coasts — will face higher prices.

A ban on diesel and other refined products has been proposed before and soundly rejected. The Biden administration broached the topic in late 2021 but ultimately decided against it. Several analyses concluded that the action would adversely impact the country.

RELATED: The one loophole in Trump’s tariff policy

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

A 2022 American Council for Capital Formation study predicted that such a ban would shut down roughly 1.3 million barrels a day of refining capacity. More than two-thirds of U.S. consumers would see price increases of roughly $0.15/gallon for gas and $0.45/gallon for diesel, and GDP would drop by $44 billion the following year.

McKinsey & Company similarly calculated bad news for U.S. consumers. A ban may initially provide relief for Gulf Coast and Midwest customers, but it wouldn’t last. Import-reliant regions, such as our coasts, would experience diesel price spikes due to global prices inflating by at least $0.60 per gallon.

Unfortunately, until there is a durable resolution to the geopolitical conflicts and disruptions abroad that would restore a steadier flow of resources, there is not a quick remedy that can bring energy costs down. Since energy markets and refinery operations are globally interconnected, a rash course of action has ripple effects felt across supply chain networks, some of which touch parts of our own country.

Lawmakers should focus on long-lasting solutions at home that will provide better insulation and protection from outside forces beyond our control.

Make federal land leasing more predictable and feasible for petroleum exploration and development. Streamline permitting to facilitate and hasten building energy infrastructure like refineries for processing fuel and pipelines to transport it across the country. Create a regulatory environment that fosters investment in the essential energy sources that run our economy.

A durable fix requires resisting the temptation of quick, politically satisfying moves and instead doubling down on policies that expand supply, modernize infrastructure, and strengthen the resilience of our energy system.

Banning diesel exports would raise prices for most Americans, destabilize global markets, and weaken the very regions already under strain. Rather than constricting flows in a tightly interconnected network, lawmakers should pursue reforms that unlock investment, improve distribution, and ensure that the U.S. can reliably meet its own needs.

The path to lower prices runs through growth and modernization — not restriction.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.

​Export ban, Fuel, Gas prices, Midterms, Republicans, Gulf coast, Oil refineries, Crude oil, Gdp, Americans, Global markets, Energy, Midwest, Opinion & analysis, Diesel prices 

With just over one month left before Election Day, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is telling its voters to turn out — no matter what.

Blaze News received an exclusive sneak peek at a new video the committee is releasing Saturday calling on Republicans to “hold the line” in what it describes as a record number of toss-up Senate races. With thin projected margins and a slew of candidates who previously overperformed the polls, the NRSC is betting on voters pollsters are missing carrying Republicans to victory.

‘We will win.’

“American freedom, safety, and prosperity are on the line,” NRSC Communications Director Joanna Rodriguez said in a press release obtained by Blaze News. She warned of “socialist Democrats taking control of Congress.”

Rodriguez named names. She called Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed a “terrorist sympathizer.” She called Maine’s Troy Jackson, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, and Alaska’s Mary Peltola “corrupt losers.”

“The battle for Senate control in the midterms is leading to nationwide attention that could decide the balance of power next year,” the ad states.

“The fight is on,” it continues and calls Democrat triumphalism into doubt.

The ad shows Democrats sounding hopeful but not confident. Former North Carolina Democrat Governor Roy Cooper notes that the state hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly two decades. New Hampshire’s Democrat Senate candidate, Rep. Chris Pappas, calls New Hampshire “a purple state.”

RELATED: ‘Fool me once’: CNN analyst has bad news for Democrats who believe recent polls

“No matter what state you’re in, the margins are too thin,” NRSC Chairman Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) can be heard saying. “Work your tail off.”

The video also invites Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to chime in. Thune can be heard saying Democrats have “embraced the socialist wing of their party.”

The NRSC is asking voters to remember just how chaotic things can become under Democrat rule. The campaign doesn’t want voters to forget about America’s recent past.

There are others taking notice of that recent past.

For instance, CNN’s chief data analyst has found Republican turnout enthusiasm running at near parity with Democrats. With a map showing that registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats, that enthusiasm gap can make all the difference in the world.

National polls underestimated the GOP by three points in 2014, three in 2016, five in 2020, and three in 2024, according to the NRSC. If these 2026 midterms skew by a similar margin, CNN’s Enten projects a 53-47 Republican Senate majority.

