Category: blaze media

About a month ago, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem held a press conference to announce that about “1.6 million illegal immigrants have left the United States population.”

That’s a fraction of the number of people who arrived in the years that the Biden administration essentially opened the border. But it’s a lot of people, and it engendered much eye-rolling among journalists who compared Noem’s claim to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s declaration that President Trump’s drug interdiction policies had saved 258 million lives, roughly 75% of the U.S. total population.

The foreign-born population in the US declined from 53.3 million at the beginning of the year to 51.9 million by the end of June — a decline of 1.4 million in just six months.

However, in the weeks since Noem’s announcement, several data points have since emerged that suggest her estimate may be reasonably accurate. It might even be too low.

Numbers don’t lie

In August, the Pew Research Center estimated that the U.S. foreign-born population dropped from 53.3 million at the beginning of the year to 51.9 million by the end of June — a decline of 1.4 million in just six months. The Pew report noted that the January count of 53.3 million was “the largest number ever recorded” and that the decline this year will be the first decline in the immigrant population since the 1960s.

About the same time, the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that the foreign-born population fell by 2.2 million in the first seven months of the year. The center estimates that 1.6 million of those who left were in the country illegally. If this estimate is correct, it would indicate that about 600,000 immigrants left, despite having the option legally to stay.

The center’s report indicates that it relied in part on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks the number of foreign-born workers. The bureau’s data shows that the number of foreign-born workers peaked in March at 32.2 million, before falling to 30.8 million by August — a decline of 1.4 million. Even so, the level remains historically high, and numbers appeared to stabilize in late summer.

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office updated its demographic projections, based on changes in immigration patterns and enforcement since the beginning of the year. It lowered its projection for the population in 2055 from 372 million to 367 million. The current population is about 350 million, so their projection suggests that the U.S. will add only 17 million new residents over the next 30 years. That will be the slowest population growth in the country’s history.

RELATED: American jobs first: Hefty new H-1B visa fee will likely curb legal immigration, especially from India

Photo by filo via Getty Images

The Congressional Budget Office also projects that natural population growth (births minus deaths) will turn negative in 2031. At that point, any population growth will be almost entirely dependent on incoming immigrants. (Longer life spans play a minor role in such projections.) The office’s numbers still assume growth from immigration this year and in subsequent years. That certainly seems unlikely, at least for this year, given all the preliminary data showing that many immigrants have already left the country.

If the U.S. population declines this year, it will be only the second time in the nation’s history. The only other time was in 2021, at the height of the COVID pandemic.

Uncharted territory

There will be those who decry a lower population trajectory as a calamity and others who celebrate it as a blessing. But the truth is that we are in uncharted territory. Classical economic theory holds that the change in economic activity is the sum of the changes in population and productivity, implying that a population decline will lead to economic contraction.

However, many argue that there are conditions today that distort the classical theory. These include the negative impacts of a dysfunctional immigration system, declines in the proclivity of immigrants to assimilate, and a potential massive increase in productivity driven by technology, especially AI.

In other words, all these opinions about the advantages or disadvantages of slower population growth, or perhaps even a population that is declining, are nothing but speculation at this point. For 250 years, companies, institutions, governments, policymakers, and investors have been basing decisions on the assumption that our population will continue to grow each year. At a minimum, this new trajectory will require a major reset of those long-standing assumptions.

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

​Opinion & analysis, Opinion, Immigration crisis, Immigration enforcement, Immigration, Border patrol, Border enforcement, Border crisis, Immigration and customs enforcement, Pew research center 

While we were in the throes of babies and toddlers, pregnancies and postpartums, my husband would often walk through the door after work with groceries, pour me wine, and hold the baby in one arm while he made dinner with the other. I remember on some days being too exhausted to reciprocate with much except an ardent feeling and expression of gratitude to him, for him. That image of him still stands in my mind as the image of heroic manliness.

Another good father and husband we know once said that when he arrives home, he says to himself, “It’s showtime.” It’s his way of reminding himself that the crux of his day belongs to the moment he comes home from work and crosses the threshold into home. Rather than collapse on a sofa with beer and TV and be done for the day, he intended instead to bring his greatest efforts to his home life. What these anecdotes exemplify is a proper ordering of work and home that translates into specific small acts of love that echo throughout the family.

For too long we’ve repeated the cultural lore in movies and media about the domineering and distant man and the oppressed and under-actualized woman.

The good of home

To say that home ought to have primacy over work for men and women is not to say work is unimportant or that we shouldn’t develop professional skills or seek to advance careers. A job doesn’t need to be seen strictly as a means to an end; it can be a good in itself insofar as it is ennobling and sanctifying, and care should be taken to ensure it be done well. But it is a subordinate good to the good of home. Home isn’t a mere launch pad for a man’s success in the world — rather his success in the world is for the sake of home.

If a man sees his work life as a parallel good, divorced from the good of home, the two disparate goods will tend to become rivalrous, for the family wants from the father what is the family’s due: to have a significance in his eyes greater than that of his career.

It’s not difficult to see how these two goods become inverted. Twenty-first-century Americans look to career for so much: an identity, the expression of some core passion, a measure of success and worth, a measure of where we stand in relation to others. It’s a compelling part of life, and the cultural stoking of its importance has coincided with the modern attenuation of home life.

These ambient messages grease the slide for us all to descend into an exaggerated view of work at the expense of home. Compounding that is the unavoidable fact that jobs often include deadlines and pressure that can understandably (and sometimes justifiably) claim a more immediate urgency than that of home life. All of this creates a tendency to subvert home for work, even without an explicit intention to do so.

Domino effect

But there are good reasons to be wary of such a tendency. When men fail to privilege home above work, as expressed in how they live each day, it has a domino effect on the family, and therefore society, in several ways.

Firstly, the husband can grow to see his family as a burden getting in the way of his higher purpose, which is his career. He begins to see his principal identity as derived from work and his primary relationships that of employer and employee. Home then starts to adopt similar characteristics; his family may be subconsciously reduced to the equivalent of employees in his charge.

Secondly, the mother’s mission is trivialized. She begins to sense her own work at home is not their common life’s work but merely her burden to endure in service of a higher mission that is his alone and to which she has not acquiesced. If work is a separate and vying good from home, it’s more natural that she begins to want that separate good for herself even at the expense of home life, which now has diminished in value for her as well.

Thirdly, their unity of purpose dissolves. The often tedious work of home is elevating and ennobling when acknowledged by both husband and wife as a taking part in an extolled good, valuable in itself and for the sake of their ultimate end of beatitude. Without this unity of purpose, these duties seem merely menial and heavy — and merely menial and heavy work will quickly feel suffocating and oppressive for whoever shoulders it. Resentment calcifies like a tumor as husband and wife become competitors rather than allies.

RELATED: Rob Konrad: Former Dolphin who swam for his family

Eliot J. Schechter/Getty Images

Finally, there are repercussions for society that might be obvious but are worth spelling out. Sons will learn about manhood and daughters about their worth in the eyes of men in large part based upon the axis on which a father orients his life. Both will begin to understand God’s love through their father. Far less than their father’s job promotion, children will remember how he prioritized their mom and them in the small details that make up the composition of their childhood. It’s not the work of one evening or a trip to Disneyland, but it’s the quiet, persevering work of a lifetime. This work, cheerfully and generously done, will reverberate into society and future generations. The neglect of it will as well.

Ordinary love story

The stories we tell as a culture about the dynamics between husband and wife matter. When men and women are united in giving pre-eminence to home, the story can be one of families working in concert, with generosity and gratitude exchanged back and forth in a currency that multiplies with each and every exchange. It’s the story of ordinary people living their quiet shared purpose, a purpose that saturates their hearts and inclines their wills toward God and one another. This love story is transformative and extraordinary precisely because of the seemingly everyday subjects and acts that constitute its operations.

For too long we’ve repeated the cultural lore in movies and media about the domineering and distant man and the oppressed and under-actualized woman, both wanting to break from the tedium of middle-class values. The modern response to this story of dissatisfaction has been that we’ve valued home too much and at too great an expense. What this critique fails to see is that when home feels like a prison, it’s not because we’ve given it too much importance but because we’ve given it far too little.

This essay originally appeared in the Family Revival Substack.

​Family, Fatherhood, Men and women, Greatness, Lifestyle 

Shortly before 10 p.m. ET on Saturday, shots rang out in Southport, North Carolina, a seaside community 50 miles east-northeast of Myrtle Beach. Video provided to Blaze News by Duncan Grey Baker shows law enforcement saying at least three people are dead and multiple additional victims are injured. According to Baker, who is on the scene, the suspected gunman fled the scene by boat, and the Coast Guard and other law enforcement vessels are in pursuit.

According to a Facebook post by the City of Southport, a shelter-in-place order was issued at 9:53 p.m. local time. The post said the shooting took place in the Southport Yacht Basin.

— (@)

Further video shot by Baker shows victims being transported to a staging facility and the massive police presence on the scene.

— (@)

— (@)

Citing a conversation with Southport City Manager Noah Saldo, the Wilmington StarNews reported that “a boat pulled up to the American Fish Company restaurant and fired into the crowd. Then the boat took off, he said. He confirmed that several people were taken to the hospital.”

This is a developing story.

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

​Mass shooting, North carolina, Southport, Crime 

Let’s dive into a driving-related danger you’ve probably never considered: brake dust.

That gritty, black buildup on your wheels isn’t just an eyesore — it’s also a health hazard. New research is pulling back the curtain on how this stuff is quietly damaging our respiratory systems. Buckle up — this is worth your attention.

