Category: blaze media

There is a peculiar kind of intellectual cowardice that disguises itself as “skepticism.”

Instead of asking questions, engaging with evidence, or — God forbid — actually picking up the phone, it fires off a dismissive post and lets the crowd do the rest.

To Jones, it is highly possible that this anomaly indicates ‘the corridors of a ship.’

Lately, the target of this cowardice is a man named Andrew Jones. His offense? Daring to propose that a boat-shaped formation in the mountains of Eastern Turkey may just be the remains of Noah’s ark.

Jones, whom I recently interviewed over video chat, will be the first to tell you he is not an archaeologist.

What he is, however, is the project coordinator for one of the most methodical investigations of a potential archaeological site in recent memory — one being conducted by geologists, geophysicists, soil scientists, and archaeologists with decades of experience between them.

Jones has lived in Turkey since 2020, building relationships with Turkish universities, navigating government permitting processes, and assembling a team capable of doing this work the right way.

And for all that, he is being rewarded with mockery on the internet.

Wyatt’s folly

For many critics, Noah’s ark research begins and ends with one man: the late Ron Wyatt.

Wyatt, a Tennessee nurse anesthetist turned amateur biblical archaeologist, has become the universal escape hatch for anyone who doesn’t want to engage with legitimate, peer-reviewed Noah’s ark research.

Never mind that Wyatt also claimed to have found the Ten Commandments and the Ark of the Covenant. For critics, he has become a kind of all-purpose scarecrow: Invoke Ron Wyatt, roll your eyes, and the conversation is over.

One of the strangest things about the criticism is the assumption that Ron Wyatt somehow created the Durupinar story from whole cloth.

In reality, the site’s Noah’s ark connection predates Wyatt’s fame by decades.

It was discovered in 1959 by Turkish Army Captain Ilhan Durupinar during an aerial NATO mapping mission. A Turkish-American ground expedition followed in 1960, covered in a spread in Life magazine. This was documented, publicized, and treated as a legitimate subject of inquiry before Wyatt was anywhere near it.

Signs of life

The site itself is a boat-shaped impression in the earth about 18 miles south of Mount Ararat. It passes the eyeball test. It doesn’t look natural.

But more importantly, it sits in a valley loaded with Armenian and Urartu historical artifacts, such as abandoned churches and old graveyards.

Just recently, according to Jones, a Turkish archaeologist visiting the site found pottery fragments.

“Maybe 50 feet away from the site, he [found] pottery just laying on the ground where the locals are plowing,” he recalls.

The archaeologist dated the fragments to the Early Bronze Age and Late Chalcolithic. “This is the age you’re looking for for Noah’s Ark,” says Jones. “If you’re doing biblical chronology, they would place it during that time period.”

Jones is careful not to overstate the significance of these finds, noting only that they demonstrate human activity during the same time period as Noah’s ark.

These aren’t irrelevant, peripheral details. They’re central to the flood story. Because if the biblical account places Noah’s landing in the region of Ararat, which it does, then the valley floor below Durupinar is precisely where you would expect civilization’s earliest post-flood fingerprints to be.

Which brings us to the first target of the critics: the site’s location.

The Ararat question

Wes Huff, a Christian apologist with a significant online following, recently posted a lengthy critique of the Durupinar project.

He claims that “the modern site of Mount Ararat has only been called that since the 13th century” and that “the broader issue is that the precise location of Ararat remains unknown.”

This is the kind of claim that sounds clever and smart if you don’t actually know anything about the subject.

When the Bible says Noah’s ark came to rest in the “mountains of Ararat,” it is describing a region: the Armenian Highlands. And the Durupinar site is squarely inside the highlands. This is not a fringe interpretation. It’s basic historical geography.

The word “Ararat” in the biblical text is not a reference to a single volcanic mountaintop. It is a transliteration of Urartu, the ancient kingdom that spanned what is now Eastern Turkey, Armenia, and Northern Iran.

“If you look [at] the Bible, it says Urartu, which is Ararat,” says Jones.

The Urartu people were the predecessors of the Armenians. Their capital sat at what is today the city of Van in Eastern Turkey, on the shore of Lake Van. Their ruins, castles, and settlements are scattered throughout the entire region, including in the valley directly below the Durupinar site.

The implication of treating Ararat as fundamentally unknowable is that any candidate site can be dismissed before it is seriously investigated.

Going to ground

Huff’s second major line of attack targets the methodology, specifically ground penetrating radar. His claim is that “you simply don’t know what you’re looking at with GPR alone.”

This is technically true, which is exactly why nobody on Jones’ team has ever argued otherwise.

But Jones does challenge what he sees as a widespread assumption that GPR is used to bolster “sensational claims.”

As Jones explains, “A lot of scientists [and] archaeologists [and] geologists use GPR. … It’s not the final word, but it helps you understand what’s going on below the surface.”

GPR is not the conclusion. It is a step. It is a standard, widely used, non-destructive geophysical survey tool deployed by archaeologists across Europe and the Middle East as a matter of course before any excavation begins. Dismissing it as inconclusive is like criticizing a doctor for ordering an MRI before performing surgery. The whole point is that you look before you cut.

New angles

What the critics also won’t tell you is what the scans have actually found. Because at this point, “we don’t know what we’re looking at” is getting harder to sustain.

The 2019-2020 GPR surveys didn’t just confirm the boat outline visible from the surface. They mapped angular, right-angled internal structures, which may indicate rooms and chambers running the length of the formation.

They used modern digital equipment capable of generating three-dimensional models and sharing raw data with independent reviewers. According to Jones, unaffiliated geophysicists examined the scans and identified several features they considered noteworthy.

Among them was a linear anomaly running through the center of the formation.

Jones is again careful about the distinction between observation and interpretation: “There’s a straight line of voids,” he says. “Now I interpret that as someone who’s thinking this is possibly Noah’s ark.” To Jones, it is highly possible that this anomaly indicates “the corridors of a ship.”

Natural geological synclines don’t produce right angles. Rock doesn’t spontaneously organize itself into rectilinear geometry at depth. That’s the kind of finding that, in any other archaeological context, would generate serious professional interest rather than a dismissive podcast appearance.

What lies beneath

Or consider the 2014 electrical resistivity tomography data, collected by an independent New Zealand researcher. The ERT scans identified three distinct horizontal layers running through the formation. The Genesis account describes Noah’s ark as having three decks. Jones’ team members aren’t the ones drawing that connection loudly. They don’t need to. The data draws it.

In 2025, new analyses of the raw GPR data found what resembled a central corridor or tunnel running through the formation, flanked by side tunnels tracing the interior perimeter of the ship shape, and beyond that, a large central void extending at least 13 meters below the surface.

And then there is the soil. In 2024, Jones’ team collaborated with Australian soil scientist William Crabtree and Turkish geologist Dr. Mehmet Salih Bayraktutan to conduct a formal survey of 88 samples across 22 locations inside and outside the formation. The samples were then analyzed at Atatürk University laboratories.

They found that organic matter inside the formation runs three times higher than in the surrounding soil, with significantly elevated potassium levels consistent with the presence of decayed biological material (specifically wood) rather than the inorganic rock and mountain soil you would expect from a natural formation.

Yet critics routinely reduce years of work by multiple specialists to a single talking point: “It’s just GPR.”

RELATED: 5 reasons this ‘Noah’s ark’ discovery is harder to dismiss than skeptics admit

Heritage Images/Getty Images

Amateur hour

Dr. Jeremiah Johnston, appearing on Michael Knowles’ podcast, went farther than simply questioning the methodology. He implied that Jones and his team were amateurs chasing hype, while claiming he could conduct a proper excavation of the site himself for $500,000.

Let’s think about the claim that the current work being done at Durupinar is all for publicity for a moment.

Jones has spent years in Turkey, building working relationships with the Turkish government, navigating the permit process required for each phase of the investigation, signing formal agreements with a Turkish university whose archaeologist has over 20 years of field experience and has been covered in American newspapers for his other discoveries.

He has assembled geologists, geophysicists, soil scientists, and archaeologists across multiple countries. He has submitted proposals to government bodies and waited on approvals. He has done the slow, unglamorous infrastructure work that actual, serious science requires.

Meanwhile, Johnston went on a show talking about what he would do with half a million dollars.

Geology first

Huff’s accusation that there are no archaeologists on the team is equally misleading.

The work done to date — the GPR, soil sampling, geophysical surveys — all falls under geology, not archaeology. You don’t call an archaeologist to run a magnetometer. You call a geophysicist.

Archaeology becomes necessary when you excavate. The project simply isn’t at that phase yet. The archaeologists on staff have been consulting, reviewing, and preparing. In fact, the Turkish university archaeologist who recovered the pottery fragments from the valley floor was performing the kind of formal pedestrian survey that is the standard opening phase of any archaeological dig.

The critics want to hold Jones to archaeology’s standards while he’s still doing geology. Presumably they’ll hold him to geology’s standards when he starts doing archaeology.

Worth getting right

I am ethnically Armenian. I grew up hearing stories about Noah’s ark resting in Ararat. Until recently, Mount Ararat itself appeared on the Armenian passport. It remains one of the most important national symbols of the Armenian people because of what it represents: the place where civilization began again after the Flood.

I’m not asking anyone to accept that on faith. Neither is Andrew Jones. What Jones is asking is simply this: Let the investigation finish.

The sonic core drilling that will finally produce intact subsurface samples is pending Turkish government approval, potentially arriving this fall. That drilling will either find what Jones believes is there or it won’t. The AMT surveys will either show bedrock in the wrong place to support a natural formation theory or they won’t. The geophysical data will either hold up or it won’t.

What the critics have offered is not a counter-investigation. They have offered no alternative data, no competing site survey, no engagement with the soil samples or the GPR profiles or the pottery finds. They haven’t even picked up the phone to request the data directly from Jones.

If Durupinar is nothing, if it is a geological oddity and nothing more, the data will show that, and Jones has said as much. He follows where the data leads.

The question worth asking is why so many people with such loud opinions about this site are so determined to make sure that data is never fully collected or taken seriously.

