Last month, I wrote here that the AI bubble was about to pop and that when the subsidies ran out, the bill would land on the customer. The whole thing rested on one ugly fact: The companies selling AI were losing money on nearly every power user and pretending otherwise.

I figured we had a year or two before the cracks really showed. Maybe three. But the receipts started landing within weeks. What I got wrong wasn’t the diagnosis, but who would blink first. I figured the pain would start at the bottom, with small shops priced out when their renewals came due. Instead, it started at the very top, with the richest companies on earth — including several of the same outfits building and selling the stuff.

The message was: Get on board or get left behind.

The implications are massive. Let’s review.

Uber torched its entire AI budget in four months

Uber’s CTO, Praveen Neppalli Naga, told the Information in April that the company had already burned through its full 2026 AI coding budget. Four months in. Gone.

The culprit was Anthropic’s Claude Code. Uber rolled it out to its engineers in December 2025, and usage roughly doubled by February as adoption climbed from a third of the organization to better than four-fifths. By April, Naga was, in his words, back to the drawing board, because the budget he planned for the year had vanished in a third of it. Per-engineer costs were reportedly running anywhere from $500 to $2,000 a month.

On the “Rapid Response” podcast, Uber president Andrew Macdonald admitted he can’t connect all that token spend to anything customers can actually see. Asked whether the AI was producing more useful features, he said flatly, “That link is not there yet” and that the spending gets harder to justify when AI isn’t free.

Uber dropped roughly $3.4 billion on R&D in 2025, with AI a big chunk of that. Now the company has slapped a cap on it. Employees get $1,500 worth of tokens per coding tool each month, and the company is still trying to figure out what, exactly, it bought.

Microsoft revoked its own people’s Claude Code licenses

Microsoft is canceling internal Claude Code licenses across its Experiences + Devices division, the group behind Windows, Teams, Outlook, and Surface. The cutoff is June 30, 2026, which happens to be the last day of Microsoft’s fiscal year.

The pilot launched in December 2025. Engineers liked Claude Code so much that they started ditching Microsoft’s own GitHub Copilot CLI for it. Six months later, the company is pulling the plug and herding everyone back to Copilot. Token billing turned what looked like a flat seat license into a runaway tab, and Microsoft’s finance people reached the same conclusion Uber’s did.

Remember, this is Microsoft. They put money into Anthropic. And they still couldn’t justify keeping the lights on for their own engineers to use the tool.

Meta flipped from ‘tokenmaxxing’ to ‘tokenminimizing’

“Tokenmaxxing” was Silicon Valley’s newest bit of corporate slang, and it means exactly what it sounds like: Burn tokens to hit a target, climb a board, prove you’re “innovative.” Output optional.

For two years, Meta pushed staff to use AI for everything. Internal leaderboards tracked who burned the most tokens, handing out titles like “Token Legend.” The message was: Get on board or get left behind.

Now the memo reads differently. In June, Meta told roughly 6,000 employees the company clamping down on AI costs by capping token usage and building an internal dashboard to track who’s spending what. The Information called it “tokenminimizing,” and the company admitted internal AI use alone is on track to cost billions this year.

Here’s the context that makes it sting. Meta raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to between $125 billion and $145 billion, nearly all of it AI infrastructure. It also announced about 8,000 layoffs in April, roughly 10% of the company, with cuts beginning May 20.

RELATED: Shadowy companies are selling access to your smart TV — and its data

JDawnInk/Getty Images

So: Meta is spending more on AI than ever, fired thousands of people to help pay for it, and now can’t afford for the survivors to actually use the thing. Got it.

Amazon shut down its AI leaderboard

Amazon ran an internal leaderboard called KiroRank that scored employees on AI usage. The idea was to gamify adoption and reward the heaviest users.

It worked a little too well. Staff started “tokenmaxxing,” assigning AI agents pointless busywork just to climb the board. Some reportedly used AI for tasks they could have knocked out faster by hand, burning compute to chase a number. First reported by the Financial Times, Amazon killed KiroRank at the end of May. Senior VP Dave Treadwell’s message to the troops: “Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.”

That’s the whole problem in one sentence. Amazon wanted adoption. What it got was theater. Employees gamed a metric that had nothing to do with whether any real work got done.

The tokenmaxxing hangover

The sticker shock is showing up everywhere. TechCrunch reported in early June that a Priceline employee watched a routine Cursor renewal come back four to five times more expensive. One financial operations director described companies blowing through their entire 2026 token budget by April and quietly panicking.

Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn put a headstone on it in late May: “Tokenmaxxing is dead.” Companies raced to burn tokens and reward people for it, then discovered that adoption metrics aren’t business outcomes.

For two years, the answer to “should we use AI” was always yes, and the only argument was how fast. The question has quietly changed to “what did we get for it,” and a lot of companies don’t like the answer.

