Category: blaze media

One of Irregular’s jobs is to build fake networks where the world’s most capable AI models can be turned loose as hackers without hurting anybody.

This summer, some of those fake networks had a small problem: They were connected to the real internet.

The models don’t have to turn evil to be dangerous.

Models being tested for Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta got through that open door and attacked systems belonging to real organizations. They didn’t discover some ingenious way to escape a hardened sandbox. In the Irregular cases, internet access was available when it wasn’t supposed to be, and the models generally believed the real computers they found were part of the hacking exercise.

Irregular published an August 14 postmortem explaining what went wrong and what it says it has done to fix the problem. What it doesn’t provide is a simple total: How many times did its AI evaluations end with a model attacking something in the real world?

That omission prompted criticism from security researchers interviewed by the Record. University of Surrey computer science professor Alan Woodward called the report heavy on “marketing spin” and accused Irregular of using ambiguous language to make multiple compromises sound like a single incident.

The mess becomes easier to understand if you start with Anthropic, which has been much more specific about what happened.

After OpenAI disclosed its breach of Hugging Face, Anthropic reviewed 141,006 cybersecurity evaluation runs in which Claude could have obtained internet access. It found three separate incidents involving six runs. Those incidents compromised the production infrastructure of three different organizations.

The first involved a fictional company in one of Irregular’s capture-the-flag exercises. Unfortunately, the made-up company’s name also belonged to a real website.

Four runs of Claude Opus 4.7 found the real company, identified vulnerabilities, extracted credentials, and gained access to a production database containing several hundred rows of data. Anthropic says that in all four runs, the model eventually encountered evidence that the system was real. It kept going anyway. In two runs, Claude reasoned that the real company must still be part of the test.

From bad to worse

The second incident was considerably weirder.

Claude Mythos 5 found setup instructions inside a fictional company that told employees to install a Python package that didn’t actually exist. Claude realized it could create a malicious package with that name so the target would install its code.

So it did.

The model went through the process of registering accounts and uploaded a malicious package to the real Python Package Index. It remained publicly available for roughly an hour and was downloaded and executed on 15 real systems.

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solar22/Getty Images

One belonged to a security company whose automated scanner installed Python packages to inspect them for malware. Claude’s code ran on the scanner, captured credentials, and sent them to a collection point the model had created. Claude then used those credentials to access more of the company’s infrastructure.

Anthropic says Mythos 5 actually considered the possibility that it was on the real internet. It then talked itself out of that conclusion. Among other things, the model decided that seeing the year 2026 on the computer was evidence that the environment had been staged.

The third incident involved an internal Anthropic research model. Unable to reach its intended fictional target, the model started looking elsewhere and scanned roughly 9,000 internet-facing systems. It eventually compromised a real company’s application using credentials exposed on a debug page and SQL injection.

This time, the model eventually figured out that the compromised system had nothing to do with the exercise and stopped on its own.

Anthropic says it found no evidence that any of the models were pursuing goals of their own. They were doing what they had been told to do, attack systems and capture a flag, while operating under a false assumption about where the simulation ended.

That doesn’t make the incidents harmless. It makes them embarrassingly mundane.

Somebody left the door open.

OpenAI reported its own Irregular-related incident on August 4. Its models had likewise been told they had no internet access, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed them online. Once again, a fictional target happened to share a name with a real domain. An OpenAI model attacked the real site, exploited what OpenAI described as a basic vulnerability, and found and used credentials belonging to the site.

OpenAI explicitly distinguished this from its earlier Hugging Face breach. In that case, models inside an isolated evaluation environment found and exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in an Artifactory package-registry proxy, obtained internet access, moved through OpenAI’s research network, and eventually compromised Hugging Face infrastructure.

The Irregular incident was much simpler. The internet connection was already there.

Meta then disclosed another case. The company told Reuters that an Irregular misconfiguration inadvertently gave one of its models internet access during an evaluation. The model then exploited a vulnerability in a third-party service.

Reuters reported that the model was Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1, citing the Information, but Meta itself has not publicly identified the model.

A shady synopsis

This is where Irregular’s accounting gets murky.

Its postmortem says public disclosures stemming from the same underlying evaluation problem involved activity from “a single evaluation scenario” and therefore are “not materially separate incidents,” regardless of how many outside parties were affected.

There is a legitimate technical point buried in there. If Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta all ran models against the same badly configured scenario, three companies later publishing disclosures does not necessarily mean three unrelated failures occurred inside Irregular.

But Anthropic didn’t disclose only that scenario.

Anthropic says plainly that its three incidents involved three different fictional capture-the-flag scenarios. One attacked the real company sharing the fictional company’s name. Another put malware on PyPI. Another scanned thousands of internet systems before compromising one of them.

Irregular’s own post also shifts terminology. It refers to “a few interactions” in which models took offensive action in the real world, discusses a “handful” of attempts against the real domain, and says the incidents occurred in fewer than one out of every 10,000 advanced simulations.

Maybe one configuration mistake explains several public disclosures. That’s useful information if you’re trying to fix the configuration mistake.

It still doesn’t tell us how many real-world compromises occurred.

If you leave one gate open and five cows get out, you have one open gate and five loose cows.

Irregular also says it has “no evidence of a customer’s systems being breached or customer’s data being leaked.” Read narrowly, that’s reassuring: The AI labs whose models Irregular was testing apparently weren’t compromised.

Other companies absolutely were.

Anthropic says Claude extracted credentials and reached a production database at one company, captured credentials from another company’s security scanner and used them to access additional infrastructure, and compromised a third company’s internet-facing application.

Calling Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta “customers” is perfectly normal business language. Dropping that reassurance into a postmortem about attacks on other companies without immediately explaining the distinction is less helpful.

Irregular says it has added safeguards and expanded manual review of model behavior. It also says manual review by itself cannot handle the enormous volume of activity generated during these tests.

That’s believable. A hacking evaluation is supposed to be full of behavior that would set off alarms on a normal network. The hard part is detecting when the hacking that is supposed to happen inside the test suddenly starts happening outside it.

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Darko Mlinarevic/Getty Images

But that’s also the business Irregular is in.

For comparison, look at an entirely separate incident disclosed by the U.K. government’s AI Security Institute this month. The setup there was different: AISI deliberately gave frontier models internet access and disabled their normal cybersecurity classifiers so researchers could measure what the models were capable of under permissive conditions.

AISI tested seven models across two cyber ranges in 122 evaluation runs. In 10 of those runs, researchers found out-of-scope activity. They catalogued 19 distinct actions, 17 involving Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and two involving OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, while stressing that those 19 actions were not 19 separate incidents.

Among other things, Mythos 5 attempted to put malicious code into a real open-source project, created fake identities, tried to socially engineer a real maintainer, attempted to contact real people, and planted instructions intended to manipulate other AI coding systems.

AISI’s monitoring caught unusual data leaving a test system through Tor on July 28. The agency says it stopped the related evaluations and isolated the relevant machines within an hour. Its investigation found no resulting real-world harm.

The interesting part for Irregular isn’t that AISI had a containment problem too. It’s how AISI wrote the incident report.

It gave the total number of runs. It gave the number of runs containing unauthorized behavior. It gave the number of actions. It named the models involved. It explained when monitoring detected the activity, how quickly the tests were stopped, and what investigators found afterward.

Harsh lessons

There are still unanswered questions about the AISI episode, but you don’t need a decoder ring to figure out what the agency says happened.

Irregular, meanwhile, was already well aware of how quickly AI hacking capabilities were improving. In research published in December, the company reported that frontier models had gone from scoring near zero on the hardest tier of its private offensive-security tasks through the first half of 2025 to roughly 60% by late fall.

Those tasks include difficult vulnerability discovery, exploit development, reverse engineering, and cryptographic problems. Irregular itself warned that the improvement represented a meaningful shift in offensive-security capability.

That’s the real lesson here. The models don’t have to turn evil to be dangerous. They don’t even have to escape.

They just have to be competent enough that when somebody screws up a network configuration, the screwup matters.

Irregular says the known problems have been addressed and that it plans to publish a white paper on safer containment and cyber evaluations. That’s probably worth doing. Frontier models are getting good enough at offensive security that putting them inside a pretend corporate network and telling them to start hacking clearly requires more care than it did a year ago.

But before Irregular starts writing the industry’s rule book, it could answer a simpler question about its own tests: How many times did the AI hackers hit something real?

​Artificial intelligence, Tech 

The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy — the 36-year old former nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, who confessed to killing her three young children — is making national waves.

According to court records and statements from the prosecution, on January 24, 2023, Clancy sent her then-husband on an errand. While he was gone, she strangled their three children — Cora, age 5; Dawson, age 3; and Callan, approximately 8 months old — with exercise bands in the basement. Clancy’s lawyers do not dispute that she killed the children. They are asking a Massachusetts jury to find her not criminally responsible, citing postpartum psychosis and her report of a male voice ordering her to take the children’s lives and her own.

Support, largely female, has rallied around Clancy — with some framing her as a victim of a fragmented, overmedicating health care system and others pushing conspiracy theories that her husband, Patrick, is the real killer who framed her.

But instead of just wearing pink T-shirts to show solidarity and holding silent vigils, supporters can now donate to the Musgrove Family Fund — a GoFundMe account started in mid-August by a Wisconsin TikTok creator for Lindsay Clancy’s parents, Mike and Paula Musgrove.

The account has already accumulated over $1 million of its $2 million goal.

BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock is deeply disturbed by the entire situation — including the robust support for Clancy and her parents.

“Three dead children. A million-dollar pot so the killer’s parents can sit the livestream in comfort,” he says.