EVs and hybrids don’t get a free pass, either — regenerative braking reduces pad wear, but extra weight means even more dust when the brakes engage.

Every time you hit the brakes — whether you’re driving a gas-powered SUV or an electric vehicle — tiny particles from your brake pads get launched into the air. A study from the University of Southampton took a close look at this dust and found it’s not just grime — it’s a toxic mix that might be worse for your lungs than unfiltered diesel exhaust. We’ve spent years blaming tailpipes for dirty air, but the real troublemaker could be hiding on your wheels.

Copper stoppers

So what’s in this brake dust? Most brake pads in the U.S. are classed as non-asbestos organic, a change made decades ago to ditch the cancer-causing asbestos of older brakes. Progress, right?

There is a catch, however. Today’s brake pads rely on copper fibers to manage the heat and friction of stopping your car. As they wear down, those copper particles — mixed with other nasty stuff — float into the air. Breathe them in, and they don’t just hang out. The Southampton study shows this dust sparks inflammation in your lungs, kicking off a chain reaction that’s bad news for your breathing.

Slow smolder

Here’s the deal: Inflammation is your body’s distress signal. But when it’s constant — like from inhaling brake dust every day — it’s like a slow smolder in your airways. Over time, that irritation can make breathing harder, worsen conditions like asthma, or even set the stage for bigger problems.

Researchers are starting to talk about possible links to lung cancer. And if you’re already dealing with allergies or smog, this is just another hit to your chest.

EVs and hybrids don’t get a free pass, either — regenerative braking reduces pad wear, but extra weight means even more dust when the brakes engage.

This hits close to home. Picture kids playing near busy roads, commuters stuck in gridlock, or even washing your car in the driveway — you’re all in the path of this stuff. Unlike tailpipe emissions, which face extensive regulation, brake dust and other non-exhaust pollutants are still flying under the radar globally.

RELATED: How female crash-test dummies could save thousands of lives

Jonathan Nackstrand/Getty Images

Fuel to flames

So how does this affect your lungs daily? If you’re healthy, it might just be a slight cough. But for the millions with asthma or COPD, it’s like adding fuel to the flames. Those copper-laced particles are tiny enough to slip deep into your lungs, where they linger and cause trouble.

Over years, that could mean more doctor visits, extra inhalers, and a higher chance of lung scarring — damage that sticks around.

What can you do about it? Next time you need brake pads, opt for low-copper or copper-free ones. Keep your wheels clean to cut down on what’s swirling around your garage. But the real solution? Automakers and regulators need to step up — clean air shouldn’t end at the tailpipe.

Brake dust may be small, but its impact on your lungs is anything but. Stay aware, breathe easier, and let’s keep this discussion moving.

​Brake dust, Lifestyle, Consumer safety, Auto industry, Emissions, Align cars 

The American Academy of Pediatrics, like other institutional medical organizations, demands respect and submission to its pronouncements about public health.

The AAP is extraordinarily influential — perhaps even more powerful than the American Medical Association — because it asserts itself as the authority on our children’s health. The reason it wields more power is because parents — especially first-time parents, even if they’re willing to question “medical authorities” in general — often fold like a cheap suit at the disapproving frown of their own pediatrician.

That’s what makes the latest power play from the AAP especially revolting.

The AAP is unquestionably political and firmly left-wing. Its stance on the ridiculously named “gender-affirming care” is proof.

“The science still supports gender-affirming care; children will still need it,” Dr. Susan Kressly, president of the AAP, said this year. “The American Academy of Pediatrics remains unwavering in our support for transgender and gender-diverse youth and their access to the same standard of compassionate, evidence-based care as every other child.”

Now, the AAP is going to war against states that allow religious exemptions for childhood vaccines, framing its stand as a “public health” issue.

Religious gurus?

To make its argument against religious exemptions to vaccines, the AAP essentially deems itself a source of theological and doctrinal experts.

The AAP said recently:

Among the major world religious traditions, none include scriptural or doctrinal guidelines that preclude adherents from being vaccinated. Just as with other types of doctrines, those related to vaccines might even be developed by small communities or individuals in ways that are completely independent from antecedent scriptural or doctrinal traditions but are, nonetheless, thought of as “religious” commitments by those who hold them.

In other words, the AAP believes that only dumb hicks from small towns believe their faith should inform how they, as parents, care for their children.

It’s sheer arrogance. But not only that, I don’t think parents should listen to the AAP, because its moral authority on the matter of childhood vaccines is compromised — at best.

Protecting pediatricians — not children

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed this year that thousands of physicians had Medicare reimbursements altered based on childhood vaccination rates. He called it coercion. Others call it corruption. But there is no dispute that pediatricians receive financial incentives for increased vaccine uptake, sometimes amounting to many thousands of dollars a year.

Until pediatricians stop financially benefiting from a patient’s choice to use Big Pharma’s products, their advice must be examined with considerable suspicion.

The larger reason to dismiss the AAP is that, thanks to the Make America Healthy Again movement, vaccines are finally under well-deserved scrutiny. Research questioning the safety and efficacy of vaccines has existed for years, but it has been actively suppressed by Big Medicine and Big Pharma.

RELATED: Jab first, ask questions later: Vaccine truths your doctor won’t tell you

SementsovaLesia/iStock/Getty Images Plus

As more research comes out, the childhood vaccine schedule is not looking good. Even President Donald Trump is questioning it. The AAP and other similar organizations unforgivably ignore these facts as they seek to protect their fiefdom over vulnerable young parents and their even more vulnerable babies.

Make no mistake: The AAP doesn’t want your kids to be able to go to school unless you inject them with highly questionable and unnecessary substances (a great reason for homeschooling, if you ask me) — and your pediatrician will likely push you hard in that same direction.

I know all about that. I’m an original MAHA mom who visited the pediatrician armed with a list of vaccine questions over 30+ years ago. That doctor was arrogant, dismissive, refused to answer them, and told me I’d be sorry when my child died.

But my child did not die. She is still alive and thriving, more than three decades later.

Vaccines 101

If this is new to you — or if you’re unsure of your own convictions — the rest of this essay will help you.

The starter information that I’ve compiled below — some very practical, some philosophical (even more important for a strong foundation) — is especially designed for soon-to-be parents, friends who are terrified to go against a pediatrician’s advice, or anyone else who has not yet seen through the lies we’ve been fed for so very long.

However, be warned: Once you start down this rabbit trail, your faith in the medical establishment may be shaken so hard you’ll realize that, ultimately, you are responsible for your family’s health. No pediatrician or medical organization — like the self-important, misinformed AAP pontificating about our faith traditions — have your child’s best interests at heart the way you do.

But take courage. There’s a world of information and support out here. Arm yourself with as much of it as possible.

“The Unvaccinated: Proof of What We Lost”: Outstanding starter essay to start getting your brain ready to shift paradigms.Committee of Homeland Security Hearing on Vaccines: Some of the latest intel.No vaccine has been proven to save any lives: I know it sounds shocking, but here’s how peer-reviewed medical journals lie about vaccine efficacy.“Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated: Serious and Irreversible Neurological, Developmental, and Immune-Related Health Risks”: Tip of the iceberg.“Eighth study of unvaccinated kids is a doozy”: A lot of information is being exposed.Vaccinated kids vs. unvaccinated kids — more: Some of the most recent truths to come to light.How vaccines affect autism and the brain: The nitty-gritty.“Why Is Every Newborn Forced to Get the Dangerous Hepatitis B Vaccine?”: More specifics.“SIDS: Maybe Babies Don’t Just Suddenly Die. Maybe It’s Vaccines That Are Killing Them”: Are we being lied to about SIDS? Probably.“100 Facts Your Doctor Won’t Tell You About Vaccines”: Helpful notes to discuss with your pediatrician — if you’re still seeing one.A complete list of ALL vaccines, all the stuff in the vaccines, and the package insert for all vaccines: Exactly what it says.“Vax Time Religion”: Thoughtful essay well worth your time.

Trust in the medical industry is at an all-time low — and for good reason. They blame everyone but themselves — like the AAP targeting religious people — but the problem isn’t our lack of trust.

The problem is their lack of transparency. And not only is the medical industry not transparent, but the “experts” seem unwilling to consider solutions and ideas found outside of Big Medicine and Big Pharma. They think they know best, but they’re woefully uneducated on nutrition, movement, light, and other well-known natural remedies.

Ironically, these same people should be at the forefront of vaccine transparency because they claim to be guided by “science” and “truth.” And yet, they want to lecture us about our faith.

Now is the time to take back control of our health with professional healers who work with our bodies — not against them. That’s the philosophy we must adopt, whether we’re “religious” or not.

​Big pharma, Big medicine, American academy of pediatrics, Aap, Vaccines, Childhood vaccine schedule, Medical industrial complex 

A few weeks ago, I enjoined all of you men to do what the right-wing bodybuilders and broscientists of X do and sun your scrota, treating the testicles within to certain health-giving frequencies of light.

As silly as that might sound, red-light therapy is a pretty hot trend, and exposing your genitalia to it probably has testosterone-boosting effects. This week, I’m going to be counseling you avoid light — and not just for your nether regions.

A study from last year found a ‘significant relationship between outdoor light pollution and Alzheimer’s disease prevalence.’

The fact is that we’re exposed to too much light, of the wrong kind and at the wrong times, and it’s seriously screwing with our bodies and minds.

Apeman

My attitude to health, in a nutshell, would be this: Try to live, as much as you can, in the manner of your ancestors. Why? Well, because we’re the same as them, more or less. We Homo sapiens haven’t changed much from our days as hunter-gatherers 200,000 years ago. We’re still running more or less the same firmware, with a few important updates here and there.

