Category: blaze media

Democrats aren’t hiding anything when it comes to what they want for not only our immigration system, but the future of America — and BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is sick of hearing it.

“They’re just saying it out loud,” Gonzales says, noting that all she has to do is “roll the tapes.”

“I’m going to have to remind you guys what this country will look like again with Democrats in power,” she continues, adding, “One of their endgames is to flood this country with immigrants to replace us.”

“And this is an area that we really need to have a healthy and robust immigration program,” Democrat Senate candidate Josh Turek said to an audience.

“You’ve got around 41% of the direct care workers that are immigrants. And so I think we also need an easier pathway to earn citizenship so that we can bring in more workers, not only for that industry but as well as the agriculture industry and the meatpacking plants,” Turek continued.

“I mean, this is a state that’s really, really struggling,” he added.

“No, no, no,” Gonzales says. “Literally all across the country, we are all saying the same thing. We do not need more foreign workers. We do not need more immigrants. We actually need less. We just voted in November of 2024 for mass deportations. We want people gone.”

“‘Meatpacking plants are struggling, let’s bring in cheap foreign labor,’” she mocks.

“Because you know, that’s always the Democrats’ plan. The Democrats’ plan is always, ‘Let’s figure out how to make slavery legal again in every way, shape, or form,’” she adds.

But Turek isn’t the first one to make his case for what Gonzales calls “slave labor” in the United States.

“Mass amnesty for cheaper labor,” Gonzales says. “Chuck Schumer actually let that cat out of the bag all the way back in 2022.”

“Now more than ever, we’re short of workers,” Schumer said in a 2022 speech. “We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants. The dreamers and all of them.”

“Because our ultimate goal is to help the dreamers but get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here,” he added.

“What are we doing?” Gonzales, annoyed, asks.

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.

​Democrats, Immigration, Chuck schumer, Amnesty, Josh turek, Iowa, Sara gonzales, Blazetv show 

Arizona State University’s Ratio Christi chapter hosted Christian apologist Frank Turek Monday night. The topic especially caught my attention as a philosophy professor: If God exists, why is there evil?

I call this the major objection to belief in God. Atheists may begin elsewhere, but once the other objections are answered, the problem of evil keeps returning. I have found that true whether I am talking with an atheist at a bar watching a ball game or an elite physicist at Cambridge.

What if the very problem of evil that you think disproves God actually points to God?

Turek made the question as pointed as possible. He told the audience that when he and Charlie Kirk were approaching Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025, Kirk asked him to pray. Turek prayed for the event to be effective and safe.

“God said no,” Turek told the audience. About 20 minutes later, Kirk was fatally shot. Turek has asked the same question publicly ever since: Where was God?

To some smug atheists, and a few conspiracy-minded people, the story invites a sneer: If Kirk was such a good Christian, why didn’t his God protect him? Why would anyone want to be a Christian if that is the outcome?

Turek answered with a challenge: What if the very problem of evil that seems to disprove God actually points toward him?

His argument came in two parts.

First, before we can say evil disproves God, we have to know what evil is. And to know what evil is, we need some account of the good. Invoking Augustine, Turek described evil as a corruption or privation of something good. Augustine’s formulation is simple: Evil depends on the good it damages.

Students are often confident that they can define the good until the examples get difficult. Happiness seems like an obvious candidate, but people can be happy about wicked things. Happiness alone therefore cannot tell us what is good.

That is where students often retreat into relativism: What is good for you is good for you, and what is good for me is good for me.

Turek’s answer was that human beings share a common human nature. If something is genuinely good for a human being as such, it cannot become bad merely because another person prefers something else.

Then he pushed the argument into explicitly Christian territory. If Christianity is true, what could be better than knowing God? He cited John 17:3, where eternal life is described as knowing God and Jesus Christ.

That brought him back to Kirk. Kirk’s murder was evil; Turek did not pretend otherwise. But he argued that God can bring good from evil. Turek says he still hears from people who encountered the gospel because of Kirk’s life and death. In his language, the ripple was not merely a ripple but a tsunami.

RELATED: What Chris Hansen knows about sin that modern culture forgets

Kelsey McNeal/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images

That was Turek’s first point: The objection from evil assumes that some things are objectively wrong. His argument is that objective moral law requires a standard beyond individual preference and that the ultimate ground of that standard is God. The problem of evil therefore borrows the very moral categories it tries to use against him.

Turek then moved from philosopher to pastor.

In a philosophy class, people will debate the logical problem of evil. In the middle of intense suffering, nobody wants a philosopher to arrive with a chalkboard and draw syllogisms. They want to know why this happened: Why this child? Why this cancer? Why this death?

Turek answers with what he calls the ripple effect. We know very little of the past, only fragments of the present, and nothing of the future except what has been revealed to us. We cannot trace all the consequences flowing from a single event.

God, in the Christian account, is not only powerful and good but wise. He knows the whole of history and can order events toward ends we cannot see. Turek appealed to Romans 8:28: God works all things together for the good of those who love him.

That reminded me of an old pastoral illustration. A couple had grown cold in their faith. Their child died, and they asked their pastor why. He told them to imagine a shepherd trying to lead two stubborn sheep across a river from danger to safety. They refuse. So the shepherd picks up their lamb and carries it across. The sheep follow.

Was that for their good?

The point is not that suffering itself becomes good. It is that suffering can force us to confront questions comfort lets us avoid. It exposes our finitude and can make us consider our own sin. When we recognize how little we know and how much God would have to know, Paul’s question in Romans 9:20 becomes harder to brush aside: Who are we to correct God?

RELATED: Christians are missing the opportunity next door

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With those two claims — objective goodness and divine wisdom — Turek took questions.

One student asked why God creates people who will be damned to hell. Turek answered that people who finally reject God receive what they insist upon: separation from Him. If that is what they choose, he asked, on what grounds do they complain about receiving it?

Another asked about animal suffering that no human being ever sees. How could that possibly help us?

Turek’s answer was essentially: How do you know it does not? Human knowledge is extraordinarily limited. The fact that we cannot identify a good purpose for some instance of suffering does not prove that no such purpose exists. He also noted that in the Christian account, the whole creation is affected by human sin.

So is Turek right? Does the problem of evil point toward God rather than away from him? Are atheists borrowing from an objective moral framework they cannot ultimately ground without God?

The audience was clearly intrigued. Skeptics had something substantial to push against, and Christians had to think more carefully about what they claim the Bible teaches concerning good, evil, suffering, and God’s wisdom.

As a philosophy professor deep in the heart of Sun Devil territory, I count that as a good thing.

​Charlie kirk, God, Frank turek, Asu, Arizona, Christians, Atheism, Evil, Jesus christ, Gospel, Philosophy, Saint paul, Bible, Opinion & analysis 

Emma Waters is a proud, Christ-centered patriot. The 28-year-old bioethics researcher at the Heritage Foundation lives by a strict six-word mantra: “Love God, get married, have babies.”

She married young and recently welcomed her third daughter while working from home in Pennsylvania. When she’s not raising her kids, Waters devotes her time to exposing what happens when human reproduction stops being a natural byproduct of family life and becomes a high-tech engineering project.

The problem arises when tech shifts from restoring nature to overriding it entirely.

Waters has made it her mission to expose one of the most seismic shifts in modern medicine. Doctors have moved beyond merely helping desperate couples conceive; now clinics try to control which children are (and aren’t) born, who carries them, and what traits they possess. Waters consistently raises alarms about commercial surrogacy, embryo selection, and a fertility business that treats parenthood like a shady concierge service. Her concern is justified.

The most fascinating fight over this issue isn’t between traditionalists and the iconoclastic, often idiotic left. The real battle line lies squarely on the political right, dividing old-school social conservatives from Silicon Valley’s tech-driven pronatalists. And the battle is growing increasingly ferocious.

Can babies be solved?

Both sides agree that falling birth rates pose an existential threat to America. But while traditionalists want more babies born into married homes, tech titans want to manufacture them using IVF, surrogacy, polygenic embryo screening, and artificial wombs. Essentially, Silicon Valley wants to code a way out of demographic winter. Traditionalists think the answer lies in simple, un-automated human commitment.

Silicon Valley wants to solve the fertility crisis in the lab. Traditionalists want to solve it with marriage. And in truth, the traditionalist approach makes far more sense. If young people stop getting married, inventing ever more sophisticated ways to make babies only treats the symptom while leaving the family crisis untouched.

Technology itself isn’t inherently evil, nor is every fertility treatment misguided. Modern medicine performs genuine miracles by healing broken minds and bodies. The problem arises when tech shifts from restoring nature to overriding it entirely.

The pitch of the modern fertility industry is pure, unadulterated control. If a couple can’t conceive, technology intervenes. If a woman wants to delay motherhood, she freezes her eggs. If parents want to select specific embryos, technicians run tests. If adults want someone else to carry the burden, they hire a surrogate.

RELATED: They met top tech experts behind closed doors. Now these religious leaders are urging Congress to act.

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The cultural message has shifted dramatically over two generations. Society used to tell young people that the biological clock actually ticks and that building a life with a special someone matters early on. Modern culture now tells them not to worry because science will grant extra decades. That promise sells a dangerous illusion. It tricks people into believing they can outrun the human body’s limits forever. And once people believe technology can overcome every natural limit, the next question becomes obvious.

Why stop at conception?

When parents screen, rank, and discard embryos based on calculated disease risk, physical attributes, or predicted intelligence, parental love starts looking like a trip to an online retail shop. Historically, a child arrived as a gift to be welcomed and cherished unconditionally. The tech-enabled model treats a child like a product customized before checkout.

For 50 years, Western society systematically dismantled the traditional family structure. Contraception severed physical intimacy from reproduction. Abortion severed pregnancy from parenthood. IVF severed conception from marriage. Donor eggs and surrogacy severed genetics from motherhood.

Now society is facing the consequences of that perverse experiment. Reproduction is becoming an expensive, institutionalized service completely independent of marriage and even pregnancy.

The demographic crisis facing the United States and the West is, in many ways, the logical result of modern incentives. Long-term commitment is treated as an unnecessary drag on personal mobility; marriage is now delayed until every career milestone is unlocked; and having children is viewed as something between a hindrance and a hazard. Silicon Valley can build all the productivity tools it wants, but innovation can’t offset a society increasingly uninterested in its own continuation.

Eugenics on demand

The tech industry naturally focuses on the paying customer, including the adults writing six-figure checks for surrogates and genetic testing. Nobody asks what the child wants. An infant doesn’t choose anonymous genetic donors, years spent in a cryo-preservation freezer, or half-siblings scattered across three continents. The fertility lobby endlessly preaches reproductive freedom for adults, completely ignoring the basic rights of the person being created.

No Nazi uniform is required to revive eugenics. Simply give parents enough data, enough options, enough cash, and a well-stocked dish of embryos, and biological selection quickly becomes good parenting.

Eventually, this dynamic introduces a brand-new form of inequality, far more consequential than the type blue-haired liberals whine about. Wealthy urban couples will screen hundreds of embryos to secure cognitive and physical advantages for their offspring, while working-class families struggle to afford baby formula. The political left spent half a century agonizing over income gaps, but conservatives ought to ask what happens when the stinking rich can literally buy superior genetics at a boutique clinic.

