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A convicted sex offender college professor whose criminal past made him “ineligible for legal status in the United States” has been arrested by ICE, according to a DHS press release published earlier this week.

On November 12, ICE officers arrested Sumith Gunasekera of Sri Lanka in Detroit. According to the press release, he told officers that he was employed as an associate professor at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, about 200 miles northwest of Detroit.

He was arrested for invitation to sexual touching and sexual interference. He told officers at the time that the … incident involved a minor, DHS reported.

Gunasekera first came to the U.S. in February 1998, spent some time in Canada, and then returned to the U.S. later that year on a student visa, the press release said.

During his stint in Canada, he was arrested in Brampton, Ontario, on two separate occasions just three days apart. In the first instance, he was arrested for uttering death threats. In the second, he was arrested for invitation to sexual touching and sexual interference. He told officers at the time that the second incident involved a minor, DHS reported.

In November 1998, a Canadian criminal court convicted him of utter threat to cause death or bodily harm and sexual interference and sentenced him to one month of incarceration and one year of probation, DHS said.

Gunasekera — who earned a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Nevada, according to the Ferris State website — also ran afoul of the law in Las Vegas a few years after his trouble in Canada, the press release said. Cops arrested him for open and gross lewdness in September 2003, and just four months later, he was convicted of disorderly conduct and sentenced to fines.

In 2012, Gunasekera filed for a change in immigration status with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, at which point his Canadian convictions came to light. Those convictions rendered him “ineligible for legal status in the United States,” the press release said. Despite his ineligibility, Gunasekera “repeatedly attempted to manipulate our immigration system between applications, denials, and appeals,” it added.

“It’s sickening that a sex offender was working as a professor on an American college campus and was given access to vulnerable students to potentially victimize them,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Thanks to the brave ICE law enforcement officers, this sicko is behind bars and no longer able to prey on Americans. His days of exploiting the immigration system are OVER. Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, criminals are not welcome in the U.S.”

RELATED: Trump to ‘permanently pause’ migration from third-world backwaters in wake of National Guard member’s grisly murder

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As of Sunday evening, Gunasekera remains listed on the Ferris State website as an assistant professor of marketing. According to a statement from Dave Murray, Ferris State associate vice president for marketing and communications, he has since been placed on administrative leave.

“Ferris State University leaders on Tuesday became aware of accusations regarding professor Sumith Gunasekera. He has been placed on administrative leave while the university gathers more information. This is a personnel issue and it would be inappropriate for the university to further discuss the matter,” Murray told the Detroit News.

A federal immigration database states that Gunasekera remains in ICE custody at a federal facility in Baldwin, Michigan, about a half-hour from Ferris State. Further immigration proceedings are pending, DHS said.

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Most people are concerned about what others think, which is why most people don’t stand up for what they truly believe in — and BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is not one of them.

“If I wanted to be popular, I would not be a reformed Christian. I would not be anti-IVF and pro-death penalty. I just wouldn’t. Like, I have very narrow beliefs, and I am an anchor on the right, getting more and more people to come to what I believe is a biblical position on politics and culture,” she says on “Relatable.”

“I don’t do that because it’s popular. I believe these things. I say these things because I believe that they are right. And I’m doing my very best as a fallible person to follow the word of God. And women, that’s what you are called to do,” she continues.

However, feminism is accepted by most people — and thus, many women will fall into its trap unless they know to avoid it.

“Do not run into the arms of a feminist. I’ve seen this happen so much with people who are deconstructing. Someone hurt them in the church. Maybe a group of people hurt them. Maybe people in their theological camp hurt them. They didn’t like what was going on in their local church,” Stuckey explains.

“Don’t run into the arms of people who are flattering you and who are telling you nice things and who are saying, ‘Oh, maybe progressivism’s right. Maybe the church isn’t right.’ Oh, Satan loves that so much. Goes all the way back to the garden,” she continues.

“When Satan puts that wedge between Eve and God by saying, ‘But you know, she saw that the fruit looked good.’ She was hungry. Satan exploited that and used that,” she adds.

This is why it’s so important that if doubt springs into your mind, that you don’t feed it.

“You want to starve your doubts with faith and knowledge from the word of God,” she says, adding, “If you live by the crowd, you will die by the crowd.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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Here are the basic rules.

First: If the corporate left-wing press doesn’t like a claim, it invariably becomes a “right-wing conspiracy theory,” usually with the tag “without evidence.” The evidence may exist. It may even sit in plain sight — but the press decides what counts.

The ruling class wants your trust back. It hasn’t done the first thing to deserve it.

Second: Some claims get taken seriously no matter what. Those become “allegations.” Allegations quickly morph into “fact.”

Take the recent example of Democrats who alleged on X that President Trump spent Thanksgiving in 2017 with Jeffrey Epstein. The story collapsed in minutes — presidents don’t slip away unnoticed on major holidays to meet notorious sex criminals — but the claim still got ample attention. Point it in the right direction, and it gets a hearing. Point it at the wrong people, and it gets the back of the hand.

Sharon Waxman’s recent column at the Wrap follows the script. The former Washington Post correspondent was shocked to discover the Epstein emails prove that “conspiracy theorists were right.” She writes as if she uncovered some long-lost truth.

Hardly.

Waxman’s column is less revelation than admission: For years, the people who run newsrooms turned a blind eye to the obvious. Donald Trump wasn’t the big fish in those files. Their sources were.

The Epstein email cache runs more than 20,000 documents. Nothing in it should shock any honest observer. The messages show politicians, financiers, academics, diplomats, think-tankers, and media figures seeking introductions, favors, and even dating advice from a convicted sex offender.

Some wanted Epstein’s contacts. Others wanted his money. Some wrote to him while serving in public office. This is not rumor. It is record.

And yes, Epstein talked a lot about Trump, which should surprise no one. They ran in the same social circles. They were friends until they fell out.

Waxman’s piece matters because of what it shows about her profession. Reporters are oddly incurious creatures. They love the line: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. In practice, the checking stops the moment a story threatens the wrong interests. Then skepticism fades. The questions stop. The story dies.

Epstein proved this in real time. His 2008 sweetheart deal with the feds should have made him untouchable. Instead, it signaled that he was protected.

After that deal, Epstein did not retreat. He didn’t slink off into the shadows. He worked the same world that lectures the rest of us about “norms” and “Our Democracy.™” He gave the very married Larry Summers advice on how to seduce a colleague who happened to be the daughter of a high-ranking official in the Chinese Communist Party. He dined with Bill Gates. He hung out with Ehud Barak and ex-Prince Andrew.

Americans saw this and reached the obvious conclusion: rules for the public, exemptions for the powerful.

Say that aloud, though, and the press rolled their eyes and muttered “conspiracy theory.” The famous rule about checking every claim never applied to Cabinet officials, donors, university presidents, or tech titans until the obscenities were too outrageous to let pass.

The press know their own history. They know the government lies. They know institutions close ranks. They know networks protect themselves.

They know about the Tuskegee experiments and MK Ultra and the Gulf of Tonkin sham. They watched the Wuhan “lab leak” go from preposterous to plausible. “You will own nothing” and the “Great Reset” aren’t right-wing fever dreams — they’re actual publications.

But when a live case of elite protection appeared in Jeffrey Epstein, suddenly none of this counted. Suddenly it was unthinkable — not in their circles, not involving their friends, not touching their institutions.

Waxman’s column accidentally exposes the pattern: Our establishment manufactures ignorance and then uses that ignorance as proof that nothing is wrong.

Remember the 2017 Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity? The same experts who drone on about “no evidence of widespread fraud” attacked the commission for probing “unsupported claims” — while states withheld the data needed to determine the truth. When a system blocks audits and then declares itself clean, it isn’t proving confidence. It is proving fear.

That is how Epstein was protected. Not through lack of evidence, but lack of curiosity. Evidence didn’t vanish. Inquiry did. And anyone who noticed was treated as the problem.