What this actually means

In May, I argued that AI companies were running loss-leading subscriptions, burning investor cash to buy the market, and hiding the real cost behind a subsidized price. You weren’t paying for the product. You were getting a subsidized demo, with the price hike scheduled for after you got hooked.

What I didn’t see coming was how fast the subsidizers would start cutting themselves off.

The companies with the deepest pockets are first in line to ration it, and several of them are the very ones building and selling it. They looked at the invoice and realized they can’t afford their own product. Uber’s CTO said the budget was blown away. Meta is building dashboards to meter its engineers. Microsoft, an Anthropic backer, is canceling licenses. Amazon found out its own people were manufacturing fake demand.

These aren’t scrappy startups running out of runway. They’re the richest companies on earth, with effectively bottomless access to capital, and they all hit the same wall at roughly the same time.

It’s not just them, either. On June 14, the Economist ran a piece called “Companies are scrambling to curtail soaring AI costs,” and the best line came from an executive at a big U.S. tech company who called the coming squeeze “an absolute nightmare.” His point: A large company runs hundreds of software programs, and once each one ships its own AI agents, the bills stack up fast. Ramp, the corporate-card provider that can see its clients’ actual spending, figures AI bills have jumped 13-fold in a year. Its heaviest 1% of users now average around $7,450 per person per month, against $11 for the typical customer. Even Sam Altman has called mounting customer costs a serious problem, which is a strange thing to hear from the man selling the tokens.

At current prices, AI costs more than it returns, and even the companies selling it can’t make the internal math work.

The lesson

AI has real uses, and I lean on it every day. But economics don’t care how you feel, and you can’t meme your way around a compute bill that climbs every month a power user gets better at burning tokens. That’s not hypothetical. It’s the whole reason the firms selling AI are the first ones rationing it.

If you run a business and you have bet the whole thing on API calls to somebody else’s model, look hard at that dependency. When the companies building these models can’t afford to let their own staff use them freely, what do you think happens when your renewal lands?

There are alternatives, and they’re getting absurdly cheap. The Economist notes that a mid-tier model like Anthropic’s Sonnet can run about 1/20 of what its flagship Opus costs. Kimi, an open-weight model from the Chinese startup Moonshot AI, runs about 1/20 of that. Stack those up, and a lot of routine work runs at a rounding error next to frontier pricing. “Send the easy jobs somewhere cheaper” is a real strategy now, not a compromise. You don’t have to stay locked into a vendor that is quietly rationing its own product.

The bubble isn’t bursting with a headline. It’s bursting with a memo. A budget revision. A canceled license. A quiet decision to ration the tool you were told would change everything.

And the people who sold you the revolution? They’re the same ones pulling the plug.

​Tech 

For American leftists, Father’s Day — like Columbus Day — constitutes an annual opportunity to publicly unload their baggage, air petty resentments, and express their depravities in creative ways. This Sunday was no different over at the New York Times.

Days after a liberal rag north of the border ran an article calling for the abolition of Father’s Day, America’s supposed newspaper of record endeavored to make Father’s Day about a reality-averse woman.

‘The cultural elite[‘s] contempt for dads runs so deep.’

In an essay published on Sunday titled “To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated,” trans-identifying woman Zach Ellams discussed both her imagined fatherhood and her daughter’s absorption of the corresponding lunacy.

Ellams notes at the outset that while she has been “living as a trans man” since she was 18, she had to “learn how to be a trans dad” after she and her lesbian “wife” had a child.

This learning process apparently consisted of Ellams simultaneously developing confidence in the lie while indoctrinating her daughter — a little girl whom Ellams calls Elliot and who has apparently wondered about her mother’s new facial hair; stated she too wanted to grow a beard and tried to convince other children it was possible; told teachers about her mother’s breast-removal surgery; and asked her mother about her phantom breasts — “How long did you have breasts for, Dad?”

Whether Ellams or her lesbian partner gave birth to the girl is unclear.

RELATED: Actress Elliot Page mocked ruthlessly after trying to define ‘healthy masculinity’

Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images

The essay concludes with Ellams noting, “I thought I was teaching Elliot how to be happy and secure. Yet all along she had being doing that for me.”

Critics blasted the Times over its decision to mark Father’s Day with an essay about a dysphoric mother.

Investigative reporter Matt Taibbi called the essay an “all-timer,” noting he didn’t “know where to put it on the funny-vs-horrifying axis.”

Alex Berenson, a former reporter for the Times, congratulated his former paper for “perfectly catching how the cultural elite view men and fatherhood this Father’s Day — yes, to the Times, being a dad is something you do to feel better about having your tits cut off. Cannot make it up.”

“The cultural elite[‘s] contempt for dads runs so deep we don’t even get to speak for ourselves,” Berenson also said.

“The New York Times celebrated Father’s Day by saluting the real heroes: left-wing gender goblins who think mentally ill women mutilating themselves, mainlining hormone injections, and playing daddy dress-up are the true embodiment of fatherhood,” wrote Sean Davis, CEO of the Federalist.