What is different, however, is the environment you inhabit. It really kicked off about 10,000-12,000 years ago, with the Agricultural Revolution in the Near East. Now there were these things called farms and cities, and there was commerce and administration and taxes, armies and wars.

Once agriculture started to spread, the pace of change really started to pick up. Fast-forward to about 200 years ago and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and it starts to get really crazy.

All of a sudden you’ve got people living in communities of millions and a mind-boggling complexity. You’ve got people working in factories, eating food made in factories, wearing synthetic clothing made in factories, illuminating their homes and communities with electric light 24/7, bombarding their bodies with electromagnetic radiation 24/7, dosing themselves with ever-increasing numbers of medications, inhaling and swallowing billions of tiny pieces of plastic invisible to the naked eye.

The modern age

I’m not going to list all the changes here. The truth is that our bodies simply can’t cope — not fully — with the vast transformation our way of life has undergone in recent centuries and especially in the last hundred years. Keep in mind that this “modern” way of life is but a blip in human time. Our genes haven’t caught up yet, and maybe they never will. So it pays to treat your body, as much as you can, in the manner of your ancestors — to eat like them, move like them, and do the things they did.

Of course, you can go too far in your pursuit of an ancestral lifestyle — just look at the sad, sad story of the Liver King, a true cautionary tale for the “primal” community.

And I’m not saying the modern world doesn’t have its beguiling or useful aspects. I rather like the fact that I’m here, in my centrally heated living room, writing this article on my swish little iPad with its touch screen and magnetic keyboard. That’s pretty cool and useful. Then again, I suppose I could get used to writing in the manner of, say, Cicero: reclining on a couch in a toga, dictating to a slave while another one feeds me grapes.

Who loves the sun

The changes that have taken place in terms of light in the last century or so — to how we use and relate to light, natural and artificial — have been no less drastic than the changes to any other aspect of our lives, including the way we eat.

For the vast majority of human history, we organized our lives consciously and unconsciously around the natural diurnal rhythms of the planet. We woke up with the sun, and we went to bed when it became dark. There were seasonal changes, but they repeated, year after year. The invention of artificial light — fire, candles — didn’t really affect any of that much.

It was only with electric light that it become possible to defy the natural rhythms of night and day and the seasons and become what we are today: beings in possession of perpetual suns we can use to illuminate ourselves and our surroundings as much as we want, whenever we want.

Night moves

Banishing the darkness has had dramatic effects on our health.

Light governs the body’s circadian rhythms, also known as the “body clock,” which play a key role in regulating the secretion of hormones and processes of growth and recovery.

The main frequencies of light emitted by screens and LED lighting are blue, and these seem to have particularly bad effects on our bodies. Some scientists have suggested that blue light should be considered an endocrine disruptor — something as prone to mess with our hormones as nasty plasticizing chemicals, herbicides and pesticides, and many of the additives we find in ultra-processed food.

A study in the journal Environmental Research associates blue-light exposure with increased rates of breast cancer among women who do night work and sleep disorders among teenagers.

RELATED: LED astray: Yes, those harsh lights are the spawn of Satan

Photo by Bloomberg/Getty Images

Blue arrangements

In my piece on the boon of ball bronzing, I mentioned a study showing that chronic exposure to blue light could actually bring on early puberty in rats. This is a pretty worrying finding, especially since we know the age of puberty in the developed world has been decreasing for decades and children are being exposed to ever-greater quantities of blue light from the screens and electronic devices they play with all day long.

Large-scale studies clearly suggest exposure to artificial light could be having population-level effects. Research has linked nighttime light exposure to cognitive decline, for example. A study from last year compared rates of Alzheimer’s to satellite data for nighttime light levels across the U.S. The scientists found a “significant relationship between outdoor light pollution and Alzheimer’s disease prevalence. States and counties with higher levels of artificial light at night consistently had higher rates of Alzheimer’s disease.” Most worryingly of all, the association was strongest in the under-65s, a demographic that typically doesn’t suffer from this terrible disease.

So what can you do?

Doctor my eyes

In general terms, you should try to reduce your exposure to artificial light and do things that mimic the natural rise and fall of light levels. Go out and get sunlight early in the morning, or expose yourself to bright light with a SAD lamp. As afternoon draws into evening, begin to reduce levels of light in your home or workspace. Tell your body it’s getting closer to sleepy time. Turn off the main lights, turn on lamps, close the curtains — you could even light a few candles. I light my kitchen in the evening with candles, and it creates a wonderfully relaxing atmosphere. Begin to wind down your use of electronic devices that emit blue light.

If you have to spend your day or large portions of it staring at a screen, you can buy a pair of blue-light-blocking glasses. Ra Optics makes some very fetching blue-light blockers that don’t look at all silly. In fact, they’re basically indistinguishable from normal glasses or sunglasses. You could also buy one of Daylight’s very swanky tablets that has a blue-light-free backlight.

Alternatively, you can play with your device’s brightness settings or download a blue-light app like f.lux or Twilight. There’s also a built-in feature on Windows called “Night Light” that allows you to reduce levels of blue light in the evenings. You can even toggle it to come on automatically at set times.

Of course, you could just turn the bloody thing off. Imagine that. Our ancestors, fortunate creatures that they were, didn’t have to.

​Red light therapy, Screen time, Circadian rhythms, Body clock, Endocrine disruptor, Health, Lifestyle, Make america healthy again 

Investors are always looking for hot stocks. But what if the hottest stocks became that way via cursed baptism in a certain lake of fire?

Sulfur and brimstone are two commodities not many should be excited about adding to their portfolio. And yet the world of investing has a twisted fascination with companies that deal in vice. There’s one particular mutual fund that singles out investments in “sin stocks” like cannabis and casinos. The investment thesis is that buying into morally murky industries is a long-term win because addicts make loyal customers, and even in bad economies, people still want to get high.

If people are serious about making America great again, they must consider what their investments are funding.

But the Vice Fund is not actually all that unique — it is just saying the quiet part out loud.

There are hundreds of mutual funds and ETFs invested in the shady businesses of abortion drugs, pornography, strip clubs, and LGBT activism. But what you might not realize is that there is a good chance you own one of those funds in your 401(k), IRA, or other investment fund.

Don’t believe me? Type one of your ticker symbols into www.inspireinsight.com and see for yourself.

It’s easy to be deceived. These dirty funds have normal-sounding names from reputable companies like American Funds Growth Fund of America, iShares Core S&P 500 ETF, and Vanguard Large Cap Index Fund. The devil comes disguised as an angel of light, after all.

But don’t be too hard on yourself. If anyone should have known better it was me. I had the wool pulled over my eyes, too. A financial adviser working in the lofty private client group of a prestigious bank and a dedicated pro-life Christian, I was dumbfounded the day I discovered that I was personally invested in three abortion drug manufacturing companies.

The unsettling truth pierced my heart that every time a young lady went to Planned Parenthood and had an abortion, I made money on that transaction. I literally profited from the murder of an innocent child and was recommending all of my wealthy clients to do the same.

But it didn’t stop there: porn, LGBT activism, human trafficking, the list went on like a “hottest stock picks” newsletter from hell. How could this be?

According to a recent study by the faith-based investing organization Kingdom Advisors, $22.4 trillion of investment assets are owned by Christian church members in the United States, representing about 50% of the entire investment market.

I have two questions: How much of that money is invested right now in industries and activities that are diametrically opposed to the biblical values their Christian owners seek to live their lives by? And how different might corporate America be — and indeed our nation at large — if those Christian investors directed their capital away from the works of evil and into companies that did good instead?

What if major corporations got the message that 50% of the investment assets in America were off limits to any business that manufactured abortion drugs? Or pushed LGBT activist agendas? Or distributed porn?

What if the mutual fund, ETF, and 401(k) providers got the message that 50% of the investment assets in America refused to invest in funds that bought morally compromised stocks?

RELATED: How corporate America helped fuel the hate that killed Charlie Kirk

baloon111/iStock/Getty Images Plus

I believe things would be much different — and much better. Last month, Costco announced its decision not to sell the abortion drug mifepristone in any of its pharmacies. This decision is a huge pro-life victory and followed a sustained shareholder engagement campaign that began more than two years before by my faith-based investing firm, Inspire Investing.

Thanks to Biden-era shenanigans, in 2023, long-standing safety restrictions limiting mifepristone distribution were loosened to allow retail pharmacies to apply for a special exemption to dispense the abortion pill directly: a dangerous practice that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration itself says puts women in elevated danger of hospitalization and potentially deadly complications, regardless of what you believe about abortion and the effect on the baby.

In early 2024, CVS and Walgreens jumped on the abortion bandwagon and signed up for the exemption. Other large retail pharmacies such as Costco, Walmart, Albertsons, and Kroger, were considering following suit. That’s when our team snapped into action.

We leveraged our position as investors to lobby the investor relations department and made the strong case against getting into the abortion business. We gathered over 9,000 signatures from Costco members and investors ready to cancel their memberships if Costco started stocking mifepristone. We rallied a coalition, including faith-based investors, treasurers, and other financial officers from conservative states. We had numerous conversations with Costco’s management.

Liberal abortion activists were also hard at work, bringing their own firepower to bear.

In the end, goodness and common sense prevailed, and Costco made the rational decision to stay out of such a contentious and legally tenuous line of business, while also citing a “lack of demand from our members and other patients.” But it wasn’t only Costco. Walmart made the same decision, and we are hopeful that other pharmacies will be listening to reason as well.