It’s a question occupying Waters’ mind, and the answer should concern anyone who cares about the future of America.

​Tech, Biotech, Ivf, Designer babies, Fertility, Family, Marriage 

From integration and national identity to the challenges posed by competing values and worldviews, BlazeTV host Nick Freitas and Konstantin Kisin examine whether Western nations have ignored the cultural consequences of mass immigration.

“This is fundamentally about cultural compatibility,” Freitas tells Kisin. “Some cultures merge well together, they work well together, they enhance one another, and some do not, because they’re openly hostile, because they want very different things.

“If we accept that as a premise,” he says, “and I certainly do, what should immigration policy look like? What should it look like in the U.K.?”

Despite believing Freitas framed it “exactly correctly,” Kisin wants to add some “nuance.”

“The big concern, obviously, and the thing people are always alluding to in Europe and also in the U.S. about the situation in Europe is Islam,” he explains.

“It’s become kind of very — not extreme, but very black and white on both sides of that debate. You know the left will say everyone’s equal, Muslims are wonderful … and increasingly, people on the right have a black and white view of it as well, which is the opposite of that,” he continues.

“Which is, you know, Muslims are terrible, they can’t be trusted,” he adds.

While it’s not always true that immigration is a negative, “importing a large number of people from a different culture is naturally disruptive, and Islam is particularly difficult because of it being a political ideology and a theology at the same time.”

“And that meshing together creates real tensions and problems,” he adds.

“Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK for $20 off subscriptions.

​Konstantin kisin, Nick freitas, Immigration, Islam, Muslims, Blazetv show 

Trump’s recent assembly of many of the very top people in AI must be counted among the most momentous political occasions in U.S. history — and perhaps human history. It comes at a time of extreme instability, uncertainty, and acceleration.

Even — or especially — those at the summit of tech and politics are unclear on what is going to happen and why. But they do know one thing: The nature of ultimate power on Earth is changing, and they are positioned to receive more of that power than almost anyone else.

Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us.

Power does not arrive alone. Rapidly acquiring unprecedented power brings anxiety, pressure, exhaustion, confusion, and the temptation to mistake possession for mastery.

The important thing about this is precisely that it is an experience. To deal with the consequences of a profound infusion of power is to plunge into the mysterious depths of being — the realm philosophers call ontology — in stark contrast to epistemology, the realm of knowing.

Power reminds us that knowledge arises from being, not the other way around.

For anyone operating at the highest levels of tech and politics, that reminder is crucial. Decades of bad modern philosophy and overzealous nerdery have encouraged the opposite idea: that being arises from knowledge.

That fake news is bad news. It feeds the fear that we have poured so much knowledge into machines that they are about to spring to life as an altogether new form of being — uncreated by God, no less — that will instantly dwarf and dominate us.

Yet one prominent techno-utopian belief treats the same prospect as good news, almost literally a new gospel. In this telling, the machine is not merely a rival life form. It becomes the vehicle for a new man. Rather than dwarfing and dominating us, the alien intelligence will fuse with us, becoming in effect a new god and a new soul, transforming us into Adam 2.0.

People who recoil from that prospect, and fear it could become real, are scrambling to fight or slow it through new law. The impulse is understandable. But it carries the seeds of its own failure.

RELATED: America’s ‘AI czar’ could revolutionize our form of government

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Christians know there are sharp limits to what lawgiving can accomplish. St. Paul wrote that, having died to what bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit rather than the old way of the written code (Romans 7:6). He also wrote that God “has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant — not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Paul’s point is spiritual, but it bears directly on our technological confusion. Treat lawgiving as the highest activity of man and God, and you begin to imagine that being arises from knowledge. If being arises from knowledge, then creating knowledge can create being — as if the Golem of Prague or Frankenstein’s monster could be brought to life by sufficient information.

That is not life. It is a parody of life: death pretending to be life and producing more death.

At the intersection of unprecedented technological and political power, we have to remember that epistemology is downstream, not upstream, of ontology.

That is why the new “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” signed by Trump and six of the industry’s most powerful executives, is so momentously uneventful. The companies say they “should implement” four basic layers of controls and audits: robust internal safety controls; an empowered internal team to make sure those controls work; an independent external auditor or evaluator; and an independent board committee to oversee the whole structure and make sure problems are fixed.

That’s it.

RELATED: Now they’re saying the AIs built ‘secret civilizations’ — the truth is far worse

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The accord adds that the companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices. “Over time,” it concludes, “it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.” But for now, no. Basically, it is a plan to get better organized about not screwing up the whole AI thing.

That may sound a little scary, considering how fast things are moving and how deep the trust gap has become between many Americans and the tech titans.

But it would be scarier if the companies threw themselves at the feet of lawgiving and tried to fob off responsibility onto a new written code. Because if they did that, they would in effect force the rest of us to do the same.

That kind of thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us. Christianity’s warning against pharisaical faith in the letter is not an invitation to lawlessness; it is a warning against confusing compliance with righteousness.

It is good that the accord is simple and unsensational. Strip away all the words, codes, boards, controls, and audits, and there are still people underneath — people who can run from responsibility but can never finally hide from it.

All told, the accord is being-first — human-being-first. That is exactly what it needs to be if we are to avoid the false faith that our identity is merely the slave of information.

​Ai, Trump, Algorithms, Huma beings, Americans, Big tech, White house, Christians, Power, Philosophy, God, Humanity, Ultimate power, Earth, Opinion & analysis 

When the Walter Reed scandal erupted in 2007, the officers under fire were more than names in a newspaper to me. I knew many of them. I saw their frustration and outrage as they scrambled to address failures some were only then discovering.

My wife, Gracie, and I were at Walter Reed frequently. A bilateral amputee herself, she had been invited to sing and spend time with wounded warriors, particularly women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with amputations. The military was struggling to care for troops with devastating injuries, many caused by improvised explosive devices.

We cannot turn the page simply because the people responsible do not want us to read it.

Knowing people working there helped me understand the strain. Knowing more wounded were coming helped me understand why the failures could not wait.

The Washington Post exposed serious problems in outpatient conditions and care, including mold, vermin, bureaucratic delays, and wounded soldiers falling through administrative cracks. The reporting was painful for people I knew. It was also necessary.

I discussed the scandal with my father, a retired Navy captain. The military, he explained, survives by folding painful lessons into its policies, procedures, and institutional memory so others do not have to learn them at the same cost.

That is what an after-action review is for: What happened? Why did it happen? What changes now?

The lesson must outlive the embarrassment.

When our leaders and the media lie, conceal, or confidently tell us something that later proves false, they do the heavy lifting for our enemies. How do we defend the country together when we cannot trust the people describing the danger?

Consider the assurances about President Biden’s capacity. In February 2024, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “He is sharp. He is on top of things.” In March, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough went much further, calling the sitting president “the best Biden ever” intellectually and analytically.

Then came the June debate and Biden’s withdrawal from the race in July.

The debate did not establish a medical diagnosis. It did demand an explanation from people who had spent months assuring the public that concerns about Biden’s capacity were misplaced.

In May 2025, Scarborough finally said, “I was obviously wrong.” He explained that his confidence came from extended personal encounters with Biden. Then he added that he was not sure what lesson to take from the episode.

That’s precisely the problem.

What evidence did he discount? What did he see that persuaded him? What did others see that contradicted it? What will he do differently next time?

RELATED: Gavin Newsom invoked Nietzsche. I thought of ‘Blazing Saddles.’

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Those questions belong not only to Scarborough but to every politician, aide, reporter, editor, broadcaster, and institution that gave the public confident assurances. An after-action review cannot end with “I was wrong” any more than it can end with “I meant well.”

The next people relying on you need to know what changed.

The border demands the same accounting. In September 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris said, “The border is secure.” In October 2023, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified that more than 600,000 known “gotaways” had evaded apprehension during that fiscal year.

What did “secure” mean? More important, what evidence would have caused the administration to abandon that description sooner?

An honest accounting must distinguish between what officials got wrong and what they knowingly concealed. That requires records, testimony, names, timelines, and decisions. Citizens should not have to settle for whichever explanation best protects a party, an administration, or a network.

We may expect politicians to lie. That does not excuse them. Nor does it relieve journalists of the obligation to test what politicians say rather than repeat it.

Over 40 years of caregiving, I have had plenty of doctors get things wrong. I understand the reluctance to offer a mea culpa. But I take their advice home and live with the consequences. If we are going to continue together, I need to know how the next decision will be better.

RELATED: The fourth bus of the Apocalypse

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That was the obligation at Walter Reed. The next wounded soldier needed the previous failure corrected whether anyone responsible felt sorry or not.

“Mistakes were made” leaves the authors conveniently absent. “Turn the page” asks the public to move on while the questions remain unanswered.

We cannot turn the page simply because the people responsible do not want us to read it.

Our enemies benefit from failures we refuse to examine. If those responsible will not come clean, voters should elect people willing to use lawful investigations, public hearings, compelled testimony, and the release of records to establish what happened. Where evidence establishes crimes, pursue prosecution.

But a hearing cannot become the place where accountability goes to die.

The Constitution provides authority. The law provides tools. Voters must supply people willing to use them.

This election, ask candidates whose records they will demand, which decisions they will examine, and whether their own allies will have to answer questions under oath. Anyone can promise to investigate an opponent. The test comes when the evidence reaches a friend.

I owe my preferred candidates and broadcasters that same scrutiny. Excusing them would preserve the very failure I want corrected.

We can disagree on policy and still defend this country shoulder to shoulder. But we cannot make truth optional. Calls for unity ring hollow when the people asking for trust refuse to account for how they broke it.

Our children will inherit whatever we excuse.

​Walter reed medical center, Hospitals, Trust, Washington post, Msnbc, Joe biden, Kamala harris, Wounded warriors, Doctors, Constitution, Opinion & analysis 

Philadelphia is full of must-see locations on sightseeing trips: Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, the Art Museum, to name a few.

But in a city known for its cheesesteaks as well as for its nation-shaping historical landmarks, one eatery stands tall: Pat’s King of Steaks.

‘This guy just messed with South Philly … we don’t forget!’

Pat’s has been around for almost 100 years, according to the colorful sign sitting above the South Philly establishment on East Passyunk Avenue. You might also recall it was a filming location for the 1976 Oscar-winning movie “Rocky.”

And while Pat’s certainly contends with plenty of competition around town these days, and the ongoing who-has-the-best-cheesesteak argument certainly opens the door for many opinions, one unhappy customer took things too far Wednesday.

General manager Tom Francano — who has worked at Pat’s for nearly 50 years — told KYW-TV the customer walked up to the window and ordered a cheesesteak.

Then about 10 minutes later, the customer returned with the opened cheesesteak and said, “This steak’s garbage,” Francano recalled to KYW.

Francano added to the station that he and the customer had a back-and-forth over the sandwich’s quality, and then Francano took an informal poll, asking other customers about their cheesesteaks — after which the patrons replied that they were satisfied.

“That’s when he got a little pissed off. He got mad, and he picked the steak up and threw it at me,” Francano told KYW, adding that he thought the customer might be a social media influencer. “He had this phone on, you know, on a pole, taking pictures outside and everything.”