RELATED: The right must choose: Fight the real war, or cosplay revolution online

Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images

But trust isn’t owed. Trust is earned.

And the people who demand it have done the most to destroy it. The loss of trust didn’t come from memes or bots. It came from watching Jeffrey Epstein remain welcome among the same people who so archly declare that “democracy dies in darkness.” It came from watching the press spend more time policing public suspicion than scrutinizing powerful friends. It came from institutions that treat questions as insults.

Now Sharon Waxman tells us the “conspiracy theorists” were right.

Gee, thanks, Sharon. Better late than never, I guess.

America didn’t need that revelation. The country has seen it time and again, as the “conspiracy theorists” turn out to be right. The only people who pretended otherwise were the people paid to find the truth.

The ruling class wants your trust back. It hasn’t done the first thing to deserve it.

​Conspiracy theory, Media, Cover up, Epstein, Opinion & analysis, Media bias, Jeffrey epstein, Sharon waxman 

Just weeks after the major AWS outage that took a chunk of the internet out of commission, millions of Americans were struggling to log into websites like X, Spotify, and ChatGPT due to a widespread Cloudflare outage.

“The internet is not some magic cloud. It is really a house of cards,” Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck warns.

“Cloudflare is probably a company that you’ve never even heard of. It is the front door and the alarm system, if you will, for the entire internet. It protects websites from attacks and security problems. So the internet flows through Cloudflare,” he explains.

“When they go down, traffic to the entire website can stop, and most of the internet uses Cloudflare. Without them, the internet would be really, really vulnerable to cyberattacks,” he continues.

“It’s almost irreplaceable. They have the capacity to absorb massive attacks that will take down companies as large as Amazon and Microsoft. This is the first line of defense, and it’s a great line of defense,” he adds.

However, if this technology were to get into the wrong hands, it could spell disaster for all of us — especially considering what our enemies are capable of.

“One of the bad guys is communist China. … They just launched the world’s first AI agent army. This is unbelievable. This is not sci-fi. This is real,” Glenn explains.

“In September, the hackers, you know, didn’t sit in dark rooms typing and trying to get out. They turned an American AI, Claude … into a terminator. What they did is they got into Claude and they said, ‘Hey, pretend you’re a good guy doing security tests. Then gather this information and put some problems into the system,’” he continues.

“They scanned the networks. They wrote exploits. They stole secrets from Big Tech companies, from banks, even from our government. … Four breaches were confirmed. And that’s just what we caught. There was no human involved in this,” he adds.

Glenn’s concern isn’t just that the internet can be hacked, but that we rely on it.

“We’ve handed our entire lives over to the internet and to automation, banking, shopping, voting, talking,” he says. “These are all really fragile digital pipes.”

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For most of his career, Charles Murray carried a strange sort of notoriety.

He never asked for it, and he certainly didn’t enjoy it, but it clung to him all the same. He was the man who pointed out differences in IQ across groups — differences supported by mountains of data — and was promptly told he was a monster for noticing.

It is refreshing to watch a man of his stature poke holes in the pretensions of modern unbelief.

To the elite commentariat, acknowledging uncomfortable facts is far more dangerous than denying them. Murray learned that lesson the hard way. The label “racist” followed him for the simple sin of looking at the world as it is, not as fashionable minds say it must be.

Now, in his new book “Taking Religion Seriously,” he commits a second and perhaps even more impermissible offense: He takes God seriously. And in our age of brazen unbelief — when Richard Dawkins still preaches that matter explains everything and Sam Harris speaks of spirituality while denying the Spirit — this is the ultimate rebellion.

Murray has joined an unexpected migration of thinkers who once rejected faith but now find themselves drawn to it. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once firmly planted in the New Atheist camp, shocked her old colleagues in 2023 when she publicly embraced Christianity.

Murray’s turn is quieter, more measured, and unmistakably his own. But he is walking down the very same path.

Faith beyond reason

The book is a quick read, but it echoes for days.

Murray writes not as a preacher but as a man who has spent a lifetime studying human behavior at its highest and lowest extremes. He knows what happens to communities when faith vanishes. He tracked it in “Coming Apart” long before religion reporters noticed. When church attendance drops, families weaken, neighborhoods suffer, and loneliness settles like dust over entire towns.

For years, Murray called for a “cultural Great Awakening” — a return to shared habits and values without requiring belief itself. Even then, the idea looked doomed, like trying to spark a flame in deep space. And now, finally, he seems willing to concede the obvious.

This book is Murray’s attempt to understand that missing ingredient. It’s the story of an agnostic who found himself slowly pulled toward the transcendent.

His wife, Catherine, became interested in faith. Murray followed her questions, then his own. He approached classical arguments for God not as trophies to be displayed but as puzzles worth pondering. The unmoved mover. Fine-tuning. The strange universality of the moral compass. And he reads C.S. Lewis with the care of a man who knows he may be wrong and wants to be right.

This humility gives the book a sense of clarity. Murray doesn’t pretend to have been struck by lightning. He jokes that he has yet to feel the “joys of faith,” comparing himself to a child outside a bright window, watching a celebration he longs to join. It is one of the loveliest passages in the book and one of the most honest.

RELATED: Why real Christianity terrifies the elites — and they’re right to worry

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To his credit, Murray confronts the fear that haunts the secular mind: the fear of looking foolish.

His mention of the “tribe of smart people” lands less as pride and more as an admission that he was shaped by a previous paradigm in which intellect stood in for conviction. And he knows exactly how that tribe behaves. Terminal lucidity? Near-death experiences? To the self-appointed high priests of materialism, such things must be dismissed before anyone dares examine them. They carry their disbelief like a badge of honor.

Murray refuses to play along. If the evidence points beyond matter, he says, follow it. Even if the clever people frown — and especially then.

It is refreshing to watch a man of his stature poke holes in the pretensions of modern unbelief, not with anger or sarcasm, but with a steady hand and a willingness to face what many prefer to ignore — and hope we ignore too.

Truth conquers data

For Christians, the most moving aspect of the book is Murray’s recognition that religion can’t be divorced from the heart of who we are. A society can’t thrive on secondhand virtue. It must grow from living faith, not admiration from a distance.

Murray’s old belief in an underlying, all-encompassing framework without God now strikes him as absurd. The last few years have shown him what many Christians already know: Attempting to build community on the fumes of forgotten belief is folly. The foundation is already dust before the first brick is laid.

Murray now accepts the existence of God. He accepts the reliability of scripture. He accepts the claims of Christ. And perhaps most telling of all, he no longer fears death. A man who once considered suicide at the end of life now finds himself at peace.

That, in itself, is a kind of miracle.

“Taking Religion Seriously” isn’t an altar call. It’s something rarer: the record of a mind long trained to trust data now learning to trust truth. Murray shows that the honest search for meaning will always lead beyond materialism, beyond ego, beyond the boundaries set by those who pride themselves on sophistication but know nothing of the soul.

​Charles murray, Reason, Christianity, Christian, God, Taking religion seriously, Faith 

Genesis 6 remains one of the most debated and controversial sections of the Bible. The extreme brevity yet massive implications of the description of the Nephilim — the wicked offspring of “the daughters of man” and “the sons of God” — have kept scholars locked in debate for well over two millennia.

There are three main bodies of belief when it comes to the Nephilim: They were wicked humans spawned from the intermarriage of the godly line of Seth and the ungodly line of Cain; they were human tyrants born of kings claiming to be divine and their harems; or they were giant human-god hybrids created from the coupling of fallen angels and human women.

Timothy Alberino — “explorer, teacher, real-life Indiana Jones, and the author of “Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam’s Dominion on Earth”’ — falls into the latter category, arguing there’s abundant biblical and historical evidence proving the divine nature of the Nephilim.