This isn’t an isolated incident. You can read many more stories of the successes we’ve had, including details of the behind-the-scenes conversations influencing major corporations with conservative, biblical values in my book “Biblically Responsible Investing: On Wall Street as It Is in Heaven.”

If people are serious about making America great again, they must consider what their investments are funding. Is your own money working against you?

Will you invest the hell out of your money?

​Christianity, Christian, Hell, Investing, Money, Finances, Faith 

As a woman in a leadership role of a Christian organization, I appreciate the opportunities available to me in modern America. Women can and do lead with great effectiveness in countless contexts as the Lord calls and equips women to advance His kingdom.

But let me say something that will sound scandalous to modern ears: National leadership belongs to men, and the 19th Amendment was a mistake.

Western imagination continues to swallow, without chewing, the dogma that men and women are virtually interchangeable in every respect but reproduction.

Does that shock you?

It probably does, and we have the rise of feminism and its pervasive influence on the West to thank for that.

Feminist programming

The factory settings of the American mind are thoroughly feminist. We instinctively view women rising into roles once held exclusively by men as positive. But rarely do we pause to contemplate whether such role-swapping might actually be a factor in the sharp moral decline of the last century.

The Western imagination continues to swallow, without chewing, the dogma that men and women are virtually interchangeable in every respect but reproduction. But this is biological and biblical falsehood dressed in cultural orthodoxy. Men and women are different to the core — in body, brain, hormones, and God-given roles.

How could we possibly ignore the reality that these vast differences will have a significant impact on our institutions if we liberally swap women into governing roles?

The emotional, nurturing leanings of femininity are God-ordained. In their proper place and function, they are a strength. But when it comes to the leadership of a nation, feminine traits are an inherent weakness.

Is it time we began reconsidering this?

Grace meets justice

At the recent memorial for Charlie Kirk, masculine and feminine, government and personal were on full display. In an unforgettable moment, Erika Kirk publicly forgave her husband’s alleged murderer. This was a faithful demonstration of the gospel of God’s grace. It was right.

Not long before that, Stephen Miller, in no uncertain terms, made it abundantly clear that our enemies must be destroyed. This was a faithful demonstration of God’s justice and role of government: wielding the sword against the evildoer. It was right.

RELATED: How Erika Kirk answered the hardest question of all

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

For the government to absolve the doer of a wicked deed and refrain from doing justice would be evil. For an individual to forgive is right. This tension is complementary, but blurring the lines is catastrophic. While there may be the rare exception of women who understand this and are able to unflinchingly pursue justice against evildoers, the truth remains that men are intrinsically designed by their Creator for that in a way that women are not.

Seeing men and women as interchangeable in the halls of government has opened our nation up to all manner of evil. Favoring the nurturing tendencies of female leadership over the strength and forcefulness of male leadership has allowed our nation to be infiltrated by those who hate us, using the Trojan horse of misplaced compassion.

Order, not oppression

Not long ago, few questioned whether men should lead their families and their nation.

Leadership of this kind was understood as God’s assignment to men. Departure from this was the exception — not the goal. Scripture itself portrays the rule of women and children over men as a sign of divine judgment, not of blessing (Isaiah 3:12).

When 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, no one raised an eyebrow at their failure to assemble a gender-balanced cast of signers. The signers knew they were risking their lives by writing their names on that document, and this extreme risk has always been understood to be the God-given role of men.

Voting rights, originally limited to land-owning males, followed a simple principle: Those given authority with the vote should also bear a tangible interest in society’s future. They should have skin in the game.

George Washington once warned: “It is to be lamented that more attention has not been paid to the qualifications of electors. Without property, or with little, the common interest will be disregarded or postponed to that of individuals.”

This was neither a call to oppress nor arbitrary discrimination, but it was a protective recognition of human nature. A man with land, family, and livelihood invested in the community was far less likely to cast votes carelessly than someone detached from such responsibilities.

Disordered chaos

Change came gradually. By the 1820s and 1830s, property requirements for white men were swept away in the name of “universal manhood suffrage.” By 1856, every state allowed men to vote regardless of land ownership.

This was celebrated as progress — but it marked a philosophical turning point. Authority was no longer tethered to responsibility.

The 19th century brought the women’s suffrage movement, culminating in the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. What had for millennia across the globe been seen as natural order was reframed as injustice. Strong male leadership as an ideal was abandoned in favor of sameness.

RELATED: Misogyny? Please: Our real problem is female entitlement

Getty Images Plus

Instead of viewing womanhood as a high calling of influence through nurture, wisdom, and faithfulness, women began rejecting the way God has naturally wired us in order to become functionally men.

Are our families stronger for it? Is our society more stable?

Of course not. Broken homes abound. Men shrink back in passivity. Women carry burdens they were never meant to bear. Children grow up without clear models of what it means to be a man or a woman.

God’s blueprint

Feminism is destroying us, and Christians hardly want to give it a look. A Christian today would likely recoil in horror at the idea of strongly preferring a male candidate vs. a female candidate, all other conditions being equal. But this idea is thoroughly biblical.

The stats are undeniable that unmarried women vote overwhelmingly Democrat, citing the “right” to murder their own babies as a primary issue. This should deeply trouble every thoughtful, Christian conservative. Yet suggest repealing the 19th Amendment and returning to the heavily limited voting rights advocated by the founding fathers, and the negative response from Christians will be more intense than the response to blasphemy against our Creator.

Robust debate is healthy and good for a flourishing society. Disagreement is not a bad thing. But feminism is one of the key culprits that has effectively shut down vibrant debate. All that is required is an accusation of meanness or offense, and the conversation is over before it begins.

Women are experts at leveraging this to our advantage. Men have allowed this to happen.

If America and, more importantly, the church are to recover, we must shed the feminist factory settings and return to God’s blueprint. Men and women are equal in dignity but distinct in design. Women can lead in many contexts — but national headship, church eldership, and family authority are given by God to men.

That is not oppression; it is order. It is not diminishing; it is dignifying. When men and women live according to God’s good design, society flourishes, families strengthen, and the watching world sees something of Christ on display.

​Feminism, Christianity, George washington, Christian, America, Faith 

“Don’t give me doctrine — just give me Jesus.”

It sounds humble, even noble. But ask, “Who is Jesus?” and suddenly you’re doing theology. You cannot follow a Savior you refuse to define.

The modern church has traded catechism for catchphrases. “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” “Don’t judge.” “Everything happens for a reason.” Feelings outrank Scripture. Sentiment trumps substance. Haul those slogans into an ICU or a funeral home and watch how empty they sound.

I’ve been a caregiver for four decades. My wife has endured 98 surgeries, the amputation of both legs, and relentless pain. I’ve tested theology in the harshest corridors of suffering. If it doesn’t hold up there, it doesn’t hold at all.

Jesus said to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Paul told believers to be transformed by the renewing of the mind. Thinking is not optional for Christians. It’s obedience.

Common sense without Scripture isn’t wisdom — it’s presumption.

Charlie Kirk understood this. He urged Christians to prepare their minds and defend the gospel, echoing Peter’s command: “Always be ready to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). A church allergic to thinking leaves its people defenseless.

God Himself asked hard questions: “Where are you?” “Where is your brother?” “Who do you say I am?” From Eden to Emmaus, He forced clarity. If the Creator asks hard questions, why should His people settle for bumper-sticker answers?

Economist Thomas Sowell cut through bad reasoning with three questions: Compared to what? At what cost? What hard data do you have? Christians should be just as discerning.

When someone says, “God told me …,” the right response is, “Where is that in Scripture?” Jeremiah 29:11 wasn’t written for entrepreneurs chasing dreams. It was God’s word to exiles facing 70 years of captivity. Context matters.

Bad theology always hands someone the bill. “If you had more faith, you’d be healed.” Cost: shame when healing doesn’t come. “God just wants you happy.” Cost: broken families. “Don’t judge.” Cost: silence in the face of destruction. Cheap slogans carry devastating price tags.

The real test? Would you say it to grieving parents? To a family in hospice? If not, why say it at all? Job’s friends did well when they sat in silence. Once they opened their mouths, they leaned on speculation that sounded like wisdom. God rebuked them for speaking falsely about Him. Common sense without Scripture isn’t wisdom — it’s presumption.

I saw that same trap in a heated exchange with a friend. He waved off Scripture: “That doesn’t make sense to me.” Then he defended himself with, “It’s just common sense.” It was a modern echo of Job’s companions: trusting opinion over revelation. My answer stayed the same: “But what does Scripture say?” He had no reply. Like too many believers today, he didn’t know his Bible.

This problem extends beyond private conversation. When Jimmy Kimmel returned from suspension, he tearfully said he tried to follow the teachings of Jesus. It sounded noble. But isn’t that just another way of saying, “Just give me Jesus” — without doctrine, without definition?

RELATED: How Erika Kirk answered the hardest question of all

Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Where does he think those teachings come from? The only record of Jesus’ words is in Scripture. To claim His teaching while denying His identity cuts out the very ground you’re standing on. Which parts of the Bible will he follow, and which will he ignore? You cannot have the Sermon on the Mount without “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). C.S. Lewis was blunt: Jesus was Lord, lunatic, or liar. There is no safe middle ground. To quote Him on television while ignoring His divinity may play well on-screen, but it isn’t Christianity.

Proverbs gives the wiser course: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5). Our reasoning is clouded by sin. Scripture, not sentiment, must be our guide.

Jesus never called for blind faith. He asked, “Who do you say that I am?” He invited thought, demanded clarity, and confronted error. We don’t need louder voices. We need sharper minds — sanctified, surrendered, and grounded in Scripture.

