A few years ago, journalist Ezra Levant received the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for defending freedom of expression after refusing to “bend the knee” and publishing Danish cartoons of Muhammad.

Now, the prime minister of the United Kingdom has banned him from the country.

“To have the prime minister of the United Kingdom ban me, a journalist … I’ve never done anything illegal in my life. I’ve never even had a parking ticket in the U.K. When I go there, it’s to do journalism,” Levant tells Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck.

“Glenn, your radio and you would be shut down within a week; I’m sorry to say it,” he continues. “Your First Amendment in America is more important than almost anything else, because with that, you can fight for all your other freedoms. Never give up your First Amendment.”

While everyone assumes other Western countries have the same First Amendment rights, Levant explains that they’re different.

“In the United Kingdom, according to the Times of London, a very prestigious newspaper, on any given day, on average, 30 people are arrested for what they post on social media. 30 a day. I’m not a fan of Russia, but even they don’t arrest 30 people a day for word crimes,” Levant says.

And the government doesn’t go after those who are actually harming others.

“They’re targeting people who criticize the government, especially on the issue of mass immigration. And the number-one thing that they’re scared about talking about is the rape gangs of largely Pakistani Muslim men targeting white girls,” Levant explains.

“When people have a march or a rally against these rapes, the government goes into freakout mode because it challenges the entire multiculturalism and immigration structure of the U.K.,” he says.

“So,” he continues, “never give up your free speech, Glenn, because you can see it in real time in the U.K.”

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.

​Blaze media, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blazetv, Conservative, Ezra levant, First amendment, Free speech, Glenn beck, Globalist agenda, Government, Journalism, Mass immigration, Muhammad, Prime minister, Russia, Social media, The glenn beck program, Times of london, United kingdom 

The Pentagon appears to be sending Ottawa a message: Rhetoric is no substitute for military capability.

The Department of Defense announced Monday it was “pausing” the 86-year-old Permanent Joint Board on Defense between the United States and Canada, according to Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby. The move comes amid mounting frustration in Washington over Canada’s chronic defense underinvestment — and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s increasingly confrontational rhetoric toward President Donald Trump.

‘We can no longer avoid the gaps between rhetoric and reality. Real powers must sustain our shared defense and security responsibilities.’

Established in 1940 by President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, the board became one of the earliest pillars of continental defense cooperation. Coming as Nazi Germany tightened its grip on Europe and fears grew over Atlantic security, the agreement reflected Roosevelt’s recognition that American and Canadian security could no longer be treated separately.

That alliance eventually evolved into NORAD and decades of deep military integration between the two countries.

All talk

Now Washington appears to be signaling that the relationship cannot continue on autopilot.

“We can no longer avoid the gaps between rhetoric and reality,” Colby wrote on X. “Real powers must sustain our rhetoric with shared defense and security responsibilities.”

Colby argued that while a militarily capable Canada benefits the United States, Ottawa has repeatedly failed to meet its defense commitments in a credible way.

The timing is awkward for Carney, whose government has loudly projected Canadian independence from Washington while remaining vague about how it intends to rebuild the country’s depleted armed forces.

RELATED: ‘AMERICAN INVASION’: Flailing Canada PM Mark Carney invokes historical grudge in latest lob at Trump

George Rose/Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Jet blues

Although Ottawa recently claimed the government had finally reached NATO’s benchmark of spending 2% of GDP on defense, critics have questioned how the government arrived at that number. Media reports have indicated that the Liberals counted items such as landscaping at military bases and civilian airport infrastructure upgrades as defense expenditures.

More tellingly, Carney’s April 28 Spring Economic Statement reportedly contained little detail on major procurement priorities.

That uncertainty now extends to Canada’s planned purchase of 88 Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets. Despite years of delays and political debate, the Carney government is still reviewing the order, with Defense Minister David McGuinty recently confirming that alternatives remain under consideration.