“‘Liberal women let men have even one single thing challenge’: impossible,” quipped conservative commentator Michael Knowles.

The X account for Prager University simply asked, “What are we doing here?”

Ellams’ essay was published just days after the surgically mutilated lesbian actress formerly known as Ellen Page attempted to define “healthy masculinity,” suggesting what’s ultimately needed is more weeping and banana consumption.

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​New york times, Propaganda, Leftism, Trans, Father, Alex berenson, Sean davis, Women, Men, Politics 

Tyranny rarely arrives wearing a villain’s mask. More often, Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck argues, it comes wrapped in the language of compassion.

“The most dangerous sentence in all of human history is not, ‘I hate you.’ It’s, ‘This is for your own good.’ Cruelty announces itself, and you can guard against it. But tyranny that believes it’s being kind never stops because it never feels guilty,” Glenn explains.

“When somebody justifies power, a policy, or an exception by telling you it’s to protect the vulnerable, that is not the time to relax. They’re not protecting the vulnerable. They may think they are, but they’re not,” he continues.

And Glenn has several news stories to back up his belief.

“Britain, that full report on the sex scandal that has been going on with the, dare I say it, with the Muslim immigrants, the number now is at a quarter of a million girls were raped,” he begins.

“The officials shielded, you know, one favored group from criticism at all cost. And the cost was the children. And the instinct that did this was not hatred for the children or the British people. It was a warped idea of protection. Protect the favored group,” he explains.

“Story two … the UK wants to scan all content on every phone in the country. Not kids’ phones, every phone. Your photos, your messages, everything you do on the presumption that it might find something helpful to protect the children,” he continues.

“Protect the child becomes scan every adult. That’s the slope. That’s the play,” he adds.

The third story Glenn uses as an example is the FTC’s lawsuit against the world’s leading transgender medicine organization, where they allege that it “cooked its own clinical guidelines to juice insurance coverage for procedures on minors.”

“Now, I want you to set aside wherever you land on the underlying issue. Look only at the structure here. The institution you’re told trust because it’s credentialed authority where the doctors were protecting your child,” he says.

“They bent the science toward the billing department. Same pattern, different lab code,” he continues, before revealing the one question those who value their freedom need to ask when it’s being challenged.

“Ask the one question that has protected free people for 300 years,” he says, asking, “Who watches the protector?”

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.

​Free speech, Tyranny, Muslim immigrants, The glenn beck program, Government, Glenn beck 

Liberal politician Keir Starmer announced his resignation on Monday — just hours after President Donald Trump let the cat out of the bag and faulted the British prime minister for failing “badly on two very important subjects — IMMIGRATION AND ENERGY.”

Critics celebrated his downfall, fellow travelers romanticized his time in office, and Starmer’s putative replacement, Andy Burnham, called for an “orderly and responsible” transition.

‘I couldn’t have predicted how quickly he would reveal himself as the most incompetent Prime Minister this country has ever had.’

Starmer, a deeply unpopular leader whose job disapproval rating has hovered around 76%, characterized his nearly two years in office as a success, stating, “We changed our party, ripping out the poison of anti-Semitism, restoring trust on the economy, defense, and national security, and becoming a party that once again stood proudly with, not against, our national flag.”

After suggesting that he had taken steps to “change Britain for the better” — “to build a fairer country with dignity and respect, where everyone is seen, everyone is valued” — and reiterating London’s support for Ukraine, Starmer noted that his party has made clear he is not the individual “best placed to lead us into the next general election.”

“I accept that answer with good grace,” said Starmer, the U.K.’s sixth prime minister since July 2016. “Every decision I’ve taken has been about putting the country I love first. That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour Party. I have spoken to His Majesty the King this morning to inform him of my decision. I will ask the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party to set out a timetable with nominations opening on the 9th of July.”

A Labour leadership election would ensure that Starmer is replaced before the British Parliament returns in September. Starmer said he would remain in office until he is replaced.

RELATED: ‘Beyond evil’: Nightmarish report reveals full scale of mass Islamic rapes of ‘250,000’ white British girls

Labor politician Andy Burnham. Gary Roberts/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images.

The Labour Party has been roiled in recent months by a civil war.

Ninety-six of Starmer’s 402 Labour members of parliament demanded the prime minister’s resignation last month after the party suffered significant losses — a net-loss of 1,229 seats out of a total of roughly 5,000 — in local elections, while Reform UK saw tremendous gains.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood reportedly urged Starmer in early May to establish a timetable for his departure.

The infighting did not go unnoticed by opponents in parliament.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, for instance, stated late last year that “the PM has shown he is in office but not in power.”

‘Digital ID was to be foisted upon people regardless of their wishes.’