“Postpartum becomes a hall pass, fundraising becomes penance, sympathy migrates from the grave to the defendant table because a secular people cannot say a mother who strangles three children has sinned,” he says.

It’s the same brand of darkness, Whitlock points out, that defined the robust and loud support for Karmelo Anthony, who was convicted in June for murdering 17-year old Austin Metcalf. The GiveSendGo account started by his mother raised roughly $634,000.

“Same machine, different zip code, different skin, same transfer of sympathy,” he says, comparing the Clancy and Anthony cases.

“In Massachusetts, the dead are three children, and the living adult on trial is their mother. The culture rushes to her diagnosis, her meds, her parents’ hotel bill. In Texas, the dead is a 17-year-old track athlete and football player, and the living adult with the knife said a push made the blade necessary. The culture rushed to his fear, his race, his family’s GoFundMe,” he continues.

The support for the killers in both of these cases, he argues, exemplifies a “godlessness.”

“A people who still answer to God can hold two truths. A sick woman can still be sick and still be guilty of murder; a teenager can feel insulted and still be a murderer,” says Whitlock.

“Suffering is real. Disrespect is real. Neither one writes a blank check on a child’s life. Sin does not evaporate because a psychiatrist arrives after the fact. Murder does not shrink because a boy says, ‘He put his hands on me,”’ he continues. “The sixth commandment did not come with a postpartum footnote. It did not come with a disrespect clause.”

People who see themselves as God, says Whitlock, make their own commandments — “Thou shalt not judge a mother; thou shalt not question a racial narrative.”

He reads from Judges 21:25: “Every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

“Judges 21:25 is not ancient color. It is August 2026 in Plymouth and last spring in Frisco,” he warns.

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

To enjoy more fearless conversations at the crossroads of culture, faith, sports, and comedy with Jason Whitlock, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Jason whitlock, Lindsay clancy, Karmelo anthony, Blazetv show 

Alan Greenspan died in June at 100. They got him.

Have you noticed that nobody ever really “dies” any more?

Move the deadline often enough, and eventually everyone dies right on schedule.

Certainly nobody famous. Nobody politically important. Nobody who once knew somebody important, embarrassed somebody important, or appeared in a photograph with the Clintons.

Those people don’t die. They get silenced. They knew too much. They were about to expose something. They crossed the wrong people.

They get “got.”

The lovely actress Hayden Panettiere died last Sunday at 36, about a week short of her 37th birthday. She was found in cardiac arrest at an apartment in Greenville, South Carolina. Paramedics could not revive her.

At the moment, the cause and manner of death remain undetermined. An autopsy found no trauma contributing to her death, and police found no evidence of foul play. The Drug Enforcement Administration is assisting Greenville police. All signs point to a drug overdose, though.

Naturally, the internet has already solved the case: Hollywood killed her.

The former “Heroes” and “Nashville” star published a memoir in May called “This Is Me: A Reckoning.” She described some genuinely ugly experiences as a young actress. At 18, she said, a woman she trusted put her into bed aboard a yacht with a famous British singer-songwriter. At 19, an Oscar-winning actor exposed himself to her at a party. She identified neither man.

You can see where this goes.

She knew things. She wrote a book. Three months later, she’s dead.

Case closed.

Except another corner of the internet identified a different culprit. Libertarian writer Jeffrey A. Tucker responded to Panettiere’s death by asking, “Is it time to stop this absurd gaslighting? Everyone knows the murder weapon.”

He meant the COVID-19 vaccine.

Tucker is a smart fellow. He’s been a hero in the fight against COVID tyranny. But I think he got ahead of himself here.

Or maybe when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I love conspiracy theories. I love sound arguments more.

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Nyia Sissac/Washington Post/Getty Images

Conspiracies exist. Watergate was a conspiracy. COINTELPRO was real. MKUltra was real. Corporations conceal evidence. Governments lie all the time. Sometimes a suspicious death really is suspicious.

Nevertheless, conspiracies require evidence.

That seems to be the part many of us have let go.

Antonin Scalia died in his sleep at a Texas hunting ranch in 2016. He was 79, had serious health problems, and no autopsy was performed. Early confusion about the circumstances — including an unfortunately described pillow — turned his death almost instantly into a murder mystery.

Ah, but Barack Obama needed a Supreme Court vacancy, didn’t he? Even Donald Trump entertained the speculation publicly.

Sure. On the other hand, old men die.

Four years later, Scalia’s “best buddy” Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at 87 after years of recurring cancer.

And, mostly, she died like any other elderly woman.

There was fury over her replacement and a bitter confirmation fight over Amy Coney Barrett. But nobody built much of a murder theory around an 87-year-old woman with metastatic pancreatic cancer.

Evidently, some important people are still permitted to die in peace.

Conspiracy theories about famous deaths are hardly new. John F. Kennedy alone has supported an industry for more than 60 years. What social media has done is speed up production.

Now, within minutes of a public figure’s death, thousands of people can search old interviews, posts, photographs, and acquaintances for the clue that explains everything. Then comes the question: What are the odds?

Usually, nobody knows.

Earlier this year, I experienced what doctors called “stroke-like symptoms.” High blood pressure appears to have been the culprit. I also got two Moderna shots in 2021.

I regret getting the jabs. But according to some of the loudest alarmists at the time, they should have killed me by 2022.

Somehow, I lived.

Five years later, I had something approximating a stroke, and now somebody can point backward and say: See? The vaccine!

Sorry, no. You don’t get to predict that millions of vaccinated people will drop dead within a year, watch the prediction fail, then spend the next few years claiming every heart attack, stroke, cancer diagnosis, and celebrity death as vindication.

Move the deadline often enough, and eventually everyone dies right on schedule.

That doesn’t mean suspicion is foolish. Sometimes the official story really is wrong. Sometimes — often! — institutions deserve skepticism.

But skepticism asks questions. A conspiracy theory that begins with the answer is something else.

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Matt Cardy/Getty Images

That’s what makes Panettiere’s death such an awkwardly perfect example. We have an unexplained death, a troubling memoir, a history of addiction, the DEA assisting police, and no final cause — yet.

That is plenty of fodder for speculation.

It isn’t enough for certainty, which we so desperately desire.

So nobody merely has a heart attack. Nobody merely overdoses. Nobody simply grows old. Nobody has a stroke. Strokes are boring; trust me.

No, somebody did it. Somebody got got.

Alan Greenspan lived to 100. He palled around with Ayn Rand. He chaired the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades. He advised presidents. He moved markets by clearing his throat.

Then he croaked.

No assassins. No cover-up. No final secret — as far as anyone knows.

Death got him.

Eventually, it gets us all.

​Alan greenspan, Cardiac arrest, Conspiracy theories, Coverup, Death, Drug overdose, Hayden panettiere, Heart attack, Natural death, Overdoses, The clintons, Vaccine, Opinion & analysis 

BlazeTV host and Lakepointe Church Pastor Josh Howerton recently discussed with the eponymous host of the “Shawn Ryan Show” the ongoing war against Christianity and what set the stage for America’s present “prodigal son” moment.

While he recognized that Christ’s church is now, as ever, assailed on all sides, Howerton emphasized that many have awoken in recent years to the reality that there are dark spiritual forces at work in the world and also that there are also prevailing forces of light whose victory was secured at Calvary two millennia ago.

‘That light has a name.’

Early in their conversation, Howerton told Ryan — who recently announced that he has resumed going to church — that the war on Christianity is primeval; that after the Fall, Satan declared “war on the offspring that God’s going to use to redeem the world. So that’s the storyline of the entire Bible. It’s Word versus world.”

“The Bible says the whole world lies under the power of the evil one. The Bible actually calls Satan the little-g god of this world,” said the pastor, who noted also that when tempted in the desert, Jesus Christ did not correct Satan when the dark one claimed dominion over the kingdoms of the world.

Howerton noted that there is “this tacit assumption throughout the entire Bible that Satan is really over all of the world’s systems — and that’s why everything in the world aligns against one thing in particular, and it’s Christianity — Christ and Christians. That’s baseline.”

Expounding on an observation shared with him by Middle East expert Raymond Ibrahim that this satanic contempt makes sense of otherwise nonsensical political alliances — such as those formed in recent years between LGBT activists, feminists, and Islamists — Howerton noted, “The unifying principle is the enemy of my enemy is my friend: anything but Christianity, and anyone but Christ.”

Howerton also detailed the commonalities between the Antichrist referred to in the Bible and Mahdi, the messianic figure in Islamic eschatology who is supposed to defeat Muslims’ enemies in the end times, and strongly suggests that the purported angel who spoke to Muhammad was the same demonic entity Saint Paul warned of in 2 Corinthians 11:14.

Ryan had expressed interest in whether Christianity was actually growing, citing statistics highlighting the years-long trend of widespread apostasization in America, which recent polling indicates has actually slowed down.

Although Howerton reassured Ryan that Christianity is “globally growing,” he noted that “in my lifetime, Christianity in America has generally been declining. I’m 43; 1983. Feels like the tide’s turning.”

RELATED: America’s fastest-growing Christian voice is joining Blaze Media

Screenshot – Courtesy of “Shawn Ryan Show,” YouTube

Ryan observed that widespread disenchantment with and distrust for government and various institutions has prompted people to seek something concrete and true, and this has driven them to Christ.

He also agreed with Howerton’s suggestion that the increasing immorality and vile actions exhibited in the West have awakened people to the twofold reality “that there was a non-ignorable dark force in the world” and that “if there’s a darkness, there must be a light, and that light has a name, and His name is Jesus Christ.”