RELATED: Armed South Philly residents guard Columbus statue from vandalism — and leftist mayor, district attorney call them vigilantes, ‘criminal bullies’

“I was pretty pissed off, you know. I’m not used to getting a steak thrown in my face, you know. I mean, if you don’t like the steak, be a little nicer about it,” Francano added to the station in the aftermath.

Shop owner Frank Olivieri told the station he reviewed video showing the customer ripping the cheesesteak apart by hand before approaching the window.

“The guy picked the sandwich up, threw it in his face, and ran away — the coward,” Oliveri told KYW.

“He assaulted my employee, so we’ll see how many of his friends that he has online are really his friends, see who’s going to turn him in first,” Olivieri added to the station. “The power of the camera, AI, we’ll find him. We’ll find him. $5,000, we’ll pull him out of whatever rock he’s living under right now.”

Yes, Pat’s offered a pretty penny for information leading to an arrest and charges in the incident, the station said.

But it appears the cash may not have been necessary.

A Philadelphia police spokesperson told KYW that a man turned himself in Thursday and was charged with harassment.

“This whole Streaming for Clout thing is getting out of hand … stuff like this needs to be stopped,” one commenter under the above video stated. “This guy just messed with South Philly … we don’t forget!”

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​Cheesesteak, Philadelphia, Pat’s king of steaks, Physical attack, Harassment, Arrest, Social media, Crime 

We live in a day when a teenager with a smartphone can perform tasks governments couldn’t fathom just three decades ago, says Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck is already disturbed by this strange reality, but he knows the technology in the pipeline will make our current capabilities seem like child’s play. “Something’s now being built that will hand every one of us abilities that we have not earned, we have not personally developed, and we were not formed to carry,” he warns.

He is referring, of course, to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, which many experts and developers have warned could spiral out of control and turn on humanity.

It seems like a new problem, but it’s actually as old as time itself, says Glenn.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” he connects Genesis, the book of Enoch, the Tower of Babel, and one of the Old Testament’s final warnings to ask a question we may soon be forced to reckon with: What happens when technological capabilities develop faster than our ability to handle them?

Glenn, citing both Genesis and the book of Enoch, recounts the story of how he believes the giant human-demon hybrids called Nephilim came to be.

“200 [Watchers] come down on a mountain [Mount Hermon] … and they bind themselves by an oath because each one knows the other is going to lose the nerve. So what do they do? Among other things, they open a school,” he says.

“One of them teaches metalworking: swords, knives, armor. Along with it, how to grind minerals into paint for the face and dye for the cloth. Others teach reading the stars and the property of roots and plants and cutting of spells,” he continues. “And the account doesn’t say they taught lies. It says they taught things that were true and the earth was ruined by it.”

Glenn says the fact that true things ushered in destruction, including the great flood, is the “weirdest part of the story” for him.

“The crime was the calendar. It arrived early. It arrived unearned from a source with no interest in what it would do to the people who received it. The giants in the story are simply the result — something enormous born of that union with an appetite that the earth couldn’t feed,” he says.

The Tower of Babel followed the same trajectory and was also thwarted by God, he notes.

But Enoch, according to Latter-day Saint scripture, converted a people who became so unified — “of one heart and one mind,” with “no poor among them” — that God named them Zion and took their city into heaven, Glenn explains.

“Same architecture, opposite foundation. One is built out of what people became, and the other is built out of what some people could engineer,” he says.

He wonders if artificial intelligence is a modern-day Mount Hermon or Babel.

“We’re being sold the Tower of Babel — a merged intelligence, a unified mind, every problem solved by consolidation. It’s Enoch’s city offered without the price that Enoch had to pay,” he says.

If the world of the Nephilim and the city of Babel were both destroyed for grabbing power before they had the character to hold it, what’s to stop it from happening a third time, he wonders.

To answer that question, Glenn looks at God’s warning to mankind in Malachi 4:5-6: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

“He’s threatening a repeat,” says Glenn.

The verse names only one stay of judgment: the hearts of fathers and children — not rulers, walls, laws, or restricted knowledge.

“The [Watcher] school on that mountain was teaching knowledge, and it was unearned. … Fatherhood without fatherhood, capability handed down by beings with no stake in the children receiving it — no relationship, no formation, nothing owed, just given — give a child a blade and no reason to sheath it, and you have manufactured a giant,” says Glenn.

He points out how human flight and nuclear fission were discovered at the same time by people with no connection to each other. That’s not coincidence but divine timing, Glenn argues. “We earned [that knowledge]. We controlled it. We’ve been responsible with it.”

But artificial intelligence, he says, is not following that same trajectory. It’s ushering in knowledge at a rate strikingly similar to the empires built by the ancient Watchers and the builders of Babel.

Enoch and Elijah, Glenn notes, are the only two men in the Bible who do not die — and that’s not a coincidence in his opinion. Enoch is “the man sent to deliver the verdict on the first bad transfer of knowledge,” he says, and Elijah is the man who will be “sent back before the last day to repair fathers and children, which may be now — another time of bad transfer of knowledge.”

“The danger in new technology is almost never the technology; it’s the interval between when a capability arrives and when the character to hold it arrives,” he says.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, Glenn wonders if the technology was “received or seized.”

While he has no hopes that AI development will slow down before it reaches dystopian potential, he does have hope in people.

“Turn your heart to the Father and to the children,” he pleads.

To hear more, watch the video above.

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Horror has always had a respectability problem. But filmmakers eventually discovered a useful trick for getting around it: Make the monster a metaphor.

The creature in “The Babadook” isn’t merely a boogeyman under the bed; it’s grief and depression. “It Follows” has been read as everything from an allegory for sexually transmitted disease to a story about sexual trauma and mortality. Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” turned body-snatching horror into an examination of race and liberal paternalism. Even “Hereditary,” which gives us actual demons, comes wrapped in grief, mental illness, and inherited trauma.

Moore was said to have been decapitated, horribly echoing the death Richardson had devised for the movie.

Nothing wrong with that. Horror works best when it gives physical form to intangible fears.

But the metaphor also provides a convenient escape hatch. Whatever battles of principalities and powers we see on screen, we know the real horror lurks in our minds — best addressed with modern, morally neutral techniques like therapy.

Asking us to believe in monsters that stand for nothing more than themselves — real monsters, in other words — takes us uncomfortably close to an idea Christianity has maintained for 2,000 years: Supernatural evil actually exists.

It’s no wonder filmmakers who want their commercial success with a side of art-house respectability don’t often go there.

But there might be another reason as well. When filmmakers do attempt to depict the devil, he has a curious way of making himself known through strange disruptions to the production: fires, equipment failures, injuries, even death.

Almost as if he would prefer to be dismissed as a fairy tale.

Here are six movies that took supernatural evil seriously — and the strange things that happened while people were making them.

1. ‘The Exorcist’

If any movie were ever cursed, surely it was “The Exorcist.” William Friedkin’s 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel has plenty to say about a broken family, psychiatric medicine, and a priest suffering a crisis of faith.

But when Regan MacNeil starts speaking in strange voices and contorting her body, “The Exorcist” is blunt about the cause: demonic possession. Friedkin brings an almost documentary realism to material that might otherwise have been safely dismissed as gothic fantasy. Audiences fainted, vomited, and fled theaters. The movie became a cultural phenomenon.

And if the stories that emerged from the production are to be believed, audiences weren’t the only ones disturbed by its unflinching treatment of evil. The trouble started before Friedkin had even begun shooting in Iraq. A statue of Pazuzu, the demon who possesses Regan, had been built in Burbank and shipped to Mosul for the movie’s opening sequence. It never arrived.

Somehow, Pazuzu ended up in Denmark. “It was lost,” Friedkin recalled years later. Shooting in Iraq was delayed for weeks while somebody presumably worked out how to get the demon to the right country.

Things got worse back in New York. In the early hours of the morning, a fire tore through the set of the MacNeil house at 20th Century Fox’s studio on West 54th Street.

“The production manager called me at 4 a.m. and said, ‘Don’t bother to come to work today,’” Friedkin later recalled.

“I said, ‘Why? Am I fired?’”

No. The set had burned to the ground. Well, most of it had. Regan’s bedroom — the room where Friedkin was filming the exorcism — survived. Investigators never established what caused the fire. Friedkin later blamed a pigeon that had flown into a light box.

Production shut down for six weeks while the set was rebuilt. Then Ellen Burstyn hurt her back. During the scene in which Regan strikes her mother, a stuntman attached to a wire was supposed to yank Burstyn backward. After several takes, Burstyn told Friedkin that the stuntman was pulling too hard.

“Well, it has to look real,” she remembered him replying.

On the next take, she landed hard on her coccyx and screamed in genuine pain. Friedkin kept the camera rolling. Burstyn later summed up her relationship with the director rather neatly: “He was always great with me. Except when he permanently injured my spine.”

Burstyn went on to do many more films. Others in the cast weren’t so lucky. Jack MacGowran, who plays director Burke Dennings — murdered by the possessed Regan in the movie — finished his work and died of influenza at 54. Vasiliki Maliaros, who played Father Karras’ mother, also died during production.

In the 1998 BBC documentary “The Fear of God: 25 Years of ‘The Exorcist,'” Burstyn remembers others connected with the production dying as well: the newborn child of an assistant cameraman, the man responsible for refrigerating the bedroom set, and a night watchman.

None died in accidents while shooting the movie. But there were enough deaths, injuries, delays, and other mishaps that people began talking about a curse.

The actor playing the conflicted priest and trained psychiatrist who attempts to save Regan got a more explicit warning. In “The Fear of God,” Jason Miller recalls eating and studying his lines at the Jesuit residence while filming at Georgetown. One day, an elderly priest handed him a medal of the Blessed Virgin and asked whether Miller had ever heard of “intervention.”

“If you do anything on the devil, anything at all on the devil to reveal him as the trickster that he is,” Miller remembered the priest telling him, “he will seek retribution against you, or he will even try to stop what you’re trying to do to unmask him.”

The priest told Miller the medal would protect him.

About three days later, Miller was walking through the Jesuit residence on his way to dinner when something caught his eye in one of the side rooms. He went back and looked, only to see the old priest lying there in a casket.

By 1974, Castle of Frankenstein magazine was running an article with the wonderfully unsubtle headline The Curse That Hangs Over “The Exorcist.”

Eventually, Friedkin called the Rev. Thomas Bermingham, the Jesuit priest serving as a technical adviser to the movie.

“Would you come down and exorcise the set?” Bermingham recalled Friedkin asking in “The Fear of God.”

Bermingham refused. “I don’t want to increase anxiety or anything like that,” he told him. But Bermingham wasn’t laughing off the possibility that they had gotten themselves into something strange.

“There was definitely a feeling that it could happen,” he says in the documentary. “We were playing around with something. I even felt it. I felt we were playing around with something I shouldn’t be playing around with.”

He blessed the production instead, just in case.

2. ‘The Passion of the Christ’

Mel Gibson’s 2004 “The Passion of the Christ” isn’t a horror movie, although anyone who has sat through the scourging scene might dispute the point.