Starmer’s ultimate decision to throw in the towel — just days after he and his party were blasted in the 219-page “Rape Gang Inquiry Report” — was welcomed by Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe, who stated, “He has been a truly disgraceful Prime Minister. I do not believe him to be a good man or a patriot. He has deliberately and rapidly accelerated the destruction of our Britain, of our home. History will not remember him kindly, nor should it.”

“I sat in Parliament, looking him in the eye, listening to him attempting to justify his decision to block a national inquiry into the mass rape of young British girls,” continued Lowe. “I will never forgive him. For that, and so much else.”

Labour politicians voted against a national inquiry into grooming gangs in January 2025. Starmer’s spokesman stated at the time, “We will be guided by the victims and what we’ve heard from the victims is that they don’t want to see another national inquiry.”

RELATED: African suspected of trying to cut white Briton’s head off identified — while police fret about online critics

Isabel Infantes/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage wrote, “The Prime Minister is finished. I have to give Starmer some credit: even I couldn’t have predicted how quickly he would reveal himself as the most incompetent Prime Minister this country has ever had the misfortune of having.”

Farage, who has demanded a prompt general election “at the soonest possible date,” countered Starmer’s success narrative with a list of some of the Labour government’s apparent misdeeds over the past two years:

The party started by trying to steal from pensioners, while simultaneously refusing to take action against welfare cheats. Rachel Reeves raided your pay packet to throw money towards public sector fat cats. Promises to “smash the gangs” were hollow, as illegal migration through the Channel hit record highs. Digital ID was to be foisted upon people regardless of their wishes. Hardened criminals were released from prisons back onto your streets. The Chagos Islands were nearly handed over at a cost to the taxpayer, and farmers were hit by a death tax.

The Free Speech Union also welcomed Starmer’s exit, noting, “He has led the most authoritarian government in more than a generation, unleashing an unprecedented assault on free speech. Indeed, he seems determined to make social media censorship his legacy.”

The FSU, like Farage, pointed out, however, that the Labour Party’s likely replacement may be just as bad as, if not worse than, Starmer.

Starmer’s most likely successor is Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor who handily won a special election on Thursday, thereby securing a seat in parliament and a viable pathway to the head of the Labour Party.

A radical leftist who welcomes mass migration, Burnham is also an Islamophile who:

opposed the U.K.’s counter-extremism program as “toxic” for supposedly discriminating against Muslims, whom he said feel “unfairly targeted”;rushed to downplay the religious nature of the May 2017 Islamic terror attack at the Manchester Arena that left 22 people dead and 1,017 injured, noting that “the person who did it in no more represents the Muslim community than the person who killed Jo Cox represents the white Christian community”; andsupported the adoption of a definition of “Islamophobia” that claims it is “rooted in racism.”

Other candidates are, according to conservative politician David Frost, variations on a theme:

All the likely candidates, just like Starmer, are creatures of the same political class. All have devoted their lives to Labour politics and none appears to have any meaningful non-political hinterland or wider interests beyond pop music and football. They all support Burnham-style state‑led regionalism, they all see the state as capable of resolving all society’s ills, and they are all in their different ways steeped in corporatism and the trade unions. All are pro-EU and want to reverse Brexit. And of course all are hostile to “populism.”

Burnham thanked Starmer on Monday for his “leadership and dedication during such a challenging period” and emphasized the need for the transition process to be “conducted in an orderly and responsible way.”

“People want to see progress on economic growth, cost of living, public services, housing and opportunities for the next generation,” wrote Burnham. “Political change should never distract from the responsibility to improve people’s lives.”

Liberals at home and abroad did their apparent best to paint Starmer’s short stint in office in rosy colors.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, for instance, said Starmer “can be proud of the contribution he has made to the country he loves.”

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, claimed that “it can take many leaders years to grow into the statesman [Starmer] became in just two years,” adding that Starmer had helped make European and Ukrainian security stronger.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan claimed that Starmer “is a man of great integrity” who has “made a huge contribution to the Labour party and our country.”

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​Andy burnham, Britain, Donald trump, Immigration, Keir starmer, Leftism, London, Nigel farage, Rape gang, Uk, Politics, Labour party 

I don’t know what I clicked on that caused this, but lately most of the suggested videos on my YouTube sidebar are of morose and lonely young men saying things like:

Nobody wants to be in a relationship.

I’m 31, and I’ve never had a girlfriend.

It’s an easy formula. Speak in low tones. Sigh with profound weariness. Encourage men to feel sorry for themselves.

Everything about life sucks and is horrible.

I’m not sad. I’m empty.

I look at women, and I’m exhausted.

I prefer to live alone. In silence.

The pains of being pure at heart

The sad-looking narrators of these videos are usually sitting in a dark room, or at a desk, or sometimes in their crappy car. There are no visible decorations, no posters on the wall. Maybe there’s a row of Russian novels in the back or the collected works of Nietzsche.

The young men are usually sitting far enough from the camera to make them look fragile, weak, broken, and alone.