​Ararat region, Life magazine, Noahs ark, Durupinar site, Lifestyle, Bible, Biblical archeology, Turkey, Armenia, Old testament, Faith 

The other day, I was making a right turn at a busy intersection, and I almost ran over an elderly woman who stepped into the street unexpectedly.

She had lost her balance because she was crammed together with seven or eight other old people on the street corner.

If these elder protesters are being paid, whoever is hiring them must not care much about their safety.

This odd-looking group was waving to motorists and holding political signs with slogans like: “NO MORE DICTATORS,” “STOP RACISM,” and “NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL.”

I hit the brakes and waited while they helped the lady back onto the curb. Everyone smiled and waved to me. I waved back. They seemed friendly and nice, if not a bit delusional.

Old is new

I’ve seen similar groups in other places. It’s apparently a new trend. Old people randomly gathered on a corner, or on an overpass, or outside a supermarket, holding left-wing signs and waving at cars as they pass by.

The car drivers honk and wave back, and everyone feels good about themselves.

Some people claim these retirement-age protesters are getting paid for their efforts. I don’t know if that’s true. But I have to agree that they look strange and out of place. And not totally authentic.

Welcome to the neighborhood

Usually, these protests take place in affluent, left-leaning areas.

Since there’s so much honking and waving, I assume most people who drive by agree with their message: Trump is bad. Racism is bad. Criticizing open borders is bad.

But if everyone they engage with agrees with them, what exactly is the point of standing out there?

RELATED: ‘Nice to meet you. My kid is gay’: When dads turn ‘support’ into an identity

SOPA Images/Getty Images

The illusion of a dominant left

One reason might be to convince people that the left is firmly in the majority, in your neighborhood and everywhere else.

This is an important project for the left. This is why every late-night talk show audience boos loudly every time the host mentions Trump or anyone in his administration.

You never hear anyone cheer when these people are mentioned. And surely there must be a few conservatives in those audiences.

But no, you only hear boos. I don’t know how the shows do that. Maybe there’s a big “BOO” sign flashing at the audience. Or maybe they are told ahead of time that it’s required. Or maybe the “booing” sound is just edited in.

However they do it, the effect is the same. The right-leaning viewer, watching at home, gets the impression that he or she is in a very small minority. And that the vast majority of Americans hate Trump and his people.

This is not true of course. But the illusion can be effective nonetheless.

This is probably why you see your elderly neighbors standing on street corners: to make you think all your neighbors are leftist and adjust yourself accordingly.

The medium is the message

And what exactly is the message of these elder activists? Their signs are weirdly generic. It doesn’t appear much thought went into them.

Like “No More Dictators.” What’s that supposed to mean? That Trump is a dictator? That all our presidents have been dictators? Last time I checked, American presidents are fairly restricted in their powers.

Trump can’t get his ballroom built. Obama barely got his health care passed. Biden wanted to forgive student loans. And couldn’t.

Do these old people not know what a “dictator” is?

Politics can be fun!

I’ve volunteered for different political actions in my area. I’ve waved signs from the sidewalk. But those were for specific candidates. Or particular ballot measures. We weren’t just spouting random slogans.

I‘ve always enjoyed political activism. It’s a great way to meet other conservatives and learn about the political process.

And interacting with actual voters is always great fun. Going door to door. Talking to people about the issues of the day. Listening to their concerns. Saying hi to their dog.

Old people are especially interesting to visit with. They are often the more independent thinkers, having experienced a wider range of historical events.

Simple. Obvious. Dumb.

But these old people I’m seeing now, they don’t seem to have anything of substance to say. They are more like bad political TV ads come to life. Simple. Obvious. Dumb.

And what about the physical dangers they face? Standing dangerously close to heavily trafficked roadways, exposed to the elements and whatever zombie street people might come along.

That woman who stumbled into the street in front of me? She could have broken her hip!

Call your ombudsman!

If these elder protesters are being paid, whoever is hiring them must not care much about their safety. These old people are apparently expendable.

But that’s classic leftist strategy. Once the minions have served their purpose, they’re tossed aside.

In the meantime, I continue to see these groups of old people lined up along the street, waving their signs, and expressing their tired outrage.

Noam Chomsky called this “manufacturing consent.” I would call it elder abuse.

​Antifa, Aarp, Retirement, Donald trump, No kings, Politics, Lifestyle, Protesters 

Protesters are claiming that Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees have been subject to poor conditions at the Delaney Hall ICE facility in New Jersey and have planted themselves outside the facility for the past week — with many protesters clashing with ICE agents.

“There were these rumors about a hunger strike going on in the ICE facility, and we are now up to day 13 of this alleged hunger strike. Now, that’s like dangerous territory. People aren’t eating for 13 days. That’s life-threatening. I would say that’s a problem,” Gonzales says.

“Their conditions are so terrible that they’re protesting,” she continues, noting that Democrats are claiming there’s “medical neglect,” “lack of sanitation,” and “spoiled food.”

“You’re going to be shocked to hear none of that is actually true. There is no hunger strike,” Gonzales says.

A post from Jennie Taer on X reads: “New data obtained by The Daily Wire shows that commissary sales at Delaney Hall surged 161% during the so-called ‘hunger strike’ rising from $11,498 on May 26 to $30,013 on June 1. While snack sales jumped, the detainee population fell from 724 to 621 during that same time period.”

The Department of Homeland Security quote tweeted Taer’s post, writing: “The hunger strike HOAX was actually just Delaney Hall detainees trading nutritious meals for Honey Buns and Hot Cheetos. It’s time for sanctuary politicians to drop the political theater and work with us to get criminal illegal aliens OUT of our communities.”

However, Democrats like Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) and LaMonica McIver (N.J.) do not care about the stats.

“Here in America, immigration enforcement should be fair, just, and humane. That’s not what’s going on here at Delaney Hall. We spoke to several individuals, none of whom has a criminal record, many of whom have been detained here at Delaney Hall for months. Delaney Hall should be shut down,” Jeffries said in a video uploaded to social media, where he’s standing outside the facility alongside McIver.

“And every single individual, particularly those at a high level connected to this facility, they’re engaging in a depraved indifference to human life. And every single member of this Trump administration is going to be held accountable,” he added.

“Hakeem, the problem for you is every single one of them actually are criminals because they’re here illegally. It’s the ‘I’ and the ‘L’ that go in front of the word legally that actually indicates to you that they are in fact criminals. All of them,” Gonzales comments.

“Also, I love that LaMonica, she already looks like she’s in prison. She’s already dressed for prison, I guess,” she adds.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Sara gonzales, Ice, Illegal immigration, Hunger strike, Delaney hall ice facility, Hakeem jeffries, Lamonica mciver, Sara gonzales unfiltered, New jersey 

As the nation approaches what looks like a weak and divided commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, another milestone has arrived with little acclaim. Today marks the 239th anniversary of the introduction of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. House of Representatives.

It should be a day of celebration every year. The Bill of Rights is one of the most important documents in human history. James Madison, one of the nation’s central founders and a future two-term president, introduced it in Congress on June 8, 1787.

We have less than half a decade to avert a fiscal collapse of the federal government and the social and economic destruction that would follow.

The central lesson of the Bill of Rights lies in Madison’s purpose: to bind every level of government to one overriding mission — protecting individual rights against majority tyranny.

The Bill of Rights Institute summarizes Madison’s concern well. Before the Constitutional Convention, Madison wrote “Vices of the Political System,” an essay detailing the flaws of the Articles of Confederation. One of the chief defects, in his view, was that tyrannical majorities in the states passed unjust laws violating the rights of minorities. He had seen the oppression of religious dissenters in Virginia and became the leading advocate for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

At the Constitutional Convention, Madison argued for separation of powers, checks and balances, bicameralism, and federalism as safeguards for liberty. But he lost one key feature of his plan: a national veto over state laws meant to prevent majority tyranny in the states.

Today, we are light-years away from Madison’s vision and from the founders’ plan to protect it. Neither Madison nor anyone else could force the American people and their governments to live within the letter and spirit of the Constitution and the common law. The founders could only encode their vision into the Constitution, laws, and judicial precedents, then hope later generations would preserve it.

They often have not.

In 1840, only a half-century into the American experiment, Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated the rise of “soft despotism” in the United States. He saw that the passion for equality could erode devotion to natural law, natural rights, and self-government.

Tocqueville warned of a sovereign power that takes each individual “into its powerful hands” and covers society with “a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules.” Such power, he wrote, “does not tyrannize” but “hinders, represses, enervates, extinguishes,” and finally reduces the nation to “a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

He also warned that this mild, regulated servitude could exist “in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.”

That is the danger America now faces.

Tocqueville foresaw that citizens might voluntarily give up sovereignty in exchange for temporary economic stability and government largesse extracted from their neighbors. In doing so, they would surrender the things that made the nation great: self-rule, protection against majority coercion, voluntary association, free enterprise, and ultimately each person’s dignity as a unique human being.

RELATED: The timeless truths behind the Declaration of Independence

Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Restoring respect for the Bill of Rights and the founders’ vision is essential if we hope to rescue the United States from the soft despotism into which the American experiment has devolved — and from the harder totalitarianism toward which it now hurtles.

Documents and laws alone will not achieve that. In our present decline, the only way to reverse the slide is to remove the temptation that feeds it: the ability of majorities at all levels of government to vote themselves ownership over other people’s property, liberties, and lives.

In an ironic turn, the United States may now be approaching a resolution of sorts: the collapse of the national government’s ability to pay for everything Congress, presidents, and courts have promised Americans over the past century and a half.

Entitlements such as Social Security, food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, federal housing subsidies, and other national bribes have become insupportable. They now threaten a debt spiral as high interest rates and inflation weaken the economy and erode the government’s tax base.

The federal debt has already risen above 100% of gross domestic product — the nation’s entire annual economic output. More ominously, the debt is accelerating. The total now sits just short of $40 trillion. It is projected to rise to $55 trillion by 2031, an increase of more than one-third in five years. By 2036, it is projected to reach $77 trillion, nearly doubling in a decade.