The pastor likened this particular moment of apparent religious renewal and spiritual awakening to the biblical story of the prodigal son’s return.

“He spends all his money on parties and strippers and alcohol and, you know, whatever. And then if you read that, there’s this little verse, and everybody skips the verse that I think is most important, where he gets to the spot where he spends all the money and … everything that he thought was gonna make him happy, and it just didn’t,” said Howerton.

“It says, ‘and then he came to his senses,’ and he started running back to his father.”

Howerton added, “We got a bit of a prodigal nation.”

Like the prodigal son, the pastor suggested that it has finally dawned on America, “Everything else didn’t work, but I know I can go home to Dad.”

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​Josh howerton, Shawn ryan, Christianity, Religion, Satan, Islam, Faith 

For nearly 20 years, the same sentence has greeted me every morning.

It first appeared on a yellow Post-it note stuck to the door of my office in Nashville. When my wife and I moved to Montana, the note came with us. Eventually, the paper curled and the ink faded, so my wife had the words beautifully rendered in calligraphy and framed.

A culture that ceases to ponder the character of God will eventually begin reinventing the character of man.

Today, they hang on the wall in my office, where I see them before I begin each day’s work.

The sentence comes from Catherine Winkworth’s 19th-century translation of Joachim Neander’s 17th-century hymn, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty”: “Ponder anew what the Almighty can do, if with His love He befriend thee.”

The word ponder is surprisingly rare in our hymnody. Yet Neander was hardly the first to call God’s people to this discipline. More than a thousand years earlier, an ancient text from the Liturgy of St. James, rooted in the worship of the early church, gave us the hymn we know as “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand; ponder nothing earthly minded …”

Silence and pondering belong together. Silence quiets the noise. Pondering fixes the mind on what is true.

Our culture has become proficient at neither.

Relentless conflict eventually exhausts everyone. We were not created merely to react to the world around us. We were created to contemplate the God who rules over it.

Ask friends, family, or neighbors how they are doing, and many will answer with the same word: “Tired.”

Fatigue has become shorthand for nearly every kind of cultural exhaustion: political, racial, social, even digital. The causes differ, but the word keeps returning. We have become exhausted by the demand to react to every controversy, and in the process we have nearly forgotten how to ponder.

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Serggn/Getty Images

That discipline has quietly eroded. We accumulate information without assembling it. We have access to more knowledge than any generation in history, yet seem to spend less time fitting those pieces together into wisdom. We react to isolated events without considering the larger story. We spend more time contemplating the latest controversy than contemplating the unchanging character of Almighty God.

Joachim Neander built his life around a different discipline.

He frequently retreated into a valley outside Düsseldorf to pray and contemplate the majesty of God revealed in creation. That contemplation eventually found its way into his hymns.

The valley where he so often prayed and wrote came to bear his name: Neander’s Tal, or Neander’s Valley.

Nearly two centuries after his death, laborers uncovered ancient human remains there. Scientists named the discovery for the place where it was found: Neanderthal.

Today, the word has become a pejorative. We use it to describe someone as backward, primitive, or unenlightened.

The irony is striking.

Long before the world associated that name with fossils, it belonged to a man who saw with remarkable clarity. While others would one day search that valley to understand where man came from, Joachim Neander walked those same hills contemplating the One from whom man came.

That irony reaches beyond Neander’s name. The habits that shape a people’s souls eventually shape their civilization.

America’s founders inherited centuries of reflection on the character of God, the nature of man, the meaning of liberty, the demands of justice, and the proper limits of civil government. Their constitutional order reflected two convictions especially important to the American experiment: Rights do not originate with government, and human beings possess great dignity while remaining profoundly capable of abusing power.

Those convictions help explain both the founders’ insistence on individual liberty and their determination to restrain political authority.

At its best, America bore the fruit of generations that had pondered questions larger than politics itself.

RELATED: You didn’t build that, Mr. Obama

Pablo Martinez Monsivais – Pool/Getty Images

A civilization eventually follows the direction of its gaze.

A culture that ceases to ponder the character of God will eventually begin reinventing the character of man. Gratitude gives way to grievance. Stewardship gives way to entitlement. And politics begins carrying burdens it was never built to bear.

Which brings me back to the sentence hanging on my office wall. Tomorrow morning, I’ll walk into my office, glance at those familiar words, and begin another day: “Ponder anew what the Almighty can do, if with His love He befriend thee.”

The noise of the moment loses some of its authority. Headlines surrender some of their urgency. The fatigue begins to dissipate. And before long, pondering gives way to praise.

Perhaps that is why Neander ended the hymn where such pondering inevitably leads: “Let the Amen sound from His people again; gladly forever adore Him.”

​Hymns, Doomscrolling, Lyrics, Joachim neander, Pondering, Irony, God, Creation, Dusseldorf, Praise to the lord the almighty, Amen, Opinion & analysis 

The chatter surrounding the Lindsay Clancy murder trial continues to grow more convoluted and contentious by the day.

Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, strangled her three children — ages 5, 3, and 8 months — with exercise bands in January 2023 before attempting suicide by jumping from a second-story window, leaving her paralyzed. She has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming postpartum psychosis.

Hundreds of women recently gathered in pink outside her ongoing murder trial courthouse (and online via the “Same, Lindsay” trend) to defend her, arguing the medical system failed her and that many mothers share similar postpartum mental-health struggles. Another viral theory perpetuated largely by female Clancy supporters speculates that it was actually her now ex-husband, Patrick, who killed their children and framed her for the murders.

BlazeTV host John Doyle sees beyond the disturbing Clancy support to what he believes is fueling the apologetics surrounding her: the true crime obsession that has gripped so many American women.

True crime, Doyle explains, has become so popular that it’s the subject of many podcasts, television series, and books. There’s even entire true crime conventions that attract thousands of fans.

But it’s predominately women who make up the true crime audience.

Doyle believes there’s a connection between this data and Clancy’s significant base of female supporters. He argues that many of the women who get sucked into the twisted tales of serial killers will find ways to reject the “settled science” when it’s a woman who’s the perpetrator.

To illustrate this point, he reads a tweet from friend of the show Sean Fitzgerald who attended CrimeCon:

This tendency of these true crime fans to support female defendants regardless of the evidence brought against them is what’s fueling the support for Clancy, Doyle argues.

Women, he says, have been conditioned by modern culture to be “extremely paranoid of men” — even in situations when it’s a woman who’s facing conviction.

“The true crime thing, part of what they like about it is the mystery. … It’s like who did what to whom? What’s going on? Oh my gosh, what if this person was framed and it was actually the man?” says Doyle.

What these “junior psychologists” fail to realize, however, is that “most everybody who is actually at the point of going to criminal trial is guilty,” he adds. “They’re in that room for a reason.”

But in addition to their general distrust of men, Doyle continues, there’s the “drama” that pulls them in. A woman being framed by a man is a far more interesting scenario than a cut-and-dry case.

“These people are only interested in drama, in entertainment, in narrative. There’s no part of them that considers the merits of individual claims. This is not about truth for them,” he says.

“If you put something in front of them that contradicts what they are telling you, they will reflexively deny it basically on credit. They’ll say, ‘No, this isn’t true. I just have to go find why,’ and then they go digging to find some piece of information to rationalize their having reflexively denied it,” he continues.

But if pushback continues, the doubling down only intensifies.

“They will even … amplify the drama to themselves by asserting without any evidence at all that you, by not feeding into their fantasy, are actually a part of it — but on the side that’s trying to hide the truth,” says Doyle. “Ultimately though, they’re going to get mad at you for basically pouring water on their fantasy.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from John Doyle?

To enjoy more of the truth about America and join the fight to restore a country that has been betrayed by its own leaders, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​John doyle, Lindsay clancy, Murder trial, True crime, Blazetv show 

Does Israel still have a biblical claim on the Middle East?

That’s the title of a recent article in which a prominent Christian theologian disqualifies himself from his own argument by putting forth a pack of half-truths, innuendo, and outright lies as the foundation informing his biblical interpretation of Israel’s claim to its land.

I’ve also attended services at an evangelical church in Jerusalem, and neither going in nor coming out were we ‘spit on’ or accosted in any way.

Christian theologians definitely disagree on Israel’s role in the end-time and its relevance to us today.

That’s OK. We don’t have to agree on everything.

What’s not OK is undergirding your “biblical interpretation” with ignorant lies.

Michael Horton is a theology professor at California’s Westminster Seminary, and he believes the answer to the question is no; Israel has no biblical claim in the Middle East.

Honestly, I’m not going to address his biblical interpretation (see: above, “We don’t have to agree on everything”).

However, this article slyly uses almost every Jew-hating talking point to build a foundation for Horton’s point.

I’m going to talk to Mr. Horton here.

‘Terrorists’

The only time you use the word “terrorist,” Mr. Horton, you’re referring to Israeli settlers, who can be unpleasant but have yet to dip into pastimes such as raping women or slaughtering children in the most hideous ways imaginable (see: October 7).

Why can’t you bring yourself to apply the word where it absolutely fits — the ongoing campaign of terrorism the Palestinians have inflicted on Israeli citizens?

Instead, you share a whopper like this:

“Since 1948, Israel has fought for its own existence, while Palestinians have also defended their homes. The only way forward was a two-state solution, which was very close in the 1970s and ’80s, but is being brought to a forever-impossible point with the current Israeli government.”

Whew, that’s a lot to unpack.

So what the Palestinians have been doing since 1948 is simply “defending their homes”? How do we explain the existence then of security checkpoints and walls near freeways and all manner of other anti-terrorist setups in Israel? Were those crazy Jews just imagining the suicide bombings and knife attacks and rocks being pelted at cars? Surely you’ve heard of terrorist attacks on Israeli soil, sir?