One possibility floated by Ottawa is a mixed fleet pairing the American-made F-35 with Sweden’s Saab Gripen fighter. But U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra has repeatedly warned that Canada’s role in NORAD could be jeopardized if Ottawa fails to follow through on the full F-35 purchase.

Buy or beware

The concern is not merely political but operational. Every branch of the U.S. military that flies fighter aircraft is transitioning to the F-35 platform, which is also used by several of Canada’s closest defense partners, including the British Royal Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force. Hoekstra has argued that the Gripen would create interoperability problems inside a continental defense structure increasingly built around the F-35 ecosystem.

For Washington, the frustration is becoming increasingly obvious: Canada wants the diplomatic stature and moral authority of a serious middle power while continuing to hesitate on the military commitments required to sustain that role.

The Pentagon’s decision to pause the defense board may ultimately prove symbolic. But symbols matter in alliances — especially when they come from Washington.

After decades of assuming continental defense cooperation was automatic, the United States now appears willing to publicly question whether Canada is prepared to carry its share of the burden.

​Defense department, Canada, Culture, Donald trump, F35 fighter jets, Franklin roosevelt, Lockheed martin, Mark carney, Norad, Pentagon, Pete hoekstra, William lyon mackenzie king, Letter from canada 

California Highway Patrol officers responded around 12:20 p.m. on Tuesday to a multiple-vehicle crash near Lodi that left two young Americans dead. The man believed to be responsible for the carnage — an illegal alien from India — reportedly fled the scene on foot.

The suspect, 24-year-old Manvir Singh, was quickly tracked down and arrested by San Joaquin County sheriff’s deputies and taken to the county jail, where he remains in custody as of early Thursday.

‘This criminal illegal alien from India should never have been behind the wheel of a semi-truck and allowed to kill.’

The deceased, ages 20 and 16, were sitting in a Kia Forte and slowing to a stop behind a Nissan Frontier and a Toyota Camry in the far right lane of northbound Highway 99 when a heavy-duty truck driven by the suspect and carrying a fully loaded semi-trailer smashed into them, reported Freight Waves.

According to CHP, the 80,000-pound truck hammered the rear of the Kia and launched it into the Camry, killing two Americans and sending five others to hospital, two of whom suffered critical injuries.

Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy revealed that Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom’s California — where an estimated 35% of the commercial drivers are Sikh, an Indian religious group — issued Singh a commercial driver’s license in March 2025.

RELATED: Fraudulent trucking carriers just ran out of road with new registration system, DOT says

Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Duffy noted further that Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration investigators “are looking into how this illegal got his CDL and will investigate the trucking company who employed this driver.”

Amritsar Trans Inc., the intrastate freight company that reportedly operates the truck, is registered in Manteca, California; owns or leases five vehicles; has nine drivers; is unrated by the FMCSA; and is apparently run by Baljeet Singh.

Freight Waves highlighted that the company was cited for six violations across 11 inspections in the two-year window that ended April 24, 2026. One of the violations was for speeding 15 or more miles per hour over the posted limit, and another was for falsifying duty status to conceal having driven over hours.

Manvir Singh has been charged with felony vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, felony hit-and-run resulting in death or injury, and obstructing or resisting arrest. The Indian, whose bail has been set at $185,000, is set to appear in court Thursday afternoon.

The Department of Homeland Security told Fox News that Manvir Singh illegally entered the country through Arizona in 2023 and was subsequently released into the U.S. by the Biden administration.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lodged a detainer request in hopes that California authorities will ultimately transfer the illegal alien into federal custody.

“This criminal illegal alien from India should never have been behind the wheel of a semi-truck and allowed to kill two innocent people in a multi-vehicle crash in California,” DHS acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement. “He is now charged with vehicular manslaughter, hit and run resulting in death or injury, and resisting a police officer.”

“This is yet another example of why illegal aliens should not be operating trucks on American highways,” added Bis.