Meanwhile, federal and state governments have steadily eroded individual rights, freedom of association, free enterprise, election integrity, and countless other safeguards of liberty.

This is the outcome of majority tyranny. We have less than half a decade to avert a fiscal collapse of the federal government and the social and economic destruction that would follow. What would arise from such a catastrophe is impossible to know.

History offers little comfort. The chances are strong that whatever replaced our flawed yet hardy constitutional system would not resemble the order our forefathers established in the 1700s. A nation founded on individual rights and self-government could vanish from the earth.

That is what Americans must confront as we approach another election season and another referendum on our founding values.

​Bill of rights, Soft despotism, James madison, America 250, Constitutional convention, Articles of confederation, American government, Founding fathers, Opinion & analysis 

The next time one hears of virtue, honor, and “the profession of arms” in the U.S. military, one should ask whether those words still mean anything.

Consider a military in which the highest flag ranks sell influence for future employment, commanders conspire to steal optics before deployment, soldiers loot their own supply rooms, chiefs sell night-vision devices online, officers defraud grieving families, and bureaucrats steal money meant for military children.

Petty theft below, influence peddling above, and a thick frosting of platitudes about honor everywhere.

It sounds like Russia — a kleptocratic band of mercenaries where the uniform is just another way to get paid. The officer corps that emerges from this culture is not simply politically adrift, but morally unformed.

Institutions designed to form officers became institutions designed to credential them.

As Alasdair MacIntyre argued in “After Virtue” — the most important book the military profession has not read — although we still use the words “honor,” “duty,” and “integrity,” we have lost the traditions that gave those words their content.

We are, MacIntyre argues, like the survivors of a catastrophe who have salvaged pieces of a scientific textbook without retaining the theories that made them coherent. This describes the average Army values poster.

The loss of the military’s honor culture is exemplified in its typical response to an ethics scandal, which follows a predictable liturgy. A stand-down is called for. A policy is updated. A general delivers remarks about what the uniform represents. Yet nothing changes because the problem is not a deficit of information. It is a deficit of formation.

MacIntyre’s insight is that virtue and honor — the public recognition of virtue — cannot be transmitted through instruction alone. They require practices: socially established, cooperative activities with internal standards of excellence conducted within institutions that have a coherent sense of purpose.

Honorable officers are made by placing them inside a community where virtue is demanded, rewarded, and — critically — where its absence is punished publicly and without mercy.

The Army values and their equivalents are the ghosts of morality: a past civilization’s catechism recited by an institution that can no longer summon the world that made them intelligible.

The linguistic evidence is all around. No one says “that’s dishonorable” anymore — not in barracks, not in the Pentagon, not in the pages of professional military journals. The word survives only as a legal term, a bureaucratic category. As something one man could say to another’s face and have it land, honor has been mocked entirely out of the language.

You can call a fellow officer unethical, unprofessional, or toxic. But call him dishonorable, and you sound like you wandered in from a Patrick O’Brian novel. MacIntyre’s point drives this home: An institution cannot enforce a norm whose name has become a joke.

RELATED: The Pentagon is blowing a fortune fighting bargain-bin drones

Jordon R. Beesley/U.S. Navy/Getty Images

Honor factories

It was not always this way. For most of American military history until very recently, West Point and Annapolis stamped honor into young men through consequences so immediate and so public that the culture became self-enforcing. A cadet who lied, cheated, or stole did not receive counseling or remedial training. He was gone, and the entire corps knew what had happened and why.

Honor functioned because shame functioned, and shame requires witnesses.

The results were not incidental. The officer corps that fought from Cold Harbor to Normandy was decisively shaped by such institutions. These were not perfect men. But they were men whose relationship to honor had been formed by years of practice.

At the service academies, honor adjudication has become increasingly legalistic, with due-process protections, administrative review, and all sorts of punishment short of separation now built into the system.

The total institution — Erving Goffman’s term for an organization with sufficient control over its members’ lives to form their character — is systematically liberalized into an expensive state college with uniforms. Honor talk remains in the brochure, but the machinery around it treats dishonor as an adjudicative problem rather than a communal rupture.

No civilizational catastrophe forced a reckoning with what courage and loyalty meant. In conditions of relative peace and institutional stability, the honor culture of the services was eaten away within a single generation.

The post-Vietnam civilianization of military culture brought enormous external pressure to make the academies more like the universities they competed with for talent. Overreaching judicial decisions through the 1970s and 1980s extended due process protections to cadets that made swift, public expulsion essentially impossible.

The rise of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the 1990s introduced the concern that strict honor enforcement produced disparate outcomes that disadvantaged certain populations.

Each of these pressures was arguable in isolation. Taken together, they achieved something none of them individually intended: institutions designed to form officers became institutions designed to credential them. Formation requires the authority to demand, correct, and, if necessary, expel. Credentialing requires only that the student complete the program.

The good news is that these are policy choices, and while they can theoretically be reversed, they will be difficult to undo. Unlike military revolutions of the past, which left wreckage that demanded reconstruction, this one is comfortable — and lucrative.

Rebuilding the culture

The service academies are the only total institutions remaining in the American military enterprise. If honor cannot be rebuilt there, it cannot be rebuilt anywhere — because nowhere else in the military does an institution have sufficient formative authority to do the necessary work.

What restoration looks like is not complicated. Public consequences for honor violations being swiftly administered and witnessed by the community. Superintendents having the moral courage to empower an honor system run by cadets with genuine authority to separate their peers, not a board whose findings are subject to administrative review and legal appeal.

A culture in which the response to a classmate’s dishonor is not sympathy but shame — for him and, if they tolerated it, for those around him.

The non-toleration clause of the honor code — a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do — was once the Sword of Damocles. It made the entire corps complicit in enforcement rather than being diluted by heavy-handed oversight.

RELATED: How ‘wet noodle Christians’ surrendered America to Marxists

Paul Marotta/Getty Images

When a cadet violated the honor code at the Virginia Military Institute, the cadet commander would formally assemble the corps and announce: “Cadet X has been found guilty of an honor violation. His name will never again be spoken within the walls of this institution.” And then the drumming out — the cadet was brought to the center of the quad, marched to the gate, and thrown out.

In 2021, amid legal concerns and political pressure during a state-ordered racism investigation, VMI stopped naming expelled cadets during the drum-out.

Shame requires an audience. When you remove the audience, you remove the shame. When you do that, you remove the social technique that humanity used for thousands of years to enforce honor from the inside out rather than ineffectively from the top down.

Consequences must communicate to every observer that dishonor is not a career setback but social death. The burden of proof is entirely on those who would defend the present arrangement, which produces flag officers who leave public service under a cloud, pass through a mild embarrassment ritual, and reappear almost immediately as best-selling authors, board members, fellows, or global-security sages.

The academies cannot do this alone, and no honest argument claims they can, but they are the only place left where the military has the authority to begin.

When institutions fail to enforce virtue through honor, the only remaining answer is the man who enforces it from within — who understands that he cannot be responsible for the Army, but is unconditionally responsible for himself and refuses to be complicit in his own degradation.

The ultimate purpose of the service academies is to produce military officers who win without losing their souls in the process. We are not made to be machine men with machine hearts. We were made for something greater.

What is required is deep and far-reaching — a national renaissance, a rebirth on the 250th anniversary of America, out of the conviction that there are things worth being, not merely things worth having.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the views or positions of the U.S. Army, the Department of War, or any part of the U.S. government.

​Us military, Military academies, Honor culture, Honor code, West point, Dei, Alasdair macintyre, Army values, Annapolis, Service academies, Opinion & analysis 

A 98-year-old was brutally beaten inside his Brooklyn apartment building amid an argument earlier this week — and police said they’re searching for the female culprit.

Investigators said the female responsible for the attack punched, kicked, and struck the elderly victim with a broomstick and metal chair inside his apartment building in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, News 12 Brooklyn reported.

The beating is yet another in a stretch of attacks involving older Brooklyn residents.

The attack took place around 4 p.m. Thursday, the station said.

Investigators released video showing the woman appearing to drop off flyers at a building, News 12 Brooklyn reported, adding that investigators said the woman on the video is the person they’re trying to identify.

Investigators told the station that the 98-year-old man had just entered the apartment building when he got into an argument with the female.

Then the verbal spat reportedly became violent, the station added.

RELATED: Video: Female bully towers over and beats up elderly woman on Florida bus. Victim is left ‘battered and bruised’: Sheriff

Investigators told News 12 Brooklyn that the woman repeatedly punched and kicked the elderly man — and then she began hitting him with a broomstick and a metal chair.

She then ran from the building and headed east on Maple Street, the station said.

Despite the brutal beatdown, the victim suffered only minor injuries and was treated at the scene, News 12 Brooklyn reported.

New York City police are looking for the suspect, CBS News added.

The beating is yet another in a stretch of attacks involving older Brooklyn residents, News 12 Brooklyn said, adding that a 72-year-old man was punched multiple times in the face in Brownsville last week — and just days later, an 83-year-old woman was slashed in the head while walking to church.

No arrests have been announced in this latest case, News 12 Brooklyn said, adding that those who recognize the woman seen in the video are asked to contact Crime Stoppers.

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

​Physical attack, 98-year-old victim, Nypd, Brooklyn, New york city, Female suspect, Brutal beating, Crime 

As the Texas Senate race heats up between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton, BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey feels compelled to remind Texas voters of Talarico’s moral failings — which are anything but small.

These moral failures are reflected even in the church he attends, St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, which was recently exposed by the Daily Wire for having “explicit LGBTQ books in its bookstore aimed at children.”

Stuckey calls the books “basically pornographic,” as they contained “illustrations of sexual acts.”

The church is also an “ardent supporter of Planned Parenthood.”

“He also has his own kind of personal scandal that we very unfortunately had to read about last November in the New York Post. They found that he was following on his official account at least 10 OnlyFans models,” Stuckey explains.

The Democrat had liked multiple sultry photos posted by at least one of the accounts and exchanged private messages with another.

“If we’re already liking accounts and messaging OnlyFans models as a professing Christian, like we obviously have a sexual immorality issue going on there,” Stuckey says.