Truth doesn’t fear scrutiny. Faith doesn’t fear questions. So ask them. Challenge the slogans. Don’t leave your brain in the narthex.

Feelings collapse. Scripture stands.

​Opinion & analysis, Faith, Religion, Scripture, Gospel, God, Jesus christ, Truth, Christianity, Theology, Doctrine, St. peter, Charlie kirk, Thomas sowell, Abide, Hospice, Funeral home, Slogan, Bad advice 

Childbirth is often painted as beautiful and natural — but for many women, the fear is overwhelming.

And that fear has a name: tokophobia.

Tokophobia is defined as an extreme fear of childbirth that can cause some women to take excessive measures in order to avoid pregnancy. And Abbie Halberstadt, a mother of 10, while a major advocate for pregnancy and childbirth, understands those women who are paralyzed with fear.

When she was a few weeks out from her labor with her eighth child, she started having “significant anxiety in the evenings.”

“This is my number eight … and I have tokophobia. I mean, I am like, ‘I can’t do this again. Like, I can’t,’” she tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable,” explaining that she had the closest thing she’s ever had to a “full-blown panic or anxiety attack.”

“I woke up contracting in the middle of the night … in the middle of a contraction and could not catch my breath. My heart started racing,” she explains.

And while she understands the fear, she believes that there’s a problem with the way women think about pregnancy and childbirth that leads to this extreme fear.

“I think the problem is that the mindset that is feeding this is ‘hard things are bad things.’ Hard is not the same thing as bad,” she says.

“I think when we’re picturing birth or picturing pregnancy, and I’m even, you know, talking to myself, I have a lot of fear surrounding all of that, having done it three times already, it’s like I can trust that God is a good shepherd, that he’s going to lead me where He wants to lead me,” Stuckey agrees.

“Not that it’s going to be perfect or easy,” she continues, “and also that His goodness and His mercy will follow me and will accomplish in and through and behind and around me everything that God wants them to accomplish.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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

​Camera phone, Free, Sharing, Upload, Video, Video phone, Youtube.com, Relatable, Relatable with allie beth stuckey, Allie beth stuckey, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Childbirth, Fear of childbirth, Pregnancy, Religion, God, Jesus christ, Post partum, Abbie halberstadt, Womens health 

In an article published only two days before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a writer at the far-left outlet Jezebel detailed her experience working with witches in an attempt to place a curse on Kirk and silence his message.

The article, titled “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk,” was written by Claire Guinan. It has since been taken down but can still be accessed through internet archives.

Guinan wrote that she felt obligated to do something about Kirk, whom she called a “fake news vending machine.” If it meant silencing his “nightmare ideology,” she wrote, “I’m more than happy to be the hag of his nightmares.” She went on to describe “cursing Kirk” as her “personal goal.”

One of the supposed witches sent her evidence of the completed curse: a burning photo of Kirk and the message, ‘Trust the unseen.’

To procure a curse, Guinan turned to Etsy, a popular e-commerce platform where private sellers can advertise and sell a wide variety of products and services. Her search term, “curse enemy,” turned up 5,000 results. She purchased the services of three different women claiming to be witches, who agreed to place curses on Kirk.

Guinan provided Kirk’s date of birth to ensure accuracy and even paid $50 extra to boost the supposed power of the curse. She claimed that she did not intend for the curse to actually harm Kirk: “I’m not calling on dark forces to cause him harm.” She described her intent as an effort “to ruin his day with the collective feminist power of the Etsy coven.”

RELATED: Evil unmasked: How Charlie Kirk’s murder exposed a diabolical spiritual war

Photo by Milissa Majchrzak / Contributor via Getty Images

After ordering the curses, Guinan waited in the hope that “justice would be done.” The next day, one of the supposed witches sent her evidence of the completed curse: a burning photo of Kirk and the message, “Trust the unseen.” Guinan was optimistic since she had “timed the purchase perfectly with the August new moon in Virgo.”

In wondering whether the curses would work, Guinan placed her trust “in the timing of the great unknown,” relating how one of the witches told her “spellwork is a collaboration between the caster, the client, and the universe itself.”

At the time of the article’s publication, she was still waiting for definitive results, while giving a shout-out to “the witches of the modern world” for their efforts “to hex Republicans and topple conservative regimes.” She ended the article with a line directed at Kirk, telling him, “May the rash come swiftly.”

Jezebel and Etsy did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

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

​Abide, Align, Witches, Charlie kirk, Etsy, Curse, Politics 

Veteran journalist Paul Bond is breaking the silence on what really happens inside major newsrooms — and it’s not comforting for those who want to believe that there are still objective journalists out there.

“If we don’t have journalists that say, ‘I will be an objective journalist, not an activist,’ we are a communist country,” BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan tells Bond, who has some bad news for Shanahan.

“Problem is, we have lots of people who say that; they just don’t mean it,” Bond warns. “I mean, if you ask the people who work for the New York Times and the Washington Post and Newsweek and Time and MSNBC and CNN, they will tell you, ‘I’m an objective journalist.’”

“I’ve met some that are good, and they’re hard to find,” Shanahan agrees.

“It’s hard to be a trusted journalist,” Bond says, “because you’re dealing with others with other agendas. And, you know, sometimes somebody at Newsweek or at the Hollywood Reporter would reach out to me saying, ‘Hey, we’re writing this piece on so and so, and we know you have a relationship with them. Can you get a comment?’”

“I’ll reach out for a comment, and they’ll give me a comment because they trust me. And then it’s this hit piece. And so, I feel like I was used,” he adds.

Bond recalls once interviewing Jesse Watters from Fox News while someone at Newsweek was writing a negative piece about Watters at the same exact time.

“I forgot what it was, but in that story, it says, you know, ‘Newsweek was unable to reach Jesse Watters.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m on the phone with Jesse Watters. Newsweek is able to reach Jesse Watters. I’m talking to Jesse Watters about this thing that you’re writing about,’” he recalls.

“They wanted their hit piece. They didn’t want him to deny that it was true, or whatever he would have said if he hadn’t been on the phone with me. So, they write this hit piece. They publish this hit piece. ‘No access to Jesse Watters,’” he says, noting that this happens all the time.

“A lot of times, they’ll reach out to people to get their comment after the story’s written,” he adds.

Want more from Nicole Shanahan?

To enjoy more of Nicole’s compelling blend of empathy, curiosity, and enlightenment, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Camera phone, Free, Sharing, Upload, Video, Video phone, Youtube.com, Back to the people, Back to the people with nicole shanahan, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, The new york times, Mainstream media, Newsweek, Washington post, Corrupt journalists, Msnbc 

After eight months in office, almost all of the Trump administration’s aggressive trade agenda has come into focus.

Sectoral tariffs have been applied to industries deemed important to national security. A fresh review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, negotiated and signed during President Donald Trump’s first term, has been announced. And while lots will hinge on the outcome of a U.S. Supreme Court review of the legality of “reciprocal” tariffs, the president has used them to trigger trade talks and higher rates with almost every major trade partner.

Trump has a chance to stand on higher ground than his predecessors on China. But it all depends on what kind of deal his administration strikes with that country.

But the biggest trade question remains unanswered: How will the second Trump administration ultimately deal with China?

The China question

Negotiations between the U.S. and Chinese governments are ongoing, the results of which will be hugely consequential. But judging from the administration’s own body language and with a November deadline rapidly approaching, you might conclude that the president is most interested in another deal for the sake of a deal.

That would be a mistake. China’s state-directed economy massively distorts global trade. Many of its manufacturing industries are in a state of intentional overcapacity, and the Chinese government has proven willing to absorb those trade barriers rather than correct the imbalances; as such, China remains a major U.S. trading partner, despite the wall of tariffs and other restrictions our nations have raised and lowered against each other.

A bad precedent

Moreover, we know what happened the last time a Trump administration cut a hasty trade deal with China. The promised bulk-commodity purchases weren’t completed, and China made no meaningful changes to specific unfair trade behaviors like intellectual-property theft, circumvention, and its raft of industrial subsidies. While Trump began both his terms as a China trade hawk, looking to differentiate himself from his predecessors, his first-term retreat and ongoing second-term hesitation make that distinction hardly discernible.

Misreading Beijing

Over the last quarter-century, every American president has misread the Chinese Communist Party. President Bill Clinton trusted that market power would liberalize Chinese society; it has since grown more authoritarian. President George W. Bush trusted the power of Hank Paulson to manage the U.S.-China relationship. Instead, the American manufacturing workforce suffered the horrific China shock. President Barack Obama, much more sanguine about China, aimed to mitigate the damage but trusted that bilateral dialogues and engagement through the World Trade Organization would induce Beijing to move off of its model of state capitalism; it instead ran out the clock on him and his efforts.

Donald Trump, the ultimate dealmaker, trusted that an agreement would change the bilateral dynamic, but then Xi Jinping ignored it. President Joe Biden, to his credit, kept many of Trump’s tariffs and even made nascent progress in shoring up our own industrial capacities and enlisting our allies. But, to borrow a phrase utilized by his administration, the “yard” in “small yard and high fence” was, in fact, too small to spark systemic change.

What’s the strategy?

Now Trump has returned, but has his approach evolved? The administration’s actions on China to date could cause whiplash. Perhaps this strategic ambiguity is by design. But it makes one wonder what his priorities are now. Is it a TikTok deal inconsistent with U.S. law? Will we have 145% tariffs, a grand trade bargain, or something in between? Does the president want to make China dependent on American technology for artificial intelligence, or does he want to completely box it out of the latest tech? Will he invite Chinese domestic investment or view it as a national security threat?