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, contributes even sharper analysis to the argument. His analysis on Thursday found that Senate polls taken 33 days before Election Day overstated Democrats by an average of 6.2 points in Iowa, Ohio, and Michigan from 2018 through 2024. The NRSC says those same polls wrote off Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who both cruised to victory in a presidential election year.

Two of those three states, Ohio and Michigan, are on the battleground list again this year. Ruffini’s analysis may be especially serendipitous for a cycle that could defy generations of set-in-stone expectations.

The video refuses to concede the midterms as a done deal. Rather, it calls Republicans into action for an off-cycle election year. The NRSC wants Republicans to know that the future of American governance rests on committed voters turning out. Without them, Republicans may fall victim to a midterm curse that has held for almost 100 years.

“We will win,” the narrator says.

The NRSC has just over a month to make that proclamation come true.

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​Politics 

Attention car buyers: For once, Washington has some good news for you.

The federal government has finalized a major change to fuel-economy rules that could make vehicles less expensive for automakers to build. The new standards are projected to produce a fleet-wide average of about 34.9 mpg by model year 2031, down from the 50.4 mpg trajectory under the previous rules.

If manufacturers now face tens of billions of dollars less in projected technology costs, I want to know what happens to those savings.

The Transportation Department estimates the change will reduce manufacturers’ average cost by about $1,300 per vehicle and save Americans roughly $138 billion over five years.

Room to maneuver

But the number that jumped out at me is $60.6 billion.

That’s how much the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration projects automakers’ technology costs will decline through 2031 compared with the previous standards. General Motors alone accounts for an estimated $20.4 billion, followed by Stellantis at $6.6 billion, Ford at $5.8 billion, Toyota at $4.5 billion, and Honda at $4.1 billion.

Those aren’t small numbers. Change the economics of building a car that much, and eventually I want to see the difference on the showroom floor.

For years, increasingly aggressive fuel-economy requirements pushed automakers toward additional fuel-saving technology and complicated compliance strategies. Electric vehicles were one way of improving fleet averages, and product planning increasingly had to account for what Washington demanded as well as what customers wanted.

Meanwhile, buying a new vehicle has become painfully expensive. The average new-vehicle transaction price hit $50,089 in August, according to Kelley Blue Book.

Now automakers have more room to maneuver. NHTSA says its new rules give manufacturers more flexibility to build vehicles based on customer demand. The agency is also changing vehicle-classification rules beginning with the 2030 model year. Under the current system, NHTSA says manufacturers have incentives to modify vehicles so they qualify as light trucks, while hatchbacks, wagons, and other smaller vehicles are discouraged.

That’s the sort of regulatory change car buyers may actually notice.

Automakers don’t build vehicles simply because somebody in Washington thinks they should exist. They build them when the economics work.

California split

California has been pushing in the opposite direction. Its Advanced Clean Cars II program required manufacturers to meet increasingly stringent zero-emission-vehicle targets on the way to 100% by 2035. And California’s influence doesn’t stop at the state line. The Clean Air Act allows other states to adopt California’s vehicle-emission standards, and several have done so.

Congress moved against those rules last year. On June 12, 2025, President Trump signed H.J. Res. 88 into law, disapproving the EPA waiver that allowed California to enforce Advanced Clean Cars II.

California immediately sued, arguing that Congress had improperly used the Congressional Review Act to overturn a Clean Air Act waiver. That legal fight has continued, so the underlying dispute over California’s authority isn’t finished.

For car buyers, though, the direction of federal policy has plainly changed. Manufacturers have substantially more freedom under the new federal fuel-economy rules to decide which powertrains they want to sell.

My position on that hasn’t changed. If you want an EV, buy one. If a hybrid works better for you, buy that. If you need a gasoline-powered SUV or pickup, you should be able to buy that too.

Let the cars compete.

RELATED: Welcome to the new traffic stop, where it’s your word against AI’s

NurPhoto/Getty Images

No free pass

But I’m not giving automakers a free pass. If manufacturers now face tens of billions of dollars less in projected technology costs, I want to know what happens to those savings. I’m not expecting $1,300 to disappear overnight from every window sticker. Automakers still have factories, employees, suppliers, research and development, and shareholders.