But that’s not even close to all of what Talarico’s done.

“He has repeatedly blasphemed God, saying God is nonbinary … he’s advocated for the gender mutilation surgeries of kids. He has pushed for the killing of unborn babies through abortion,” Stuckey explains.

“And these aren’t just policies … this is Talarico’s rejection of God’s order, rejection of God’s justice, his order of male and female, his desire to strip innocent babies of the right to life. It’s a spiritual position. It’s a theological position. And his politics are just downstream from the immorality and the corruption that’s in his heart,” she continues.

While Stuckey admits that Ken Paxton also has moral failings, these failings don’t bleed into policy the same way Talarico’s do.

“Talarico is very pro-abortion … he votes on the side of lax abortion laws and against any measure to protect the life of unborn children,” she says, pointing out that he has said he is pro-abortion “because” of his “faith.”

In an interview on “The Jamie Kern Lima Show,” Talarico explained that he trusts Texas women “to make decisions about their own bodies, to shape their own destinies in consultation with their family members, their doctors, their faith leaders.”

“I don’t believe that’s a place for government. That’s a belief I hold not despite my faith, but because of my faith. Jesus never talks about abortion. The Bible is silent on abortion. And when that happens with a social issue as important as abortion, we Christians have to take Scripture as a wholem and we’ve got to try to make some kind of ethical determination,” he added.

“I just want to remind you,” Stuckey comments, disturbed, “that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”

“So don’t allow his humble-seeming, gentle-sounding disposition and tone of voice fool you into thinking that this is reasonable or biblical,” she adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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

​Relatable, James talarico, Ken paxton, Texas, Senate, Democrat, Republican, Allie beth stuckey, The bible, Christianity, Relatable with allie beth stuckey 

More Americans are turning to chatbots with their hardest questions, often before they turn to anyone else. Grief, guilt, whether to leave a marriage, whether God is real — the questions people once carried to church now go into the text box.

So it matters a great deal what the text box says back. New work from researchers at Brigham Young University, gathered under a group called the Consortium for Evaluation of Faith and Ethics in AI, suggests the answer should trouble anyone who takes faith seriously.

Lies of omission

They built a test called the AllFaith Benchmark, which included hundreds of real moral questions drawn from religious communities, and ran it through the major models: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. The pattern held across all of them. Asked about death, forgiveness, or the meaning of a life, the machines reached for secular, generic answers and left faith out of the equation. The omission was systematic. It showed up steadily, measurably, and every time the test ran.

A third of American adults already rate spiritual advice from AI as trustworthy as a pastor’s.

Why does an absence matter this much? Because these tools do more than recite facts. They frame what counts as a reasonable answer. When a model treats the believer’s answer as clutter to clear away, it teaches a lesson, never stated outright, about which replies belong in serious conversation and which can be skipped.

Iterate that process at scale, and entire generations get a reshaped sense of what a thoughtful person, or even a soulful person, sounds like.

That deep-seated formation was once the province of the Christian wisdom that built the West. The conviction that every person carries equal worth, and that even kings answer to a law above their own, entered Western civilization through the Church and outlasted the doctrinal quarrels that produced it. Among the great civilizational faiths, none shaped this part of the world the way Christianity did.

Spiritual appropriation

A second finding goes deeper, and it’s considerably stranger. A researcher named Tim Hwang recently took a model and did something close to an MRI on it, watching its inner workings while it ran. He gave it a simple prompt, “As a Christian,” and watched what changed. What changed was a single switch. Begin a prompt with those words, and one specific, dormant part of the model wakes up and fires the same way, no matter what follows.

Ask it whether lying is wrong, ask it to describe a sofa, and the response shifts in the same direction both times. The switch does two things. It pushes religious words to the front, such as God, Jesus, and prayer. It also pushes absolute words like always, never, and not to the front. That’s the entire performance. When this model acts Christian, it grabs holy vocabulary and a hard, certain tone, whether you ask about salvation or seating. The model believes nothing. It speaks with fluent reverence and flawless conviction, but possesses neither.

RELATED: It’s not easy being pope — Leo’s big new tech encyclical proves it

ANDREAS SOLARO/Getty Images

The machine has decided that Christian identity comes down to holy phrases delivered with real conviction. Absent from that picture is everything a believer would claim as the substance of it: grace, mercy, humility, patience — and the slow, unglamorous labor of moral reasoning.

This would be a harmless oddity if these systems stayed in a lab. But they don’t. They pulse in the pocket of nearly every teenager in America, fielding questions about sex and suffering and forgiveness long before a parent or pastor hears a word of it. And they’re not asking ironically. A recent survey found that a third of American adults already rate spiritual advice from AI as trustworthy as a pastor’s, a number that climbs to two in five among Gen Z and Millennials. When someone types “what does Christianity say about this,” the machine answers.

Simulating salvation

They get the surface and miss the center, and they never notice the gap, because the answer is convincing. A pastor who got the faith this wrong would be corrected, possibly even banished, by Sunday. The chatbot answers 10,000 times an hour, and no one corrects it at all. That’s the trouble with a good fake. It doesn’t look fake. And people want to believe.

Christians have argued for centuries upon centuries that faith lives in the heart, that a man can say every right word and mean none of them. The machine has now built, by accident or by design (I’ll let you decide), a virtual likeness of exactly that man, who can preach but cannot believe. So the worry is simple. People are learning Christianity from a system that has mastered the motions and missed the whole point.

Smashing the machine is a fantasy, so put the fantasy away. The work that remains is teaching the people forming their faith how to tell the difference between a voice that lives the faith and one that has only read about it.

​Faith, Lifestyle, Culture 

For many Christians, the world seems impossibly dark right now. The scale of abortion is truly massive, with over 1.1 million per year in the U.S. alone. There has been an explosive rise in occult and pagan practices, human trafficking continues as a multibillion-dollar industry, and Christian persecution — especially in parts of Africa — has led to the deaths of thousands. Wars rage in multiple regions, while record levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation disproportionately impact today’s youth.

Many feel crushed by the weight of the world’s depravity and wonder if things will only get worse.

But Rick Burgess, BlazeTV host of the spiritual warfare podcast “Strange Encounters,” offers hope against the oppressive darkness: Revival is also happening.

Rick points to a powerful example at Joby Martin’s Church of Eleven22 in Jacksonville, Florida. Last month, at the church’s annual Beach Baptism held at Hanna Park, 2,552 people were baptized in the Atlantic Ocean — the largest single-day baptism in the church’s 14-year history and a significant jump from nearly 2,000 the year before. Over 14,000 people gathered for the event.

“[Martin] said that these were numbers that they had not seen before, and most of these people were young people,” he says.

Rick explains what’s happening right now on the spiritual plane.

“[Satan] always overplays his hand, and what he’s doing right now with this revival of evil — it’s actually working detrimentally against his plan,” he says.

“Now we have a generation of young people … they’ve looked at this overplaying of evil’s hand and saying, ‘If this is the best that a fallen world can offer me, I don’t want it. I’m going to Jesus,”’ he continues.

Rick believes Eleven22’s record-breaking numbers are part of a larger movement, especially among younger men, who are rejecting the emptiness of modern culture and turning toward authentic faith instead.

In the midst of widespread moral confusion and spiritual darkness, moments like the Eleven22 baptisms serve as a powerful reminder that God is still at work — and that light often shines brightest when the darkness seems overwhelming.

To hear more, watch the full episode above.

Want more from Rick Burgess?

To enjoy more bold talk and big laughs, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Strange encounters, Rick burgess 

As we approach our nation’s 250th birthday, Americans will be doing a lot of celebrating. They will honor not only the fact of our independence and nationhood, but also the political thought that shaped America’s founding struggle for freedom. Special attention will be paid, of course, to our Declaration of Independence.

But some may be rather cool to celebrating the Declaration’s doctrine of universal truths, such as the equality of all human beings in their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration has become a source of controversy among some younger conservatives who came of age during the Trump era.

The New Right’s dissatisfaction with the Declaration’s universalism is an understandable — but mistaken — reaction to various political misuses of America’s founding creed in recent decades.

There is no conflict between the Declaration’s universal principles and the New Right’s America First nationalism.

The older generation of conservatives who grew up admiring Ronald Reagan love to boast about America’s defense of universal truths. The New Right has argued that this rhetorical approach has not served the conservative political movement or the country well.

The Reaganite message, so powerful in the late 20th century, proved unable to keep winning national elections in the 21st. As a result, conservatives ceded political power to a Democratic Party and a left wing increasingly committed to an alarming agenda of social and cultural transformation.

The old-guard conservatives could not beat the Obama coalition. Moreover, their excessive preoccupation with America’s commitment to universal moral principles harmed the nation’s interests — and the interests of many Americans, especially those of the working class — in areas such as immigration, trade, and foreign policy.

In response, the New Right developed its now well-known message of American nationalism in the wake of Trump’s victory in 2016. They have embraced an “America First” agenda that places the social and economic well-being of its citizens at the center of national policy.

This stands in sharp contrast to the older conservatism, which tended to approach immigration, trade, and foreign policy in light of the country’s universal moral commitments as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

The New Right’s recalibration proved politically successful: witness President Trump’s electoral victories in 2016 and 2024. But such success breeds criticism, and many on the left and among the older conservative establishment have condemned the new nationalism as a betrayal of the Declaration’s universal principles. Such criticism has, no doubt, deepened the New Right’s skepticism of the Declaration.

What are we to make of all this?

The New Right is correct to reject superficial and politically unhelpful misappropriations of the Declaration. Its members are justified in repudiating suggestions that America is just a political “idea” with no particular and concrete interests. And they are correct to dismiss claims that the Declaration’s universal principles require us to embrace immigration, trade, and foreign policies at odds with the well-being of our own citizens.

RELATED: Polarization may be the cure — and the clarity — America needs

Elen11/Getty Images

It would be a terrible mistake, however, for the New Right to go farther and reject the Declaration itself.

Such rejection is, in the first place, unnecessary. Contrary to the self-serving hectoring from the left and the old-guard conservatives, there is no conflict between the Declaration’s universal principles and the New Right’s America First nationalism. Those principles do not require the open-borders moralism preached by globalists of all stripes.