But his theory doesn’t end with their decimation in the worldwide flood described in Genesis 6-9. Alberino believes we will see the return of the Nephilim agenda in the end times — not the same giants, but a new hybrid abomination born of man, machine, and forbidden knowledge.

In this riveting interview with Glenn Beck, Alberino dives into a theory that will leave ice in your veins and fire in your prayers.

The book of Enoch, which Alberino argues is an authentic, divinely inspired text corroborated by both the Old and New Testaments, gives us insight into the world’s “golden age” — the period when the giant race of Nephilim roamed the Earth. It also perhaps explains legends like Atlantis — a city ruled by Poseidon’s “demi-god” sons before the sea swallowed it up in a great flood.

The “golden age” of human-god procreation outlined in the book of Enoch is the “origin story” of “every primary ancient civilization,” including the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, says Alberino. In these cultures, demon gods (“Watchers” in Enochian language) and their giant offspring were revered and worshipped. Only the Hebrews saw this era of halfbreeds as “a nightmarish dystopia.”

While this age ended with the great flood, Alberino believes another golden age of hybrids is coming. “Everything that was done in the antediluvian [pre-flood] world,” specifically “the corruption of all flesh,” is “going to be repeated to some extent, [but] not exactly in the same way,” he says.

In this new golden age, humans will merge not with gods but with something that is quickly becoming god-like: technology.

As humanity edges ever closer toward a “post-human apocalypse,” with developments in “genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology” continuing to skyrocket and coalesce, we will inevitably be forced to answer this harrowing question: “What does it mean to be a human being, and is our humanity worth preserving?”

“We are in some sense building the mechanism of our own destruction right now. We are creating the tools that are going to enable us to redefine human biology — to remake Adam,” says Alberino.

But it won’t be Adam from Eden. It will be the demonic spawn of man and machine — a transhuman and eventually a post-human, which we’ve been told repeatedly by globalists and tech elites are in humanity’s pipeline.

Much of the world won’t bat an eye.

“From the secular, atheistic, Darwinian perspective, who cares, right? Because there’s nothing sacred about being human,” says Alberino. “I mean, there’s nothing in their worldview that makes the human being anything other than an animal with a bigger brain.”

To these godless technocrats and the hordes who blindly follow, transhumanism and post-humanism are “just the natural course of human development,” but “the biblical narrative is quite different,” Alberino explains. “The biblical narrative defines mankind … as being created in the image and likeness of God.”

But the imago dei of our nature isn’t the only reason preserving humanity is paramount. Christians would do well to remember that there’s only one qualification for eligibility in Christ’s redemption plan: “You must be human,” Alberino warns.

But transhumans and post-humans aren’t people any more, which means they’ve lost access to salvation of Christ.

Glenn, who has been warning about digital Armageddon for years, wonders if this merging of man and machine is the mark of the beast warned about in the Revelation. According to the prophetic text, once you have the fatal mark, salvation is impossible. What if the reason for this is because the mark of the beast signifies that you’re not a human and therefore not eligible?

“Once you become transhuman, you can’t undo that. … That starts to make that scripture in Revelation work … because you’re not human,” he says.

“Precisely right,” agrees Alberino.

“The technology we hold in our hands is going into our brains very soon. It is going into the cerebral cortex, and rather than surfing the internet with our thumbs, we’re going to be surfing the internet with this accomplice — artificial intelligence — through the speed of thought,” he says.

Once this happens, being a regular human being means oppression, isolation, and poverty. It means the world leaves you behind. But to those who either bend the knee or excitedly sign up for the merge, they’ll be living in a new golden age.

As the world hurtles forward into a harrowing technological future, we ironically find ourselves back in the Garden of Eden faced with the serpent’s same temptation: “You will not surely die. … You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The question, Alberino says, is: Will we strike another “Faustian bargain” and “sell our birthright for a bowl of stew — for the advances and the advantages of post-humanism, of transhumanism?” Or will we see “the worth of [our] humanity” — the humanity that gives us access to the blood of Jesus — and resist the pull?

To hear the full interview, watch the video above.

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Handing a smartphone over to a child in 2025 is like putting a child in the middle of a junkyard and calling it a playground.

Yes, the space contains useful tools and materials for adults who know what they are doing. They arrive with knowledge, caution, and protective equipment. They know where to step and what to avoid. And if the adult should get hurt through recklessness or inattention, they have enough life experience to know how to mitigate the harm.

Missing red flags is not just possible — it is inevitable.

And even if you post warning signs at the gate, the environment itself remains full of hazards — rusted metal, broken glass, exposed wiring, spilled gasoline. A child placed in that environment is vulnerable not because the child disobeys the signs, but because the space was never designed for them to navigate safely. The danger is structural.

But kids are naturally curious, and they like to explore. Five out of every 10 children who spend time in that “playground” will be significantly, perhaps even fatally, harmed by the experience.

This is the situation we have created by normalizing smartphones for children. Smartphones were never intended for young users, yet in the U.S., more than 60% of children ages 5 to 11 and 84% of teens now have one.

Those devices are portals to an enormous ecosystem of apps — approximately 1.8 million available in Apple’s App Store alone. According to Apple’s 2023 Transparency Report, 500 experts assess about 132,000 apps each week. That breaks down to around 265 apps per reviewer per week or about nine minutes per app.

Nine minutes to determine how the app collects and stores data, whether it enables account creation (and deletion), whether it uses copyrighted materials, whether it meets hardware and software standards, whether it contains illegal or harmful content, and whether it can be used to facilitate illegal or harmful activity

Most readers could not read the Apple App Review Guidelines in nine minutes, let alone meaningfully evaluate an app’s design, mechanics, and community-risk profile.

All that before you even get to questions of safety.

Little wonder, then, that so many apps that seem innocuous at first blush are later discovered to be a predator’s playground.

RELATED: Is your child being exposed to pedophiles in the metaverse?

Francisco Javier Ortiz Marzo/iStock/Getty Images Plus

A recent New York Post headline warns, “Wizz is like ‘Tinder for kids,’ as teens use the app to hook up while adult predators lurk.” Wizz is marketed to users ages 12 to 18 as a way to meet new friends who share common interests. In practice, it functions more like a teen version of Tinder, complete with profile swiping and private messaging that connects minors with total strangers, including adults posing as teens. The Post details three cases of adult men who allegedly used the app to meet underage girls.

Wizz is far from the only example.

This fall, a married 42-year-old father of two was convicted in the U.K. for encouraging a child to self-harm. The man created six fake profiles on Discord and Snapchat, each one posing as a teenaged boy, in order to ensnare, blackmail, and abuse a 13-year-old girl.

The investigation was hampered by the fact that he had used stolen identities and fake accounts to communicate with his victim and by the fact that the apps he used to communicate with her allowed him to set the messages to “auto-delete,” which left no digital trail for investigators to follow.

Kik, an anonymous messaging app, was considered a haven for child predators because it provided anonymity and allowed users to communicate without sharing phone numbers. Vice reported in 2019 that the app was shutting down, but it is still available for download on Apple’s App Store and, as recently as this summer, was linked to a number of child exploitation cases.

Any social media platform targeted specifically to young users is ripe for abuse, but often parents do not know about the dangers until the harm has already been done. We rely on the imagined expertise and authority of professional reviewers.

If the app is available on an app store, we assume it has been properly vetted.

But the truth is that app stores rely on developers’ self-reported age-ratings and safety claims. And with less than 10 minutes to spend reviewing each app, the deck is stacked against children and families. Missing red flags is not just possible — it is inevitable.

Congress must act and pass the App Store Accountability Act.

The bill would require app stores to be transparent about how apps handle data, how they moderate interactions, and for whom their products are intended. It would establish clear responsibility when apps marketed to minors become vehicles for grooming, harassment, or exploitation. And it would ensure that companies profiting from child-facing platforms cannot simply shrug and point to the fine print when harm occurs.