Transportation Secretary Duffy emphasized that “Dalilah’s law would have revoked this illegal trucker’s license. Congress must pass Dalilah’s Law NOW.”

H.R. 5688, Dalilah’s Law, would ban states from issuing commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens and limit issuance to U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and holders of specific work visas. The legislation would also require the revocation of any existing ineligible CDLs.

The legislation takes its name from Dalilah Coleman, a little girl grievously injured in a car accident that was caused by an illegal alien from India who reportedly obtained a commercial driver’s license from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Department of Motor Vehicles.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​California highway patrol, Hit and run, Illegal alien, Department of homeland security, Indian, Truck driver, Truckers, Immigration, Transportation, California, Gavin newsom, Accident, Killer, Politics 

We’re learning a lesson that should be unmistakably clear as the world watches instability ripple outward from the Middle East: Geography still matters.

The war with Iran and the ever-present threat of disruptions at the Strait of Hormuz are exposing how fragile global energy supply chains have become. When choke points half a world away can rattle prices at the pump throughout the nation, it is time to rethink how and where America produces its energy.

Alaska offers our nation something rare: stability, security, and strength without choke points.

That rethink points north to Alaska.

Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz. When tensions rise, insurance rates surge, shipping slows, and prices spike. Families feel it immediately, particularly young families already struggling with affordability. These price shocks do not stem from resource scarcity; they stem from dependence on unstable routes and hostile actors.

Alaska has no Strait of Hormuz

What Alaska has is something the rest of the nation desperately needs right now: secure access to energy, open ocean shipping lanes, and proximity to Asian markets without relying on canals, narrow passages, or adversarial regimes. From the Gulf of Alaska, resources can move freely across the Pacific without transiting choke points that can be threatened, closed, or weaponized.

This geographic reality significantly cuts travel days and costs; it embodies freedom of access. It is geography that is Alaska’s destiny — and America’s — if we act on it.

For years, Alaska has been sidelined in national energy conversations, despite holding nearly all the critical minerals the United States depends on and vast reserves of oil and natural gas. Here at home, Alaskans pay some of the highest fuel prices in the nation, in part because we lack refining capacity and sufficient infrastructure to fully use what we already have.

A failure, not a shortage

When conflicts like the Iran war inject chaos into global markets, Alaska should be part of the solution. Responsible development of Alaskan oil, gas, and minerals strengthens national security, lowers costs for American families, and reduces reliance on adversaries who do not share our values or our interests.

Alaska should be treated as a critical asset, not an afterthought. That means advancing energy projects, encouraging refining capacity, and opening pathways for responsible exports. It also means making sure the benefits of development flow first to Alaskans — through jobs, lower costs, and long-term economic stability — rather than being locked away by red tape or federal neglect.

RELATED: The Iran war is causing another shortage — and it will directly affect every American

Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

The cost of service

The lesson of today’s uncertainty is not that America should retreat from the world, but that we should stand on firmer ground at home.

Wars are not measured by headlines, speculation, or the arguments that swirl in the middle of the conflict. They are measured at the end. If this conflict concludes with Iran defeated, its ability to threaten the world diminished, and our troops coming home safely, then Americans should unite in gratitude and pride.

Alaska understands the cost of service. We have one of the highest rates of veterans per capita in the nation. Our communities know sacrifice, duty, and resilience. If our sons and daughters in uniform succeed and return home victorious, we should celebrate their service and the removal of a dangerous foe from the world stage.

Alaska offers our nation something rare: stability, security, and strength without choke points. There is no Strait of Hormuz here, only opportunity. It is time we seize it. The time is right for Alaska and for the whole nation.

​Alaska, Middle east, Strait of hormuz, Supply chains, Gas prices, Global markets, Iran war, Opinion & analysis 

It doesn’t take a genius to manipulate the population. It just takes some mid-level AI chatbots with a mean streak.

That thought haunted Glenn Reynolds, the author of the new book “Seductive AI.” The tome doesn’t look to a near future in which artificial intelligence has a profound impact on our lives and culture.