And if he announces an agreement, will it be strong enough to move more critical supply chains out of China?

RELATED: Trump hasn’t changed his position on China one bit

Photo by Neil Hall/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images

After all, defending U.S. manufacturing and its workers against unfair Chinese trade used to be the clear goal. If it remains so, any deal with China must maintain tariffs at a level high enough to limit import volumes, make extremely narrow and time-limited exceptions for the inputs necessary to turbocharge the reshoring effort, and phase tariffs for those categories over time.

The administration must also continue to enlist allies in the effort to surround China. There will be a chance for that with Canada and Mexico during the USMCA negotiations. Higher tariffs for “transshipped” goods, like the recent deal with Vietnam, should be a feature of all these reciprocal agreements. The latest China shock is hitting manufacturing hard in the European Union, so the EU’s participation should be a priority.

Lasting change

Finally, the administration must include the U.S. Congress in this work. Executive orders only go so far, and, in 2025, skepticism about the U.S.-China trade relationship is one of the few areas of bipartisan political agreement. President Trump should leverage that, call on Congress to repeal China’s permanent normal trade relations, and make a higher tariff rate permanent. That would be a huge step toward locking in a sensible derisking strategy and also demonstrating to businesses that the strategy is durable.

Trump has a chance to stand on higher ground than his predecessors on China. But it all depends on what kind of deal his administration strikes with that country. A lot of American factory jobs depend on the outcome.

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

​Opinion & analysis, Opinion, China, China deal, Trump china trade war, Trump china deal, China tariff, China tariffs 

Medical groups, foreign health organizations, and some lawmakers threw a conniption this week after President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dared to take action over the apparent association between autism and prenatal exposure to acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.

A popular tactic taken by critics was to refute a claim the Trump administration wasn’t making, namely that acetaminophen was causally linked to autism.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, for example, stated, “In more than two decades of research on the use of acetaminophen in pregnancy, not a single reputable study has successfully concluded that the use of acetaminophen in any trimester of pregnancy causes neurodevelopmental disorders in children.”

Of course, the point the administration was making concerns the apparent correlation, not causation, between Tylenol use during pregnancy and autism in children — a correlation that has been borne out in numerous studies published in reputable peer-reviewed scientific journals such as Environmental Health, JAMA Psychiatry, Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics, and the International Journal of Epidemiology.

While such studies evidently have not swayed organizations cozy with the pharmaceutical industry, they certainly caused alarm behind the scenes at the very company that made Tylenol for six decades.

Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson made the acetaminophen product Tylenol available over the counter in 1960. In 2023, J&J spun off its consumer health care division Kenvue as an independent company, which now makes the drug.

Damning internal documents recently obtained by the Daily Caller indicate that years before J&J parted ways with Tylenol, some of its senior scientists admitted that a possible association existed between Tylenol and autism.

RELATED: Fact-check: Tylenol confirms 2017 pregnancy warning tweet is authentic

Photo Illustration by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

For instance, when serving as the U.S. director of epidemiology for J&J’s pharmaceutical arm Janssen in 2018, Rachel Weinstein noted in an email, “The weight of evidence is starting to feel heavy to me.”

After referencing “studies in prenatal exposure and neurodev outcome,” Weinstein wrote, “It looks like there are a bunch of papers from 2016 that we somehow missed. Many of them by Liew et al.”

One of the papers Weinstein may have been referring to was a study published in the international journal Autism Research. The study indicated that maternal use of acetaminophen for over 20 weeks of pregnancy “increased the risk of [autism spectrum disorder] or infantile autism with hyperkinetic symptoms almost twofold.”

The company documents were provided to the Caller by the law firm Keller Postman, which is leading a class-action lawsuit against Kenvue as well as against retailers that sell their own store-branded acetaminophen.

Ashley Keller, lead attorney for the families whose suit will be heard before the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit beginning on Oct. 9, told Blaze News, “The emails confirm that the company’s nothing-to-see-here response to the administration’s announcement is pure spin.”

“Internally, the company was aware of the growing body of scientific evidence linking prenatal Tylenol use to neurodevelopmental harm in offspring,” Keller added.

‘There are dozens of studies showing a link between Tylenol and neurodevelopmental harm in offspring.’

Weinstein wrote in a 2014 letter to one of the researchers behind the 2014 study titled “Acetaminophen use during pregnancy, behavioral problems, and hyperkinetic disorders,” which was published in JAMA Pediatrics, “We recognize the substantial strengths of the study and the data sources.”

That study concluded, “Maternal acetaminophen use during pregnancy is associated with a higher risk for HKDs and ADHD-like behaviors in children.”

Referencing her correspondence with the researcher on the 2014 paper, Weinstein and other top J&J scientists considered backing follow-up studies; however, she then noted, “Do we really need to stick our neck out and make this offer?”

Slides for a 2018 internal presentation labeled “privileged and confidential” discussed epidemiological studies concerning potential links between Tylenol and various neurodevelopmental disorders. The slide summarizing the studies under review states, “Individual observational studies show a somewhat consistent association of increased occurrence of neurodevelopmental outcomes with prenatal exposure.”

Internal communications further indicate that some J&J employees were reportedly also aware of a 2018 scientific review that indicated nine recent studies had suggested “an increased risk of adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes following prenatal [acetaminophen] exposure.”

The Caller indicated that Weinstein could not be reached for comment.

A spokesperson for J&J told the Daily Caller, “Johnson & Johnson divested its consumer health business years ago, and all rights and liabilities associated with the sale of its over-the-counter products, including Tylenol (acetaminophen), are owned by Kenvue.”

The current maker of Tylenol, Kenvue, in turn continued downplaying a link between its drug and autism.

“Nothing is more important to us than the health and safety of the people who use our products,” said Kenvue spokeswoman Melissa Witt. “We have continuously evaluated the science and continue to believe there is no causal link between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and autism.”

When asked about Kenvue’s assertion that “there is no credible science that shows taking acetaminophen causes autism,” Keller, the attorney representing families in the class-action lawsuit against Kenvue, told Blaze News, “To quote the late, great Justice Scalia: ‘Pure applesauce.'”

Alluding to some of the credible science that has been undertaken to date, Keller underscored there is cause for concern.

“There are dozens of studies showing a link between Tylenol and neurodevelopmental harm in offspring. The direct measurement studies that look at biomarkers all show dose response (more Tylenol, more risk),” Keller said. “They also show very elevated odds ratios (double, triple, quadruple, even quintupling of the risk). The animal models, which can control for genetics far better than human observational studies, show that acetaminophen is neurotoxic.”

“Does that mean causation has been definitively established? No, it is simply likely,” Keller continued. “But even if you only think it is plausible, we shouldn’t have to wait for definitive proof of causation before we warn pregnant women of risks.”

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

​Acetaminophen, Tylenol, Drugs, Big pharma, Donald trump, Kenvue, Ashley keller, Lawsuit, Health, Maha, Politics 

Steve Reams, sheriff for Weld County in Colorado, posted a chilling warning on Facebook earlier this month.

Reams revealed that an inmate who “is a potential danger to the community” was being released.

‘God help this State.’

The sheriff’s Facebook post included a mugshot of 21-year-old Ephraim Debisa (aka Debisa Ephraim) along with video allegedly showing the suspect repeatedly pounding the heads of fight victims even after they were unconscious.

In the first part of the clip, a male appears to get knocked out and is lying on a sidewalk when another male begins repeatedly punching the victim in the face; the second part shows a one-on-one street fight during which a male sucker-punches another male, the punched male falls to the street, and the male who walloped him repeatedly punches the face of the motionless victim.

Reams said Greeley Police arrested Debisa on April 5 on charges of suspicion of attempted murder, first-degree assault causing serious bodily injury, and engaging in a riot. Reams said Greeley Police on April 23 issued another arrest for a separate case regarding Debisa while he was still incarcerated in the Weld County jail.

Nevertheless, the sheriff noted in his Sept. 8 Facebook post that Debisa “will be released from the Weld County jail today per Colorado statute. Competency was raised in two of his criminal cases, and the courts found in July of this year his competency could not be restored, and therefore he would not be able to stand trial.”

Reams added, “The state legislature and the Governor have continued to weaken the criminal justice system by handcuffing law enforcement, prosecutors and judges for the sake of criminals. Colorado HB24-1034 has created a crisis where very dangerous individuals are being released to the street to reoffend over and over; this is the latest example. I pray this individual doesn’t hurt another innocent victim, but the public deserves to know of his past violent actions so they can protect themselves accordingly. God help this State.”

Democrat Gov. Jared Polis signed House Bill 24-1034 into law last year, KCNC-TV reported, which says in part that those deemed incompetent to stand trial in the last five years should be given mental health treatment if possible.

RELATED: Justice for Laken Riley at risk? Shocking court decision could give vicious killer a new trial.

But Sheriff Reams told the station that the law allows those who don’t qualify for the mental health program to be released without further attention. Indeed, the Weld County District Attorney’s Office told KCNC it had to drop its case against Debisa since mental health evaluators did not believe they could restore his competency within a reasonable, foreseeable future, which the law requires.

“With that ruling, we are forced to release that individual,” Reams told the station.

The sheriff added to KCNC that prosecutors tried to extend Debisa’s jail stay through legal channels while trying to find ways to prosecute him further or get him into a mental health facility. But those efforts were exhausted, and the inmate was legally required to be released, the station said.

“He is a very dangerous person, and his actions, from what we can tell, were unprovoked,” Reams added to KCNC.

Reams added to the station that he would have considered getting federal agencies involved to consider deportation since Debisa is a refugee from Tanzania — except technically he was never acquitted or found guilty of the charges against him; Debisa only was found incompetent to stand trial. Therefore he also couldn’t be prosecuted for deportation, KCNC said.