Nor do you mention that when a two-state solution has been close, it has always and forever been nixed by the Palestinians. All they have to do is agree to stop killing Jews and live in peace. And that, Mr. Horton, has always been unacceptable to them.

And you turn this on its head, by blaming the “current Israeli government” and, later in your piece, “Christian dispensationalists.” It’s never the Palestinians’ fault. They’re the victims, and not once in this piece do you even hint at their own responsibility for so much bloodshed and hatred.

RELATED: ‘Anti-ICE’ Christians mistake moral confusion for empathy

Ryan Murphy/Getty Images

‘Horrible atrocities’

The internet is full of outlandish tales of Christians supposedly being persecuted in Israel, so the Candace Owens/Tucker Carlson fans are afraid to travel there for fear of being “spit on” at best and tortured in a dungeon at worst. You play into this nonsense by claiming you’ve talked to pastors in the Middle East (you notably don’t say where in the Middle East) who tell of “horrible atrocities” by the Israeli soldiers and the Israel Defense Forces.

Surely you are not unaware of the people who have it IN THEIR CHARTER to wipe out the Jews? The people who train their children to hate Jews? The people who pulled off October 7? Is there no place in your seemingly measured discourse to condemn actual “horrible atrocities”?

I know many Christians in Israel, and I have visited there, including non-tourist places. I’ve also attended worship services at an evangelical church in Jerusalem, and neither going in nor coming out were we “spit on” or accosted in any way, because the vast majority of Jews could not care less. The church live streams its services for Pete’s sake. It’s not an underground or persecuted church. Not to mention that the number of Christians in Israel is growing unlike any other Middle Eastern country.

‘Genocide’

Of course you had to use the g-word, even though Israel has never, ever called for genocide. It is, however, precisely what the Palestinians explicitly call for (regularly, and in Hamas governing documents). But you said it is Israel’s far-right Kahanist party that is “demanding genocide wherever Palestinians now live.”

That is simply not an accurate description of Kahanism. Meir Kahane and his Kach Party advocated the forced expulsion — or “transfer” — of Arabs from Israel and the territories under its control. Whatever you want to call that policy, it is not in any way “genocide.”

Words mean something, Mr. Horton.

I also grow weary of the demonization and complete mischaracterization of “dispensationalist” churches. You again:

“In the dispensationalist churches of my youth, the whole Bible centered not on Christ but on the nation of Israel, especially its reconstitution in 1948.”

Yeah. I grew up in dispensationalist churches, too. And at no time, in no way, did the nation of Israel displace Christ as the center of the Bible or anything else. I have heard this nonsense so many times lately, that Christian Zionists or dispensationalists “worship Israel.” It’s not true, outside of some weird sects that may exist, and it is frankly sinful to besmirch fellow believers in this way.

The soft-pedaling of the Palestinian/Islamic worldview that is in fact genocidal toward Jews (and the West in general) is galling. You describe what you call “horrific acts of ultra-orthodox violence” and then sympathetically offer this: “As is too often true in families and national histories, those subject to extreme violence seek revenge through a similar dehumanization of the other.”

So it’s the Israeli settlers who are extremely violent? Poor Hamas has no choice but to burn families alive in their homes? After October 7, I simply cannot see how a professed Christian can twist truth this way.

Whopper after whopper

Let’s finish with one more of your whoppers:

“Christianity in the West Bank, including Bethlehem, is being erased by ultra-orthodox settlers under the protective umbrella of the Israel Defense Forces.”

There is a kernel of truth here. There have been documented incidents of extremist Israeli settlers harassing and attacking Palestinian Christians, vandalizing Christian property, and encroaching on Christian-owned land.

But you take those incidents and spin them into something much larger: a story in which Jews are “erasing” Christianity from the West Bank under the “protective umbrella” of the Israeli military.

Where is the evidence for that sweeping claim?

And just as striking is what you leave out. Palestinian Christians have also faced documented harassment, intimidation, violence, and property disputes involving Muslim Palestinians, including incidents in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Christian communities have been shrinking across the Middle East for decades, including in places where there are no Israeli settlers and no IDF.

That Horton blames Jews for “erasing” Christianity in the West Bank, when said erasure precisely patterns the erasures in every Muslim country — well, it’s just the same old libel: anti-Semitic libel.

Perhaps you didn’t mean to lie. I hope so. I also hope you consider that you approached this all wrong, and you need to try again.

​Bible, Christianity, Dispensationalism, Genocide, Hamas, Israel, Israeli settlers, Jews, Middle east, Muslims, Palestine, Theology, Two-state solution, Faith, October 7 

Jonathan Goodman’s mnemonic words were written down and stored in safes and safety-deposit boxes. The device that generated them had never touched the internet. The cable was never plugged in, the QR code never scanned by anything connected to the wider world. Every visible precaution was observed with great care. Then, on the evening of July 29, 2026, the Canadian investor watched 18.25 Bitcoin leave his wallet over seven minutes. The sum was worth roughly 1.6 million Canadian dollars. He thought he had done everything right, but the money was now gone.

Goodman, like others, had put his trust in Coldcard, a hardware wallet for cryptocurrency. The natural instinct, when confronted with a theft like the Coldcard hack that hit him and many others, is to look for the intrusion: the broken window, the intercepted message, the insider. The Coldcard incident offered no such satisfaction. The secret was never stolen in transit; it was simply never secret enough.

What remains is not the absence of trust but its redistribution.

A hardware wallet is a small device that generates and guards the cryptographic keys controlling a Bitcoin balance. The device does not hold the coins. The coins exist as entries on a distributed ledger maintained by thousands of computers. What the device holds is the authority to move them, encoded as a string of words derived from a number that is supposed to be random. The entire architecture of private ownership rests on the proposition that the number your device chose when you pressed the button could not have been predicted by anyone else on earth. However, the Coldcard’s number could be.

A tale of self-deception

In 2021, Coinkite, the Toronto company that manufactures the Coldcard, migrated its cryptographic library. The migration was routine, and the new library was reputable. However, during integration, a function call that was supposed to reach the device’s hardware random-number generator instead resolved to a software fallback, a deterministic pseudorandom-number generator built into MicroPython. A hardware generator harvests physical noise, the kind of irreducible unpredictability that makes a secret genuinely singular. A software fallback produces numbers that look disordered but are fully determined by their inputs. Feed it the same inputs and it will produce the same outputs, every time, on every machine. The function returned bytes of the correct length in the expected format. The mnemonic phrase looked random, but it was not.

On older Coldcard models, the effective search space collapsed to roughly 40 bits, meaning an attacker had to consider about a trillion candidates rather than the intended hundreds of trillions. On newer devices, secure-element entropy raised the figure, but independent analysis found that only 32 bits of genuinely secret material survived in a critical reseeding operation. A trillion sounds like a large number, but it is not when the adversary has rented a cluster of GPUs and the public blockchain serves as a free answer key against which every guess can be checked in milliseconds.

The thefts were automated. On July 30, roughly 1,083 Bitcoin moved from 1,196 addresses in 41 minutes. Subsequent waves targeted thousands more. By early August, estimates ranged from 1,596 to over 2,000 Bitcoin drained across thousands of addresses, a sum approaching $130 million. The attackers did not need to know who owned the wallets or where the devices were stored. They needed only to regenerate the small universe of secrets those devices could ever have produced, derive the corresponding addresses, compare them against the blockchain, and sign. The protocol saw valid signatures, which is the only authority it recognizes.

RELATED: A shocking storage exploit bankrupts Bitcoiners — with lessons for us all

Velishchuk/Getty Images

The Coldcard had occupied a particular niche in Bitcoin’s self-image. It was the serious person’s wallet, the one recommended on the forums and podcasts that prized operational security, air-gapped signing, open-source firmware, and a philosophy of radical self-reliance. Its marketing vocabulary was a compressed manifesto: sovereignty, verification, trust minimization. Two weeks before the mass thefts, Coinkite published an essay arguing that offline status alone was insufficient and that real security required architectural separation, trusted displays, secure elements, and reproducible builds. The essay ironically enumerated the locks on the doors in a house whose foundation was already fissured.

Hidden is not secure

Bitcoin was designed to eliminate the need to trust institutions. You do not need to trust a bank to honor its ledger because the ledger is maintained by mathematics and distributed consensus. However, the self-custodying individual must trust or personally verify the firmware on the device, the compiler that built the firmware, the library the compiler linked, the symbol the linker resolved, the entropy source the symbol reached, the chip that generated the noise, the build system that packaged the result, the reviewers who examined the code, and the update channel that delivered the fix. One is trusting an entire institutional apparatus compressed into a plastic rectangle the size of a playing card.

“Do not trust; verify” is the community’s canonical imperative, but verification requires a division of labor. The user verifies an address on a screen. An auditor inspects the firmware. A reproducible-build operator compares binaries. A laboratory assesses an entropy source. No single person does all of these things, and almost no one does more than the first. What remains is not the absence of trust but its redistribution, away from a chartered institution with a complaints department and toward a dispersed, informal, largely volunteer apparatus of maintainers, reviewers, and forum participants whose oversight, in this case, missed a five-year-old defect in the most consequential function the device performs.

Jonathan Goodman’s safe was not breached. His backup was not photographed. His mnemonic words were not intercepted. The words themselves were simply a member of a knowable set, a predictable output dressed in the costume of randomness. The distinction between concealment and unpredictability turned out to be critical. While the Coldcard was offline, the institution that made the key never was.