But neither is it the kind of “faith-based” film that confines the battle between sin and redemption to the dialogue. Gibson keeps the personification of evil in the frame.

Satan stalks Jesus through Gethsemane. He moves through the crowd as Christ suffers. During the scourging, he carries a grotesque child. After Christ’s death, Gibson cuts away from Calvary to show Satan defeated. On screen, Satan can only howl in rage. What happened off screen suggests a more active opposition.

Jim Caviezel, the man playing Jesus, was struck by lightning. Producer Steve McEveety recalled seeing the bolt hit him from roughly 100 feet away. Assistant director Jan Michelini was struck too.

Which would already make for a pretty good story, except Michelini had reportedly been struck by lightning once before during the same production.

Caviezel later joked that the strike lit him up “like a Christmas tree.” Contemporary reports said neither man was seriously injured.

Caviezel had previously turned down three opportunities to play Jesus. He accepted Gibson’s offer because, he later said, he sensed the director’s commitment to telling the Passion story “without restraint.”

Be careful what you pray for.

The lightning strike was far from the only hardship. Caviezel separated his shoulder carrying the cross. He developed hypothermia while hanging nearly naked in bitter winds during the crucifixion scenes, followed by pneumonia and a lung infection. The elaborate makeup left his skin raw. During the scourging, one of the actors missed the protective board behind Caviezel and struck him across the back hard enough to tear the skin.

At one particularly miserable point, hanging on the cross in the cold, Caviezel remembered crying out to God:

“So you don’t want this movie to be made?”

Caviezel kept making it anyway; appropriately enough, the suffering itself began to serve the movie. He received Communion daily, prayed the rosary during the long hours in makeup, and went to confession during production.

Caviezel also came to see his suffering as part of what made the performance work. Recreating the crucifixion on a comfortable soundstage, he later said, would have lost some of its “effect and reality.” The cold, the injuries, the exhaustion — things that might have stopped another production — became part of the movie Gibson and Caviezel had set out to make.

3. ‘The Omen’

If “The Exorcist” created the cursed-movie template, “The Omen” perfected it.

The 1976 movie is even less interested in metaphor. The little boy at the center of the story really is the Antichrist, and the people who figure this out have a nasty habit of dying before they can do much about it.

Bob Munger, the advertising executive who helped originate the premise, later recalled warning producer Harvey Bernhard about making the movie in the first place.

“If the devil’s greatest single weapon is to be invisible,” Munger told him, “and you’re going to do something which takes away his invisibility to millions of people, he won’t want that to happen.”

Bernhard eventually became convinced Munger was right. “The devil was at work,” he said years later.

The stories began before audiences had even seen the movie. In April 1976, New York magazine was already reporting that Gregory Peck’s plane had been struck by lightning while he was traveling to London to make “The Omen.” The magazine named screenwriter David Seltzer and director Richard Donner in connection with troubled flights as well. Executive producer Mace Neufeld later recalled a lightning strike on his own flight. The surviving accounts make it difficult to say exactly how many people were struck by lightning, which is not ordinarily a problem a movie production has.

The close calls continued once Neufeld reached London. He later recalled walking out of his London hotel with his wife when a bomb exploded about a block and a half away. The couple also had reservations at Scott’s, the Mayfair restaurant bombed by the IRA in November 1975. Both bombings are real; Neufeld recounted his brushes with them in the 2020 documentary series “Cursed Films.”

For one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, Damien visits a safari park and the baboons go berserk at the sight of him. The sequence was filmed at Windsor Safari Park. During the production period, 22-year-old keeper Sidney Bamford was killed there by a tiger. Later curse accounts claimed the keeper died immediately after the filmmakers shot the sequence. Contemporary reports establish the tiger attack, but not that timing or that Bamford personally worked with the movie.

And then there was the airplane the filmmakers didn’t take. Donner later recalled that the production had intended to use an aircraft for aerial filming, only to lose it at the last minute when it was reassigned to Chinese customers. According to the story, the plane subsequently crashed.

There was a remarkably similar accident during production. On November 20, 1975, a Hawker Siddeley executive jet carrying a Chinese delegation took off from Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey, flew into a flock of lapwings, lost power in both engines, overran the runway, and struck a passing car.

All nine people aboard the aircraft survived. All six people in the car died.

The timing and the Chinese passengers make it a plausible match for the crash Donner remembered. What the investigation doesn’t establish is that “The Omen” crew had ever booked that particular plane.

The strangest story came after “The Omen” was finished.

Special-effects designer John Richardson had helped create one of the movie’s most gruesome deaths. Photographer Keith Jennings is standing by the side of a road when a sheet of glass slides from a truck and takes off his head. Richardson’s effects team accomplished it with a rigged dummy and replica of actor David Warner’s head.

In August 1976, Richardson was in the Netherlands working on “A Bridge Too Far” when he was involved in a car crash. Richardson survived. Sculptor Liz Moore, traveling with him, did not. Biographical accounts date her death to August 13.

Over the years, the accident acquired two details that made it irresistible to anyone writing about the curse of “The Omen.” Moore was said to have been decapitated, horribly echoing the death Richardson had devised for the movie. And Richardson was said to have emerged from the wreck near a road sign reading:

Ommen — 66.6 km.

The crash and Moore’s death are well attested. Those two grisly details are not. No contemporary report or official record located in our research establishes that Moore was decapitated. Richardson did later recall a roadside marker involving sixes and a road leading toward Ommen, but the famous “Ommen — 66.6 km” sign has never been independently verified.

By then it hardly mattered. “The Omen” had acquired a curse almost as elaborate as its screenplay.

Fox eventually made the legend part of the product. By 2000, the DVD included a featurette called “Curse or Coincidence?”

4. ‘The Possession’

The 2012 movie “The Possession” had something most demon movies don’t: a supposedly genuine haunted object behind it.

The “dybbuk box” was an old wine cabinet whose strange history had first attracted widespread attention on eBay. Kevin Mannis supplied a terrifying history involving a Holocaust survivor and a malicious Jewish spirit. Owners supposedly experienced nightmares, illnesses, and other misfortunes.

The story spread online, made its way into newspapers, and eventually became the inspiration for a Hollywood movie.

Then odd things started happening on the movie.

Director Ole Bornedal recalled production lights exploding even though they weren’t switched on. About a week after filming ended, he said, a warehouse containing props from the movie burned; Bornedal said he never learned what caused the fire.

Years later came a fairly devastating blow to the legend: Mannis admitted that he had invented the box’s elaborate backstory. So much for the haunted box.

Except Mannis inventing a story about a wine cabinet doesn’t explain why Bornedal said lights exploded. It doesn’t explain the warehouse fire either.

Bornedal himself offered the best skeptical argument. “Would we have noticed if this had been a ‘Love Story’? Perhaps not.”

RELATED: Inside the mind of a Catholic exorcist: Fr. Chad Ripperger talks shop with Shawn Ryan

Photo by SIMON WOHLFAHRT/AFP via Getty Images

5. ‘The Omen’ (2006)

Thirty years after the original “Omen,” Fox decided to make it again, if only to take advantage of a uniquely demonic release date: June 6, 2006, or 6/6/06.

Director John Moore had been raised Catholic, and maybe that’s why he found the strange happenings that befell him so unnerving.

Two days of footage involving the discovery of Damien’s 666 birthmark were destroyed. Moore received an airfare costing exactly $666. And a promotional videotape apparently wound up overwritten with ESPN footage even though, Moore said, the machine wasn’t capable of recording.

Moore was disturbed enough to wonder whether making the movie might offend God. Eventually, he reasoned that a movie acknowledging the existence of evil necessarily acknowledged the existence of good.

As for Fox, the curse was great publicity. Although perhaps even the box-office bean counters were a little shaken by the movie’s first-day box office:

$12,633,666.

What were the odds? Pretty good, as it turned out. Fox distribution executive Bruce Snyder admitted that the studio had adjusted the reported estimate to give it the demonic final digits.

“We were having a little fun,” he said.

6. ‘The Deliverance’

By the time Lee Daniels made “The Deliverance” in 2024, the old stories had become part of Hollywood folklore.

Daniels had read about what supposedly happened during the making of “The Exorcist” and “Poltergeist.” His Episcopalian mother warned him about making a movie dealing with demonic evil.

“She was just like, ‘You are a portal. You work from a place of groundedness, and your soul is open, and I don’t want anything bad happening to you,’” Daniels recalled.

He took precautions. The production brought in an ordained Christian who conducted deliverances on set. Daniels also instituted daily prayer circles.

“We prayed every day,” he said.

Netflix HR reminded him that Christian prayer couldn’t be mandatory. Daniels told anyone who didn’t want to participate that they were free to leave.

“There were a few that left, but for the most part, most of them wanted to be covered by the blood of Jesus,” he recalled. “They knew what was up.”

The precautions didn’t prevent “The Deliverance” from acquiring a curse story of its own.

Daniels’ sister had appeared in every movie he made as his “good luck charm.” For “The Deliverance,” she appeared in a scene with Glenn Close involving chemotherapy.

Two days later, Daniels said, his sister was diagnosed with lung cancer.

“My dog died on set,” he added.

Mo’Nique had a more explicable brush with the supposed curse. While filming an outdoor scene involving a demon, Mo’Nique said material being blown around the set made it difficult for her to breathe. Afterward, she was hospitalized with an enlarged thyroid.

“It was a lot of things happening with ‘The Deliverance,’” she recalled.

None of this proves that anything supernatural was happening. Mo’Nique herself described a perfectly physical reason for becoming ill. Cancer diagnoses and dead dogs require no demonic explanation.

But half a century after “The Exorcist,” Daniels went into another movie about demonic possession worried enough about the old curse stories to pray over his set every day and bring in someone to perform deliverances.

Then his sister got cancer, his dog died, and one of his stars wound up in the hospital.

​Entertainment, Cursed films, Movies, The exorcist, The passion of the christ, Jim caviezel, Mel gibson, The omen, Culture, Satan, Evil, Christianity, Faith 

John Cleese must feel very lonely.

Not only is the Monty Python alum virtually alone in calling out the inconvenient ills of British society, but he rarely gets support from his fellow stars.

It’s climate change alarmism run wild, a shocking project from an actor who aggressively avoids political hot takes.

Cowards, the lot of ’em.

Now, things could be getting serious. A British Muslim group has reported Cleese to the authorities for his “anti-Islamic” comments. It’s not funny. Just ask Graham Linehan. The British comic/writer got arrested last year for his thoughts on transgenderism.

Will Cleese be next? Just know that if he’s sent to the hoosegow, free speech “warriors” like Jimmy Kimmel and Howard Stern will remain whisper-silent …

Woody’s buzz

Woody Allen is heading back to work at the age of 90.

The quasi-canceled auteur is prepping his next film, a story he describes as “a comedy with romance, intrigue, and infidelity.”

The more things change, right?

Except some things have changed for Allen. A-listers now flee his projects, fearful of the MeToo blowback. Did Allen inappropriately touch his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow many years ago? For a while, Hollywood shrugged off the accusations. Then, after the #MeToo revolution, “name” stars stopped working with him.

There’s an easy fix for him. All he needs to do is shout, “Free Palestine,” and he could be back in the industry’s good graces again …

Green party

Hulk still mad!