The App Store Accountability Act will not eliminate every risk, but it will help end the era of Big Tech reviewing itself and calling it protection. That would be a big win for families.

​App store accountability act, Smarphones, Predators, Children, Protect children 

Elton John has recently praised President Donald Trump for his foreign policy work but stopped short of saying he was one of the nation’s greatest presidents.

Instead, the beloved musician explained what could cement Trump as one of the greatest American presidents ever to sit in the Oval Office.

Last year, John called it “brilliant” when Trump labeled North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un “Rocket Man” in reference to one of John’s songs, but the singer faced backlash over allegedly endorsing Trump for the 2024 presidential election.

‘If he wants to go down as one of the greatest presidents in history…’

John later clarified his position in an Instagram post, saying he was “simply acknowledging the fact that Trump has long been a fan” of John’s music and that “historically he’s been very kind” to him.

Fast-forward to an interview with Variety published Tuesday, and the 78-year-old is still not shy about giving the president credit where it is due. Moreover, John praised Republicans who have shown interest in his work to find a cure for AIDS.

“The bipartisan thing makes common sense. To see us come so far with the medical and scientific advances, and to think this is the only disease that can be completely cured in one’s lifetime,” John explained.

“President Trump has maybe solved the peace problem. If he wants to go down as one of the greatest presidents in history … if he ended AIDS, that would really be a feather in his cap.”

RELATED: Trump called Kim Jong Un ‘Rocket Man’— and Elton John ‘thought it was brilliant’

2004: Melania Knauss, Donald Trump and Sir Elton John during 12th Annual Elton John AIDS Foundation Oscar Party Co-hosted by In Style – Inside at Pearl in West Hollywood, California, United States. Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage

Sir Elton spoke more generally on Trump’s peacemaking progress overseas, expressing hope that the “big war” between Israel and Palestine will be “settled” soon.

He then referred to AIDS as “another war” that is being prevented from ending because governments won’t allow medicine to get to the people who need it.

“There are crimes against millions of other people that are happening because of governments and stigma and hate,” John remarked to Variety. “It’s so frustrating when you have the medicine, you have prep, you have the antiretrovirals. We can stop the spread of AIDS, if people just got off their backsides and treated human beings in a Christian kind of way.”

RELATED: Trump admin leaves Elon Musk’s Grok, xAI off massive list of AI tech partners

Donald Trump and Elton John walking together at the Taj Mahal Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey May 19 1990. Photo by Jeffrey Asher/ Getty Images

During his first administration, Trump launched an initiative called Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. and announced it during the 2019 State of the Union address.

“In recent years, we have made remarkable progress in the fight against HIV and AIDS. Scientific breakthroughs have brought a once-distant dream within reach,” Trump said in February 2019.

The president said the goal of the program was to eliminate the HIV epidemic in the United States within the next 10 years.

“We have made incredible strides. Incredible. Together, we will defeat AIDS in America and beyond,” he added.

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President Donald Trump’s latest comments on semiconductor exports sounded almost conciliatory — until they weren’t. Speaking recently on “60 Minutes,” the president said he would let Nvidia “deal with China” but drew a bright red line: Beijing could buy chips, just not the “most advanced” ones. The message was calibrated for maximum effect: permissive enough to please markets, hawkish enough to claim toughness. Nvidia’s stock jumped immediately — but China did not get what it wanted.

Days later, in a Financial Times interview, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, warned that if the U.S. blocked his company from selling more of its advanced chips to China, it would “lose” the AI race. The argument was astonishing in its candor: Cut us off, Beijing wins.

As grateful as America should be for breathtaking innovations, an irreconcilable tension exists between national interest and fiduciary duty.

The comparison between a president sounding measured and a CEO trying to sound indispensable captures a dangerous inversion of power. Nvidia has become more than America’s most valuable company. It’s attempting to become its policymaker, shaping the boundaries of what Washington thinks possible in its competition with China.

To understand how one company reached that position, it helps to revisit what happened in Washington just days before Trump met Xi Jinping in South Korea.

Nvidia called it a GPU Technology Conference. Yet the event felt less like a developer’s conference and more like a tech-bro-meets-MAGA jamboree: free swag and a booming video hymn to American genius — from Thomas Edison to Donald J. Trump. Huang, leather jacket gleaming, strode out like a preacher to proclaim that the age of reindustrialization had arrived.

The D.C. version of GTC was not the San Jose GTC tech insiders have come to know. For the first time, Nvidia brought a full-blown edition of its developers’ confab to the capital, a strategic choice. The company does not merely want to sit at the table where policy is made — it wants to own it.

After hours of Super Bowl-style buildup — financiers whispering, tech CEOs hinting — attendees were herded into a dimly lit hall, where Huang unveiled a cascade of partnerships. The headline act that made sleeves roll up on both the policy bench and the brokerage floor was the Vera Rubin Superchip, billed as made in America and spoken of with the gravity reserved for national monuments.

It’s a dazzling feat of engineering: silicon that can be waved before a crowd as proof that America can still design, assemble, and scale. Expected to debut next year, the chip is music to policy wonks’ ears, a gleaming symbol of reindustrialization, and perhaps a psychological hedge against the fragility of Taiwan. For investors, it’s manna. As robots increasingly take charge, building chips in the U.S. will keep the supply chain close to home and safeguard companies against the whims of geopolitics.

Then, with the applause fading, an undercurrent of tension lingered, one that perhaps only the wonks could fully register. After that opening montage, capped by Jensen’s almost rhetorical question, “Was that video amazing?” the subtext became harder to ignore. And when he closed his remarks by thanking the audience “for your service and for making America great again,” it was impossible not to think of what the financiers were murmuring on the next stage over.

“Nvidia will — or should — ship more GPUs to China.” “Jensen’s flying straight to Korea after GTC to meet Trump.” “A deal’s coming.”

Those were among the refrains traded by figures like Cantor Fitzgerald’s C.J. Muse and Altimeter Capital’s Brad Gerstner. All this, of course, is contrary to the prevailing consensus among China-watchers that the notion of rendering Beijing dependent on Nvidia’s chips is fantasy. Cultivating indigenous capability by acquiring American technology by legal or illicit means has long been Beijing’s modus operandi.

Huang knows this. Still, his company has long worked to blunt export controls and push China-specific versions of its flagship Blackwell chip, the so-called B20. It’s a familiar playbook: First came the H100, then its “export-compliant” cousins, the H800 and H20. Each time, Washington tightens the rules; each time, Nvidia finds a workaround. But this must stop.

RELATED: Big Tech’s AI boom hits voters hard — and Democrats pounce

Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

The dilemma is simple but corrosive. As grateful as America should be for breathtaking innovations, an irreconcilable tension exists between national interest and fiduciary duty. Huang may sound bullish on “betting on America,” but the reality is starker: If his company could power the AI revolutions of both superpowers at once, it would add trillions to its market cap. He is pragmatic and coldly arithmetic. Build the best chips, profit from ubiquity. You don’t get where he is without knowing your math.

At GTC, I saw the divide play out in miniature. As Altimeter’s Brad Gerstner floated the idea that “logic is on the side of letting Nvidia compete with China,” I turned to a biotech researcher. Blunt and unamused, he said: “Bulls**t.” He went on to explain that, in his field especially, China’s ascent has been a wholesale rejection of the “make China dependent” fantasy. He wasn’t wrong: Under Xi Jinping, the Made in China 2025 agenda has rendered such dependency theories delusional.

Huang tries to thread the needle gracefully, extolling U.S. manufacturing while signaling an embrace of Chinese developers. As an American, it’s hard not to be charmed by his all-American chip. As a realist, however, one leaves with questions no press release can answer. In a way, the release of this patriot-approved superchip was meant to suggest, “See, now we can sell some Blackwells to China.” As charmed as one can be, the answer is still no.