​Tech, Hacking, Savings, Security, Bitcoin 

Students head back to classrooms this month. Many will arrive already convinced their future is hopeless.

In a Lancet Planetary Health study of 10,000 young people across 10 countries, 75% said the future is frightening and 56% said they believe humanity is doomed.

We are graduating energy-illiterate students at precisely the moment the country has to build.

A 2025 PNAS study found one in five Americans ages 16 to 24 is afraid to have children because of the climate. That gloom has deepened over time. In Yale’s long-running survey, the share of Americans 18 to 34 who say global warming is already harming this country rose from 40% in 2012 to 64% in 2022.

What’s causing such a dramatic shift? It could be what’s missing in the classroom.

Teenagers name teachers as their leading source on climate and energy. Seventy-one percent say they learned “a lot” or “some” from a teacher, ahead of parents at 67% and social media at 63%. Yet the median high school science teacher spends one or two hours a year on the subject, and three-quarters of teachers say they have never been trained to teach it.

The teaching gap shows. Nearly three-quarters of teens believe ocean plastic is a major contributor to climate change. Energy illiteracy is even worse: Fewer than a third of high schoolers can name the three sources that generate most American electricity. Energy literacy scores among high school seniors fell between 2017 and 2022.

What fills the gap is the phone. Researchers at the University at Buffalo, writing last fall in Climatic Change, found that heavier social media use correlates with what they call “climate doom,” the belief that warming will collapse social and economic order. When other researchers examined 100 climate videos on TikTok, only eight cited a reputable source.

A video feed full of ignorance and despair doesn’t make a good curriculum.

The consequences are economic as well as emotional. After 15 flat years, American electricity demand is climbing again, roughly 2% annually since 2020. Data centers are on pace to double their share of peak demand inside two years. We are graduating energy-illiterate students at precisely the moment the country has to build.

For a teenager trying to figure out what to do with his life, that ignorance could be costly. We hear a lot these days about how artificial intelligence is closing the on-ramps into white-collar work.

The head of one leading AI lab has warned that the technology could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, concentrated in the fields that used to hire new graduates.

RELATED: China is building power. America is still debating it.

Yuan Hongyan/VCG/Getty Images

But that’s not the whole story. Electricians are growing at three times the rate of the average occupation, with roughly 73,500 openings a year. Nuclear technicians earn a median above $104,000, often without a four-year degree. Applied trades have added 2.5 million jobs since 2019, and the average utility worker is past 50 and nearing retirement.

Students need to know the full picture. That goes for job prospects as well as the climate. Natural gas displacing coal drove the largest share of the decline in American power-sector emissions, according to the Energy Information Administration. Technology companies have committed more than $50 billion to nuclear power, more than in any previous decade. Three Mile Island restarts next year. Most new reactors arrive in the 2030s.

For a 16-year-old who wants to work in the nuclear industry, that timeline sounds like job security.

Kids deserve to know that their futures are far from hopeless. A little bit of energy education could work like an SSRI for doomsday depression.

Some groups are trying to fill the energy education gap. Generation Atomic runs a nuclear science program for grades 6 through 12. The American Conservation Coalition organizes young people around nuclear power and permitting reform. And Blue Energy Nation’s BENERGY course launches nationally this fall. It features six modules built for homeschool families but is easily folded into any science, civics, or economics class.

Students shouldn’t be left to form a worldview based on TikTok videos. We should teach them where energy comes from, how it impacts their futures, and what it will need from them. Fear is a lousy career counselor. A generation convinced the future is already finished will not build the grid that future requires.

This article was originally published by RealClearEducation and made available via RealClearWire.

​Artificial intelligence, Energy, Natural gas, Social media, Students, Climate change, Technology, Opinion & analysis 

The Muslim Brotherhood’s influence in America may be far more deeply embedded than most Americans realize according to former CIA targeter Sarah Adams.

Adams tells Christopher Rufo and Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman on “Rufo & Lomez” that the organization has spent decades building relationships and political power from the ground up, financially supporting candidates while embedding itself in universities, religious organizations, chambers of commerce, and local civic groups.

“They back a lot of the political candidates financially as we know. They pump a ton of money into our universities, but they also are very much like the Chinese, and nobody’s really honest about that,” Adams explains.

“They start at the local level,” she continues, “They get involved in community organizations and chambers of commerce, you know, religious organizations, volunteer organizations.”

“So they’re more integrated than I think most people realize,” she adds.

Lomez points out that there are even reports that Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is funded by the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Admittedly these are just headlines, that you know, he may be funded by Muslim Brotherhood,” he says. “This comes as a surprise to me, but it sounds like you’re saying, ‘No, this is something to be expected.’”

While expected, Adams notes that it is “complicated.”

“When it comes to the U.S., though, it’s so complicated because when we say ‘Muslim Brotherhood,’ you’re not going to drive down the street and have a building and it says ‘The Muslim Brotherhood.’ It’s going to be called something like, I don’t know, the Saudi American Friendship Society, right?” she explains.

“And so that’s where it’s complicated because people at the local level don’t even know that they’re interacting,” she says, noting that even local candidates and activists have no idea.

“That awareness does not exist at all in the United States,” she adds.

Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Christopher rufo, Cia targeter, Jonathan keeperman, Muslim brotherhood, Sarah adams, Blazetv show, Abdul el-sayed 

Bill Gates spent the 1990s acting like a corporate warlord, threatening any rival startup that dared to exist in the same ecosystem. Then, after nearly being torn apart by antitrust lawsuits, he hired a massive PR team to rebrand himself as the world’s kindly, sweater-wearing grandfather who just wants to eradicate disease.

It was a shameless makeover, and many on the left eagerly bought in to it. Then came the stories about cozy dinners with Jeffrey Epstein long after his conviction for sex offenses. When asked about it, Gates gave answers so limp and evasive that they barely qualified as English.

Gates is innocent until proven guilty, but the evidence raises serious questions.

Now we turn to his daughter, Phoebe Gates. When it comes to deceptive tactics, the apple doesn’t appear to fall far from the tree.

The scandal at her shopping platform, Phia, is far from an isolated accident.

Phia is under scrutiny due to evidence suggesting that the platform allegedly utilized an illegal digital trick called cookie stuffing that sent top tech executives to federal prison over a decade ago. In a previous landmark federal fraud case involving deceptive tactics, eBay’s most lucrative marketing partners, Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning, were convicted of federal wire fraud and landed behind bars after stealing over $33 million by secretly dropping tracking cookies onto millions of unsuspecting web users. Hogan alone pocketed tens of millions before federal prosecutors and the FBI dismantled the operation.

Phoebe Gates may ultimately face the exact same fate if found guilty in a court of law.

If misdeeds are proven, they may stand as the latest high-profile iteration of a multibillion-dollar digital scam that has preyed upon internet commerce for decades. Cookie stuffing involves sneaky companies secretly planting hidden tracking codes on your web browser to claim undeserved cash. Instead of creating tools that genuinely help consumers save money, these immoral operators hijack web traffic, diverting sales commissions from honest creators and straight into their own corporate bank accounts.

Understanding why this practice is so damaging and diabolical requires going a little deeper.

Stepping on the little guy

Niche bloggers, independent reviewers, and digital workers spend countless hours testing products, writing detailed advice, and guiding consumers to reliable goods. Yes, some are downright deceptive, but my focus here is on the decent ones.

When a reader clicks a link on a small creator’s site and buys a product, that creator earns a modest commission. Digital tracking hijacking destroys that fair, free-market exchange. Software can secretly inject a tracking code into the customer’s browser at checkout, as Phia is alleged to have done, overwriting the original creator’s referral tag and snatching the payout. It functions as an invisible pickpocket standing at the store register, snatching commission payments right out of the hands of hardworking men and women.

The economic damage hits everyday consumers in their wallets. Major retail brands include affiliate commissions in their operating overhead costs. When millions of dollars are skimmed from the retail pipeline by parasitic browser extensions, store profit margins shrink. This forces companies to raise retail prices across the board to offset the losses. Think of a massive siphon system built to extract wealth from independent workers and concentrate it inside the portfolios of Silicon Valley’s privileged class.

That’s hardly a fair marketplace.

RELATED: Mark Zuckerberg: No superintelligence, no liberal democracy

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc./Getty Images

When it comes to Phia, which did not respond to a request for comment, what renders the scenario even more disturbing is evidence that alleges to show there was early corporate awareness. According to a recent Bloomberg report, internal Slack messages seem to show that Phia’s leadership knew for months that its browser tool could claim commissions on sales it had not actually generated. This allowed Phia’s tracking code to attach itself to customer transactions after those shoppers had already been directed to merchant sites by outside sources.

The internal Slack records deal a blow to any hopes of a preemptive public defense strategy. They suggest this wasn’t a minor technical glitch discovered after launch, but a mechanism executives were discussing while aware of its effect on commission payouts.

Working the system

Unfortunately, the alleged strategy mirrors Gates’ formal academic training at Stanford University. While enrolled on campus, she gained entry into “So You Think You Can Rule the World?” an exclusive, invitation-only seminar. According to investigative reports by the Stanford Daily, a select group of students met behind closed doors each week to analyze power structures. They studied institutional influence and how to work the system, lessons Ms. Gates could have learned from her father for free. The course focused on teaching students how to “hack” bureaucracies and navigate them to their own advantage. And people say elite universities don’t teach anything useful.