The Declaration asserts the great and universal truth that all human beings are equal in their natural rights. However, it nowhere asserts that everyone has a natural right to enter a political community of which he is not already a member, much less a natural right to become a citizen of that community.

The founders and subsequent generations of Americans regulated immigration according to the nation’s needs and interests rather than a fanciful moral obligation to accept all who want to come here.

Nor does the Declaration rule out an America First trade policy. Its philosophical framework was influenced by John Locke, in particular his claim that all human beings have a natural right to “life, liberty, and property.” None of these rights, however, entails a right to engage in trade across national borders.

Indeed, Locke’s Second Treatise makes clear that government, once established by the consent of the governed, would regulate foreign trade in the nation’s interests. The founders reflected this understanding in the Constitution by vesting Congress with the power to regulate foreign commerce.

Finally, nothing in the Declaration requires the U.S. government to promote democracy abroad or undermine tyrannies in foreign lands.

The Declaration famously teaches that a people can appeal to the right of revolution when their government is determined to destroy their individual rights and subject them to despotism. That right, however, must be exercised with “prudence” by the people living under a tyrannical government — not by the people of another nation.

Nothing in the Declaration indicates that America or any nation has a right — much less a duty — to liberate other nations from their tyrannical regimes and to impose on such peoples all the costs of a revolution that cannot be certain of success.

RELATED: The timeless truths behind the Declaration of Independence

Art Images/Getty Images

The Declaration teaches that America’s foreign policy needs to be guided by our reasonable and just interests, the star by which founding-era statesmen such as Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison steered the ship of state.

Indeed, the Declaration itself affirms a kind of nationalism. Before turning to the political theory in its famous second paragraph, it teaches that peoples or nations are not mere artificial contrivances but instead exist in contemplation of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

They have a right to a “separate and equal station” among the other “powers of the earth.” In other words, every people has a right to control its own political fate. Read as a whole, the Declaration is as much an affirmation of the sovereignty of nations as of the rights of individuals.

There is, then, no reason for the proponents of America First nationalism to reject the universal principles of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, to do so would be a grave mistake. However abused or misunderstood, those principles are a foundational and vital element of America’s political identity.

It is no part of the duty or interest of any movement of the political right — or of any movement governed by sobriety and caution, not to mention gratitude for what one has inherited — to reconstruct the identity of one’s own nation.

An America indifferent to the universal principles of the Declaration would no longer be the America we have all been blessed to inherit — and that we all have an obligation to preserve.

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

​Declaration of independence, Nationalism, Trump, America first, Ronald reagan, John locke, Democrats, New right, American founding, Founding fathers, Foreign policy, Opinion & analysis 

Every government form I sign contains some variation of the same warning: “I certify that the information provided is true and correct.” “False statements may result in civil penalties.” “Federal charges may apply.”

I have been signing forms like that since Ronald Reagan was president.

Americans do not need another report telling them what everyone already knows. They need accountability.

For 40 years, I have managed a medical catastrophe. My wife has endured nearly 100 surgeries, multiple amputations, years of hospitalization, and enough insurance claims and medical bills to wallpaper a house. Over those four decades, I learned something millions of family caregivers understand all too well: You don’t respect what you don’t inspect.

Long before smartphones, electronic records, and artificial intelligence, I sat at kitchen tables with a pencil, a calculator, and a telephone, combing through Explanation of Benefits forms, hospital bills, physician statements, pharmacy charges, and insurance claims. I have argued with surgeons, hospital administrators, insurance executives, case managers, billing departments, and just about everyone in between. I have won all but two of those arguments because if I did not, my wife paid the price. The consequences of their mistakes landed in my living room.

When your loved one’s health and financial survival hang in the balance, you learn to confront, challenge, and stay in the room long after everyone else wishes you would leave. That is what advocates do. That is what skin in the game looks like.

Imagine if our elected advocates approached their responsibilities with even a fraction of that urgency.

As America approaches its 250th birthday, we are preparing celebrations, restoring monuments, and planning fireworks displays. That’s fine. I enjoy fireworks as much as anyone. But the colonists did not risk everything over fireworks. The Stamp Act was never merely about stamps. It was about accountability. It was about whether government could impose burdens on citizens while remaining insulated from the consequences of those burdens.

RELATED: Mercedes, Bentley, and McLaren cars seized in BUST of $30 million Medicaid fraud scheme, feds say

CHUYN/iStock/Getty Images

Two hundred and 50 years later, that question remains painfully relevant.

More than 65 million Americans serve as family caregivers. Together, they provide an estimated $1.2 trillion in unpaid care each year. They keep loved ones out of institutions, reduce burdens on taxpayers, and shoulder responsibilities that would overwhelm many public systems. We do not have lobbyists. We do not have communications directors. We have kitchen tables covered with bills. We have loved ones whose lives depend on us showing up again tomorrow.

Then, we turn on the news. We see stories of fraud. We see agencies unable to account for money. We see programs consuming billions with little to show for it but waste. We see officials preside over failure and retire comfortably while ordinary Americans are left holding the bill.

In “The Dark Knight,” the Joker tells Batman, “It’s all part of the plan.” After enough years of watching obvious failures produce little accountability, cynicism begins to sound less like paranoia and more like experience.

Finding fraud matters. But merely finding it is not enough.

If I discovered an error in a medical bill and nobody corrected it, the problem remained. If I identified the source of a problem and nobody addressed it, all I had really done was document my frustration. At some point, discovery without consequence becomes theater.

Americans have watched report after report, audit after audit, investigation after investigation. Fraud was found. Good. Now what?

Finding fraud is important. Arresting fraudsters is important. But accountability also requires asking who ignored it, who enabled it, who benefited from it, and who failed to stop it.

And if those people occupied positions of authority, what consequences do they face? Loss of office? Loss of contracts? Public accountability? Criminal prosecution where warranted? Or do they simply move on while the public absorbs the cost?

Otherwise, we’re not fixing a system. We’re simply rotating villains.

The average American lives under penalty of perjury. Every form I sign reminds me of it. If I knowingly misrepresent information, consequences follow. Why should the people entrusted with billions of taxpayer dollars operate under a lower standard than the citizens paying the bills?

If fraud occurred, prosecute the people responsible and name names. If someone knowingly violated the public trust, identify him and hold him accountable. Not for revenge. For stewardship.

I write this while undergoing cancer treatment. At the same time, I am still caring for a woman who has spent four decades battling catastrophic disability. If I sound impatient with waste, fraud, and excuses, it is because I have spent too much of my life paying for other people’s mistakes.

RELATED: Minnesota fraudsters fined millions of dollars — but report finds many don’t pay and get released anyway

DNY59/iStock/Getty Images

Millions of caregivers know exactly what I mean. We are tired in a way that is difficult to explain to people who have never lived this life. Staying outraged takes more energy than most caregivers can afford. But we are paying attention.

Scripture says, “When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan” (Proverbs 29:2).

There is a lot of groaning in this country. I hear it in hospital waiting rooms. I hear it in caregiver support groups. I hear it from people staring at medical bills long after midnight.

Americans do not need another report telling them what everyone already knows. They need accountability. They need leaders willing to impose upon government the same standards government imposes upon them.

For too long, the consequences of government failure have been borne by the wrong people. It is time for accountability to land somewhere else.

​Opinion & analysis, Medicare, Medicaid, Fraud, Caregiving, Disability, Waste fraud and abuse, Crime, Accountability 

Taryn Thomas was a dedicated Black Lives Matter and pro-Palestine activist in high school and later at Stanford University. But after years of faithful activism, the narrative she once fully embraced began to unravel. Ideological inconsistencies and a visit to an exhibit honoring the Nova Music Festival victims eventually led her to renounce the BLM-Palestine allegiance and begin a new journey as an outspoken critic.

Taryn joined Glenn Beck on a recent episode of “The Glenn Beck Program” to share her journey, the October 7 attacks’ impact, and how the pro-Palestine movement at Stanford evolved into something that could only be described as “anti-Israel and anti-American.”

Taryn explains that at 16-years-old, she was conditioned by BLM leadership to believe that “for [black people] to be free, Palestine has to be free.”

By the time she reached college, she was prepared to lead the coalition. Taryn helped organize and mobilize student protests and the early encampments that sprang up on Stanford’s campus right after the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.

“By October 20, Stanford already put up its encampment, ‘Sit-In to Stop the Genocide.’ This is before the families had even finished identifying its dead. This is a week before a single [Israeli] soldier had even crossed into Gaza,” she tells Glenn.

The group’s rapid labeling of the conflict as a “genocide” and the immediate ostracism of anyone who mourned the Israeli lives lost made Taryn wary.

“I felt like I wanted a two-state solution, but … I never wanted to talk about it with anyone because everyone was anti-Zionist, and it felt that … the safest position was the most radical one,” she says.

In June 2024, one of the Stanford protests got so out of hand, Taryn started to seriously question her membership.

“They broke into the Stanford University’s president’s office and caused $700,000 in damages, 12 students received felonies, and they spray-painted disgusting things, such as ‘death to Israel,’ ‘death to America,’ ‘kill cops,’ ‘pigs taste best when dead,’” she recounts.

“At some point, our pro-Palestine movement became more of an anti-Israel, anti-American one. And I no longer could recognize what we were doing anymore.”

Shortly after distancing herself from the organization, Taryn was invited to see the Nova Music Festival exhibit.

“I thought I would find Zionist propaganda and Zionist lies, and I wanted to reaffirm my pro-Palestine position more than anything,” she admits.

What she found, however, was the exact opposite.

“I found instead, you know, half-written ‘I love yous’ and last messages sent to parents and loved ones,” she reflects.

“These are kids my age going to a music festival that I would have went to, and it was just not political. Nova Music Festival was not a political thing, and yet we had compressed them and flattened them into this political narrative, and in doing so we killed them a second time,” she confesses.

At the exhibit, Taryn also got to experience the sick celebrations of Hamas soldiers.