A warranted warning

As you might already be guessing, it turns out that Sheriff Reams’ dire warning to the public earlier this month was warranted.

Police in Greeley just arrested Debisa after University of Northern Colorado officials said he was spotted on campus with a gun, KCNC reported in a follow-up story.

RELATED: Ohio woman who allegedly stabbed 3-year-old to death at grocery store found incompetent to stand trial

Indeed, the Weld County Sheriff’s Office said Wednesday, “Today, Ephraim Debisa, 21, was arrested again by the Greeley Police Dept. with the help of the Weld County Sheriff’s Office STRIKE team.”

The sheriff’s office said Debisa was arrested on a warrant from the UNC police on a pair of felony charges: unlawful possession of a weapon on school grounds and trespass of an inhabited dwelling.

Sheriff Reams reacted to Debisa’s new arrest by saying exactly what you might expect: “I knew this would happen. I am glad no one was hurt.”

The sheriff’s office added that jail staff couldn’t produce a new mugshot for Debisa “due to his uncooperative behavior.” Debisa in a virtual interview from jail said he’s being politically targeted.

More from KCNC’s follow-up story:

CBS News Colorado’s report about Debisa’s release was shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, by Elon Musk. It was also shared as one of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s final tweets before he was assassinated the next day. Musk and Kirk both echoed the sentiments Reams had in the CBS News Colorado report, demanding laws be changed to not allow people facing serious charges to be released in such a way as HB24-1034 allowed.

Gov. Jared Polis responded to Musk’s share of the report, claiming Debisa’s release was “absolutely unacceptable.” Polis tweeted out, calling on authorities to “Remove this threat now.” However, both Reams and Weld County District Attorney Michael Rourke said they followed the law that Polis signed, citing the law as the reason they weren’t able to retain Debisa in jail.

Lori Gimelshteyn of the Colorado Parent Advocacy Network knows about this issue all too well. Her group launched a petition calling for Polis and the state legislature to convene an emergency special session to amend or repeal competency laws “before more lives are impacted.”

Gimelshteyn told Blaze News that “these laws have created a revolving door for violent offenders, putting communities at risk and denying justice to victims and their families.”

One prominent related case in Colorado concerns Solomon Galligan, a transgender sex offender accused of trying to kidnap a boy at an elementary school. As it turns out, Galligan recently was declared incompetent to stand trial, and his charges were dropped.

RELATED: Transgender sex offender accused of trying to kidnap boy at elementary school gets good news from DA

Solomon Galligan. Image source: Aurora (Colo.) Police Department

Gimelshteyn told Blaze News the Galligan case “is just one of many where the system has failed” — and that she hopes the new Debisa case “will prompt even more [petition] signatures, as it highlights just how serious the consequences of the current competency laws are.”

Sheriff Reams told KCNC that both cases “are very giant highlights to the mistake that was made. It needs to be corrected. Someone is going to get hurt, and someone is gonna get hurt bad.”

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

​Attempted murder charge, Colorado, Ephraim debisa, Inmate set free, Mental competence, Physical attack, Sheriff steve reams, Solomon galligan, State laws, Very dangerous, Weld county sheriff’s office, Crime 

The accelerating ascent, ubiquity, and commercialization of artificial intelligence require a renewed focus on truly elite human capital if we are to safeguard the future of Western civilization — both from external adversaries like China and also, perhaps even more importantly, from ourselves, especially given our postmodern and transhumanist tendencies.

In the coming years, we will need an elite cadre of Americans residing at the top levels of national and state government and bureaucracy. And yet, we are confronted by a very sad state of affairs across K-12 and postsecondary education, making the creation of such an elite class an increasingly difficult task.

We are clearly sapping the attention spans and atrophying the brains of our high school students.

A recent Atlantic article illustrated “Exhibit A” of this problem, namely, Harvard, the peak of elite credentialing institutions. The article, titled “The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A,” documents an alarming trend after decades of grade inflation. This excerpt helps give a sense of the problem’s progression: “In 2011, 60% of all grades were in the A range (up from 33% in 1985). By the 2020-21 academic year, that share had risen to 79%.”

Harvard has studied the problem and its effects: It turns out that when little effort is required to succeed in traditional academic respects, students stop going to class and, unsurprisingly, are doing less and less learning. An embarrassing fact emerges from faculty and student interviews: Fewer students are reading books and engaging with ideas at the world’s leading bastion of higher education. Trends are similar across the Ivies. The rise of ChatGPT and other large language models only exacerbates the problem.

The collapse of true learning in higher education should not be a surprise: The supply side for higher ed — teenagers — are rapidly incorporating LLMs into their daily academic lives.

In January, a Pew Research survey found that the number of America’s teenagers, ages 13-17, using ChatGPT had doubled since 2023 from 13% to 26%. Awareness among teens of ChatGPT has grown significantly over the last two years as well from 67% to 79%. With increasing familiarity comes the rising likelihood of teens using ChatGPT for homework and paper writing, as well as the opinion that it is legitimate and good for such purposes — roughly 50% to 80% of those surveyed, depending on how familiar they are with the technology.

Some initial studies suggest that this problem may be worse than the rising temptation of machine-aided plagiarism. An MIT Media Lab study determined that the use of ChatGPT in researching and composing papers led to underperformance “at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” The main author of the paper emphasized that “developing brains are at the highest risk.” The study is still under peer review and has a small sample size, but it would seem to confirm a common theme of similar cognitive and concentration studies done by many researchers since the rise of social media and the smartphone.

We are clearly sapping the attention spans and atrophying the brains of our high school students. The best of them are going to elite institutions of higher education, where they are less likely than ever to take any real advantage of their most important years for stocking intellectual capital and forming their minds and souls.

Technological Quixotism

Our pursuit of the holy grail of artificial general intelligence is sold to us by our current technologist class on at least two tracks. We are told that the AGI revolution will cure cancer, extend our lives considerably, help us terraform Mars, and usher in a new age of abundance and convenience. Who doesn’t want that? And we also really have to do it, pedal to the metal, in order to beat China in the new nuclear arms race — that is, the AI race.

This generally pro-technologist point of view was represented in the recent attempt by Sen.Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and others to get a 10-year moratorium on state regulation of AI into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That effort failed, thankfully, despite an intense lobbying effort by a growing constellation of pro-AI Big Tech PACs, super PACS, and lobbyists.

Another finding in the MIT study also lends credence to the recent enthusiastic embrace of AI. If you took the test group that was asked to complete a writing assignment without ChatGPT to rewrite their paper without it physically in front of them but with ChatGPT’s assistance, their measured brain activity demonstrated more robust engagement and retention, and the finished product was of good quality. This suggests that the use of LLMs as aids rather than originators of thought and writing posed much less of a probability of cognitive laziness and atrophy. In this way, LLMs look more like a useful supplemental tool.

RELATED: The AI takeover isn’t coming — it’s already here

Photo by BlackJack3D via Getty Images

Students face a great temptation to use this new technology as a pedagogical aid, as some elite universities like Duke are trying to integrate AI and LLMs into their systems and educational strategies. But growing research suggests that doing so has as many dangers as advantages. Consequently, AI must be approached very cautiously.

Moreover, integration of LLMs into K-12 education is gaining steam, especially given the increasingly ideological bent of primary education in recent decades. If the education-school-credentialed leftists who disproportionately populate the ranks of our public and private K-12 teachers can’t be trusted, perhaps the solution is to cut them out altogether and replace them with AI.

The use of LLMs as aids rather than originators of thought and writing posed much less of a chance of cognitive laziness and atrophy.

This experiment is currently being run by the private K-12 Alpha School based in Austin, Texas. Alpha Schools now have 17 locations either starting or nearly ready to launch across the country, charging roughly $45,000 in tuition annually. They boast excellent results in testing metrics (SAT and ACT), even while offering only two hours a day of AI-tutor-based instruction, followed by another four to five hours (including lunch) of life skills and creative and collaborative group work under the guidance of real-life human mentorship.

This is a new experiment, so it remains to be seen how Alpha students will fare on a longitudinal basis as the first cohorts matriculate into higher education. The Alpha schools are relentlessly data- and testing-driven, so perhaps they will navigate this uncharted territory successfully, avoiding the pitfalls of screen-based learning and attendant tradeoffs.

A litany of pre-AI age studies show the positive benefits of students getting back to the basics of education before the introduction of the screen. Taking notes by hand leads to better retention and absorption of material compared to taking notes on computers, to cite just one example.

Don’t let your servant become your master

The larger looming problem, however, is how we should educate elite students — how we should cultivate elite human capital — and equip them to navigate a rapidly changing national and international technological environment that is still bedeviled by the perennial and ancient difficulties of preserving “small-r” republicanism and the common good.

The argument of our technological class is that elite students should be set free — and even subsidized and offered quasi-monopoly protection — to pursue the quest for AGI. If we don’t, they argue, we’ll lose the AI arms race, and the West will be eclipsed by China, militarily and economically.

To rip an international anecdote from recent headlines to illustrate our dilemma further, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping were caught in a hot mic moment at a China confab discussing exciting advancements in biotechnology and organ harvesting — and even what such “advancements” might mean for their own longevity. If Putin is excited about living for another 20 to 50 years, Xi and his oligarchy must be pondering and planning for the possibilities of biotechnology, gene editing, eugenic embryo selection, and artificial wombs as a possible solution to China’s demographic problem.