One could have told the Roosevelt administration that cutting Germany off from nuclear materials would stifle innovation. Yet we did exactly that during the Manhattan Project. And we won. It may not sound like it, but this is the same choice we face today — only this race has even greater implications for the future of civilization.

The goal can’t be attempting to trap Beijing in “dependency.” The stakes are too high. The most prudent approach is to focus on surpassing them in innovation while closing loopholes that let Beijing do what it has mastered: Learn from us, then try to replace us.

Jensen Huang has every right to fight for his company’s profits. But foreign policy shouldn’t run on a corporate playbook. The U.S. needs innovators — not influencers — setting the terms of technological rivalry.

Editor’s note: A version of article appeared originally at the American Mind.

​Big tech, Nvidia, Foreign policy, Trump, Opinion & analysis 

California once stood as the symbol of American innovation and unity — but today, it has become the warning sign for a nation in decline.

Harmeet Dhillon and BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan both live in California, and while it remains one of the most aesthetically beautiful places to live, policy and unity-wise, it is anything but beautiful.

“Some younger folks may not remember the time when people would be giving speeches on the opposite sides of something in Congress, and then they would play basketball together afterwards,” Dhillon tells Shanahan.

“That doesn’t happen any more in D.C., and it doesn’t happen any more in Sacramento. I mean, Sacramento has become like the paradigm of, you know, just sclerotic inefficiency over there. It’s just a one-party state, with terrible results for the consumers because of that,” she continues.

“If we had a vibrant two-party state here, we would have some compromise, and we would have some solutions,” she says, noting that instead the state is just “circling the drain” and has become “unlivable here for most people.”

And despite the way Silicon Valley and other densely populated areas of California may vote, Dhillon points out that when “you look at the map, California is a red state.”

“There’s a thin slice of blue on the coast, where there’s a population overload, but most of the state … you just drive an hour into the interior of our state, and there’s Trump signs everywhere, and there’s people working with their hands, and there’s people involved in their communities, and there’s nature, and there’s beauty,” she says.

“It is really two states in that sense. … But, you know, it’s sort of with self-interested line-drawing and the so-called independent commission, which isn’t independent. It really defines a ceiling for Republicans right now, until that system changes,” she continues.

“We’ve had Republican leaders in the state when the state was great, and I don’t think other states want to emulate California’s infrastructure, its schools, its, you know, health care system,” she says, adding, “We are not a paradigm of anything positive right now, and that should change.”

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The current state of American culture ultimately leads young girls down a path that chases independence at all costs — but fathers have the power to stop it.

“You think you’re a tough guy, and then you have a little girl, and you find out what an absolute sap you really are,” ex-Green Beret and Virginia delegate Nick Freitas tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”

And Freitas explains that he learned three things raising daughters, which is “somewhat unique to them.”

“You need to tell your daughters that you love them,” he says. “A lot of times what fathers don’t seem to understand is we do things like go to work, provide, protect, we work, you know, 70-hour weeks. And we think that’s translated in their minds as love, but it isn’t necessarily.”

“And so it does have to be verbalized as well as acted out in your day-to-day life,” he says, recalling an interaction with a man he calls one of the biggest “man-whores” he had ever encountered.

“I had asked him, I said, ‘How do I keep my daughter from ever falling for a guy like you?’ And he said, ‘Tell her you love her, because if you don’t, someone like me will, and she’ll believe him,’” Freitas explains.

“Another thing, too, that I would say, and this is true with all of your children, the relationship and the bonds you build start when they’re infants,” he continues, noting that a lot men have the idea that as their kids get older, they will share more of the responsibilities for them.

“No, from the time that they’re little, you need to be holding them and building those connections. Your daughters need to know that you will tell them the truth, but you tell them the truth from the position that you love them,” he explains.

However, no one is perfect, and Freitas tells Stuckey that “there’s going to come a moment in every father’s life where your child catches you not living up to the standard that you told them was the standard.”

“And in that moment, what you do is very, very important. Because if you aren’t able to look them in the eye and say, ‘You’re right, I’m wrong, and I’m sorry,’ then what you’ve taught them is not a standard of moral conduct. You haven’t taught them objective morality. What you’ve taught them is an authority structure,” he explains.

“So take the time to form those bonds, because they will pay massive dividends,” he continues.

And one of the most important tips Freitas has is that your daughter will “watch how you treat her mother.”

“And if you treat her mother with the sort of love and respect that she deserves, that will be all the standard that she needs for when the other guy comes around that doesn’t behave that way, or there’s something slightly off,” he says.

“You will be the reason why she rejects him,” he adds.

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Sheriff’s deputies in Wisconsin were called to a home on County Road M in Germania around 9:15 p.m. Nov. 12 for a report of a shooting, WSAW-TV reported. Germania is just under 70 miles northwest of Green Bay.

The caller told dispatchers that a male — later identified as 74-year-old Brent Hofman — shot his friend in the home’s garage, the station said.

‘We are devastated and heartbroken over the untimely loss of a wonderful man who meant so much to all of us.’

The caller had locked himself in a building on the property and told dispatchers he would defend himself if necessary, WSAW reported.

Hofman tried to enter the building where the caller had secured himself, the station said, adding that the caller fired his 22-caliber rifle in Hofman’s direction through a glass door.

When deputies arrived on scene, they found Hofman outside the home, WSAW reported, adding that Hofman sustained severe cuts to his face and head from the shattered glass.

Hofman at first failed to comply with verbal commands but was eventually arrested, the station said, adding that deputies noticed he was very intoxicated and slurring his speech.

During a search of the property, deputies found a victim dead inside a garage, WSAW reported.

Hofman was taken to a local hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries, booked into the Shawano County Jail, and made his first appearance in Shawano County Court on Nov. 18 via video, the station said.

RELATED: ‘Cold-blooded’ illegal alien murdered 15-year-old who was trying to stop him from raping his mother, ICE says

Hofman was formally charged with first-degree intentional homicide, attempted first-degree homicide, and being armed while intoxicated, WSAW reported, adding that both homicide charges carry an increased penalty for crimes against an elderly person.

The deceased victim has been identified as 67-year-old Rick Roundy from the Greenleaf area, the station said, adding that all three individuals involved in the incident are connected through ownership of hunting land in the Germania area.

Shawano County District Attorney Gregory Parker read the criminal complaint during the Nov. 18 hearing, WSAW reported.

Parker stated that Victim 2 told investigators he has known Hofman for many years through hunting and have joint properties, the station said. The DA added that Victim 2 indicated nothing was said that in any way would have aggravated or upset Hofman to cause him to do what he did, WSAW reported.

“I can’t put this thing any other way, but this is a killing in cold blood,” Parker said, according to the station.

Hofman’s bond was set at $1 million, WSAW noted.

The station said Roundy’s family released a statement:

We are devastated and heartbroken over the untimely loss of a wonderful man who meant so much to all of us.

As we grieve, we are thankful for the prayers and outpouring of support from family, friends, and community members.

Please understand our need for privacy during this difficult time. We will not be making any additional statements.

A status conference is scheduled for Jan. 5, WSAW reported, and Hofman remained in the Shawano County Jail.

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A friend who works with high school students recently said to me, “I overheard a group of boys talking about ‘international Jewry.’” He was in disbelief to hear these seemingly mild-mannered kids express views that, not 20 years ago, would have been considered taboo.

What is going on with Gen Z?

I have written elsewhere that Gen Z is experiencing a kind of church resurgence. That remains true. But at the same time, Gen Z is one of the most polarized generations in American history.

Social systems that seek to reorient reality by means of uprooting history and tradition will ultimately create a rootless and disaffected class in search of belonging.

In 2024, Gen Z — led in part by young activists like Charlie Kirk and Scott Presler — shifted toward Donald Trump. He won 46% of Gen Z voters — 56% of young men and 40% of young women. This led many to expect that a younger, more populist generation would shift the country rightward. But now in 2025, the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won 78% of the youth vote in New York City — 67% of young men and 84% of young women. Far from being locked into any one existing political party, young people are more divided than ever.