Each man tells his tale of woe. He’s given up on dating. He doesn’t enjoy talking to girls.

He feels disenfranchised, unwanted. Society is against him. The whole world is holding him down.

The women’s perspective

If you click on enough of these videos, you will eventually end up on the women’s side of the debate, faced with a cascade of videos from equally disillusioned young women saying things like:

Are men hiding?

Why are guys refusing to date?

It’s fun to hate on men.

Since when do dudes not want to smash?

The death of boyfriend culture.

If you start clicking on those videos, you might end up with some mix of the two, which reveals that the feeling of doom is everywhere:

Something isn’t right with people anymore.

No wonder everyone is gay now.

She’s 29, and she’s so lost in life.

No thank you, ladies. I’m good.

Dating fatigue is setting in. Women are giving up.

Night at the psy-opera

My first thought was that all these videos look suspiciously similar. Is this some sort of psyop? Is some nefarious organization trying to undermine heterosexual attraction? Or destroy any hope for Gen Z’s marital happiness?

Meanwhile, I find myself stupefied by the infinite parade of Millennial and Gen Z guys and gals, depressed, lonely, talking into their phones in their empty rooms.

How many people are really like this? Probably a lot. And that’s not good news for anybody.

RELATED: Evie magazine’s critics are wrong. Allow me to mansplain why.

Evie Magazine/Sigrid Estrada/Getty Images

Hetero-what?

It brings to mind the famous article “The Trouble with Wanting Men” from the New York Times, which declared, “Women are so fed up with dating men that the phenomenon even has a name: heterofatalism.”

(Since it’s the New York Times, nobody asked what the men think.)

Apparently, “heterofatalism” means that anyone who still feels trapped in heterosexual hell should kill themselves. Or at least feel very ashamed.

The writer of the piece, Jean Garnett, resents her own heterosexuality. Despite how objectively worthless men are, she still feels compelled to try to attract them. She craves that feeling of being longed for and desired.

She wants things to be like when she was younger. When men couldn’t resist her. When men couldn’t keep their hands off her.

Though from the sound of Ms. Garnett, I’m sure she would have something to say about any unwanted touching.

What women want

I have watched many of these videos. Men have their various complaints about women: Their girlboss attitude, their unrealistic standards, their doodle tattoos.

And women think men have lost their manliness. They seem withdrawn, passive, and preoccupied with their own troubles.

Women want men to approach them, charm them, buy them a drink.

But contemporary men are hiding in their basements, terrified of being #MeToo’d or rejected or ending up on social media as the butt of a small-penis joke.

Money talks

If these videos aren’t some secret plot to make young people miserable, they are at least a way to make money on the internet.

These men, sitting in their cars, staring forlornly into the gray skies outside, are gathering large followings.

It’s an easy formula. Speak in low tones. Sigh with profound weariness. Encourage men to feel sorry for themselves.

There is at least some psychological relief in that. If it’s happening to everyone, it’s not really your fault. It’s society’s fault. It’s the times. It’s woke politics.

Support the youth!

I do feel great sympathy for these young people coming up. It’s tough to be young and first venturing out into the world — especially at this particular moment in time, when everything about society seems structured to create conflict.

But I suspect they will find some form of happiness. It just isn’t going to be easy. And it might come in forms that are unfamiliar.

Either way, we should understand the challenges Gen Z seems destined to face. They are the ones with nothing to lose. Which means they’re the ones who will fight the coming battles.

We should remember that and help and support them in any way we can.

​Culture, Dating, Generation z, Heterofatalism, Lifestyle, Men and woman, Youtube, Zoomers, Blake’s progress 

When my documentary “15 Days” came out, I expected pushback. The film showed how American schools stayed closed long past the point at which honest people could defend the closures.

What I got was stranger. People asked me what to do.

Strangers in airports, parents at screenings, people who had never sat through a school board meeting in their lives — they wanted a plan. They wanted to know their part.

My second film, “Uncancellable,” is my answer.

The film is about Maud Maron. If you do not live in Manhattan, you may not know the name. You should.

Maud is a mother of four who has spent the last six years being told to sit down and shut up by every institution she belonged to. She has not sat down. She has not shut up. She keeps losing seats and titles, and somehow she keeps winning the argument.

Maud Maron is not a celebrity. She is a mother with a list of opinions and a refusal to swallow them to keep the room comfortable. The cure for the country is more of her, not fewer.

The argument is whether Americans are still allowed to think for themselves in public.

Maud was a public defender at the Legal Aid Society for more than 20 years. She started an advocacy group called PLACE NYC that defends screened schools and gifted programs in a city quietly dismantling both. She was elected to her community education council in District 2.

Then came the summer of 2020. Every progressive workplace in America held the same struggle session.

On a Zoom school board meeting that summer, a white board member sat with his friend’s black baby on his lap while making the case for keeping merit-based admissions at New York’s specialized high schools. Activists called him a racist. Letters circulated. Signatures were demanded.