But don’t tell us deregulation makes cars cheaper to build and then expect consumers not to look for the evidence.

Give us better prices. Give us more equipment. Bring back vehicles that didn’t make financial sense under the old rules. Build the smaller cars, hatchbacks, wagons, pickups, and SUVs people will actually buy.

And let competition sort out the rest.

There is a cost on the other side of the ledger. NHTSA projects that the less stringent standards will increase fuel costs by more than $1,600 over the life of a vehicle compared with the rules they replace. The agency also projects 4.6% more gasoline consumption through 2050.

That’s worth considering, especially if you drive a lot of miles or own a large truck or SUV.

Gas prices are high right now too. But today’s pump price isn’t necessarily tomorrow’s. Oil production changes. Markets change. Wars end and new ones begin. We’re going to dig into where gasoline prices are headed in a future article because that deserves its own investigation.

Right now, I’m interested in something easier to measure. Will cheaper compliance actually mean cheaper cars?

Automakers now face tens of billions less in projected technology costs. If that really gives them more freedom to build what customers want, eventually the person walking into the dealership ought to see it.

The rules changed. Now show us the cars — and the savings.

​Car buyers, Electric vehicles, Hybrids, Oil production, Clean air act, Lifestyle, Auto industry, California, Emissions standards, Automotive 

Increasing numbers of Americans are deeply opposed to building more data centers. Over the summer, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) imposed the strictest data center rules in the country, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) ordered a statewide moratorium on hyperscale construction, and Gov. Greg Abbott (R) paused new approvals in Texas pending a grid audit.

At the local level, dozens of county and municipal fights have followed no reliable partisan pattern. Polling from Heatmap and Embold, collected by anonymous Substack writer Cremieux, shows data center popularity plummeting over the last year.

Any actions seen as forcing data centers on voters who do not want them will only make matters worse.

Though Cremieux argues the opposition is fundamentally driven by NIMBYism (not in my back yard), I am unconvinced. The polling seems to follow the pattern you would expect if NIMBYism were the primary driver, but posing the problem as a generic national issue produces substantially less opposition.

The arguments most central to the anti-data-center cause, namely complaints about the effect on utility costs, seem to generate an outsized amount of discourse relative to their actual effect. For example, in Virginia — the world’s data center capital and the state where I live — the State Corporation Commission estimated that shifting capacity and distribution costs from households to the large-load rate class would lower a typical residential bill by about 3.4%, or roughly $5.52 a month.

In other words, the effect is something on the order of a Subway sandwich in 2008.

I want to be scrupulous, because the complaints about data centers are often not literally false. Households are indeed suffering from a pecuniary externality created by increased demand. But it is hard to reconcile the mostly muted effects with the surging level of emotional response.

Americans’ growing dislike of data centers stems not from animus toward any single company or product but from a cumulative reaction to the momentous technological changes of the past couple of decades.

Because AI is the latest harbinger of those changes — and offers revolutionary potential — it has inherited our culture’s immune response. This means these problems cannot be adjudicated simply by changing utility regulations or even bribing local communities.

RELATED: The dirty secret behind Big Tech’s data center boom

Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Three further factors have combined with the populist anti-tech feeling to make AI and, by extension, data centers unusually unpopular.

First, AI faces a particularly unfavorable coalition of constituencies. Its association with California and the tech industry has deeply soured much of conservative America toward it, and its association with billionaires and big business has soured many progressives. Even many techies feel personally threatened by the technology.

Second, those most aggressively advocating for data centers are not building them in their own back yards. Palo Alto, where I lived while attending grad school, has spent years fighting small-cell installations. One of the most prestigious retirement homes in the U.S., Channing House, recently fought to have wireless equipment removed from its roof.

In January, the city of Palo Alto wrote to the FCC opposing a rule that would speed up wireless approvals, while at the same time supporting the infrastructure needed to run AI-enabled services, so long as it retains the power to veto unwanted projects.

When the group that appears to benefit most from a technology is also most averse to its consequences, it is natural for the public to wonder what the tech world might be hiding. The anonymous author Polimath, writing in Marginally Compelling, gets closer to the underlying problem by viewing it as another front in the culture war, an outworking of long-simmering discontent with tech culture.