Mark Ruffalo has been obsessed with the Paramount/Warner Bros. merger for some time. “Merger bad!” he cried from every possible venue.

Now, with the deal close to fruition, he’s still sounding off.

“This merger will stifle creativity, weaken free speech, and cost people their jobs — it is a bad deal for this country and should never have been approved.”

Huh. We don’t remember Ruffalo tearing his trousers over Disney’s acquisition of Fox, or the rampant attacks on free speech during the woke era …

Hulk hypocrite!

RELATED: ‘View’ host questions Patrick Clancy’s divorce: ‘You know, in sickness and in health’

Lou Rocco/Boston Globe/Getty Images

S is for ‘socialism’

Jon Stewart is getting a tad touchy.

The far-Left “Daily Show” host has been kissing up to socialists for quite a while now. Watching him lob softballs at Zohran Mamdani gave us one undeniable thought. “Get a room.”

Now, he’s recoiling at being labeled a socialist.

And, you know, now the buzzword on, on the right is, oh, so you’re, you know, you want socialism. Well, no, I want to stop privatizing things that don’t work well in a market system like health care, like Medicare, like all those things that are getting ruined by privatization and insurance, and all those different markets and rebalance so that labor gets a fairer shake.”

Fair shake? He blasts income inequality and is a millionaire many times over. And if George Soros graced his Comedy Central studio, he would ask even more gentle questions than the ones that greeted Mamdani.

If you don’t want the “S” label on your jersey, Jon, maybe ask a tough question or two of the next DSA member who enters your studio …

Goofy ‘Globes’

There’s plenty to laugh at regarding the annual Golden Globes gala. The awards remain in the shadow of the Academy Awards, for starters. Nominees are known to hit the bar, and hard, between announcements. Plus, unusual nominees and bizarre categories are still the norm.

Now this.

“Obsession,” the year’s most unlikely blockbuster, will compete for Globe honors in the Comedy/Musical category. The horror film isn’t remotely funny, beyond some gallows humor that runs through many a horror tale. And if there was a musical number between star Inde Navarrette’s murderous rages, we missed it.

As long as the Globes cling to such insane categories, they will remain a punching bag for all things Hollywood …

‘Digger’ in deep

Steven Spielberg famously praised Tom Cruise for “saving” Hollywood with “Top Gun: Maverick.” The blockbuster coaxed moviegoers back to theaters after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, Cruise may be an anchor around the neck of a major movie studio.

Warner Bros., about to be gobbled up by Paramount, spent a reported $180 million on Cruise’s new film, “Digger.” The black comedy casts Cruise as a Southern oil tycoon whose drilling station sparks an ecological panic.

It’s climate change alarmism run wild, a shocking project from an actor who aggressively avoids political hot takes.

The film is getting some awful reviews, deservedly so, and could lose Warner Bros. millions.

How many? The conservative estimate is at least $100 million. Crunch the numbers on a cocktail napkin, and you might want to double that figure. “Digger” is looking at a $12 million opening, at best.

Once word of mouth kicks in, it’s good night, Gracie.

Did Hollywood’s onetime savior just dig an iconic studio’s grave?

​Warner bros, Climate change alarmism, Tom cruise, Islam, John cleese, Hollywood, Entertainment, Movies, Digger, Paramount, Mark ruffalo, Lifestyle, Woody allen, Jon stewart, Zohran mamdani, The daily show, Socialism, Toto recall 

On May 13, 2026, CIA senior operations officer James Erdman III appeared under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He was testifying despite his agency’s objections.

Erdman had recently led an investigation for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s “Director’s Initiatives Group” into COVID-19 origins, anomalous health incidents, and UFOs. What he told the senators was explosive.

‘We just want to clear the air. We did not take back documents.’

“Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional,” Erdman testified. He said Fauci had steered the intelligence community’s COVID-origins analysis by supplying “a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts,” several of whom co-wrote the paper dismissing the lab-leak theory.

Inside the CIA, Erdman said, six of the seven technical experts involved in a COVID relook favored a lab-leak conclusion. Management changed the assessment anyway in what he called a “middle-of-the-night anonymous rewrite.”

Then came the allegation that set House members on fire.

“The CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of DIG personnel, their investigations, and contact with whistleblowers,” Erdman said. “When the DIG ceased operations, the CIA took back 40 boxes of JFK and MK-Ultra files being processed for declassification by DNI Gabbard.”

Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) read aloud a statement the CIA had just released calling the hearing “dishonest political theater.” Then he turned to Erdman. “I have years and years and years of built-up frustration of agencies like the CIA, Department of Justice, the FBI, HHS, snubbing our oversight, giving us the big middle finger,” Johnson said.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), chairwoman of the House declassification task force, called the episode “an internal coup.” She and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) took to social media demanding that the files be returned. Within a day, the CIA invited them to headquarters.

On May 14, Burlison and Luna stood before the Memorial Wall at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, its 141 stars carved into white marble for officers who died in the line of duty.

They had surrendered their phones. No aides were allowed, no notepads, no recording devices. If anyone later disputed what was said, there would be no way to prove it.

They were led up an elevator to the top floor and through narrow, winding hallways. Burlison was struck by how ordinary it felt: a sterile cubicle farm straight out of a “Dilbert” cartoon.

The meeting was supposed to be with CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Instead, they were met by the agency’s archivist, a woman in her late 50s who oversaw two football fields’ worth of paper files.

RELATED: Fauci’s agency backed an experiment aerosolizing lethal Ebola — then he panicked about what it exposed about vaccination

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Ratcliffe, they were told, was “out of pocket.” They later learned he was in Cuba.

“We just want to clear the air,” the archivist began. “We did not take back documents.”

In the CIA’s telling, when President Trump ordered the JFK records released, Gabbard’s team showed up unannounced and demanded them. The CIA objected to the files leaving in the team’s personal cars and insisted on moving them in its own secure vans.

About 300 boxes were handed over, the CIA said, while 42 were at another location being processed. When those were ready, according to the agency, it notified the DNI’s office.

Burlison saw the irony. The CIA was telling the office that oversees it that it could not be trusted with the files.

“You do recognize that there’s a point of friction between the CIA and the ODNI,” he told them, “and there’s a reason ODNI came in without informing you that they were coming? There’s clearly a level of mistrust between the two organizations.”

RELATED: Deep-staters at FBI framed Trump firing Comey as a Russian op — then apparently worked to cover their tracks

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

They acknowledged it. They also agreed that the CIA spokesperson’s public attacks were unacceptable.

“The way they conducted themselves in the meeting was almost like they were a kid caught doing something wrong,” Burlison told me afterward, “and were profusely apologetic, and desperately trying to figure out, ‘How do we de-escalate the situation?'”

Burlison left without a clear answer about what was in those 42 boxes or whether the CIA had pulled them before Gabbard’s team could review them. The CIA also said there were 11 more boxes the DNI would never be allowed to see because they contained tradecraft secrets.

He wasn’t interested in de-escalating.

Two and a half months later, Luna told me the CIA had located the files and placed them in line for declassification.

But it took a whistleblower defying his own agency, a Senate subpoena, and two members of Congress walking into Langley to get there.

If the task force doesn’t survive November, who will make that walk next time?

Editor’s note: This article is excerpted from “Book of Secrets: Congress Tries to Find the Truth About the Deep State,” by Kent Heckenlively (Permuted Press).

​Anna paulina luna, Cia, Covid19, Eric burlison, Fbi, Homeland security, Odni, Opinion & analysis, Ron johnson, Senate, Tulsi gabbard, Whistleblower, Jfk files, Mk ultra 

As voting day approaches quickly, BlazeTV host Steve Deace believes Republicans are making a critical mistake: focusing too much on what they’re for and not enough on who they’re running against.

Laying out what he calls a political survival strategy, Deace urges GOP candidates at every level to embrace far more aggressive campaign messaging.

“The biggest strength we have is who we’re running against,” Deace explains, noting that this “is what the strategic plan should be.”

“I’m looking at what’s been used against me in the past and done so successfully and can I emulate it in a way that doesn’t violate my own worldview?” he says, “And in this case, the answer is yes. We’re not going to bear false witness.”

“We don’t have to, like they do calling us Nazis, but we’re just going to say they’re anti-American communists. We’re going to try to drive turnout down,” he adds.

While he admits that may sound “cynical,” he doesn’t care.

“I like my way of winning better than your way of losing,” he says.

“Drive down turnout. This is what they did in 2022. Drive down normie turnout because … basically every normie voter is going to just assume they’re voting against us. Our margins with normies are like minus 30 or something,” he continues.

Deace says that the Republican Party needs to assume that these “normies” will be “voting against us.”

“Drive down as much of that normie vote as you can,” he explains. “Make the environment as negative and toxic as you can.”

This strategy is one of survival, and Deace concludes it with three parts: “Drive down normie turnout, heighten the negative messaging on who our opponents really are, and try to heal the fractures within our coalition as best we can by what people are actually united against, rather than trying to message to them things they’re never going to be united for.”

Want more from Steve Deace?

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

​Steve deace, Midterms, Election, Republicans, Democrats, Messaging, Strategy, Voting, Blazetv show 

AI is coming for our jobs. It may even come for our lives. At least, that’s the assumption increasingly baked into modern life. We’re told machines will soon diagnose our illnesses, program our software, drive our cars, and leave millions of humans wondering what, exactly, they’re still good for.

What if that assumption is badly wrong?

Alejandro Rodriguez, a 20-year-old with a 4.5 GPA who spent his formative years in gifted and talented programs, certainly believes it is. By the conventional American definition of success, he was exactly the sort of kid who should have been pushed toward a four-year college. Instead, he chose technical school and trained to become a Porsche technician. His decision points to something the AI panic often overlooks. There is still an enormous number of things humans need to know how to do in the real world, and they can’t be done with a prompt. They require skill, judgment, patience, and the ability to do something useful with your hands.

The deeper problem is not AI itself. Instead, it is the growing belief that everything humans learn will eventually become worthless. That mindset is pure poison. If young people assume AI will eventually do every meaningful task, why bother learning carpentry, mechanics, welding, electrical work, cooking, nursing, or other practical skills? Why even bother getting out of bed in the morning? The irony is impossible to ignore. The more people believe humans are obsolete, the less capable humans become.

A cultural correction

America spent decades telling smart kids that success meant sitting at a desk in a fancy office, filling out spreadsheets until their mid-60s. Now tech executives are shipping code designed to render those exact spreadsheet-fillers redundant. A cultural correction is under way. Being able to rebuild a blown engine, wire a high-voltage circuit, repair a factory line, or build a house has real value because some things still have to be done by human beings.

AI will eliminate or transform some jobs. That is true. Yet a huge canyon separates a software model generating text from a physical entity that replaces millions of workers navigating unpredictable, real-world environments. A chatbot can generate a textbook explanation of a Porsche’s dual-clutch transmission. The chatbot cannot crawl onto a cold concrete floor on a Tuesday morning to replace the clutch pack.