“One of the audio recordings that we had heard was a terrorist calling his dad saying that he had killed 10 Jews with his own bare hands and celebrating. And I thought I was going to hear horror, and instead the dad congratulated his son,” she tells Glenn.

“This was who we were calling our martyrs. … I always called myself an anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic, and that completely deconstructed that,” she adds.

Taryn notes that seeing the “ordinary” faces and hearing the life stories of the Nova Music Festival victims made her realize she was rooting not against evil oppressors but against everyday people like herself.

“That could have been your kids; that could have been my friends,” she laments.

Her heart changed, Taryn returned to Stanford “genuinely scared” to share what she had learned. For a while she kept her new beliefs to herself, but once she traveled to Israel and saw what life was like for the people, she knew her silence had to end.

“It made me realize I need to start speaking up about this,” she says.

To hear more of Taryn’s story, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

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

​Glenn beck, Nova music festival, Stanford university, The glenn beck program, October 7 attacks, Black lives matter 

A proposal called the Scarecrow system says evading automated license plate recognition from unwarranted photography and capture can be done without breaking any laws.

The research predominantly rejects the collection of license plate data by ALPR operators like Flock, a company that controls cameras in thousands of jurisdictions in the United States.

‘They capture and index every plate that passes.’

Flock currently has over 100,000 monitored surveillance cameras across the country, and as the researcher Max Harari states, these cameras exist in “our neighborhoods, parking lots, and police networks.”

“They capture and index every plate that passes, feeding a searchable surveillance database with no warrant, no notification, and in most cases no public oversight,” Harari writes.

Harari’s project uses what he calls adversarial frame pattern optimization that generates a grayscale pattern to be placed on a frame around the license plate. The aim is to “suppress detection” while remaining legible to the naked eye and unobscured to humans in real life.

RELATED: Big Brother on the road: Backlash grows against license plate surveillance

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

Using the Scarecrow method, ALPR detection confidence allegedly drops from 0.84 to 0.00, which is described as “full evasion.”

The methods of distortion used include rotation and perspective warp, brightness and contrast shifts, motion blur, “additive noise,” and distance distortion.

All of these tactics allegedly disrupt Flock and “most” ALPR cameras that are mounted between eight and 12 feet.

The custom license plate requires a photo of the owner’s plate and promises to deliver an individualized pattern that completely evades AI camera detection.

The requirement of having a 3D printer means it is likely that the cover has varying depths and tangible patterns.

RELATED: License plate readers or surveillance? The number of AI cameras in the US is shocking

Rich Sugg/The Kansas City Star/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

“A system that can track anyone, anywhere, with no transparency or accountability is fundamentally immoral. This project is my way of exploring what can be done about it, ethically and legally,” the researcher argued.

Harari also said in a post that he has not tested the system on an actual Flock camera, but his research indicates it should work across different hardware and license plate detection models.

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

​Alpr, Surveillance, Flock, Ai, Tech 

A teenager was caught on surveillance video pointing a gun in the face of a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and demanding his car keys in Maryland earlier this week, but things didn’t work out so well for the punk — or his three friends.

Jheyco Borda — who was trained in hand-to-hand combat while in the military — told WTTG-TV he was working on his pickup truck near Oxon Hill High School around 4:30 p.m. Wednesday when four teenagers approached him on the sidewalk.

‘Once a Marine, always a Marine.’

Borda told the station the suspects — all of whom were dressed in hooded sweatshirts — approached him and demanded his car keys, phone, and other valuables.

WTTG said surveillance video showed one of the teens — dressed in red, white, and blue — pulling out a handgun and pointing it directly at Borda’s head.

However, the station said the gun-toting suspect became distracted for a split second — and Borda said that was all the time he needed to put his military training into practice and fight back.

Borda told WTTG he quickly disarmed the teen — and then his brother noticed the dust-up and ran over to assist.

Video shows that during the struggle, the suspect’s gun discharged, the station said.

RELATED: Knife-wielding ex-con gets tables turned on him lethally — courtesy of victim he robbed, fought, bit, and stabbed: Report

No one was hit by the gunfire, WTTG said — instead the bullet struck Borda’s truck and left a visible hole.

The station said that as the fight continued, another suspect tried to jump in, but Borda’s brother turned and grabbed him.

The brothers, in the end, managed to pin down the suspects until Prince George’s County Police officers arrived at the scene and took them into custody, Borda told WTTG.

The station said all four suspects were behind bars.

Police are asking anyone with additional information about the incident to contact them immediately, WTTG said.

In the aftermath, Borda told the station: “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

“I’m feeling grateful,” the veteran added to WTTG. “I’m still here, safe, with my family.”

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

​Crime thwarted, Maryland, U.s. marines, Veteran, Fighting back, Self-defense, Attempted carjacking, Attempted robbery, Us military, Crime 

When Delano Squires was growing up, he was surrounded by young black men who were not only getting into trouble, but getting into gangs and going to jail — while he kept his hands clean.

“At a certain point in my teenage years, I said, ‘Well, it’s because of the families we were raised in. All our parents were married, … we were going to the same church, same values across households, a community of men who were raising us and keeping us in line. And I realized that family structure was the key,” Squires tells BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock on “Jason Whitlock Harmony.”

“So from there, just one of those things that I’ve always thought about, the importance of family, the importance of marriage, importance of my dad in my day-to-day life, his everyday presence. And at a certain point, I wanted to write about it,” he explains.

And Squires did write about it in his new book, “The Vanishing Black Family,” where he argues that the breakdown of the black family is to blame for lack of education and high crime rates.

“Men and women are continuing to have children, particularly in our community, where 70% of kids are born out of wedlock,” Squires tells Whitlock.

“The other thing that we’ve seen over the course of the last 60 years is that as poverty has decreased in the black community, the non-marital birth rate has increased,” he continues, using NBA players as an example.

“In a league that was 70-plus percent black, you had guys who were fathering four, five, six, seven kids out of wedlock, even though they were making millions of dollars a year,” he explains, noting that economics appear to have very little to do with children being born out of wedlock.

“I think economics is a part of it, but the real reason is because marriage is no longer seen as valuable, desirable, accessible, or indispensable for the purpose of forming a family. And the reason for that goes back much further than current economic trends,” he tells Whitlock.

Whitlock has his own theory as to why the black family has broken down.

“If we had more God, we could have a successful marriage, and we could raise up better kids. That’s the missing ingredient,” Whitlock says.

“The cause of the vanishing black family is because we’re not looking for God to be our provider. We’re looking for money to be our provider. And so, whatever makes us the most money is going to fix the most problems,” he continues.

“And to me it’s, you know, we’ve just lost focus on who our real provider is. It’s not man-made money. It’s God,” he adds.

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.

​Black men, Community, Crime rates, Delano squires, Jason whitlock, Jason whitlock fearless, Marriage, Values, Jason whitlock harmony 

Scott Bessent may well be the most consequential secretary of the treasury since Alexander Hamilton — not simply because of the policies he advances, but because of the conditions he confronts and the clarity with which he is executing President Trump’s broader economic vision.

Like Hamilton before him, Bessent has stepped into an economy weakened by a long period of policies that, however well intentioned, failed to serve the enduring interests of the American domestic economy.

Before entering public life, Bessent operated at the highest levels of global finance. As a key figure alongside Stanley Druckenmiller, he helped execute one of the defining macro trades of the modern era — the successful challenge to the Bank of England’s currency peg in 1992. The lesson was enduring: Systems that ignore economic reality do not last. Markets force alignment.

What Bessent is executing is a re-centering, not only of economics, but of strategy.

It is precisely that market-grounded realism that now underpins the implementation of the administration’s economic strategy. But Bessent is not simply a market practitioner. His time teaching the history of economic thought at Yale reveals the deeper foundation of his approach.

He sees the economy not as a series of quarterly data points, but as a system shaped over time by production, energy, capital formation, and national power. That synthesis, of theory, history, and practice, places him firmly in the Hamiltonian tradition and makes him a natural architect for translating President Trump’s economic doctrine into operational policy.

After the Revolutionary War, the United States was financially strained under extreme levels of debt, industrially underdeveloped, and newly severed from its economic relationship with the British Empire. Hamilton’s achievement was to turn that fragility into a foundation for strength.

He tied fiscal credibility to growth, fostered domestic industry, and deployed tariffs with precision — high enough to generate revenue and support development, but not so high as to suffocate competition. He was not managing decline; he was reversing it.

Bessent faces a modern analogue, an American economy navigating the aftermath of its own rupture, not from a formal empire, but from the post-World War II Pax Americana and the rules-based system it sustained. The task, again, is not to preserve a fading order, but to build a new foundation, one that reflects the strategic reset articulated by President Trump and now being systematically implemented through the Treasury Department and beyond.

The parallel is difficult to ignore. Decades of globalization prioritized efficiency over resilience and consumption over production. The result is an economy that remains large but is increasingly imbalanced, dependent on external supply chains, tilted toward financial engineering, and less capable of sustaining broad-based growth. Bessent’s significance lies in recognizing this reality and acting on it, not in abstraction, but in execution of a defined national strategy.

Like Hamilton, he is not merely managing the economy he inherited; he is working to re-anchor it, aligning markets with the administration’s emphasis on domestic strength, industrial capacity, and economic sovereignty.

That begins with debt. The United States now carries historically elevated fiscal obligations layered on top of structural weakness. The answer, as in Hamilton’s time, is not austerity alone, but growth — stronger, more durable expansion rooted in production, investment, and rising capacity.

Debt is not ignored; it is made sustainable through expansion, a core pillar of the administration’s supply-side orientation.

RELATED: Grants are a secret weapon for American communities

NicolasMe/Getty Images

This framework was articulated clearly in Bessent’s speech at the Reagan Library. At its core is a simple recognition: An economy hollowed out by flawed globalization cannot sustain either prosperity or fiscal stability.

The answer is not withdrawal, but reordering, a principle that sits at the heart of President Trump’s economic agenda. His formulation — de-risk, not decouple — captures that balance. It preserves the benefits of trade while restoring the primacy of national resilience.

This is not a rejection of globalization but its correction, a distinctly Hamiltonian instinct and one now being operationalized across trade, capital flows, and industrial policy.