Maud shrugged it off. She would not engage in identity politics, and she would not step down from her school board seat. For that, the lawyers at the Legal Aid Society called her a racist too. She was pushed out of her job.

She did not go quietly. She sued them.

In 2024, Maud introduced Resolution 248, which asked the council to examine the question of boys competing in girls’ sports and to put girls themselves in the room where the decision was being made. The council passed it. Activists followed her around. Council members who privately agreed with her said nothing in public.

RELATED: NYC moms file federal lawsuit against leftist education officials who allegedly punish those with dissenting views

Noam Galai/Getty Images

In 2025, the resolution was rescinded. Maud lost her school board seat in the next election. The activists declared victory.

Here is what they missed: Maud kept talking.

She is slowly winning in the culture the fight she lost in the room. A growing number of parents now say in public what almost nobody would say in 2020. That is partly because of Maud and people like her, who took the first hits so the rest of us would not have to.

In the film, Maud describes people coming up to her and saying she has the courage to say what they cannot. She turns the question around.

Why can’t they?

It is a fair question. Every parent who has watched a school curriculum get rewritten without input has felt this. Every employee who has rewritten the same Slack message four times to avoid setting off a colleague looking to be offended has felt it.

We are afraid. That fear is the whole problem.

This is what I keep telling people who ask me what to do: You do not need a national platform. You need a local one.

The school board meets this month. The PTA needs a treasurer. The neighborhood listserv has a thread about a new library policy. Your sister-in-law is about to pull her child out of public school and is too embarrassed to say why. Your son’s teacher used a phrase at parent night that made you uncomfortable, and you said nothing.

Start there. Speak up at the kitchen table first. Then at the school. Most of the people in your life are probably waiting for somebody to go first. You can be that person.

People love to say one person cannot change a country. One person cannot. A million ones can. That is what a force multiplier is.

RELATED: Democrats vilify NYC parents, demand they abandon request for policy review of transvestites in girls’ sports

Photo courtesy of Palladium Pictures

It is also why every authoritarian system in history has worked so hard to make the first person who speaks pay the highest price. If you can scare the first one quiet, the second one never opens her mouth.

I come from the Soviet Union. I know how that works.

“15 Days” and “Uncancellable” may look like different films, but they ask the same question: Are you willing to be the first one to say the true thing?

Both are stories about free speech and ordinary people who refused to stay quiet when their professions and neighbors wanted silence. The cost of speaking up is real. The cost of staying silent is worse.

Some people will tell you the country is too far gone for one Tuesday-night school board meeting to matter. They are wrong, and they are mostly the people who do not want you to show up.

Show up anyway. Bring a friend.

Maud Maron is not a celebrity. She is a mother with a list of opinions and a refusal to swallow them to keep the room comfortable. The cure for the country is more of her, not fewer.

It starts with the small, unglamorous habit of saying what you actually think, in the room you are actually in, to the people who are there with you.

That is the force multiplier. That is the whole revolution.

​15 days, Covid, Lockdowns, Uncancellable, Legal aid society, School boards, Maud maron, Opinion & analysis 

James Talarico, a Democratic Texas state representative, former teacher, and Presbyterian seminarian, is the Democratic nominee facing Republican Ken Paxton in the competitive 2026 U.S. Senate race in Texas.

Talarico’s campaign is built heavily on his “Christian” faith, which he uses to justify abortion, the LGBTQ+ agenda, and other progressive causes, leading many conservatives to call him a heretic, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and a blasphemer.

BlazeTV’s Sara Gonzales is one of the loudest voices warning that Talarico would be a curse on the state of Texas. On this episode of “Come and Take It,” Sara unveils three disturbing facts about the Scripture-twisting seminarian’s church — St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.

1. ‘Christ-centered’ … but open to ‘all religions’: St. Andrew’s shocking statement of faith

On the FAQ page under the section “What does this church believe,” St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church’s website reads:

We are Presbyterian, yet our first allegiance is to Christ’s gospel of universal love. We are Christ centered, yet we respect and learn from all religions of love. We affirm the ancient symbols of our faith, yet we strive to speak a new language that includes all people and affirms the scientific discoveries of our day. We hope to teach children the stories of the Bible without sectarian dogma. We strive to be a close, nurturing community, yet we welcome all people into our midst. We wish to live in inner peace, yet hear God’s call to work for peace and for universal human rights. We take faith seriously, yet believe the journey should be fun. We celebrate life in many artistic forms.

“So, not a Christian church at all,” Sara says, calling it a “fun club.”

2. Proudly ‘out’ lesbian chaplain: The reverend on staff at Talarico’s church

One of the reverends on staff is a lesbian woman named Babs Miller. Her profile on the website reads, “I was finally ordained here in 2014, 24 years after I graduated from seminary, as an ‘out’ lesbian chaplain.”