‘The media actually had shame back then. You could browbeat them into correcting [mistakes].’

He sees its disruptive potential in the here and now.

Digital Don Juan

“There’s no reason why AI couldn’t be designed to manipulate human beings,” says Reynolds, known for his decades-old Instapundit.com website. “Raw brain power isn’t the best way to do it.”

Yes, the book explores the literal seductive power of an AI-powered device, whether an app, software program, or, eventually, a life-size sexbot coming to a Best Buy near you.

It also shares how manipulative AI can already be and some possible guardrails to prevent it from harming us.

Pop culture already warned us about AI’s seductive power. Think 2013’s “Her,” starring Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely man who falls for a bot voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Or even “The Big Bang Theory,” when the awkward Raj (Kunal Nayyar) falls in love with his Siri device.

“Seductive AI in the crudest sense … is looking more realistic as time passes,” Reynolds says. “You’ve seen these stories. … Women marrying their AI boyfriends. There’s just enough of that out there. You can’t dismiss it as ridiculous.”

The case of the 14-year-old Florida boy who took his own life after sharing suicidal thoughts with an AI bot named after “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen is hard to forget.

Blind faith

And it could soon get worse.

“One of my recurring themes in the book … year after year, the machines get better and people stay about the same,” he says, a scary thought given the technological progress we have already seen. “People’s ability to see through this stuff is a flat line.”

Humanity’s wobbly mental health status makes “Seductive AI” fears more profound.

“There’s a large number of people who are losing contact with objective reality. It’s encouraged by social media and a lot of machine affirmation. … The various AI chatbots will basically tell you how smart you are,” he says.

Even some terrible ideas, when fed into an AI bot, will spit back encouraging banter.

“All these platforms … not just the AI ones, foster engagement by pushing various emotions — fear, hatred, sometimes love,” he says.

RELATED: 6 movies that warned us about AI

Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images

The bot stops here

“Seductive AI” offers some possible guardrails, like suggesting that AI firms have a fiduciary duty to the person impacted by their expertise. That could allow people to sue if the bot’s behavior is in breach of that contract.

“The company producing the entity should be held liable for any breaches, exactly as if they had been made by a human employee acting for the company itself,” he writes in the book.

Reynolds says mainstream media outlets have done their part to promote the upside of AI, like fawning press over the rise of self-driving cars.

“Every single story you read in the automotive press was positive,” he says, downplaying the potential for fatal accident. “AI stuff was all super positive for a while. … Now that seems to have faded.”

The Blogfather

Reynolds previously wrote “The Social Media Upheaval” (2019) and “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths” (2007).

He’s best known in conservative circles for Instapundit.com, an old-school site with constantly updated links to the latest news and commentary. He was part of the early blogging wave that challenged mainstream media, with some stunning successes. In fact, he was so influential on other DIY pundits that he earned the nickname the Blogfather.

“The media actually had shame back then,” he says. “You could browbeat them into correcting [mistakes].” Take Dan Rather’s National Guard story, in which the CBS anchor claimed President George W. Bush shirked his duties based on manufactured evidence. The story might have stood unchallenged if not for several citizen journalists like the team behind Powerlineblog.com.

A simpler time

And he has his “beefs” with the current right-leaning media landscape. He recalls a simpler time in the digital arena.

“The period of 2004 to 2008 was kind of a golden age of independent media, before the walled gardens of Facebook and other platforms took over,” he says. It helped that journalists took criticism more seriously at the time.

The early blogging days also saw friendlier ties between left- and right-leaning bloggers. Now, that sense of brotherhood is gone, he says.

“It’s hard to have a civil discussion about anything now,” he says. “It’s a very unhealthy environment.”

As for his latest project, he admits the alluring nature of this technology boils down to something elemental.

“Yes, AI is extremely useful,” he says. “That’s another way of being seductive.”