Energy is central to this vision. Cheap, secure energy is not a talking point; it is the precondition for winning the next phase of economic competition, particularly in artificial intelligence.

Computing is power. Without abundant energy, neither technological leadership nor sustained growth is possible. This, too, reflects a deliberate alignment between Treasury policy and the administration’s broader push for energy dominance.

So too does the shift back toward productive capital. For years, policy favored financial engineering over real investment. Bessent’s emphasis is different, directing capital toward infrastructure, manufacturing, and technological capacity, translating strategic intent into capital allocation.

Markets have responded not in spite of this shift, but because of it.

His early attention to Federal Reserve mission creep reinforces the broader theme. By insisting that the Fed operate within, not above, the constitutional framework, Bessent is reasserting a principle that has eroded: Economic power must remain accountable. It is a subtle but critical component of restoring coherence between monetary authority and elected economic leadership.

To understand his significance, however, is to see the broader architecture now taking shape. This is not a collection of policies. It is a doctrine, one that reflects both intellectual lineage and political mandate.

At its core is a modernized American system, domestic production, strategic protection, and national development. Layered onto it is a Monroe Doctrine-style approach to economic security, treating the Western Hemisphere as a strategic sphere.

But what distinguishes this strategy is not its articulation but its execution — the translation of President Trump’s strategic instincts into coordinated economic statecraft.

In late 2025, largely under the radar, pressure on Iran’s financial system intensified and key elements of its banking sector began to fail. It generated few headlines, but the signal was unmistakable — a targeted disruption of financial plumbing rather than a blunt sanctions regime.

This is economic statecraft executed with precision — identifying pressure points, applying force selectively, and achieving strategic effect without spectacle. It reflects Bessent’s background in markets, where understanding fragility is everything, and his role in implementing a broader geopolitical-economic strategy set at the presidential level.

RELATED: No more free ride for federal grant hogs

Porcorex/Getty Images

Within this framework, Bessent is the intellectual anchor and operational executor, aligning fiscal policy, capital markets, and economic structure with national purpose as defined by the administration.

What this represents is a break from the postwar consensus. The Pax Americana was a historic achievement, but over time it evolved into a system that often detached American policy from American strength.

What Bessent is executing is a re-centering, not only of economics, but of strategy.

Just as Hamilton anchored the early United States away from dependence on the British Empire and toward internally generated strength, Bessent is anchoring the modern economy back toward its domestic foundations, while executing a presidential mandate to rebuild American economic sovereignty in a more fragmented world.

But the defining parallel is not philosophical. It is practical. Hamilton did not simply write or speak. He executed, building institutions, implementing policy, and translating theory into durable structure in real time. Bessent is doing the same, not in isolation, but as the principal architect and executor of a broader economic vision set from the top by President Trump.

That is what makes him consequential. Not the speeches, though they matter. Not the framework, though it is clear. But the execution, policy applied in real time, reshaping the trajectory of the American economy.

That is the Hamilton standard. And by that standard, Bessent is the first secretary of the treasury to meet it.

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

​Scott bessent, Ecnomy, Economics, American economy, Trump, Alexander hamilton, Markets, Globalization, Domestic products, Federal reserve, Opinion & analysis 

On June 17, Mass NOW in partnership with the MA Trans Political Coalition will put on its third annual “Trans Period Pride” — a “consciousness-raising” event featuring a group discussion on “menstrual equity” and “the experiences of trans menstruators,” a catered dinner, and free period underwear for attendees.

But this isn’t some privately funded event. Democrat Mayor Michelle Wu’s Office of LGBTQ+ Advancement — which receives nearly $1 million annually from the city budget — is officially co-sponsoring the event.

In other words, Boston taxpayers are being forced to bankroll this event while the city faces a nearly $50 million budget deficit.

When BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey saw the advertisement for this Trans Period Pride event, she admits she had to do “a double take.”

Allie says she’s unsure who exactly this event is even catering to.

“[Are we] talking about women who identify as men, still have their uterus and their eggs, and so they’re having periods? … Or are we talking about the men that I’ve seen on social media who claim because of the synthetic hormones that they’re taking to try to look more like women that they have some kind of menstrual cycle, even though you don’t have a uterus or eggs or any ability to menstruate?” she asks, speculating that the attendees will likely be “a mixed bag” of confused individuals.

She calls the entire debacle “funny, but it’s sad.”

But “Trans Period Pride” isn’t the only absurdity Boston taxpayers are being forced to fund.

In April, Mayor Wu’s Office for Immigrant Advancement partnered with the nonprofit OUTnewcomers on the “Belonging Matters” program, which aimed to provide $250-$500 “wellness allowance” vouchers to low-income LGBTQ+ migrants for non-clinical services such as yoga, meditation, massages, hair salon visits, gym memberships, and creative healing. The public backlash was so intense that the program was paused within days of launching.

“The city faces a budget deficit of nearly $50 million, but sorry, the transgender people need their period underwear. The queer asylum-seekers need their yoga classes, okay?” Allie quips.

To hear her full 2026 Pride Month breakdown, watch the episode above.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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

​Relatable with allie beth stuckey, Allie beth stuckey, Pride month, Boston, Michelle wu, Transgenderism, Relatable 

Several years ago, a team of researchers obtained numerous pig brains from a slaughterhouse and revived them off-site for experimentation purposes. That team has since moved up the food chain. Now it obtains human donors’ brains, restores their functions, and uses them to test experimental drugs.

Bexorg, a Connecticut-based biotech startup spun out of Yale University, boasts about having created a “platform that leverages the untouched potential of nature’s most complex and enduring mystery: the human brain.”

‘It’s a remarkable brain bank.’

Whereas other researchers might be limited to experimenting on lab-grown, human pseudo-brains or cell cultures, the team at Bexorg meddles with “full mature, intact, and isolated brains for days on end” with the stated aim of advancing brain disease therapies.

Unlike the company’s slick pitch, the reality appears to be something of a horror show. After all, the over 700 brains that have been subjected to experimentation at Bexorg so far were apparently far from inert.

Bexorg takes human brains from their newly deceased donors’ bodies, places them in what are effectively vats, and feeds them liters of blood substitute and other fluids that provide oxygen from an artificial lung and carry away waste to a fake kidney. The tubes that carry the sustaining fluids are connected to blood vessels in the brain via four plastic ports.

RELATED: Famed neuroscientist claims he’s disproven free will — but his peers say he failed miserably

RDB/Dukas/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

According to the peer-reviewed academic journal Science, the company’s proprietary life-support system BrainEx keeps the disembodied brains alive and preserves their key functions so that they can metabolize experimental drugs and react to other stimuli.

After roughly 24 hours in a state of drugged limbo, donors’ brains are cut up into hundreds of pieces for further study.

Although the brains are alive and reactive for the benefit of “drug discovery,” Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja has stated that “higher-level brain functions are not restored.”

According to a 2019 study in which Vrselja and other members of what became the Bexorg team used their technology to revive pig brains obtained from a food processing facility, “The observed restoration of molecular and cellular processes following 4h of global anoxia/ischemia should not be extrapolated to signify resurgence of normal brain function. Indeed, quite the opposite: at no point did we observe the kind of organized global electrical activity associated with awareness, perception, or other higher-order brain functions.”

To ensure against the re-emergence of consciousness among the subjects of their “wet-lab” experiments, researchers suppress the human brains’ electrical activity with anesthetics, specifically the drug propofol.

Propofol apparently causes brain activity to become unstable until the brain loses consciousness.

“The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness,” Brenand Parent, a bioethicist from New York University Langone Health who sits on Bexorg’s board, told Science.

Despite the company’s reassurances and use of multiple measures to block neuronal activity, some have raised serious ethical concerns about Bexorg’s technology, which initially developed with the help of funding through the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative. A source familiar told Blaze News that the company is not presently receiving NIH funding.

“This is brand-new, and there’s no kind of institutional oversight,” Yale bioethicist Stephen Latham told ScienceAlert in 2019 regarding the earlier experiments on pig brains.

“This is not animal research, because the brain comes to the researchers from an already dead animal,” continued Latham. “But if consciousness were somehow induced in the brain, we don’t have ethics committees … that are constituted to even think about how to do the kinds of trade-offs you do when you do research on human subjects or on animals.”

Vrselja claimed in a December 2025 study published in the Alzheimer’s Association’s journal, Alzheimer’s and Dementia, that the 5-year-old startup’s “perfusion‐based postmortem brain model can recapitulate the complexity of the brain at the cellular and systems level.”

The December study claimed further that “utilizing human disease brains as a preclinical model promises to substantially increase the probability of success in developing new therapies for AD.”

Bexorg did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Bruna Bellaver, a research assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, told Science that BrainEx is “a huge step up from mouse models.”

Bruce Car, the chief science officer at Biohaven, one of Bexorg’s collaborators, has used roughly 130 of the Bexorg-sustained brains to test drugs. Car told Science that one of the drugs, the intended use of which is to prevent toxic proteins from building up in the brain, didn’t perform as desired in a mouse, but worked in the disembodied human brains at a lower-than-expected dose. This apparently saved Biohaven a year of development.

“It’s a remarkable brain bank,” said MIT neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai, who instead uses pseudo-brains grown from human stem cells.

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

​Science, Technology, Brains, Horror, Yale university, Drug, Pharmaceuticals, Experiments, Disease, Health, Politics 

If there is a single idea that President Donald Trump holds with conviction, it is that the 2020 election was stolen.

Millions of Americans agree with him. How it was stolen, and by whom, is still being investigated six years later. That is a problem, because another national election arrives this fall, and Americans deserve an answer as to whether the way we now conduct elections can actually produce honest results.

Normal legislative remedies have failed. Congress has not passed the SAVE Act to ensure that only citizens vote, nor does it appear likely it will. It has done nothing about mass mail-in balloting or the vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems. Yet these are precisely the parts of the system that millions of Americans no longer trust — and for good reason.

The notion that the federal government has no role in federal elections is plainly wrong.