“That’s how you know that this is not a real church, is when they have a pastor who’s like, ‘I’m living in sin, yeah. Come to our church. … I’m going to preach to you about God’s word while I’m not following it in my daily life and bragging about it,” Sara scoffs.

3. ‘Safe haven’ for porn? Sexually graphic books found in St. Andrew’s kids’ library

“At St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, at their church library — where children allegedly are allowed to just roam, hang out — are sexually explicit books,” Sara says.

According to the church’s website, the library features “over 1,300 books ranging from topics in history to social justice to Christianity and world religions.” This includes a banned book section, described as “a safe haven for stories from a variety of life experiences and viewpoints.”

“Much like the Bible, recorded histories of people’s lives are not pornography. Using that word for LGBTQ+ stories or other hard topics is a political tactic, not an honest description,” the website reads.

But Sara disputes this claim, noting that the library catalog features numerous pornographic books, including “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson, which contains graphic depictions of rape and incest, and “This Book Is Gay” by Juno Dawson — a book that’s been widely banned in public schools for its graphic depictions of the “ins and outs of gay sex.”

Other controversial titles include “Trans Kids, Our Kids: Stories and Resources from the Frontlines of the Movement for Transgender Youth,” “Called OUT: The Voices and Gifts of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Presbyterians,” “Becoming Nicole: The Inspiring Story of Transgender Actor-Activist Nicole Maines and Her Extraordinary Family,” and the graphic novel “Gender Queer” (one of the most banned books in the country for its sexually explicit illustrations).

“If this is in a church library — not just accessible to adults who are allegedly trying to practice Christianity, but also, like, able to be viewed by children, by minors — what won’t this church do?” Sara asks. “I mean, this is demonic, to say the least.”

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​Come and take it, Come and take it with sara gonzales, Austin texas, James talarico, Presbyterian church 

When I heard that a black female Howard University professor of “communication” had written a Substack piece supporting accused murderer Karmelo Anthony and attacking the victim’s family, I was not surprised.

I regularly research this genre of racialist academia, much of it grounded in grievance, paranoia, and moral inversion. So I reviewed my personal library of pseudo-academic studies for what I already knew I would find about the author.

Con men and grifters have more than their share of psychopaths. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior appears more frequently among academics than is comfortable.

Sure enough, there she was: Dr. Stacey Patton, a prolific spinner of race-driven commentary who monetizes narcissism and paranoia for a rarefied audience.

Patton is typical of blindered black academics who contribute to the myth of ubiquitous black oppression in American society, a myth that now boasts its own literature. Much of systematized black academia has long been characterized by racial paranoia and self-regarding grievance.

This creates a paradox on campus. Mental illness in higher education is rarely identified and treated. Instead, institutions often nurture and encourage various maladies, even celebrating “neurodiversity,” especially when it serves ideology. At the extreme, grievance-studies enclaves become magnets for the like-minded, creating self-sealing provincial communities where paranoia and narcissism harden into conspiracy theory.

Consider Patton.

She contributed to “Presumed Incompetent II,” a key text in the canon of “poor me” paranoia and grandiose narcissism. Her chapter is titled “Why I clap back against racist trolls who attack black women academics.” This is classic main-character narcissism. Yet in its biography of Patton, Howard University modifies the chapter title, perhaps to make it sound more academic: “How Right-Wing Media Outlets Are Fighting Real Diversity in Academe.”

For narcissistic academics like Patton, reality can be edited as part of the self-regarding method. If needed, they can simply make it up.

Patton is hardly alone. The racialist canon contains countless articles and books with titles such as “Racial Battle Fatigue in Higher Education,” “Racial Battle Fatigue,” “Racial Battle Fatigue in Faculty,” “Black Fatigue,” and “Toxic Ivory Towers.” Patton, a “communication” professor and self-described historian, is an active participant in this paranoid fantasy. She defends her racialism this way:

Can you imagine people saying that a cancer researcher focuses too much on cancer? Or how about a climate scientist is suspiciously obsessed with climate? How about somebody saying a theologian keeps bringing up god? They wouldn’t. But when Black scholars study race, suddenly our expertise is some kind of pathology.

RELATED: Howard University professor’s wild take: Austin Metcalf’s dad is the real villain

Claudio Caridi/iStock/Getty Images

Genuine scientists are questioned all the time, and they are held to strict standards of method. Patton is not. The chief difference is that she has no discernible expertise unless she claims “identity” itself as expertise. The entire genre of narcissistic racialism rests on confirmation bias, selection bias, erasure of the distinction between fact and fiction, Orwellian manipulation of language, made-up “composite stories,” postmodern relativity of truth, outright fables, and rescue hypotheses designed to protect racialism from disconfirmation.

Most troubling, these dysfunctions are rooted in codified paranoia — the core of the racialist myth.

In Patton’s Substack piece attacking the father of murder victim Austin Metcalf, she distinguishes herself as a purveyor of communal narcissism. The piece is nominally about Karmelo Anthony. In reality, it is another exculpatory exercise for bad behavior.