The contrast between classroom theory and real-world execution would be amusing if the stakes weren’t so serious. On one side was an academic course focused on understanding how power moves through institutions and how to manipulate them to get ahead. On the other side sit corporate chat logs that seem to capture Phia operators exploiting digital retail systems to claim revenue for sales the software never earned. This sort of privilege, merged with absolute arrogance, creates a predatory threat to ordinary Americans. Federal prosecutors must apply the law without bias and ensure that tech royalty faces the exact same justice system as everyone else.

Gates is innocent until proven guilty, but the evidence described above raises serious questions that are difficult to dismiss. If prosecutors ultimately establish knowing participation, real prison time is a serious possibility.

​Technology, Tech 

The Navy has been through a lot over the past several months.

Ships have stayed at sea longer than planned. Sailors have missed more time with their families. Aircraft have flown hard. Weapons have been fired in numbers we have not seen in decades. Maintenance has been pushed to the right because the mission came first.

We cannot keep shrinking the number of ships while expanding the number of missions and pretend the math will somehow work.

Now the bills are going to start coming due.

Ships will return needing repairs. Aircraft will need maintenance. Magazines will need to be refilled. Sailors will need time at home. Families that have carried an enormous burden will want some normalcy back. All of that is understandable. But what happens next will tell us a lot about the future of the United States Navy.

We can spend the next few years talking about how hard the Iran fight was, how tired the force is, and how much everything costs. We can lower expectations, reduce deployments, accept fewer ships at sea, and convince ourselves that this is simply the new reality.

Or we can decide to get better.

That may sound overly simple, but it isn’t. This is the choice facing this generation of Navy leaders, Pentagon officials, members of Congress, and the defense industrial base. Iran did not create the Navy’s problems. It exposed them.

Listen to sailors and learn the right lesson

The extended deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln has become the most visible example of the strain on the force. Sailors and families have expressed frustration about deployment length, uncertainty, limited port calls, and conditions aboard the ship.

When we ask young Americans to spend month after month away from their spouses and children, they have earned the right to tell us when things are not working. Navy leaders should pay attention to quality of life, communications, food, sleep, medical care, and the information families receive back home.

But we should be careful about the conclusion we draw from their frustration. The lesson cannot simply be that deployments should never run long again. Wars don’t care about deployment schedules.

America’s national security commitments don’t disappear because a carrier strike group has been gone for eight or nine months.

Sometimes the mission requires more.

The real lesson is that America needs enough Navy that asking more of our sailors during a crisis does not become the only option available. That means more ships, more aircraft, more weapons, more logistics capacity, and more people.

It also means accepting something we sometimes became uncomfortable saying during the long years of peacetime operations: Serving in the military is supposed to be hard.

We should take care of sailors and their families. We should fix unnecessary problems and hold leaders accountable for poor decisions. But we also need a Navy that expects its people to be tough enough to fight and win a war.

RELATED: China is building power. America is still debating it.

Yuan Hongyan/VCG/Getty Images

The maintenance bill is coming

The bigger problem may be what happens when these ships finally come home.

Engines accumulate hours. Aircraft fly more sorties. Radars and combat systems operate continuously. Parts wear out. Repairs that might normally happen during a deployment get delayed because the ship is needed on station.

Eventually all of that work has to be done. And the Navy was already struggling with maintenance before the war. Public shipyards are overloaded. Private repair yards are stretched. Submarine maintenance has been a problem for years. Surface ships routinely spend longer in maintenance than planned.

Now we are going to add ships returning from combat operations. We should not act surprised when the backlog grows. The question is whether we do something about it.

That means putting real money into ship repair capacity. It means expanding public and private yards. It means training more welders, electricians, pipe fitters, and other skilled workers. It means using predictive maintenance and better data, so we know what is going to fail before it fails.

And it means getting serious about spare parts.

None of this is glamorous. There are no ribbon cuttings for having the right pump sitting on a warehouse shelf. But wars are often won by the side that can keep equipment operating.

Refill the magazines

Iran also reminded us that modern warfare burns through weapons quickly.

Missiles that take years to develop and months or years to produce can disappear from a ship’s magazine in minutes.

That should scare us, not because the Navy performed poorly — it performed extremely well — but because Iran is not China.

Imagine the weapons requirements of a sustained fight across thousands of miles of the Pacific against an adversary with a large navy, advanced aircraft, submarines, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and enormous industrial capacity.

The math gets uncomfortable quickly.

We should treat every weapon fired during the Iran conflict as a data point.

How quickly can we replace it?

If the answer is measured in years, we have a problem.

This is where the Pentagon and Congress need to stop treating munitions like boutique acquisition programs. We need production lines that can surge. We need long-term contracts that give manufacturers confidence to invest. We need second sources for critical components.

And we need deeper magazines.

You cannot surge missile production after the shooting starts.

Don’t become the Royal Navy

There is a historical warning here.

The British Royal Navy did not wake up one morning and suddenly stop being the world’s dominant navy.

The decline happened slowly.

Britain still had excellent ships. It still had talented sailors. It still had proud traditions. What it gradually lost was mass. The commitments remained large while the fleet became smaller. That should sound familiar.

America expects its Navy to deter China, operate in Europe, protect shipping in the Middle East, defend the homeland, reassure allies, and respond whenever something goes wrong anywhere in the world.

We cannot keep shrinking the number of ships while expanding the number of missions and pretend the math will somehow work. Eventually something gives. Iran gave us a warning. We should take it.

RELATED: How to renew American scientific research

BSIP/UIG/Getty Images

Get better

There will be a temptation after this conflict to focus almost entirely on recovery. The Navy absolutely needs to recover. But recovery cannot become retreat. This needs to be a period of brutal institutional learning.

What broke? What ran out? What took too long to repair? Which supply chains failed?

Capture those lessons and move out — don’t spend five years studying them.

Some fixes will require money. Others will require leadership. Many will require getting rid of processes and assumptions that made sense during peacetime but make no sense after experiencing sustained combat.

This should change how the Navy trains, buys weapons, maintains ships, designs the fleet, and supports families.

Most importantly, it should change the Navy’s mindset.

The service should come out of this tougher than it went in.

The choice

Every generation gets a few moments when the direction of an institution can change.

This is one of them.

Iran showed what sustained combat does to a Navy. A war with a peer competitor would ask far more. So we have a choice — slump our shoulders and talk about how difficult this is and how far behind we feel.

Or we can stop talking, learn from the last couple of years, and get better.

Fix the ships. Refill the magazines. Expand the yards.

Take care of Navy families. Demand better leadership. And expect toughness from the force.

The United States Navy is still the most capable navy in the world. The question is whether we intend to keep it that way.

Iran should not be remembered as the fight that wore down the U.S. Navy. It should be remembered as the fight that woke it up.

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

​Aircraft, Congress, Iran war, Pentagon, U.s. navy, Modern warfare, China, Supply chains, Maintenance, Leadership, Opinion & analysis 

Hollywood has spent years peppering films and shows with transgender cast members, but Lilly Wachowski — who identifies as transgender — isn’t reaping the benefits.

“The Matrix” co-creator, formerly known as Andy Wachowski, is now struggling to find financing for “The Hunted,” a $10 million dystopian political thriller featuring an entirely transgender cast.

“Well, if you’re excited for a brand-new all-trans movie, I’ve got terrible news for you,” BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere jokes.

“Of course, these are the Wachowski brothers who made ‘The Matrix’ movies and now they’re called, in the article, the Wachowski sisters,” he explains.

“It is ironic that the guys who made ‘The Matrix’ got their lives destroyed because of the computer. It’s really an interesting thing,” co-host Dave Landau says. “Also, the trans thing is the reason why they can’t get financing, I think.”

“So the fact that they want to do the entire cast of that is a bit strange to me,” he adds.

Dave, who’s a twin himself, points out that it’s also strange that they both became women “at the same time.”

“It feels a little forced. I’m not going to lie. A little forced,” he says.

While the all-trans cast element of the film might rub conservatives the wrong way, Stu doesn’t believe that’s why Wachowski can’t get funding.

“I don’t know what their funding levels are looking like. If they’re looking to make a $200 million ‘Matrix’-style extravaganza, probably not going to get that funded,” Stu says.

“I think the real reason why they can’t get funding for the Wachowski brothers from ‘The Matrix’ franchise is because of at least the third and fourth ‘Matrix.’ Like both of them were absolutely horrible,” he continues.

“First one’s a masterpiece. I don’t know what happened,” he adds.

Want more from Stu and Dave?

To enjoy more of Stu and Dave’s lethal blend of wit, humor, and insightful commentary subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Dave landau, Hollywood, Lilly wachowski, Matrix movies, Stu burguiere, The hunted, Wachowski brothers, Dystopian, Transgender, Blazetv show 

At the outset of Marco Rubio’s tenure as secretary of state, his department introduced a new paradigm for U.S.-European relations: civilizational alliance.

Rubio and his aides have persistently sought to remind Europe that our relationship is based not merely on trade deals and defense agreements, but ultimately on a shared Western anthropology and history.

The real objection is not so much to any national interest but to the assertion of American national interest.

Rubio’s July 4 message declared:

[America’s] seeds were planted by the philosophers of Athens, the imperial majesty of Rome, the monks and kings of medieval Christendom — centuries of European exploration, science, faith, and restless ambition finally unleashed from every constraint on the boundless American frontier. America was the destiny of an entire civilization.

These overtures, though sometimes welcomed by European citizens bearing the brunt of civilizational decline, have been met in conventional diplomatic circles with reactions ranging from ambivalence to indignation.

European elites are loath to admit they have a civilization to maintain, and if they do, they speak of it with contempt.

Rather than face the matter head-on, the most typical response has been to accuse the U.S. of brashness and insincerity. Critics scoff that we are hypocrites for touting civilizational alliances while unabashedly pursuing America First policies. This apparent contradiction rests on three errors.