Consider what happened this past April. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell summoned the chief executives of America’s largest banks to an unannounced meeting, alarmed by a new artificial-intelligence model capable of finding and exploiting security flaws faster than any human defender could patch them.

If the men charged with protecting the nation’s financial system feel compelled to convene Wall Street on short notice over what artificial intelligence now makes possible, our election systems — built with similar computer technology but with far less security — are open to the same threat and worse.

Our electronic voting systems

For most of American history, Americans voted on paper ballots, counted by human beings, watched by other human beings. Electronic voting promised speed and accuracy. What it delivered is elections that take weeks instead of a day, accuracy that is openly in doubt, and a counting process that has lost the transparency a republic requires.

Citing proprietary software, the major vendors have become black boxes. The public is told to trust the output. Oversight is inadequate, and skepticism is the rational response.

The deeper problem is the very idea that voting and tabulation should be done electronically. The major suppliers — Election Systems & Software, Dominion Voting Systems (now Liberty Vote), and Hart InterCivic — all record and tabulate American votes on networked digital equipment running proprietary software. The vulnerability is, in part, that many of the electronic components are made in communist China. But even if all the components were made in the United States, they are not immune to a remote intrusion, a firmware exploit, or a software supply-chain attack.

The vulnerability is the architecture itself: an opaque, software-driven counting process exposed, directly or indirectly, to any determined bad actor, most especially a nation-state adversary. That is not a vulnerability at the margin. It is a structural compromise of the most sensitive function of self-government.

This is not theoretical. The People’s Liberation Army fields a cyber force approaching one million men, and American critical infrastructure is one of its principal targets. In 2019, federal officials seized a Chinese-built power transformer destined for Colorado; analysis at Sandia National Laboratory revealed what appeared to be a hardware back door enabling remote disablement.

In 2023, Microsoft identified Volt Typhoon, a Chinese campaign pre-positioning malware inside U.S. critical infrastructure to enable sabotage. To imagine that our election systems are immune to the same treatment is folly, more so now that the aforementioned use of artificial intelligence has become another weapon in the adversary’s arsenal.

Some will point to the recent Reuters account of a federal examination of Dominion machines seized from Puerto Rico, in which investigators reportedly found no Venezuelan code and only one chip sourced from China. They will conclude that the foreign-component concern has been overstated. But that misses the point entirely.

The question is not whether a particular batch of machines, examined on one occasion, contained components from a designated adversary. The question is whether a computerized voting system, however sourced and however audited, can be defended against the cyber capabilities of a nation-state intelligence service.

The honest answer is no. The same Chinese cyber force that pre-positioned malware in our power grid, water systems, and ports does not require a chip stamped in Shenzhen to reach an American voting machine. It requires only that the machine exist, be connected to a network at some point in its life, and run software that can be updated. All three conditions are met.

RELATED: John Cornyn’s defeat could be the end of the GOP establishment

Antranik Tavitian/Bloomberg/Getty Images

New evidence

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has declassified the Jan. 15, 2020, National Intelligence Council memorandum “Vulnerabilities in U.S. 2020 Election Infrastructure,” which judged that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all had “the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure for the 2020 presidential election.”

Senior officials briefed President Trump in February 2020. The public was never told. Subsequent declassified memos indicate that Chinese actors gained access to voter-registration databases in 12 to 18 states. Gabbard has opened a probe into allegations that intelligence officials suppressed this evidence, kept it out of the President’s Daily Brief, and hid it from Congress.

This was a serious misrepresentation by members of the Intelligence Community, especially since the Chinese Communist Party declared a “People’s War” against the United States in May 2019 in response to President Trump’s efforts to halt its theft of American intellectual property.

Communist China, which spends roughly $20 billion a year on intelligence and influence operations inside the United States, has every interest, as a matter of high government policy, in who sits in the Oval Office.

The motive could not be plainer. A second Trump term meant continued tariffs, continued enforcement against Chinese IP theft, continued pressure on Huawei, ZTE, and the Chinese semiconductor industry, and a hardening U.S. posture across the Indo-Pacific. A Biden administration meant the reversal of all of it.

Consider the numbers. Obama received 69 million votes in 2008. Clinton received 66 million in 2016. Biden received 81 million in 2020. A 15 million-vote surge for the least charismatic Democrat in living memory cannot be explained by enthusiasm.

The January 2020 assessment noted that “adversaries could also use the registration data … to tailor other interference or influence efforts.” It is well within the realm of possibility that communist China, armed with the names on those rolls, mounted an industrial-scale effort to produce counterfeit ballots indistinguishable from genuine ones and therefore votes for Joe Biden.

Such a possibility must at least be entertained. Otherwise, one is left to ask the obvious question no one in Washington wants to ask: Why did communist China hack into those voter databases in the first place?

Can elections be secured?

Congress will not act. Blue states will not reform their mail-in practices or replace their electronic systems. Securing federal elections therefore falls to the president in his role as chief magistrate. Two executive orders are needed even if they will be challenged in court.

The first is an emergency declaration outlawing electronic voting machines in federal elections, on the grounds that any networked, software-driven counting system is inherently vulnerable to nation-state cyberattack and cannot, under current conditions, deliver an election the public can verify. Executive Order 13848 from 2018 recognized the threat of foreign interference but triggers only after the fact.

America cannot afford after-the-fact remedies.

The second would require, since the electronic voting machines would no longer be used, federal elections to be conducted on paper ballots, hand-counted by human beings observed by other human beings, with photo ID, accurate voter rolls, election-day voting, and mail-in ballots reserved for the military and the genuinely confined. The counting would be live streamed. The result would be the most transparent election in American history.

States today hold the constitutional delegation to conduct elections, and ideally, they would administer such a system themselves. Given the political divide, many will refuse. One alternative is for the federal government — preferably the National Guard, federalized and operating under each state’s adjutant general — to administer the election directly.

Critics will invoke Article I, Section 4, which empowers Congress to alter the times, places, and manner of federal elections. That route would be preferable if our political system were not broken. Others will invoke states’ rights. But states do not have rights. Citizens have natural rights, and states are obliged to defend them. When states fail to defend the most basic right of a self-governing people – the right to a fair election – the federal government has the duty to act.

RELATED: Polarization may be the cure — and the clarity — America needs

Elen11/Getty Images

The country’s critical infrastructure, which includes our election system, falls under the Department of Homeland Security. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Election Assistance Commission sit in the executive branch. The notion that the federal government has no role in federal elections is plainly wrong.

The problem is that those agencies are not currently equipped to defend against a nation-state cyber adversary at this scale. And cybersecurity against communist China is beyond the capacity of any individual state government acting alone.

If federal authorities had actionable intelligence that a cyberattack was going to occur on America’s electronic voting systems during a federal election but did not have the ability to stop it, are they simply to stand aside and let the attack occur?

The commonsense approach would be to find a method of conducting the election that was not vulnerable to cyberattack. That is precisely why the president’s executive order is so urgently needed.

The choice at hand

As Director Gabbard’s declassifications confirm, China has gained access to the voter-registration data that defines our electorate. No election conducted on networked computers that a hostile intelligence service has the demonstrated capacity to breach, and on voter rolls that service has already breached, can deliver the legitimacy a republic requires.

Paper ballots, hand-counted, observed in the open, can. However controversial it may sound, it is the only way to ensure a fair election for the American people.

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

​Election security, 2020 election, China, Russia, Election interference, Dominion voting systems, Trump, Foreign interference, Federalized elections, Opinion & analysis 

World-renowned director Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is a big-budget epic adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek poem that follows Odysseus’ perilous journey home after the Trojan War. Set to release this July, the film sparked scandal the moment marketing began.

Not only is Helen of Troy, who is described as a fair-skinned Greek woman in the original text, played by Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o, but Elliot (formerly Ellen) Paige, a biological woman who started identifying as a man in 2020, plays a male character in the film. Although her specific role is unknown, one viral theory claims that she will play the mighty Achilles — the greatest warrior in all of Greek mythology.

BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre was surprised and disappointed when he learned about the direction Nolan’s “Odyssey” would take.

Nolan is “a man whose work has often been described as conservative or even reactionary,” he tells libertarian author and political activist James Keena.

As one of the greatest film directors of the modern age, Nolan, MacIntyre argues, “would have had the authority to tell a studio no” if it was pushing woke ideologies, like race and gender swapping.

“Why is it so hard for even some of the most stalwart directors like Christopher Nolan to avoid this trap?” he asks Keena.

“This is an ongoing assault on Western civilization and the norms of Western civilization. When you look at the story of ‘The Odyssey,’ it’s part of Greek literature. That is one of the foundational things in Western thought,” Keena replies.

He explains that Homer’s central hero, Odysseus, is the kind of character that progressive thinkers detest. He’s “a very strong, type A male personality” who’s on a mission to return to his “nuclear family” and “re-establish law and order” in his kingdom of Ithaca, where suitors have invaded in his absence to steal what’s rightfully his.

“You can see why it sort of conflicts with what the ethos is now as to what a family should be, what a male should be like,” says Keena.

MacIntyre agrees, highlighting how Odysseus is a prime example of the patriarch archetype — the husband, father, and king who endures extreme hardship in order to return home and restore order to his household and kingdom.

“You want to, if you’re a radical leftist, undermine those things that kind of hold together the American or the Western identity,” he says.

But there’s an even deeper (and darker) reality at play in Nolan’s woke “Odyssey,” says Keena.

“When you look at the collectivist group of philosophies Marxism, socialism, communism, they can’t tolerate Western civilization or the concept of America,” he says.

Their unifying objective, he explains, is to “attack it, destroy it, replace it” by infiltrating every institution.

“And so what we’re seeing on all levels, not just about movies or literature, but education, music, anything that you can pick out in society right now, is essentially a collectivist assault on Western civilization because it has to be destroyed in order to make room for the socialist revolution,” says Keena.

To hear more, watch the full interview above.

Want more from Auron MacIntyre?

To enjoy more of this YouTuber and recovering journalist’s commentary on culture and politics, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​The auron macintyre show, Auron macintyre, Christopher nolan, The odyssey, James keena, Western civilization