One cause of this is what I call “nomadic progressivism.” Kids born between, say, 1997 and 2012 have been thoroughly inundated with progressivism and identity politics from birth. They came of age amid several key developments that shaped their moral and social formation:

The Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015 and the legalization of same-sex marriage.The killing of Trayvon Martin and the rise of Black Lives Matter.The surge of transgender activism that dominated headlines in the early 2020s.The appearance of Greta Thunberg and the new climate movement.The explosive growth of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Vine.

We could list hundreds of others, but these movements captured Gen Z’s moral imagination. Each sought, in the name of justice or progress, to undermine the inherited order, replacing the inherited structures of culture with moral and social uncertainty.

Gen Z grew up bullied by progressive ideology, and until the shocking election of Donald Trump in 2016, there was no visible reaction. Society appeared to be marching unopposed toward progressive utopia. But Trump’s election broke the spell. His first term was marked by protests, the rise of transgender ideology, and a wave of social revolt.

Then came COVID-19. As the left preached “safety,” Gen Z was locked inside, immersed in a digital environment, and wracked by depression and anxiety. Created for engagement and real community, young people were instead sent to their rooms and told to stay there.

This, I believe, is the key: Progressivism prepared the soil for radicalization. It removed the roots — churches, families, communities — that once grounded Gen Z’s moral life. It left young people searching for belonging in a barren landscape.

The philosopher and novelist Simone Weil wrote in “The Need for Roots” that “human beings have roots by virtue of their real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape particular treasures of the past and particular expectations for the future.” When that participation is stripped away, people search for roots elsewhere.

For Gen Z women, that search often led to Instagram and other social media platforms. They heard celebrities and influencers denounce the status quo. They were told marriage was oppressive, men were vile, and independence was the highest good. But that “empowerment” was often just loneliness in disguise.

RELATED: Young, broke, and voting blue: 2025’s harsh lesson for the right

Photo by Jeremy Weine/Getty Images

As for Gen Z men, constant ridicule and belittlement left them disoriented. Why invest in a society that despises you? Why build what the world condemns? In this vacuum arose the “manosphere.” Figures like Andrew Tate offered refuge. They told men it was OK to be men — and as they were among the only ones saying so, they had free rein to define what it meant. If honor, discipline, and respectful courtship were only going to get you mocked and condemned, manosphere influencers reasoned that you might as well double down on boorishness, lust, and aggression.

As distrust of the government and institutions grew, young men turned elsewhere for truth. In gnostic fashion, figures like Nick Fuentes promised to reveal “how things really are.” But as Christopher Rufo has noted, it is a ruse. Fuentes exploits the crisis of masculinity to peddle resentment and historical denialism. Progressive Gen Z women, seeking fulfillment in the depths of the online space, are little different from the young men seeking connection and meaning from those like Fuentes.

Gen Z is a generation longing for roots. Its members are trying to find them on the fringes of society, since their own roots were dug out years ago. Progressivism creates nomads. Social systems that seek to reorient reality by means of uprooting history and tradition will ultimately create a rootless and disaffected class in search of belonging. And they will find it in dark places.

The men and women of Gen Z are not uniquely radical. They are uniquely rootless. They have inherited a moral landscape stripped of shared meaning, through which they drift amid ideologies that promise belonging but deliver only bitterness. The progressive order unmoored them; now the reactionary order recruits them. And unless a deeper renewal of faith, family, and community takes root, this generation will continue to wander — searching for the very home that modernity taught them to forget.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

​Gen z, Radicalization, Covid, Internet, Opinion & analysis 

Charlie Sheen, who has historically been known for having more than a mild case of Trump derangement syndrome, recently opened up about changing his political views after taking a long look at the media he consumed.

The famous actor joined Megyn Kelly in an interview published last Friday to discuss his turn away from the left and his embrace of the right.

‘I’m going to do my own research like I’ve done with everything my entire life. I’m going to listen to other voices.’

Kelly asked Sheen if he was getting more comfortable with expressing his political views, to which he replied: “I had to feel something different. Because I think we all, or a lot of us, remain beholden to the structure of the house that we were raised in with politics, with religion, with the arts, with culture.”

RELATED: Video: Joe Rogan shaken by Charlie Kirk’s murder, warns against celebrating his death; Charlie Sheen says it’s a ‘dark day’

Photo by John Nacion/Getty Images

To a round of applause from the audience, Sheen then explained his shift in political views: “And I thought, ‘All right, I’m going to conduct an experiment.’ Literally, I’m going to change the channel. I’m going to do my own research like I’ve done with everything my entire life. I’m going to listen to other voices.”

Sheen continued: “I’m going to explore just hearing both sides of the goddamn story.”

During this process, Charlie Sheen realized the problem with the media he was consuming: “What I was so hypnotized by, in some ways, can be described as state-run media. I’m sorry, but it can. Legacy media is very much like that.”

After months of listening to alternative voices outside legacy media and doing his own research, Sheen had to admit that he had been stuck in an echo chamber.

Then came his moment of realization: “I felt really stupid. Just some of the stuff I’d bought into and some of the stuff I was worshipping and some of the people I was hating because I was told I was supposed to hate them.”

Though Sheen voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, he said it was a vote he wishes he could “have back” following his shift to the right.

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In 2013, Mississippi ranked 49th out of the 50 U.S. states in grade four reading achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the largest continuing national assessment of American students’ knowledge and capability in math, reading, science, and writing.

In what has repeatedly been dubbed a “miracle,” the state made its way up the list — to 29th in 2019 and then 10 spots higher to ninth place nationally for reading scores last year.

According to the NAEP, black students in Mississippi ranked third nationally last year among their cohort for reading and math scores; Hispanic students in the state ranked first in the nation for reading and second for math scores; and poor students in the Magnolia State ranked first for reading and second for math scores nationally.

‘No, it’s not impossible to teach children, and no, it’s not very costly.’

The assessment noted that “Mississippi is one of only a few states with improved NAEP scores since 2013. In most states, NAEP scores have been falling over the past decade.”

While there have been numerous attempts to explain Mississippi’s success, it appears the “Mississippi miracle” is attributable ultimately to the state’s 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act, which conservative commentator Rich Lowry recently noted effectively came down to adopting phonics and setting high standards for students.

Noah Spencer, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s economics department, analyzed the impact of the LBPA — the three pillars of which are improving teaching, identifying and helping kids with reading deficiencies, and holding back third-graders who can’t hack it on an end-of-year reading assessment — in a study published last year in the Economics of Education Review. Spencer found that:

the policy, which included investments in teacher training and coaching, early screening for and targeted assistance to struggling readers, and retention for deficient readers, increased both grade 4 reading and math test scores on a national assessment by 0.14 and 0.18 [standard deviations], respectively, for students with any amount of exposure to the policy, and by 0.23 and 0.29 SDs for students with K-3 exposure to the policy.

Spencer stressed the significance of these increases, citing previous research that found “that ‘children with test scores that are one standard deviation higher at age 12 report 1-2 more years of schooling by age 22’ in the lower- and middle-income countries they study.”

RELATED: Trump admin takes major step toward dismantling Department of Education

Linda McMahon. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images

“While these estimates likely do not apply precisely to Mississippi’s context, it does seem reasonable to suggest that, given the LBPA’s sizable effects on test scores for children exposed from kindergarten to grade 3, it may also increase earnings for exposed cohorts in the future,” wrote Spencer. “The impressive effects of this policy change should be noted by policymakers in other jurisdictions.”

Lowry echoed this sentiment, noting that Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee, which have employed similar strategies, have also made gains.

“With reading scores nationally sliding the wrong way, especially for the bottom 10% of students, Mississippi and the other Southern states offer a beacon of hope,” wrote Lowry. “Their example shows that, no, it’s not impossible to teach children, and no, it’s not very costly. It’s a good sign that even California just passed a phonics bill.”