​Artificial intelligence, Glenn reynolds, Culture, Lifestyle, Chatbots, Sexbots, Books, Interview, Independent media 

A former manager of a McDonald’s restaurant allegedly posted a video of herself “contaminating” french fries on social media and now faces prison time.

Kaylie Santos, 22, of Southbridge, Massachusetts, was arrested for the video that went viral on Facebook that showed two workers participating in the alleged contamination.

The video apparently showed Santos shoving the fries into her mouth before placing them in the fries carton.

Santos was apparently targeting her ex-girlfriend, who went through the drive-through of the restaurant on April 8, according to investigators. The video apparently showed Santos shoving the fries into her mouth before placing them in the fries carton.

“She wants french fries today, right?” Santos is heard saying, according to police.

Investigators also were able to obtain surveillance video from the store showing that she spit into the carton of fries.

When they interviewed the alleged victim, she said that she had ordered two sodas but that Santos gave her a bag of fries too. She didn’t think anything of it and ate the fries.

She also claimed that Santos had been harassing her and the customer’s new partner.

Santos faces one count of giving a person food “containing a foreign substance, which was intended or might reasonably be expected to cause injury.”

Investigators said they tracked down the victim by searching the license plate on the video from the drive-through.

WBZ-TV reported that the video on Facebook garnered tens of thousands of views.

RELATED: Grade school janitor contaminated children’s food with his bodily fluids and posted on social media, New Jersey police say

The owners of the restaurant said they were cooperating with police and that they had obtained a no-trespass notice against the former manager.

“The actions of these individuals are unacceptable and do not reflect our organization’s food safety standards or values,” they said. “The well-being and safety of our Southbridge community remains our top priority, and we are taking swift, appropriate actions.”

Entry-level McDonald’s managers make about $48,000, while general managers can make up to $90,000 in that part of the country.

A poll of Americans found that McDonald’s french fries blew away the competition for most popular fries among fast food restaurants.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Contaminated food, French fries, Mcdonalds, Viral video, Crime 

The U.S. House of Representatives will soon vote on a housing bill that supposedly addresses the nation’s very real affordability crisis and, even more important, lets politicians claim they are doing something about it.

The Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act in March by an 89-10 vote. Democrats backed it almost unanimously, and all but one of the no votes came from Republicans, even though President Donald Trump pushed hard for the bill.

States have the right to be stupid or smart. The federal government has no constitutional authority to make that choice for them.

One provision separates the Senate and House versions, and it matters a great deal.

The Senate bill would require investors who own more than 350 single-family rental properties to sell the excess after seven years. It exempts large institutional investors that build or buy new single-family homes for the rental market, but even they would have to sell those properties to individual homeowners after seven years.

The House bill drops that provision. That may be its best feature.

The Senate’s ownership cap is not only arbitrary and unfair; it is economically backward. Driving investors out of the market would raise prices, not lower them. It would shrink the pool of potential investors, reduce incentives to build and maintain housing, and leave buyers competing for a smaller supply of homes.

Those effects would push housing prices higher.

The only Democrat to vote against the Senate bill, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, blasted the seven-year forced-sale provision on the floor, calling it “bananas” and “a very bizarre thing” to restrict ownership by businesses other than hedge funds. The bill “demonize[s] people who want to build rental housing,” Schatz said.

He was right. The Senate version would do serious damage to housing supply. As Schatz put it, “This is positively Soviet.”

The two versions reflect sharply opposing views not only of housing, but of markets and government power in general. The real question is whether housing unaffordability reflects a “market failure” requiring federal and state correction, or whether markets work best when government limits itself to preventing force and fraud.

RELATED: When your ‘rich’ neighbor can’t afford furniture

SDI Productions / Getty Images

Today’s housing crisis is not a market failure. It is the product of government interference.