Certain tech prophets display a peculiar brand of fatalism. They demand that humans accept the swift death of their own relevance as an act of faith. This doctrine breeds its own fulfillment. Tell an entire generation that their talents are dead on arrival, and they stop pursuing difficult trades. When the nation runs out of people who can fix a broken water main, the technocrats blame automated progress rather than the cultural disdain that killed off the workforce.

RELATED: Our military turns off this invasive smartphone feature. So should you.

Thx4Stock/Getty images

America suffers from a competence famine. The economy needs citizens who can execute physical tasks correctly. Someone has to run the copper pipe, construct the frame, mend the bone, operate the lathe, and keep the power grid online. Software models function exceptionally well in environments made purely of data. The physical world remains stubbornly physical.

Rodriguez isn’t alone in obliterating America’s long-standing myth. A growing wave of high schoolers like him are drawing headlines of their own. “Elijah Rios won’t graduate from high school until next year, but he already has a job offer,” the Wall Street Journal recently reported, “one that pays $68,000 a year.” His Catholic high school in Philadelphia partners with companies looking for recruits before they even graduate. The Journal has been tracking such companies’ struggles to find hires from the typical job pools for years. Last year, Missouri senior Jenna Smith, with a 3.98 GPA and National Honor Society participation at Francis Howell High, chose to become a welder like her grandfather.

Guidance counselors and, often, parents can be slow to go along with the shifting tides. They have long treated technical trades as a consolation prize for academic failures. High marks meant a liberal arts degree, followed by 40 years of answering emails.

But high intelligence has zero natural connection to desktop work. A student can master advanced calculus and still prefer the immediate reality of a machine shop.

Competence or bust

The classic path — straight A’s leading to a university degree leading to an entry-level cubicle — is breaking at the midpoint. Automated systems are devouring the very administrative roles that university graduates relied on to pay off their student debt. Higher education still serves a clear purpose for specialized fields. But the blanket belief that a four-year degree represents the sole respectable entrance into adulthood no longer holds.

In a world made of bits, AI rules supreme. Silicon Valley coders write scripts that spit out screenplays and analyze legal contracts in seconds. Outside the server farm, rain leaks through roof shingles. Electrical transformers blow out during winter storms. Hydraulic lines rupture on garbage trucks. Millions of daily crises require spatial reasoning and fingers and thumbs.

Predicting the labor market in 2045 remains a fool’s game. AI could reshape whole industries before Christmas, or it could hit insurmountable barriers regarding energy consumption, hardware limits, and regulatory lawsuits. Betting a career on doom-mongering from software salesmen is a terrible strategy. Personal responsibility demands building actual competence that holds value on any given afternoon.

America spent half a century celebrating corporate credentials and bureaucratic titles, while ignoring the dignity of skilled craftsmanship. Rodriguez picked a difficult trade. He mastered the mechanics and built a career. His smartest observation was entirely practical: These skills guarantee employment for the foreseeable future and perhaps the entirety of his working life.

Fear can be healthy, but building your working life around it isn’t. Competence remains the only reliable shelter. Silicon Valley can create a machine that writes a short story about a broken car, but when the head gasket blows on the highway, AI won’t get you off the shoulder. The future belongs to the person holding both the wrench and the ability to use it properly.

​Tech, Auto mechanic, Artificial intelligence 

An 81-year-old delivery driver struggling up a steep flight of stairs with a family’s lost suitcase caught the attention of a woman named Erin Howell — who asked him what he was doing.

The man, Don Johnson, explained that at his age, delivering an airline’s lost luggage to families in the area is the only job he was able to get.

And he needs the money.

“He’s been married to his wife for 57 years,” Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck explains. “Her name is Josephine. Josephine has cancer. Treatments cost what treatments cost. Prescriptions cost more. So for three years, Don has been driving around North Texas delivering other people’s lost luggage to help pay for his wife’s care.”

“And then he drives home to the one thing he cannot afford to lose. For 57 years. A lifetime of knowing which side of the bed she sleeps on, how she takes her coffee, what she’s thinking about before she says it,” he continues.

“This is a man who made a promise in his 20s. He’s still keeping it in his 80s,” he adds.

Erin then posted the doorbell footage she had of Johnson and began a GoFundMe for him and his wife, which went viral.

“And America does what America does when we’re not busy being angry at each other and hating each other. Thousands of strangers gave hundreds of thousands of dollars. … Messages poured in from people who will never ever meet them, over and over, the same words: ‘We’re praying for you,’” Glenn says.

“A local TV crew came out. Don told them he thought he might actually be able to stop working, stay at home, take care of her full-time, and then it fell apart,” he explains, noting that GoFundMe shut down the campaign for unclear reasons.

However, before the campaign was shut down, Josephine sat down with a TV crew.

“She didn’t talk about money. She talked about the strangers who said they were praying for her.

And she said, “I can face it.”

“She said that was the big difference. She called it a joyful feeling. That’s not a woman who got a check,” Glenn says. “That’s a woman who found out she wasn’t alone.”

Want more from Glenn Beck?

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​Cancer, Don johnson, Glenn beck, Gofundme, Viral, Blazetv show 

Diesel prices are at all-time highs, and panic has set in. Several Republican senators from Midwest farm states in competitive midterm races are calling on the administration to ban diesel exports. Even President Trump expressed support for the proposal. Lawmakers desperately want to curb the pain felt at the pump and throughout the agricultural industry. It’s understandable. But the knee-jerk reaction to “do something” by banning diesel exports is ill advised and would quickly backfire.

Logic might dictate that preventing all diesel from leaving our borders will allow it to fulfill our needs first. It just doesn’t work that way. Petroleum is a global market.

The only way to curtail a diesel surplus would be to cut back on crude altogether, a move that would be economically devastating.

The U.S. fuel network is not set up to distribute gas throughout our country. Nearly 55% of the nation’s refining occurs along the Gulf Coast, producing more than enough diesel for the region. But much of the surplus must be exported, as there are very few avenues to ship it to other domestic markets, like the East and West Coasts, where it is needed. Both those areas rely on imports to satisfy their diesel and other gasoline demands.

The U.S. has too few pipelines and cargo capabilities to transport energy to these locations. And storage is not an option; there is only so much space.

Refineries cannot flip a switch to produce only the diesel needed at a given time. Processing a barrel of crude oil produces certain proportions of gasoline and other distillates (like diesel and jet fuel); refiners are limited in their ability to adjust those proportions.

The only way to curtail a diesel surplus would be to cut back on crude altogether, a move that would be economically devastating.

At a time when we are already experiencing significant gasoline shortages and steep prices, constricting our supply further would only continue to inflate prices. Voters still rate the economy and affordability as their top concern; higher conventional gas prices would increase financial strain on household budgets.

U.S. diesel exports represent roughly 20% of global supply, which means they put downward pressure on global prices. Removing that portion would push those prices up, and the regions that depend on diesel imports — like the East and West Coasts — will face higher prices.

A ban on diesel and other refined products has been proposed before and soundly rejected. The Biden administration broached the topic in late 2021 but ultimately decided against it. Several analyses concluded that the action would adversely impact the country.

RELATED: The one loophole in Trump’s tariff policy

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

A 2022 American Council for Capital Formation study predicted that such a ban would shut down roughly 1.3 million barrels a day of refining capacity. More than two-thirds of U.S. consumers would see price increases of roughly $0.15/gallon for gas and $0.45/gallon for diesel, and GDP would drop by $44 billion the following year.

McKinsey & Company similarly calculated bad news for U.S. consumers. A ban may initially provide relief for Gulf Coast and Midwest customers, but it wouldn’t last. Import-reliant regions, such as our coasts, would experience diesel price spikes due to global prices inflating by at least $0.60 per gallon.

Unfortunately, until there is a durable resolution to the geopolitical conflicts and disruptions abroad that would restore a steadier flow of resources, there is not a quick remedy that can bring energy costs down. Since energy markets and refinery operations are globally interconnected, a rash course of action has ripple effects felt across supply chain networks, some of which touch parts of our own country.

Lawmakers should focus on long-lasting solutions at home that will provide better insulation and protection from outside forces beyond our control.

Make federal land leasing more predictable and feasible for petroleum exploration and development. Streamline permitting to facilitate and hasten building energy infrastructure like refineries for processing fuel and pipelines to transport it across the country. Create a regulatory environment that fosters investment in the essential energy sources that run our economy.

A durable fix requires resisting the temptation of quick, politically satisfying moves and instead doubling down on policies that expand supply, modernize infrastructure, and strengthen the resilience of our energy system.

Banning diesel exports would raise prices for most Americans, destabilize global markets, and weaken the very regions already under strain. Rather than constricting flows in a tightly interconnected network, lawmakers should pursue reforms that unlock investment, improve distribution, and ensure that the U.S. can reliably meet its own needs.

The path to lower prices runs through growth and modernization — not restriction.

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

​Export ban, Fuel, Gas prices, Midterms, Republicans, Gulf coast, Oil refineries, Crude oil, Gdp, Americans, Global markets, Energy, Midwest, Opinion & analysis, Diesel prices 

With just over one month left before Election Day, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is telling its voters to turn out — no matter what.

Blaze News received an exclusive sneak peek at a new video the committee is releasing Saturday calling on Republicans to “hold the line” in what it describes as a record number of toss-up Senate races. With thin projected margins and a slew of candidates who previously overperformed the polls, the NRSC is betting on voters pollsters are missing carrying Republicans to victory.

‘We will win.’

“American freedom, safety, and prosperity are on the line,” NRSC Communications Director Joanna Rodriguez said in a press release obtained by Blaze News. She warned of “socialist Democrats taking control of Congress.”

Rodriguez named names. She called Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed a “terrorist sympathizer.” She called Maine’s Troy Jackson, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, and Alaska’s Mary Peltola “corrupt losers.”

“The battle for Senate control in the midterms is leading to nationwide attention that could decide the balance of power next year,” the ad states.

“The fight is on,” it continues and calls Democrat triumphalism into doubt.

The ad shows Democrats sounding hopeful but not confident. Former North Carolina Democrat Governor Roy Cooper notes that the state hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly two decades. New Hampshire’s Democrat Senate candidate, Rep. Chris Pappas, calls New Hampshire “a purple state.”

RELATED: ‘Fool me once’: CNN analyst has bad news for Democrats who believe recent polls

“No matter what state you’re in, the margins are too thin,” NRSC Chairman Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) can be heard saying. “Work your tail off.”

The video also invites Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to chime in. Thune can be heard saying Democrats have “embraced the socialist wing of their party.”

The NRSC is asking voters to remember just how chaotic things can become under Democrat rule. The campaign doesn’t want voters to forget about America’s recent past.

There are others taking notice of that recent past.

For instance, CNN’s chief data analyst has found Republican turnout enthusiasm running at near parity with Democrats. With a map showing that registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats, that enthusiasm gap can make all the difference in the world.

National polls underestimated the GOP by three points in 2014, three in 2016, five in 2020, and three in 2024, according to the NRSC. If these 2026 midterms skew by a similar margin, CNN’s Enten projects a 53-47 Republican Senate majority.

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, contributes even sharper analysis to the argument. His analysis on Thursday found that Senate polls taken 33 days before Election Day overstated Democrats by an average of 6.2 points in Iowa, Ohio, and Michigan from 2018 through 2024. The NRSC says those same polls wrote off Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who both cruised to victory in a presidential election year.