‘It’s really smart, local innovation at work.’

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has extolled the approach taken in Mississippi, telling the New York Post in September, “What I’m seeing now is a great return to classical learning.”

“We’ve tried a lot of things, you know — No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top — and I believe they were done with the best of intentions, but they were not successful,” said McMahon. “But what we have clearly seen is the science of reading is successful.”

Despite the noted success of the LBPA in Mississippi, some lawmakers around the country still haven’t taken the hint.

Democrats in Michigan, for instance, reportedly repealed similar reforms, eliminating, for instance, an A-F grade-ranking system for every public school in the state and scrapping the requirement that illiterate third-graders get held back.

Whereas last year, the average score of fourth-grade students in Mississippi for reading was 219/500 — higher than the national average score of 214 — the average score in Michigan was 209, which was lower than scores in 31 other states and jurisdictions.

The Mississippi Department of Education announced on Nov. 13 that 85% of the Magnolia State’s third-graders passed the reading assignment required to transition to grade four, a 1-percentage-point increase over last year.

The U.S. Department of Education noted, “Mississippi’s literacy climb may be called ‘miracle,’ but it’s really smart, local innovation at work.”

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On November 7, country music artist Kelsea Ballerini released a single titled “I Sit in Parks.” The two-minute track is a heart-wrenching lamentation of the forsaking of motherhood for career aspirations — a rare message from the secular music world.

The chorus: “Did I miss it? By now is it / A lucid dream? Is it my fault / For chasin’ things a body clock / Doesn’t wait for? I did the d**n tour / It’s what I wanted, what I got / I spun around and then I stopped / And wondered if I missed the mark.”

Ballerini, a 32-year old divorcee with no children, vulnerably admits in the ballad that she chose the freedom to pursue her music career over becoming a mother — a decision that causes her intense regret and pain.

The song has garnered a ton of attention — triggering the girlboss feminist crowd and delighting pro-natalists who hope the feminist stronghold keeping young women single, childless, and on the hamster wheel of careerism is finally beginning to crack.

Allie Beth Stuckey, BlazeTV host of “Relatable,” falls into the latter category, believing the song indicates a positive cultural shift.

“I can see how this vulnerability is speaking to what a lot of people feel. This is certainly not Christian, but it’s kind of reflecting this trend that we’re seeing among a lot of young people … wanting to go back to tradition, wanting to go back to church, wanting to go back to marriage, wanting to actually have children,” she says.

The lie so many young women fall for, Allie explains, is that motherhood isn’t for everyone. Feminist dogma convinced them that being a mom is burdensome and a hindrance to personal ambition. The essential truth it leaves out, however, is that while one can reject motherhood, one cannot reject the motherhood instinct. It is wired into women by God and will always be a central piece of their nature.

“This motherhood instinct that we all have when we’re little girls — it doesn’t go away,” says Allie. “We take care of our pets; we take care of our dolls; we take care of our flowers because that is the instinct that God has given us in general as women.”

Even the women who say they never want a husband or children can’t escape the pull of motherhood. It’s usually just channeled toward their “fur babies,” houseplants, businesses, or elsewhere. And it leaves them deeply unfulfilled.

Allie acknowledges that marriage and childbearing aren’t God’s plan for everyone, but motherhood nonetheless is. That instinct to cultivate and nurture can be and should be channeled toward people in some capacity via ministry, mentorship, or mission work. That’s the only thing that will fill the motherhood cup if marriage and having children aren’t in the cards.

Ballerini’s “I Sit in Parks” is a bleak and honest picture of what happens when women forsake motherhood altogether or channel it in unhealthy directions: a deep loneliness that hollows women out.

To hear more of Allie’s analysis, watch the episode above.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence platform has seemingly been left out of a government program to launch the technology forward.

On Monday, the White House announced a new project aimed at accelerating innovation and discovery to “solve the most challenging problems of this century.”

‘The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources.’

The new Genesis Mission is described by the Department of Energy as “a national initiative to build the world’s most powerful scientific platform.”

An executive order from the president titled “Launching the Genesis Mission” explained plans to integrate federal scientific datasets to train AI to test new hypotheses, automate research, and speed up the occurrence of scientific breakthroughs.

“The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources — combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization.”

With Elon Musk making strides in 2025 with both the advancement of his Grok chatbot and its video generation model, Imagine, tech enthusiasts were shocked to find out that Musk’s xAI was not on a list of partners for the project.

RELATED: Big Tech’s AI boom hits voters hard — and Democrats pounce

— (@)

The Department of Energy includes 55 companies on its lists of collaborators for Genesis, with xAI and Grok nowhere to be found.

Aside from the fact that Musk was a special government employee under the Trump administration, his exclusion is even more surprising given both the length and generic nature of the companies that are involved. Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft were announced as partners, as were AI companies like OpenAI and Scale AI.

It should be noted that company xLight, which is listed by the DOE, is not affiliated with Musk.

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— (@)

“For [xAI] to not be a part of the Genesis Mission, it is not just an oversight, it would have to be an intentional omission,” AI engineer Brian Roemmele wrote on X. “I spoke to someone on this project who asked for my input today, and it is the first thing I brought up. I am certain they will see the error made.”

Blaze News contacted xAI for comment but did not receive an immediate reply. This article will be updated with any applicable response.

Whether a rift exists between Musk and the Trump administration is unclear, but the government seems steadfast in believing its mission is monumental in terms of importance, likening it to the World War II nuclear arms race.

“The world’s most powerful scientific platform to ever be built has launched,” the DOE claimed on its X account. “This Manhattan-Project-level leap will fundamentally transform the future of American science and innovation.”

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Pope Leo XIV joined Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople and other Eastern Orthodox bishops on Friday at the site in modern-day Turkey where their predecessors met 17 centuries earlier to affirm and codify the core tenets of the Christian faith.

This meeting of leaders on either side of the Great Schism at the place of the Nicene Creed’s adoption signals another major step in what the pope weeks ago called “the path towards the reestablishment of full communion among all Christians.”

‘We return to this wellspring of the Christian faith in order to move forward.’

The pope made reference to the lasting significance of the Council of Nicaea in his Friday address at the archeological site of the ancient Basilica of St. Neophytos on the shore of Lake Iznik, especially the council’s rejection in the 4th century of the Arian heresy.

Pope Leo said that the question of who Jesus Christ is in the lives of men and women today “is especially important for Christians, who risk reducing Jesus Christ to a kind of charismatic leader or superman, a misrepresentation that ultimately leads to sadness and confusion.”

The pope noted in a separate address earlier in the day at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Istanbul — where he blessed the first stone for a Catholic parish in Dallas — that the “new Arianism” attempts to reduce Christ to “a great historical figure, a wise teacher, or a prophet who fought for justice — but nothing more.”

“By denying the divinity of Christ, Arius reduced him to a mere intermediary between God and humanity, ignoring the reality of the Incarnation such that the divine and the human remained irremediably separated,” the pope said on the shore of Lake Iznik in the presence of the Eastern Orthodox bishops. “But if God did not become man, how can mortal creatures participate in his immortal life? What was at stake at Nicaea, and is at stake today, is our faith in the God who, in Jesus Christ, became like us to make us ‘partakers of the divine nature.'”

Speaking of the creed, the pope noted that “this Christological confession of faith is of fundamental importance in the journey that Christians are making towards full communion,” as it binds Christians across the world and paves the way for “ever deeper adherence to the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, in mutual love and dialogue.”