As I explain in my new Heartland Institute policy study, “Housing Affordability: America’s Short-Term Crisis and Long-Term Problem,” the immediate affordability crunch began with the rapid rise in federal spending starting in January 2021. The Federal Reserve accommodated that spending by expanding the money supply, helping ignite inflation across the economy.

Housing prices rose sharply and crossed into statistical unaffordability in May 2021. They then surged further as inflation spread throughout the economy. The Federal Reserve later raised interest rates to contain the damage, which only made housing less affordable as mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen since the early 1980s.

At the same time, the country was already suffering from years of weak housing-stock growth after the 2008 financial crisis, another disaster created by the federal government and the Fed. Add a rapidly rising population driven by mass immigration, along with Millennials and then Gen Z entering prime homebuying years, and a long-running squeeze turns into a full-scale crisis.

That is the mess Congress and Trump now want to address.

Their answer is to tweak some federal regulations in the hope of encouraging more construction. That may help at the margins. It will not do much to expand supply, and it will do nothing to address the inflation that turned a difficult market into a crisis.

As I write in the policy study, “The solution to the inflation-inflicted affordability problem is significant cuts in federal spending,” though such cuts appear to have little political support.

The long-term solution is straightforward: Build more houses.

Here again, government is the main obstacle. Zoning restrictions, taxes, overregulation, rent control, urban-growth boundaries, land rationing, impact fees, excessive building-code requirements, and countless other local barriers have choked construction and sales.

Those policies mostly come from states and localities. The federal government, however, encourages them through housing and urban-development spending.

RELATED: Trump needs to denounce the Dignity Act

Alex WROBLEWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Both versions of the current bill try to reduce some of that federal encouragement of excessive state and local regulation. That is the right direction because under the Constitution, housing regulation belongs to the states.

States have the right to be stupid or smart. The federal government has no constitutional authority to make that choice for them. Congress and presidents have usurped that authority for decades and should relinquish it entirely.

The proper remedy is simple: The federal government should confine itself to the powers the Constitution actually grants. That would mean no federal spending on housing at all.

Such a change would end Washington’s manipulation of the housing market, a game that always favors major players and hurts ordinary people. It would also reduce federal spending and ease inflationary pressure.

Both versions of the bill include a provision blocking the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency through 2030. That is a good provision, though House fiscal conservatives wanted a permanent ban. They were right.

In practical economic terms, the solution to the housing crisis is simple: Build more homes and stop inflating the currency. Politically, however, that solution remains unlikely.

To Congress and the president, the bill’s most important function is political. It will do little to calm public anxiety about housing affordability, but it will let politicians say they acted. In Washington, that usually matters more, and costs much less, than doing something useful.

​Soviet, Congress, Senate, Democrats, Affordability, Constitution, Trump, Road to housing act, Opinion & analysis, Housing crisis 

The artificial intelligence boom has become one of the biggest engines of the American economy. It has also triggered a growing backlash against the data centers that make the boom possible. Tech moguls have rushed to build giant warehouses packed with the computing power needed to run AI systems, but they have done almost nothing to explain to ordinary Americans why those facilities deserve so much land, water, electricity, and political favoritism.

That failure should have created an obvious opening for libertarians. Governments shower data-center projects with subsidies, wield eminent domain to seize land, and help politically connected corporations reshape local communities in the name of technological progress. A coherent libertarian response would attack the merger of state power and corporate power.

The first great use of AI will not be liberation. It will be surveillance and control.

Instead, many libertarians have chosen to cheer the expansion without asking what the technology will be used for or whom it will serve. Their quasi-religious loyalty to capital has pushed them into another foolish position and exposed the danger of turning an economic theory into a full worldview.

The tech elite insist that AI will revolutionize the world, but they have done almost nothing to tell average people how their own lives will improve. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs spin wild stories about superhuman intelligence and the automation of tens of millions of jobs. That does not sound like a sales pitch. It sounds like the setup for a science-fiction dystopia. The one concrete justification they offer is strategic: AI will supposedly define the future of warfare, and America must stay ahead of China.