Two of those three states, Ohio and Michigan, are on the battleground list again this year. Ruffini’s analysis may be especially serendipitous for a cycle that could defy generations of set-in-stone expectations.

The video refuses to concede the midterms as a done deal. Rather, it calls Republicans into action for an off-cycle election year. The NRSC wants Republicans to know that the future of American governance rests on committed voters turning out. Without them, Republicans may fall victim to a midterm curse that has held for almost 100 years.

“We will win,” the narrator says.

The NRSC has just over a month to make that proclamation come true.

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​Politics 

Attention car buyers: For once, Washington has some good news for you.

The federal government has finalized a major change to fuel-economy rules that could make vehicles less expensive for automakers to build. The new standards are projected to produce a fleet-wide average of about 34.9 mpg by model year 2031, down from the 50.4 mpg trajectory under the previous rules.

If manufacturers now face tens of billions of dollars less in projected technology costs, I want to know what happens to those savings.

The Transportation Department estimates the change will reduce manufacturers’ average cost by about $1,300 per vehicle and save Americans roughly $138 billion over five years.

Room to maneuver

But the number that jumped out at me is $60.6 billion.

That’s how much the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration projects automakers’ technology costs will decline through 2031 compared with the previous standards. General Motors alone accounts for an estimated $20.4 billion, followed by Stellantis at $6.6 billion, Ford at $5.8 billion, Toyota at $4.5 billion, and Honda at $4.1 billion.

Those aren’t small numbers. Change the economics of building a car that much, and eventually I want to see the difference on the showroom floor.

For years, increasingly aggressive fuel-economy requirements pushed automakers toward additional fuel-saving technology and complicated compliance strategies. Electric vehicles were one way of improving fleet averages, and product planning increasingly had to account for what Washington demanded as well as what customers wanted.

Meanwhile, buying a new vehicle has become painfully expensive. The average new-vehicle transaction price hit $50,089 in August, according to Kelley Blue Book.

Now automakers have more room to maneuver. NHTSA says its new rules give manufacturers more flexibility to build vehicles based on customer demand. The agency is also changing vehicle-classification rules beginning with the 2030 model year. Under the current system, NHTSA says manufacturers have incentives to modify vehicles so they qualify as light trucks, while hatchbacks, wagons, and other smaller vehicles are discouraged.

That’s the sort of regulatory change car buyers may actually notice.

Automakers don’t build vehicles simply because somebody in Washington thinks they should exist. They build them when the economics work.

California split

California has been pushing in the opposite direction. Its Advanced Clean Cars II program required manufacturers to meet increasingly stringent zero-emission-vehicle targets on the way to 100% by 2035. And California’s influence doesn’t stop at the state line. The Clean Air Act allows other states to adopt California’s vehicle-emission standards, and several have done so.

Congress moved against those rules last year. On June 12, 2025, President Trump signed H.J. Res. 88 into law, disapproving the EPA waiver that allowed California to enforce Advanced Clean Cars II.

California immediately sued, arguing that Congress had improperly used the Congressional Review Act to overturn a Clean Air Act waiver. That legal fight has continued, so the underlying dispute over California’s authority isn’t finished.

For car buyers, though, the direction of federal policy has plainly changed. Manufacturers have substantially more freedom under the new federal fuel-economy rules to decide which powertrains they want to sell.

My position on that hasn’t changed. If you want an EV, buy one. If a hybrid works better for you, buy that. If you need a gasoline-powered SUV or pickup, you should be able to buy that too.

Let the cars compete.

RELATED: Welcome to the new traffic stop, where it’s your word against AI’s

NurPhoto/Getty Images

No free pass

But I’m not giving automakers a free pass. If manufacturers now face tens of billions of dollars less in projected technology costs, I want to know what happens to those savings. I’m not expecting $1,300 to disappear overnight from every window sticker. Automakers still have factories, employees, suppliers, research and development, and shareholders.

But don’t tell us deregulation makes cars cheaper to build and then expect consumers not to look for the evidence.

Give us better prices. Give us more equipment. Bring back vehicles that didn’t make financial sense under the old rules. Build the smaller cars, hatchbacks, wagons, pickups, and SUVs people will actually buy.

And let competition sort out the rest.

There is a cost on the other side of the ledger. NHTSA projects that the less stringent standards will increase fuel costs by more than $1,600 over the life of a vehicle compared with the rules they replace. The agency also projects 4.6% more gasoline consumption through 2050.

That’s worth considering, especially if you drive a lot of miles or own a large truck or SUV.

Gas prices are high right now too. But today’s pump price isn’t necessarily tomorrow’s. Oil production changes. Markets change. Wars end and new ones begin. We’re going to dig into where gasoline prices are headed in a future article because that deserves its own investigation.

Right now, I’m interested in something easier to measure. Will cheaper compliance actually mean cheaper cars?

Automakers now face tens of billions less in projected technology costs. If that really gives them more freedom to build what customers want, eventually the person walking into the dealership ought to see it.

The rules changed. Now show us the cars — and the savings.

​Car buyers, Electric vehicles, Hybrids, Oil production, Clean air act, Lifestyle, Auto industry, California, Emissions standards, Automotive 

Increasing numbers of Americans are deeply opposed to building more data centers. Over the summer, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) imposed the strictest data center rules in the country, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) ordered a statewide moratorium on hyperscale construction, and Gov. Greg Abbott (R) paused new approvals in Texas pending a grid audit.

At the local level, dozens of county and municipal fights have followed no reliable partisan pattern. Polling from Heatmap and Embold, collected by anonymous Substack writer Cremieux, shows data center popularity plummeting over the last year.

Any actions seen as forcing data centers on voters who do not want them will only make matters worse.

Though Cremieux argues the opposition is fundamentally driven by NIMBYism (not in my back yard), I am unconvinced. The polling seems to follow the pattern you would expect if NIMBYism were the primary driver, but posing the problem as a generic national issue produces substantially less opposition.

The arguments most central to the anti-data-center cause, namely complaints about the effect on utility costs, seem to generate an outsized amount of discourse relative to their actual effect. For example, in Virginia — the world’s data center capital and the state where I live — the State Corporation Commission estimated that shifting capacity and distribution costs from households to the large-load rate class would lower a typical residential bill by about 3.4%, or roughly $5.52 a month.

In other words, the effect is something on the order of a Subway sandwich in 2008.

I want to be scrupulous, because the complaints about data centers are often not literally false. Households are indeed suffering from a pecuniary externality created by increased demand. But it is hard to reconcile the mostly muted effects with the surging level of emotional response.

Americans’ growing dislike of data centers stems not from animus toward any single company or product but from a cumulative reaction to the momentous technological changes of the past couple of decades.

Because AI is the latest harbinger of those changes — and offers revolutionary potential — it has inherited our culture’s immune response. This means these problems cannot be adjudicated simply by changing utility regulations or even bribing local communities.

RELATED: The dirty secret behind Big Tech’s data center boom

Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Three further factors have combined with the populist anti-tech feeling to make AI and, by extension, data centers unusually unpopular.

First, AI faces a particularly unfavorable coalition of constituencies. Its association with California and the tech industry has deeply soured much of conservative America toward it, and its association with billionaires and big business has soured many progressives. Even many techies feel personally threatened by the technology.

Second, those most aggressively advocating for data centers are not building them in their own back yards. Palo Alto, where I lived while attending grad school, has spent years fighting small-cell installations. One of the most prestigious retirement homes in the U.S., Channing House, recently fought to have wireless equipment removed from its roof.

In January, the city of Palo Alto wrote to the FCC opposing a rule that would speed up wireless approvals, while at the same time supporting the infrastructure needed to run AI-enabled services, so long as it retains the power to veto unwanted projects.

When the group that appears to benefit most from a technology is also most averse to its consequences, it is natural for the public to wonder what the tech world might be hiding. The anonymous author Polimath, writing in Marginally Compelling, gets closer to the underlying problem by viewing it as another front in the culture war, an outworking of long-simmering discontent with tech culture.

Third, much of the tech world itself seems increasingly concerned about the existential risk AI might pose to humanity. For example, earlier this month, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who spent three years doing pretraining work at OpenAI and then Anthropic, publicly resigned, writing that both companies were racing toward self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.”

RELATED: America doesn’t need Dario Amodei’s permission to build

Jason Henry/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Evan Hubinger, an alignment lead at Anthropic, replied that he agreed and put the odds of AI killing everyone within the decade above 10%. From talking to my friends at these labs, the modal person really does seem to think they are summoning the machine god. That prospect naturally feeds public opposition to AI.

Taken together, these factors help explain the public’s anger. The lines of the current debate have already hardened, and the grievances far predate the specific events of the day. Any actions seen as forcing data centers on voters who do not want them will only make matters worse.

But the centers will be built regardless. Demand is so enormous, and suitable locations are sufficiently plentiful, that only a small number of permissive communities, such as Loudoun County, are needed. If localities want to opt out, I see little reason to stop them.

However, the industry could take an important step if it wants to win broad American support.

Specifically, Big Tech should make a visible effort to build data centers near the communities where its executives and employees live. This would give them a way to begin convincing Americans that data centers are an asset worth having, not a liability worth dodging.

Concerns about water and electricity are simply not what most people are worried about, and addressing them will do nothing to solve the larger problem. Since these reasons are selected ex post to justify pre-existing opposition, defeating any single point will merely invite a hundred more.

If you are opposed to data centers, my guess is that saving $5 on your monthly utility bill wouldn’t be enough to change your opinion.

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

​Ai, Americans, Big tech, Data centers, Fcc, Superintelligence, Virginia, Polling, Nimby, Culture war, Openai, Anthropic, Opinion & analysis 

A man who founded an LGBTQ+ therapy practice was arrested after he was accused of sexually assaulting two of his patients.

Joseph LoGiudice founded the “Liberation Psychotherapy” practice and acted as a clinical director when the assaults occurred, according to a press release from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

‘While expressly described as an LGBTQ-centered practice, we allege that LoGiudice abused the trust placed in him as a therapist to sexually assault members of the LGBTQ community he serves.’

One of those who accused LoGiudice did so after hearing about a separate indictment against Remington Yhap, another worker at Liberation Psychotherapy who specialized in LGBTQ+ mental health.

Yhap was arrested for allegedly raping a teenage patient he had been providing therapy to for many months.

“Liberation Psychotherapy’s clinical director, Joseph LoGiudice, allegedly sexually assaulted two patients in his care at the very practice he founded,” said Bragg in a statement with the press release.

LoGiudice had run the clinic’s Gay Men’s Therapy Group and is a licensed clinical social worker.

One victim was assaulted by LoGiudice in Nov. 2022 after engaging in “sexual misconduct” with the patient twice.

A second victim was assaulted by LoGiudice in Jan. 2024 after a group therapy session and again in Jan. 2026 during a private therapy session, according to Bragg.

“While expressly described as an LGBTQ-centered practice, we allege that LoGiudice abused the trust placed in him as a therapist to sexually assault members of the LGBTQ community he serves. This investigation is ongoing.