RELATED: Together, pope and patriarch return to Nicaea on 1,700th anniversary of defining moment in Christendom

TIZIANA FABI / Contributor, Anadolu / Contributor | Getty Images

“We are all invited to overcome the scandal of the divisions that unfortunately still exist and to nurture the desire for unity for which the Lord Jesus prayed and gave his life. The more we are reconciled, the more we Christians can bear credible witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is a proclamation of hope for all,” added Pope Leo.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, considered first among equals among Eastern Orthodox bishops, noted at the ecumenical service in Nicaea that he was “deeply moved” by the Christian leaders’ decision to “honor through this joint pilgrimage the memory and legacy of the First Ecumenical Council held here, at Nicaea, seventeen-hundred years ago.”

Emperor Constantine I called over 250 bishops — 318, according to tradition — in the year 325 to convene during the pontificate of Pope Sylvester I in the Bithynian city of Nicaea.

The council that assembled 55 miles southeast of present-day Istanbul not only dealt with various ecclesiastic matters and set a date on which to commemorate Jesus’ resurrection but tackled the Arian heresy, affirming that Christ is indeed “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.”

While similarly acknowledging the divisions that have marked many intervening centuries, the patriarch stressed that the purpose of the meeting was not simply to remember the past but to “bear living witness to the same faith expressed by the Fathers of Nicaea.”

“We return to this wellspring of the Christian faith in order to move forward. We refresh ourselves at these inspired waters of rest in order to become strong for the tasks that lie ahead,” said the patriarch.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew noted further:

The Nicene Creed acts like a seed for the whole of our Christian existence. It is a symbol not of a bare minimum; it is a symbol of the whole. Having the fervor of the faith of Nicaea burning in our hearts, “let us run the course” of Christian unity “that is set before us” (cf. Hebrews 12:1); let us “hope to the end for the grace” that is promised “at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (cf. 1 Peter 1:13); and, finally, “let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Trinity consubstantial and undivided.”

The patriarch told the Agence France-Presse ahead of the meeting that his meeting with the pope was “especially significant” in light of the conflicts currently underway across the globe.

– YouTubeyoutu.be

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After a quarter of a century, one console still reigns supreme.

It has been nearly 25 years to the day since iconic photos and video of the Paris launch showed just how crazy the world was for PlayStation 2.

‘I never leave my house.’

On November 24, 2000, crowds in Europe lined up, camped, and even pushed through crowds to get their hands on a PlayStation 2 for the first time. The launch was almost a month after the American Oct. 26 debut and signified a true consumerism-fueled riot that became synonymous with Black Friday.

From its launch day through Christmas 2000, Sony said it sold 1.35 million units in North America and another 1 million units in Europe during that same period.

The PS2 has sold an average of over 6 million consoles per year since then, or 500,000 per month, totaling more than 160 million lifetime units sold as of this November.

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As reported by Techgaged.com, the PS2 eclipses two Nintendo products at the top of the list.

The second-most sales are for the handheld Nintendo DS at 154 million, followed by the Nintendo Switch portable console at 152 million.

A steep drop occurs for fourth place with the original Game Boy, released in 1989, having 118 million units sold. Sony’s PS1 and Nintendo’s Wii are the only other gaming systems to have sold over 100 million.

Interestingly, the PlayStation 2’s main competitors during its era, the Nintendo GameCube (launched in North America on Nov. 18, 2001) and the original Xbox (launched in North America on Nov. 15, 2001), do not even crack the top-20 list.

The Xbox, Microsoft’s first foray into gaming systems, has sold 24.65 million units in its lifetime, while the GameCube has sold 21.74 million units.

Both company’s modern systems — Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch — have already surpassed the sales of their 2000s counterparts.

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Photo By Eduardo Parra/Europa Press via Getty Images

The PS2 was so pervasive, historical image banks provide a bounty of time capsules showing celebrities flooding PS2-themed parties that were constantly taking place to promote the product.

There were events like the PlayStation 2 and the Hip-Hop Summit “Race to the Polls” event in 2004, or the mouthful, PlayStation 2 Celebrates Red White and Blue with Poolside Party at the Bentley Hotel in NYC, temporarily referred to as the PlayStation 2 Hotel for the occasion, in 2003.

Super Bowl parties became linked with the console during that era too. The Sony PlayStation 2 Game Over Party saw celebrities like NSYNC in its first year and Paris Hilton in its second year. In fact, the celebrity sightings and performances connected to PS2 events at that time are nearly limitless.

If readers don’t believe the PS2 was as much of a cross-cultural phenomenon as it seems, refer to this quote from “Friends” actor Matthew Perry in 2000.

“I used to have a social life, go on dates, go to dinner parties, have a job. Now all I do is sit in a big chair and play PlayStation 2,” Perry said, per Digital Journal. “I never leave my house. My friends have wondered what happened to me. Howard Hughes must have had one of these.”

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The confusing saga continues surrounding a Dallas Cowboys tradition that happens almost every year.

During a spectacular 31-28 Thanksgiving win against the Kansas City Chiefs, Cowboys tight end Jake Ferguson somehow avoided a fine for performing a controversial celebration, but he may have gotten off on a technicality.

‘Nothing like a Zeke being dropped into one of our kettles!’

As announced by tattoo-laden singer Post Malone, the Cowboys continued their Thanksgiving- and Christmas-season partnership with the Salvation Army. This included the tradition of placing giant red kettles behind the endzones, directly in front of the first row of fans.

During the third quarter, Ferguson seemingly tapped his toes into the endzone for an epic touchdown, ran over to one of the kettles at AT&T Stadium, and jumped in. No flag was thrown on this play for excessive celebration, and the NFL has not announced any fines.

However, this is where things get confusing.

RELATED: ‘We’re getting set up’: NFL running back says league is baiting players into getting celebration fines

Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott climbed into a Salvation Army kettle after a touchdown run in the second quarter against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday, Dec. 18, 2016, at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. (Richard W. Rodriguez/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

After a lengthy review, Ferguson’s touchdown was overturned and taken off the scoreboard, adding another curveball to an already convoluted situation given that the kettle celebration has been overlooked by the NFL at times, while also resulting in fines in some instances.

In 2024, the kettle’s use in post-touchdown antics caused such a stir that Cincinnati Bengals running back Chase Brown boldly made the claim that the league was baiting players into getting fined.

With four kettles placed around the field, Brown apparently couldn’t help but jump into one during a matchup against the Cowboys. He was subsequently fined $5,481 by the NFL for unsportsmanlike conduct.

The enforcement surrounding the celebration has been about as inconsistent as imaginable, dating back to former Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott performing the act in 2016. That year, the celebration was so well received it even garnered praise from the Salvation Army.

“Nothing like a Zeke being dropped into one of our kettles!” the organization wrote on X, then Twitter.

Strangely, the following year the NFL started its own confusing tradition of going back and forth on punishing the celebration.

RELATED: Salvation Army gives perfect response to reporter who ripped Ezekiel Elliott’s epic TD celebration

ARLINGTON, TX – NOVEMBER 23: Dallas Cowboys cornerback DaRon Bland (26) jumps into the Salvation Army Kettle after returning an interception for a touchdown during the game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Commanders on November 23, 2023 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. (Photo by Matthew Pearce/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

In 2017, Seattle Seahawks cornerback Justin Coleman jumped into one of the kettles after returning an interception for a touchdown; he was not fined but got penalized during the game.

In 2018 though, Elliott performed the celebration again, but this time was fined $13,369 by the NFL.

Fast-forward to 2022 when the NFL managed to confuse players and fans even more. A Whac-a-Mole celebration in late November had three Cowboys players get into a kettle and see no discipline at all. One week later, the Cowboys, including Elliott, used a kettle in a different unique celebration. This time, participants Elliott and quarterback Dak Prescott were fined $13,261 for unsportsmanlike conduct.

On Thanksgiving 2023, a seemingly preplanned celebration that involved four Cowboys players eating turkey legs that were inside a kettle did not result in any fines.

As the confusing tradition continues, the Salvation Army did not make mention of the celebration on its X account in 2025. The charity showcased only its partnership with the Cowboys, sharing a video of the aforementioned Post Malone.

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