That argument would carry more weight if the same people pushing AI were not also so committed to building the kind of technology most likely to be used against Americans. They are not preparing some noble shield for the republic. They are building tools that can make the United States look a lot more like the techno-authoritarian China they claim to fear.

Data centers consume staggering amounts of electricity, sometimes drawing as much power as a moderate-sized city. They also use enormous volumes of water, create nonstop noise, and disfigure the landscape. Developers have found ways to soften some of those costs by building new power infrastructure and improving cooling efficiency, but none of the problems have been solved. In the meantime, local communities absorb the burden.

The economic case is weak as well. Data centers create construction jobs while they are being built, but once construction ends, they employ surprisingly few people. Governments usually justify subsidies by promising long-term economic activity and job growth. In the case of data centers, corporations collect the incentives while communities get very little in return.

A sane political movement would notice that. Many libertarians have not. Instead of challenging subsidies and land seizures, they have fought to champion the projects. Nick Gillespie of Reason recently posted a chart showing that almond farms use far more water than AI data centers. Almonds are notoriously inefficient in water use, and agriculture probably does consume more water overall.

But the comparison gives away the problem. People eat food. AI, at least so far, mostly offers job displacement and surveillance.

RELATED: Your enemies aren’t mentally ill. They apparently just want to kill you.

Blaze Media Illustration

Libertarianism grew, in part, out of the Austrian school of economics, which is useful for understanding markets. It was never meant to serve as a complete theory of human life. Like Marxists, however, many libertarians have turned an economic framework into a totalizing ideology. Free markets, contract law, and voluntary exchange become an all-encompassing lens through which everything must be judged. Once that happens, it becomes difficult to see anything that does not show up in GDP.

The real question is not how much of a resource gets spent, but for what purpose. Most people would not give up a hand to save a cockroach. Most would give up their lives to save a child. On paper, preserving the cockroach may look like the more efficient transaction. Only a lunatic would fail to understand why no sane person would ever choose it over the child.

Economics helps explain financial exchange, but in its hunger for abstraction, it often strips away the human element that drives actual decisions. Treat almonds and AI as interchangeable “economic activity,” and you erase the context that gives moral meaning to both. That is the error every ideology makes. Grand unified theories comfort the rational mind because they promise predictive clarity. Then they collide with actual human beings living in actual places.

Kevin O’Leary recently went on Tucker Carlson’s podcast to praise the record-setting data center he wants to build in Utah. Carlson pressed him repeatedly to name a job AI would create for ordinary Americans. O’Leary could not identify a single one. He fell back on vague assurances that new technologies always create jobs somewhere in the future. The one benefit he seemed sure about was that AI might help America defend Taiwan in a future war with China. That is a revealing answer to citizens asking how this technology will help their own country.

RELATED: The liberal guide to committing national suicide

Blaze Media Illustration

Many libertarians now seem to support data centers out of sheer loyalty to capital itself. Economic activity becomes an end in itself. Progress, no matter the cost, is presumed to produce more liberty. That is delusional. The first great use of AI will not be liberation. It will be surveillance and control. The same corporate and political class that backed vaccine mandates, digital surveillance, censorship, and biometric passes during COVID is now demanding trust on AI. Nothing in its conduct suggests a change of heart.

Our tech oligarchs lined up with Democrats, outsourced American jobs, embraced censorship, and showed enormous appetite for monitoring the population. They are not trustworthy allies.

The backlash against data centers may lack intellectual polish, but the instinct is sound. The elites driving AI are not on our side, and Americans have no reason to sacrifice their communities, resources, and liberty on behalf of people who plainly intend to use this technology against them.

​Control, Data centers, Elites, Free markets, Kevin oleary, Libertarians, Opinion & analysis, Progress, Surveillance, Tucker carlson, Water usage, Austrian school of economics, Libertarian, Employment, Artificial intelligence, Nick gillespie, Reason, Economics