LoGiudice is facing a total of 24 counts related to the alleged abuse, which includes 10 counts of third-degree criminal sex acts, 13 counts of third-degree sexual abuse, and one count of third-degree rape.

RELATED: Officials of ‘Latinx’ LGBTQ+ center outraged that months-long fecal attacks are not arrestable

Bragg asked for any other possible victims to contact his office.

A profile at Huffington Post said LoGiudice had published a book titled “Our Naked Lives: Essays from Gay Italian-American Men” in 2013. He wrote an article claiming that capitalism had destroyed people emotionally and psychologically.

He was also married to Michael Carosone, who was also a therapist at Liberation Psychotherapy, according to posts online objecting to anti-Semitic statements he allegedly made.

“His interests and passion are in understanding and advocating for individuals who are marginalized, vulnerable, and stigmatized, particularly LGBTQ individuals with disabilities, while utilizing perspectives from disability studies and intersectionality,” read a line from the profile.

His profile at his website has been scrubbed from the internet but can still be viewed at the Wayback Machine internet archive. His website has also been scrubbed.

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​Capitalism, Lgbtq, Sexual assault, Rape, Lgbtq agenda, Crime 

One of the first things I did when we moved into our semi-furnished rental last year was place a 12-inch concrete statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary — one of the few possessions I’d recovered from the ashes of our house in the Palisades — by the front door.

I thought the place needed a brazenly Catholic touch to counteract the tasteful Westside L.A. “spirituality” already on display: the Native American kitsch, the Henry Miller quote in the powder room, the reclining Buddha in the garden by the front door.

The closer Francis drew to Christ, the more intensely Catholic he became.

Never mind that next to the Buddha the owner had already put one of the Church’s most famous saints: a tonsured St. Francis of Assisi, cradling a dove in his hands, rabbits gathered around the birdbath at his feet.

That Francis was even welcome at such an ecumenical gathering seemed to confirm my general impression of him as a kind of generic Christian Zen master. The statue looked like a glorified garden gnome to me.

Without even realizing it, I’d bought into modernity’s slow domestication of one of the most radical Christians who ever lived.

Sainthood without sanctity

G.K. Chesterton noticed the problem more than a century ago. Modern admirers, he wrote, had learned to “appreciate the saint almost without the sanctity.”

Francis did not grow up poor. He was born in Assisi in 1181 or 1182, the son of a prosperous cloth merchant. As a young man, he enjoyed fine clothes, spent money freely, and dreamed not of feeding sparrows but of military glory.

Around the age of 20, he went to war against neighboring Perugia, was captured after Assisi’s defeat, and spent months as a prisoner. Illness followed. Another attempt at a military career ended with Francis turning back before he had really begun it.

His conversion came slowly, through humiliation, failure, illness, and prayer.

Look at one of those garden statues of Francis, surrounded by birds and rabbits, and it’s easy to imagine sharing at least a little in his saintliness. I like animals. I can be nice to a bird.

But Francis learned to love God’s creation from the bottom up, beginning with nature at its most capriciously cruel and monstrous: leprosy.

Sweetness of soul and body

The disease could horribly disfigure the human body, and in Francis’s world, its sufferers lived largely apart from everyone else. Francis, like everyone else, was repulsed by them.

Thomas of Celano, his earliest biographer, says that Francis once found even the sight of leper houses unbearable. If he spotted one from two miles away, he would cover his nose with his hands.

Then, Celano writes, Francis encountered a leper and did what would previously have been unthinkable: He approached the man and kissed him.

Francis’ own account is less dramatic but probably more revealing. “The Lord himself led me among them,” he wrote near the end of his life. He began showing them mercy, and what had once seemed bitter became “sweetness of soul and body.”

Celano tells us what that mercy looked like. Francis went to live among lepers, washing them and cleaning the pus from their sores.

To repair the Church

According to Franciscan tradition, Francis was later praying before a crucifix in the crumbling church of San Damiano outside Assisi when he heard Christ tell him to repair His church. Francis, quite reasonably, took this literally, rebuilding San Damiano and helping restore other dilapidated churches around Assisi. Only later would the command acquire its more famous second meaning. Francis would spend the rest of his life repairing the Church in a rather more ambitious sense.

His new life brought him into increasingly bitter conflict with his father. Pietro Bernardone had spent years building a prosperous business and raising a son who now seemed determined to give the proceeds away. The dispute culminated in dramatic fashion. Standing before the bishop of Assisi, Francis surrendered his claim to his father’s property and stripped off the clothes his father had provided him. The bishop covered the naked young man with his cloak.

The movement that formed around Francis eventually became the Order of Friars Minor. Its members worked, prayed, preached, cared for the sick, and lived without the ordinary security provided by possessions. Francis himself insisted on manual labor. “I worked with my hands, and I still desire to work,” he recalled near the end of his life.

Chesterton put the intensity of his asceticism more colorfully: “He devoured fasting as a man devours food.”

The peace of Christ

None of this means the familiar Francis of birds and flowers is a fraud. Francis really did possess an extraordinary love for creation. His “Canticle of the Creatures” praises God through Brother Sun, Sister Moon, wind, water, fire, and “our Sister Mother Earth.” The poem later supplied the title of Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato si’.

But Brother Sun and Sister Moon did not emerge from a pleasant afternoon spent admiring the Umbrian countryside. Francis composed the first part of the “Canticle” near the end of his life, sick and suffering at San Damiano.

When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013, his friend Cardinal Claudio Hummes embraced him and said, “Don’t forget the poor!” Bergoglio later recalled that he immediately thought of Francis of Assisi — the man of poverty, peace, and creation. He became the first pope to take the name Francis.

Visiting Assisi later that year, he addressed the Francis most of us think we know.

“Franciscan peace is not something saccharine,” the pope said. Nor, he added, was it “a kind of pantheistic harmony with forces of the cosmos.”

Behind enemy lines

Pope Francis’ contention that “the peace of Saint Francis is the peace of Christ” helps illuminate one of the most striking episodes of Francis’ life.

In 1219, while Christian and Muslim armies were fighting the Fifth Crusade in Egypt, Francis crossed the battle lines near Damietta and entered the camp of Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil.

An eyewitness account helps us understand how extraordinary this was. Jacques de Vitry, bishop of Acre, wrote the following year that this unarmed friar had walked into enemy territory in the middle of a war and preached to the Muslims for several days. The sultan eventually had him returned safely to the Christian lines.

What Francis and al-Kamil said to each other is harder to know. Later accounts supplied increasingly elaborate details, including Francis offering to undergo an ordeal by fire.

But we do know what Francis thought friars should do among Muslims, because he wrote it down. They could live among non-Christians “without quarrels or disputes,” he instructed, acknowledging themselves as Christians. Or when they believed it pleased God, they could explicitly proclaim the Christian faith. Francis had walked unarmed across a battlefield to do exactly that.

Closing the gap

Francis’ quieter contributions to Christianity proved just as enduring. In 1223, at Greccio, Francis arranged a manger with hay, an ox, and a donkey so worshipers could contemplate the conditions in which Christ had been born. A priest celebrated Mass over the manger. While there were no statues playing Mary, Joseph, or the infant Jesus, the celebration nevertheless became the ancestor of the Christmas crèche now found in homes and churches around the world.

Greccio also tells us something about the peculiar intensity of Francis’ mysticism. Again and again, he seemed determined to collapse the distance between himself and the physical life of Christ. At Greccio, he wanted people to encounter Bethlehem almost as if they had been there: the hay, the animals, the feeding trough, the poverty into which Christ had been born.

A year later, at La Verna, that identification with Christ became more mysterious — and, if the Franciscan accounts are true, physical. During a mountain retreat, Francis experienced a vision of the crucified Christ and received wounds corresponding to the wounds of the crucifixion — the stigmata. The claim did not first surface centuries later. Brother Elias announced the wounds in a letter sent after Francis’ death, and Thomas of Celano described them in the biography he wrote for Francis’ canonization.

Francis himself left no account of receiving them.

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Brother Fire

By then, his body was falling apart. Francis was losing his sight to a painful disease of the eyes. Doctors tried plasters and eye washes. They opened his veins to bleed him. His condition only grew worse. Finally, a physician proposed something more drastic: burning the flesh around his failing eye with a red-hot iron.

When the doctor placed the instrument in the fire, the man who had written of Brother Sun and Sister Moon extended his friendship to the very element about to cause him terrible pain.

“My Brother Fire,” Francis addressed it, asking it to “be courtly to me in this hour.”

The hot iron was drawn across his face from his ear toward his eyebrow. It didn’t work. Near death, according to Thomas of Celano, Francis asked his brothers to lay him naked on the bare ground so he could greet yet another member of his family of creation: “our Sister Bodily Death.” On the evening of October 3, 1226, at the Portiuncula, she arrived. Francis was probably 44 or 45 years old. Two years later, Pope Gregory IX declared him a saint.

Today, October 3, marks exactly 800 years since Francis’ death. Few Catholic saints have traveled as far outside Catholicism as Francis. Environmentalists claim his love of creation. Peace activists invoke his encounter with the sultan. Protestants have found plenty to admire too. Christianity Today has included him among its “131 Christians Everyone Should Know.” One evangelical writer simply called him “our Francis, too.”

And of course, he turns up beside Buddhas in Los Angeles gardens.

Catholic to the core

But the Church is observing his 800th anniversary in unmistakably Catholic fashion. At the direction of Pope Leo XIV, a special Jubilee Year of St. Francis began January 10 and continues through January 10, 2027. The Apostolic Penitentiary is offering Catholics a plenary indulgence for pilgrimages to designated Franciscan churches and other places connected to Francis, accompanied by the prescribed prayers and observances and the usual conditions of confession, Communion, and prayer for the pope’s intentions.

A plenary indulgence is not the first thing that comes to mind when most people look at the little friar holding the bird. But neither, probably, is Francis’ “Testament.”

Francis dictated the document near the end of his life, partly to make sure the movement he was leaving behind remained recognizably Catholic. There he writes of his reverence for priests “according to the manner of the holy Roman Church.” He says he sees in this world nothing bodily of Christ except the Eucharist, which he wants “honored above all things.” He recalls that when God first gave him brothers, he wrote down their way of life and “the Lord Pope confirmed it for me.”

The “Testament” ends by telling his friars to keep it alongside their Rule and read the two together, so that they might observe the Rule “in a more Catholic manner.”

You don’t need a specific creed to admire Francis, or even to follow him for quite a distance. But follow Francis far enough, and you eventually find yourself at the threshold of the Church and all it contains: the Eucharist, priests, confession, obedience, the pope.

At the same time, his example strips away centuries of polemic and invites us to see the Church more clearly. Here was a man almost comically ill-suited to the idea that Christianity is fundamentally about clericalism, bureaucracy, or institutional power. He owned nothing. He wasn’t a priest. He preached to lepers and Muslims, slept on the ground, rebuilt ruined churches with his hands, and founded a movement whose very name emphasized the littleness of its members.

And yet the closer he drew to Christ, the more intensely Catholic he became.

Chesterton saw in that relationship something of the mystery of the Church itself: a human institution that somehow provides a path to the divine. “The casket that was locked in Palestine can be unlocked in Umbria,” he wrote, “for the Church is the keeper of the keys.”

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