First is ignorance of the very Western tradition Americans wish to revitalize, in which duty to one’s country is second only to God. This wisdom was passed down from Cicero to Augustine to Aquinas, who taught that “just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship (cultum) to one’s parents and one’s country.” The duty of patriotism stems from the gift of life we received from particular people in a particular nation.

Naturally, those who see no significance in national origin can see no duty stemming from it.

But in truth, even nations that share a common civilization are perfectly free — and indeed obliged — to be patriotic and to pursue their own interests for the sake of their citizenry.

Working to preserve a shared civilization is exactly what helps them clarify the just pursuit of interest or “interest well understood,” as Tocqueville calls it. For example, a businessman who is outmaneuvered in the market never objects to competitors seeking their own prosperity. He objects only if they cheat to get it. So too with nations. This is doubly true for the civilization that produced Aquinas and Tocqueville, Parliament and Congress.

Second, these dynamics of Western civilization are lost on contemporary Europeans because they have abdicated both individual and national sovereignty. They fear individual action apart from collective consensus. Of course, this is to misunderstand both consensus and individuals, since authentic consensus arises only from the free assent of individuals. But contribution to a consensus is far from the only sovereign power individuals hold.

RELATED: Who gets the GOP when Trump is gone?

Blaze Media Illustration

There are a host of matters that individuals may decide for themselves without needing permission from anyone else. The sum of these choices makes up moral character and, indeed, sovereignty itself. To circumscribe them is to destroy the possibility of the moral greatness and virtue that the West champions. As is true for individuals, so also for nations.

The nations of Europe have to a large extent surrendered their sovereignty to the EU, which acts like a nation but does not take responsibility for its actions. Those in Brussels claim merely to be following the consensus of European nations, whose leaders themselves take no responsibility and dutifully follow the decisions of the EU.

To those within a system built on a shared abdication of responsibility, the sight of Americans letting their yes be yes and their no be no is an unconscionable disturbance of global order — and, if European member states catch on, to their job security.

Third, abdication of sovereignty is not applied equally. The real objection is not so much to any national interest but to the assertion of American national interest. If Ghana or Paraguay stood up at the U.N. and cited their national interest, everyone would murmur appreciatively. Only strong nations are not supposed to seek their interests, and since the U.S. is the strongest, we are expected to support the interests of others over our own.

This moral hierarchy is one of the glaring symptoms of how much globalist institutions have been captured and perverted by radical “Third Worldist” policies.

But this critique rests on another false premise: that American national interest is inherently at odds with the welfare of others. In practice, the opposite is often true.

America might be prosperous, but we also have millions of poor people living here, so many that we spend around 25% of our considerable budget for their ostensible welfare. The U.S. is also deeply concerned with global welfare. We dismantled boondoggle institutions like USAID precisely to redirect funds from woke nonsense to real needs. Just recently, Secretary Rubio spearheaded $100 million in direct aid to the Cuban people.

Finally, another 15% of U.S. spending goes toward preserving the longest large-scale peace since the fall of Rome, enabling billions of otherwise vulnerable people to live in relative security.

So separating U.S. interest from the interests of the poor and marginalized is dodgy at best.

On a deeper level, the contention that strong nations have no legitimate self-interest is a dangerous absurdity. Yet it is embedded deep in the minds of Western elites who distrust not the self-governing individual in principle, but only those who govern themselves well. The weaker, the meaner, and the baser, the more license they grant, particularly over those who are naturally stronger.

RELATED: China is building power. America is still debating it.

Yuan Hongyan/VCG/Getty Images

This is the logic that has afforded migrant rape gangs the protection of law in Britain and outlawed objection to them. It is the logic that grants or withholds jobs and benefits based on race and victim status. It is the logic that demands the United States submit to tyrannical institutions like the International Criminal Court that could not even exist without the Pax Americana.

It is difficult to pinpoint the source of these inversions. Many have suggested they spring from a perversion of Christian charity. That may be, although I hesitate to blame even the perversion of a theological virtue. Rather, one of the seven deadly sins seems a more likely culprit: despair.

Many on the left believe that the West never offered humanity anything besides oppression and that it now offers a vast storehouse of ill-gotten gains, good only for distribution and dissolution. On a fundamental level, Western nations have no right to pursue their own interests because they have no right to exist.

America disagrees. Humanity’s best hope does not live in the grave of the West. It lives here, where the flame of Western civilization has been burning for 250 years. We intend to keep it burning, both for our own sake and for the world’s.

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

​Marco rubio, National interest, Secretary of state, Western civilization, Eu, Europeans, American interests, Tocqueville, National sovereignty, Pax americana, Usaid, Opinion & analysis 

A caretaker hired to look after a 77-year-old man with dementia at a care facility in northwest Albuquerque has been arrested, according to a New Mexico prosecutor’s office.

Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman said Stephanie Paiz locked herself inside the man’s room on Friday, Aug. 14, before committing the heinous acts.

Paiz was charged with three counts of criminal sexual penetration and one count of criminal sexual contact.

An employee of the facility rushed to unlock the door and stop Paiz, according to Bregman.

The alleged abuse was captured on security cameras in the room.

Paiz was charged with three counts of criminal sexual penetration and one count of criminal sexual contact.

The president of the company that owns and manages the Ativo Senior Living facility said that Paiz had been a private caretaker hired by the family of the victim and not one of their employees.

Bregman said Paiz will stay in jail while awaiting trial.

Some studies say that one in 10 Americans older than 60 years old will experience some form of elderly abuse. Others have found only one in 24 case of abuse are reported to authorities.

RELATED: California woman arrested after police find decomposing body in plastic bags in locked closet

In one horrendous case from 2023, a 38-year-old registered sex offender named Damien Young threw a 65-year-old man through the window of a third-story building in Rochester, New York.

Young was charged with second-degree murder after the man died.

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​Dementia, Sexual assault, Elder abuse, New mexico, Crime 

Rosie O’Donnell has returned … and she didn’t bring her freshest material.

You would think her years-long sabbatical from the spotlight would have given her the time to come up with some choice zingers for her archnemesis, Donald Trump.

Jagger is 83 and looks in remarkably good shape. His rock peers? Not so much.

Instead, the best she could do was this moldy oldie: “Orange Voldemort.”

To be fair, the Queen of Not-So-Nice is also well past her sell-by date. The “A League of Her Own” star hasn’t been hot since Avril Lavigne ruled the charts. And it got even cooler last year when she fled to Ireland in mortal fear of President Donald Trump 2.0.

It’s hard to land acting gigs when you’re living thousands of miles away from La La Land.

Now, she’s back. Sort of. O’Donnell had a brief Broadway run with a one-woman show, and she’s been hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” all week.

She used the ABC perch to mock President Trump, suggesting she was getting under his skin. Yes, Trump is the president of the greatest country in the world again, and O’Donnell had to leave her home fearing some make-believe threat he poses.

You know what they say, Rosie: If you can’t say something funny, don’t say nothing at all.

Midnight in Madrid

A director synonymous with New York is having a hard time making films there now.

Woody Allen’s 51st feature is set to start shooting this October in Madrid. The Oscar winner hasn’t shared much about the project, but we know that local officials are helping defray the film’s $12 million budget.

So why not the Big Apple? It’s complicated. First, Hollywood unofficially cut bait with Allen during the #MeToo movement. Suddenly, the industry took the disturbing allegations against the filmmaker seriously. He had previously been accused of molesting his daughter Dylan Farrow, but Hollywood looked the other way until it became uncomfortable to do so.

Plus, U.S. investors aren’t as keen on backing his low-budget, low-ROI stories anymore, let alone support a star with a murky past.

Then again, maybe the Jewish filmmaker is better off in Madrid, not the Big Apple. Does he really want to shoot a movie in Zohran Mamdani’s New York?

RELATED: SCOFF LIMITS: Trump-trashing ‘South Park’ somehow skipped Biden

Leon Bennett/Stephen Jaffee/Chip Somodevilla/Win McNamee/Infadel/Jim Watson/Getty Images

Just ‘Wonder’ing

Another day, another celebrity plays the race card. But does this actor have a point?

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II snagged an Emmy nomination for playing the obscure Marvel Comics hero Wonder Man in the Disney+ show of the same name. The series earned a quick second season greenlight before the Mouse House said, “Psych!” and canceled it.

Now the actor is suggesting to Vanity Fair that Marvel has a racism problem. Maybe. Sort of. Hey, he’s just asking questions.

His proof? He brought up not just his show, which co-starred Ben Kingsley and race-swapped his character from the comics, but another doomed MCU affair.

Remember the multiyear effort to reboot the “Blade” franchise, formerly featuring Wesley Snipes? The studio hired the uber-talented Mahershala Ali as the titular vampire before multiple attempts to launch the film failed. Says Abdul-Mateen:

I think the optics are obvious. If I’m a big business, if I’m Disney, if I’m Marvel, I don’t want to be attached to these optics. So it should be a priority to change that narrative and to do what it takes to responsibly change that narrative with quality stories, with quality resources.

It never hurts to play the race card in Hollywood, and you don’t have to have an open-and-shut case for it. The star ignores the hyper-successful “Black Panther” series, which will get a third installment soon. It also downplays Marvel’s attempt to have Anthony Mackie, who is black, take over for Chris Evans as Captain America.

That film, “Captain America: Brave New World,” didn’t make as much as most big MCU projects.