Third, much of the tech world itself seems increasingly concerned about the existential risk AI might pose to humanity. For example, earlier this month, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who spent three years doing pretraining work at OpenAI and then Anthropic, publicly resigned, writing that both companies were racing toward self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.”

RELATED: America doesn’t need Dario Amodei’s permission to build

Jason Henry/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Evan Hubinger, an alignment lead at Anthropic, replied that he agreed and put the odds of AI killing everyone within the decade above 10%. From talking to my friends at these labs, the modal person really does seem to think they are summoning the machine god. That prospect naturally feeds public opposition to AI.

Taken together, these factors help explain the public’s anger. The lines of the current debate have already hardened, and the grievances far predate the specific events of the day. Any actions seen as forcing data centers on voters who do not want them will only make matters worse.

But the centers will be built regardless. Demand is so enormous, and suitable locations are sufficiently plentiful, that only a small number of permissive communities, such as Loudoun County, are needed. If localities want to opt out, I see little reason to stop them.

However, the industry could take an important step if it wants to win broad American support.

Specifically, Big Tech should make a visible effort to build data centers near the communities where its executives and employees live. This would give them a way to begin convincing Americans that data centers are an asset worth having, not a liability worth dodging.

Concerns about water and electricity are simply not what most people are worried about, and addressing them will do nothing to solve the larger problem. Since these reasons are selected ex post to justify pre-existing opposition, defeating any single point will merely invite a hundred more.

If you are opposed to data centers, my guess is that saving $5 on your monthly utility bill wouldn’t be enough to change your opinion.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

​Ai, Americans, Big tech, Data centers, Fcc, Superintelligence, Virginia, Polling, Nimby, Culture war, Openai, Anthropic, Opinion & analysis 

A man who founded an LGBTQ+ therapy practice was arrested after he was accused of sexually assaulting two of his patients.

Joseph LoGiudice founded the “Liberation Psychotherapy” practice and acted as a clinical director when the assaults occurred, according to a press release from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

‘While expressly described as an LGBTQ-centered practice, we allege that LoGiudice abused the trust placed in him as a therapist to sexually assault members of the LGBTQ community he serves.’

One of those who accused LoGiudice did so after hearing about a separate indictment against Remington Yhap, another worker at Liberation Psychotherapy who specialized in LGBTQ+ mental health.

Yhap was arrested for allegedly raping a teenage patient he had been providing therapy to for many months.

“Liberation Psychotherapy’s clinical director, Joseph LoGiudice, allegedly sexually assaulted two patients in his care at the very practice he founded,” said Bragg in a statement with the press release.

LoGiudice had run the clinic’s Gay Men’s Therapy Group and is a licensed clinical social worker.

One victim was assaulted by LoGiudice in Nov. 2022 after engaging in “sexual misconduct” with the patient twice.

A second victim was assaulted by LoGiudice in Jan. 2024 after a group therapy session and again in Jan. 2026 during a private therapy session, according to Bragg.

“While expressly described as an LGBTQ-centered practice, we allege that LoGiudice abused the trust placed in him as a therapist to sexually assault members of the LGBTQ community he serves. This investigation is ongoing.

LoGiudice is facing a total of 24 counts related to the alleged abuse, which includes 10 counts of third-degree criminal sex acts, 13 counts of third-degree sexual abuse, and one count of third-degree rape.

RELATED: Officials of ‘Latinx’ LGBTQ+ center outraged that months-long fecal attacks are not arrestable

Bragg asked for any other possible victims to contact his office.

A profile at Huffington Post said LoGiudice had published a book titled “Our Naked Lives: Essays from Gay Italian-American Men” in 2013. He wrote an article claiming that capitalism had destroyed people emotionally and psychologically.

He was also married to Michael Carosone, who was also a therapist at Liberation Psychotherapy, according to posts online objecting to anti-Semitic statements he allegedly made.

“His interests and passion are in understanding and advocating for individuals who are marginalized, vulnerable, and stigmatized, particularly LGBTQ individuals with disabilities, while utilizing perspectives from disability studies and intersectionality,” read a line from the profile.

His profile at his website has been scrubbed from the internet but can still be viewed at the Wayback Machine internet archive. His website has also been scrubbed.

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​Capitalism, Lgbtq, Sexual assault, Rape, Lgbtq agenda, Crime