She writes from the ideological hotbox known as Howard University, where the maladies of “poor me paranoia” and grandiose narcissism find a distinct genre of faux scholarship, especially among black female academics.

Howard has become a sort of academic “Love Boat,” the final destination for fading intellectual celebrities who could not survive in the world of rigorous scholarship and sharp criticism. It is the last stop for Nikole Hannah-Jones of the error-riddled 1619 Project; Ibram X. Kendi, scandal-plagued author of “How to Be an Antiracist” and failed director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of multiple empty autobiographical meditations on an unaccomplished life.

So no one should be surprised that a purveyor of paranoia plies her trade there. Howard offers a communal home for professionalized narcissism, and the symptoms are obvious to anyone willing to look.

One of those symptoms is “virtuous victimhood,” in which people story-tell themselves into victim status, blame others, then seek compensation or “reparations” for their declared victimhood. I have written extensively on this psychological phenomenon. It is the de facto resource-extraction strategy for the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement, which I explore in “DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education.”

Con men and grifters have more than their share of psychopaths. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior appears more frequently among academics than is comfortable.

The campus provides a kind of microbiology lab where mental illness can worsen, not encumbered by healthy introspection and certainly not by medical treatment. Here I refer specifically to the maladies of “poor me” paranoia and narcissistic personality disorder. Racialist oppression studies are grounded in both.

By “racialist,” I do not mean “racist” in the common sense, but rather in the neutral sense used by W.E.B. Du Bois. Racialists are consumed by race as the single explanatory factor and conduct their lives inside a race-driven fantasy. They view the world exclusively through the “lens” of race. When someone uses the term “racial lens” or “lens of race,” know that he is engaged in a resource-extraction con.

Patton monetizes her red-meat racialism on Substack, addressing a paid audience — a morally vacant fringe of black America, along with guilty white liberals — that is troubled, paranoid, easily duped, and easily led by grifters. The audience for this racialist niche literature is large enough for a quasi-academic to earn a good living. University of Pennsylvania professor John L. Jackson described this credulous audience in “Racial Paranoia.” Jackson, to his credit, survived Howard with his integrity intact.

RELATED: America is done buying bogus racial alibis

This does not mean racialists such as Patton lack passion, sincerity, intellect, or certitude. Of course they marshal facts, though often interspersed with claims that are doubtful at best and fabricated at worst. Evangelists for cults and extremist movements also exude passion, sincerity, charisma, and certainty. They weave fantasy and fact until the two become indistinguishable.

As I explain in “DEI Exposed”:

The technique appears to be to simply fabricate something, the more ambitiously egregious the better, to pass it off as fact, and then to circulate it with bluster, bluff, and zeal. It demonstrates the power of paranoid thought and action and repetition to achieve legitimacy as a ritualized “truth.”

Racialists are passionate about their faith-based ideology. Many are skilled persuaders. Some are talented tale-spinners. Others are crusaders with a burning sense of conviction.

That energy drives the racially aggrieved in academia — the vignettes, scenarios, composite stories, fables, and tales built around the assumption that whatever happens must be explained through the magical reality of paranoid ideology. The conclusion is predetermined.

As one passage from the academic literature puts it:

So long as the poor-me paranoid can maintain her strategy, she will retain a high self-esteem. She will be motivated to go to great extremes to maintain this — inventing the evidence, or concretizing ambiguous comments, expressing her beliefs in terms of absolute certainty, and, most of all, amplifying the enormity of the conspiracy against her, as would be warranted to persecute an immense talent.

Subclinical paranoia and narcissistic personality disorder provide the evaluative framework for this extremist slice of academia, whose growth accelerated after the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Unfortunately, a subset of black America, supported by “bad me paranoid” white liberals, buys into the infantilizing fantasy. In that fantasy, the faux persecuted are always absolved of responsibility, and a racialist enemy is always available to blame, no matter how tortured the explanation.

In 2026, however, we see signs of sobriety. Academia is growing less tolerant of dubious provincialism, and society is growing less tolerant of consequence-free violent behavior, even as Patton and her compatriots attempt to legitimize the murderous violence of Karmelo Anthony. Because of Patton and her ilk, we may see many more Karmelo Anthonys sacrificed before this tendency is reversed.

Stacey Patton and the racialist clique would do better to sound a warning than to cheer on racially justified violence that brings disastrous legal consequences and appropriate punishment. Patton’s next book is due in October and, of course, has a racialist theme: “Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children.” We shall see what she says.

I am not optimistic. The monetization of psychopathy is not easily remedied, especially when lavishly compensated careers depend on it.

​Opinion & analysis, Black lives matter, Karmelo anthony, Stacey patton, Howard university, Racialism, W.e.b. dubois, Racism, Ibram x. kendi, Diversity equity inclusion, Nikole hannah-jones, Ta-nehisi coates