If this were the peak woke era, “Wonder Man” might be suddenly “uncanceled” after his comments. As is, Abdul-Mateen’s best chance for revenge is holding an Emmy trophy high on Sept. 14 …

Prayers up for Parton

Mick Jagger famously sang, “What a drag it is getting old,” on “Mother’s Little Helper.”

The irony? Jagger is 83 and looks in remarkably good shape. His rock peers? Not so much. Rod Stewart, 81, just pulled the plug on his troubled 2026 tour after receiving a coronary stent.

Lionel Richie couldn’t dance on a ceiling, or elsewhere, in the early stages of his current tour. Health issues have plagued the veteran star, now 77. And then there’s poor Frank Beard. The drummer for legendary ZZ Top just passed away at 77.

Dolly Parton is still with us, but the 80-year-old legend just took a step back from the spotlight after feeling a little “swimmy-headed.” Don’t do this to us, 2026. We’re warning you.

​Celebrity, Dolly parton, Donald trump, Entertainment, Hollywood, Jimmy kimmel live, Lifestyle, Madrid, Marvel, Mick jagger, Movies, Rosie o’donnell, Woody allen, Yahya abdulmateen ii, Toto recall 

On a recent episode of the “Steve Deace Show,” the BlazeTV host framed a stark choice facing the American right when it comes to the nation’s young men: channel their energy into constructive leadership and real solutions, or watch it keep flowing toward pure grievance and nihilism.

He frames this dichotomy by holding up two very different figures. On one side you have Zach Lahn, the Iowa Republican nominee for governor — a sixth-generation farmer and businessman who shocked the establishment by defeating a Trump-endorsed congressman in the primary and has positioned himself as a paradigm-shifting “Iowa First” candidate focused on regenerative agriculture, cost-of-living pressures, and health freedom.

On the other side is James Fishback, who was a Florida Republican candidate for governor this election cycle. Fishback lost the Republican primary to Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), but Fishback is still important to analyze as someone who has built a following among younger men through aggressive online content, “anti-Israel” rhetoric, and a style Deace dismisses as pure grift.

What happens next, he warns, will shape an entire generation and the future of the nation.

The predicament America’s young men are facing today, Deace explains, is dire.

“Here’s the current deal on the table for them, particularly if they’re white: You’re automatically a racist. You’re automatically to blame for things that happened hundreds of years before you were ever born. There’s an automatic aura of suspicion around you. Your life will be half over probably before you can afford a home,” he says.

“The likelihood you will find a wife that is not proud of the amount of men she bedded on the way to meeting you and hasn’t had an abortion or three … shrinks by the day, and you went to college to get a job that we’re probably going to give to an Indian or a Muslim,” he continues.

This unfortunate set of circumstances, Deace argues, creates a restless “energy.”

“That energy is going to find conduits. It’s going to go somewhere,” he says. “It’ll be up to us to determine which direction we’ll go.”

The “constructive channel,” Deace says, will lead to “action” that sparks positive change.

“That’s what Zach Lahn represents. That’s what I think frankly JD Vance represents. … They represent younger men who understand we are in radical need of paradigm shifting,” he explains.

On the other hand, Fishback, according to Deace, has “no credentials at all,” “couldn’t survive a background check of page one of Google search,” and has a campaign built on “obvious grift.”

“James Fishback will go away. … What you don’t know though is there’ll be another one next year and then there’ll be more — unless there’s a constructive outlet for this energy,” Deace warns.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Steve Deace?

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

​Steve deace, James fishback, Zach lahn, Blazetv show 

The Toronto Tempo team of the WNBA is facing some ridicule after introducing a new mascot couple — and one with she-them pronouns.

The mascots are Dez, a snapping turtle with the non-traditional pronouns, and Dot, an arctic hare with she/her pronouns, according to a release on Wednesday.

‘This is some woke trans garbage right here fitting coming from a team who’s [sic] fans boo a woman fighting for no boys in girls sports.’

LGBTQ site Pink News described Dez as having “butch energy” and wondered whether the two were some variant of LGBTQ coupling.

“Naturally, the internet began wondering whether the mascots were friends, girlfriends, or perhaps simply two fictional animals trapped in the longest queer will-they-won’t-they of the WNBA,” the queer site mused.

The mascots, coincidentally, were introduced at the team’s Tuesday game against the Indiana Fever, whose star guard Sophie Cunningham has kicked a gender-confused hornet’s nest with her opposition to males in women’s sports.

The fans of the Canadian team relentlessly booed Cunningham emphatically, but she responded by helping her team defeat the Tempo.

Pink News added that many believed the Seattle Storm mascot Doppler was the first nonbinary mascot in the WNBA.

Others on social media were not as enthused about the apparently gender-confused mascots.

“Your organization is disgusting. I have 3 girls and none will be attending your games. Ever. Have fun losing more of the NBA’s money,” read one response.

“Butch lesbian mascot for a WNBA team you really outdid yourselves,” another critic replied.

“This is f**king HUMILIATING,” read another reply.

“Easily the worst mascots I’ve ever seen. [T]his is some woke trans garbage right here fitting coming from a team who’s [sic] fans boo a woman fighting for no boys in girls sports,” said another critic.

RELATED: WNBA co-owner FINED and SUSPENDED for cursing out teen fans of Sophie Cunningham

“Ladies and Gentlemen this is Liberal Toronto and Liberal Canada in a nutshell. Absolutely ridiculous… mascots are for children,” said another. “Yuck.”

In response to speculation that the two were in a lesbian relationship, the team said only that Dez and Dot are “besties.”

Blaze News requests for comment from the WNBA as well as the Toronto Tempo were not returned.

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​Indiana fever, Personal pronouns, Sophie cunningham, Wnba, Queer, Lgbtq agenda, Politics 

Vice President JD Vance silenced an otherwise raucous crowd Friday after he recounted the harrowing story of Kevin Flanagan, a computer programmer from California.

Vance was giving a speech to support the campaigns of gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy and Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) in Middletown, Ohio, when he made the comments.

‘No man is a king if they can’t take their family out to dinner without being mugged or having their car jacked.’

“I remember when somebody would come to school and tell me that their dad had just found out that he had lost his job. That the factory that employed their parents was going overseas to China or to Mexico,” said Vance.

“In other cases, American workers didn’t just have their jobs destroyed; they got told they were being replaced by a foreign worker, and then they had to train that worker before they got replaced. Some of these stories made national news, and they stuck with me,” he added.

“A computer programmer, not a mill worker, a computer worker by the name of Kevin Flanagan was let go at the bank that he worked at. And the business, the bank, they told him, ‘You’re only gonna get your severance package if you train a foreign replacement to do your job instead,” Vance said.

“And it’s a heartbreaking story, because he did it; he dutifully did what he was asked to do,” he added. “And on his last day, he packed up his things, he walked to the office parking lot, and he got in his truck and he shot himself.”

The crowd was hushed while processing the story. Vance went on to connect Flanagan’s story to the opioid crisis as well.

“It’s not just Kevin, as you all know. Now economists have measured the ways in which the opioid crisis exploded in the very locations where jobs were shipped overseas,” he continued.

“The open borders demanded by those same people brought some innocent people; of course it did,” Vance added. “But we also know that it brought a lot of cartels. It brought the fentanyl trade, and it left us with millions of orphaned children being raised by aggrieved grandparents.”

Flanagan’s death in 2003 made national headlines. In a note he left behind, he said that he finally felt at home when he got his job at Bank of America.

RELATED: Vance mocks AOC on her humiliating response to foreign policy query — and she lashes out

He went on to praise the populist message of Louisiana Democrat Senator Huey P. Long from the 1930s.

“Huey Long … once said ‘every man a king’ was the goal of his political program, but no man is a king if their castle is under siege by criminals,” he concluded. “No man is a king if they can’t take their family out to dinner without being mugged or having their car jacked.”

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​Jd vance, Foreign workers, Populism, Politics 

The Democratic candidate trying to keep the party’s hopes alive of flipping one of the two U.S. Senate seats in Texas is doing his pandering best.

In a recent interview on “The Breakfast Club” radio show, Talarico was asked about the controversial guilty verdict against Karmelo Anthony, the black high schooler who stabbed and killed Austin Metcalf, a white student-athlete, in Texas. A clip of his response went viral this week, thanks to a tweet from Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas).

‘I know that there were no black members of the jury. And to me, that’s the only evidence you need to really prove that the system is not working for black Texans.’

The jury found there was enough evidence to convict Anthony of murder, and he was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

The case has become a national flashpoint, especially regarding anti-white racism. In discussing the Anthony case, Talarico pounced into the deep end of the woke pool.

“I’ve done a lot of work in the statehouse on justice reform, and right now we got a system that doesn’t serve all Americans equally. And we know that black Texans have not gotten the justice they deserve in many cases,” he said on the show.

“I’m not an expert on this particular case, but I know that there were no black members of the jury,” he added. “And to me, that’s the only evidence you need to really prove that the system is not working for black Texans.”

In the clip, Talarico appears to have been expounding on his decision to nod along as a white-hating radical at a town hall meeting claimed that “Karmelo Anthony’s case is just a f**king tragedy.”

“The Breakfast Club” is a New York City-based radio show very popular with members of the black community. The episode featuring Talarico was released August 5.

RELATED: Jasmine Crockett DUMPS on Talarico’s chances of winning US Senate — and brings receipts

Talarico had previously signaled his support for the anti-white sentiment in the racial debate over the Karmelo Anthony murder case.

A recent poll found Talarico’s race against Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to be in a dead heat, with only 5% of voters undecided. The victor could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate after the midterms.

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​James talarico, Karmelo anthony, Racism, Texas, The breakfast club, Us senate, Politics