Couple that impulse with the race for AI supremacy, and we must face the possibility — perhaps quite soon — of an arms race not only in AGI, but also onto transhuman vistas previously relegated to the pages and screens of science fiction.

Navigating this future while preserving America’s spirit of liberty and constitutionalism will be a tall order. It will require large bets on the old tools and contours of liberal education by private philanthropy and local, state, and national governments.

The ultimate control of our republican future must not be left to the technologists, but rather to statesmen and leaders whose minds and souls have been shaped in their formative years by a deep consideration of those age-old questions of justice, the common good, natural rights, human flourishing, philosophy, and theology.

The argument that we don’t have time will be a powerful one. The relentless pursuit of new areas of technical knowledge will be sold as the more urgent task — after all, national survival, they say, may be at stake. Given the 20th century’s experience with technical mastery severed from ethical, political, and constitutional safeguards, the bet on the unfettered pursuit of technological supremacy to the neglect of all else is just as likely to result in self-destruction.

As my colleague Christopher Caldwell has recommended, our AI arms race must be augmented, supplemented, and ultimately guided and controlled by wise statesmen who are steeped in the older ways of American liberal arts education. My hope is that those who are anxious about the fate of free government in the face of external material threats and internal spiritual threats can join forces to navigate our brave new world with wisdom and courage.

RELATED: AI is coming for your job, your voice … and your worldview

Photo by Moor Studio via Getty Images

To that end, we urgently need to locate, recruit, equip, and refine as many members of America’s current and soon-to-be cognitive elite as we can find and help them become better readers, thinkers, and writers. They will then be properly prepared, at least to the extent we can help them to be, to balance our pursuit of technological progress — intelligently and humanely — with the traditions and principles of Western civilization.

We need a Manhattan Project for elite human capital. Our difficulty is that we can’t snap our fingers and replace the Harvards and Yales with Hillsdales. And yet something approximating that miraculous trick may be needed to save us from our international rivals — and from ourselves.

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a speech delivered at the 2025 National Conservatism Conference. It was published originally at the American Mind.

​A.i., Ai, Ai data center, Artificial intelligence, Opinion, Opinion & analysis, Transhuman, Transhumanism, Transhumanism artificial intelligence, Arms race, Education, China, Elites 

The assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, whose only crime was to host debates in the public square and declare the gospel of Jesus Christ, has made something abundantly clear: We have crossed the Rubicon.

But it was the left’s response to his tragic death that revealed this reality perhaps even more than the shooting itself. Almost immediately, radicals took to social media to post videos celebrating Charlie’s murder, claiming he deserved to die and even mocking his wife, Erika, and their two children. Across the country, they defiled memorials, crashed prayerful vigils where his admirers gathered in grief, and even called for more violence against conservative figures.

This wasn’t a fringe group, either. It was a minority, says Auron MacIntyre, but “a very large minority.”

But now that it’s clear the right will not follow the left’s suit and respond in violence, even the liberals who initially issued “half-hearted rebukes” are beginning to “[rip] the mask off,” caveating their original statements with hypocritical comments like, “Charlie Kirk was evil. He was a fascist. He was a racist. … Wasn’t he kind of asking for it?”

Auron warns: For too long conservatives have mistakenly believed that “history is over” and that modern politics is just a “debate club,” but we can no longer deny the reality facing us: A nation this divided cannot endure.

“In order to have the type of politics where you get to debate over what you disagree with instead of fight over what you disagree with, you need to share a large amount of culture, belief, religion, morality, tradition, [and] understanding,” says Auron.

But “because we do not share them, we cannot do that mode of politics.”

“What we’re trying to do right now is operate one mode of politics on top of a foundation that is completely crumbled and can no longer support it. I’m not happy about that fact. I’m not cheering about that fact. I wish that foundation was still firm,” he says. “I wish we shared a common Anglo-Protestant understanding. I wish that we could speak to each other with all the implicit understanding that comes with a shared tradition, a shared morality, a shared way of looking at the world.”

But when one side believes that chopping off the genitals of a child is not only permissible but loving? Peaceable discourse is no longer a viable option. When the disparity between worldviews is this great, “We enter into a different kind of politics. … To quote a poorly ended television show, ‘When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die,”’ says Auron.

While he loathes this method of politics, “The sad news is that history doesn’t ask us what we want.” Once a republic starts to break down, as all republics eventually do, and people begin to spit on virtue and law and order, “You’re going to probably need to go outside of the rules in order to restore that type of government,” Auron explains.

“We’re going to need to make sure the left knows there’s a cost for what they’ve done.”

But Auron isn’t advocating for the anarchy and violence that’s become expected from the left. He’s calling for a “very, very, very, very, very serious response from the Trump administration.”

“The correct answer here,” he says, “is legitimate state force under the color of law. There’s nothing that Trump can’t do under the law that he needs to get done right now.”

“Thousands of people need to go to jail. They need to be bankrupted. It needs to be impossible for them to fund [terrorist groups] anymore. Companies like Discord need to pay a severe price for going out of their way to allow the organization of terrorist networks on their platform.”

“The Rubicon’s behind you whether you like it or not.” says Auron.

“Too many people are dead. Too many more will come if we take no action.”

Want more from Auron MacIntyre?

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

​The auron macintyre show, Auron macintyre, Blazetv, Blaze media, Leftwing violence, Charlie kirk, Charlie kirk assassination 

A man who allegedly tried to rob a couple at Penn Station in Manhattan got a surprise when they turned out to be off-duty police officers.

The husband and wife officers were in plainclothes and awaiting a train on the platform for the Long Island Rail Road when 32-year-old Jahmar Stewart approached them at about 7 p.m., according to a New York Police Department spokesperson.

‘The would-be victim’s wife pulled out her firearm and shot Stewart in the arm and the gut.’

Stewart tried to rob the man but instead got into a scuffle with him.

That’s when the would-be victim’s wife pulled out her firearm and shot Stewart in the arm and the gut.

He was later transported to Bellevue Hospital for treatment and was listed in stable condition on Wednesday evening.

Police said Stewart did not appear to be armed at the time, but he may have tried to simulate having a weapon.

The officer couple had worked the United Nations General Assembly and were returning home at the time of the incident. They sustained some minor injuries.

RELATED: Man admits to raping girl thousands of times and impregnating her — he has agreed to unbelievable plea deal

WABC-TV reported that the commuters on the train to Ronkonkoma were shocked to watch police attend to the bleeding suspect on the platform during the height of rush hour.

The man was arrested at about 3:40 a.m. Thursday and charged with assault and attempted robbery.

Sources told WABC that Stewart had five prior unsealed arrests, including assault and menacing, and lived in a shelter in Brooklyn. One reported incident of assault occurred only a month prior to the shooting.

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

​Attempted robbery thwarted, Victim is off duty cop, Off duty cop shoots robber, Penn station robbery, Crime 

Tetris CEO Maya Rogers defended the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as a force for good in order to diversify workplaces.

Rogers is the daughter of Henk Rogers, the video game developer who first secured the rights to distribute Tetris to gaming console companies.

‘There needs to be something that is almost enforced to make sure that there are enough women in the industry.’

In an interview with Games Industry, Rogers said that people don’t believe she runs the Tetris company when she tells them.

“They see a youngish-looking female, and they don’t believe you, or they don’t think that you run Tetris, or whatever,” she told the outlet. “But I guess it’s never really fazed me.”

After saying that the industry should not be dominated by men, Rogers made strange claims about the difference between male and female applicants. Despite saying “of course” she has faced sexism in her industry, the CEO went on to say that men are trying to get jobs by “winging it,” while women are “overqualified.”

“Men show up to the table, and they’re kind of winging it, right? Guys are really good at winging it. … Women show up overqualified because they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, am I good enough for the job?'”

Rogers added, “We’ve got to put ourselves out there, and be OK to be vulnerable.”

Games Industry cited Rogers as having “made a point of increasing the number of women working at the Tetris Company” as well.

Rogers explained, “When my father was running the business, it was more male. And now we have a lot of women, and it’s great. We’re doing amazing things. Girls can do it all.”

The 47-year-old then championed DEI programs and said there needs to be assurances to get women into the gaming industry.

RELATED: Gen Z gets the freedom to voice chat with strangers — and they can’t handle it

Photo by Rick Kern/FilmMagic

“That in itself in America today is a thing that’s being questioned,” she said about DEI programs. “But I think that was so important to have, because it did change how many people of diversity, [of] different backgrounds, were allowed in the workplace.”

More directly, Rogers said, “There needs to be something that is almost enforced to make sure that there are enough women in the industry,” and women in powerful positions need to “be out there, being vocal, [and] inspiring people to fight for their rights.”

To further her point, the CEO said that women are still battling for change, before claiming that women “came together” to fight “for their rights,” which she believes still needs to happen.

RELATED: Why Palmer Luckey’s Chromatic blew my mind

Photo by Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images

Overall, the idea of a male-dominated gaming industry did not seem to sit will with Rogers, who said, “It shouldn’t be that way,” and, “Women need to be given a chance.”

“There’s so many women playing games, and we’re still having mostly men designing games,” she concluded. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

In 2020, CNBC cited a study by the International Game Developers Association that showed 71% of video game developers in the world are male. In 2022, a report for U.S. gaming developers by the Gamer said that 76% of developers in the United States were male.

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

​Return, Video games, Tetris, Sexism, Dei, Diversity equity inclusion, Discrimination, Sexist hiring, Tech 

Vice President JD Vance took time out of his busy day to annihilate a left-wing troll on social media who was trying to recast a video from the Bud Light transgender debacle as “violent rhetoric” from the right.

The debate over rhetoric leading to political violence has been raging since the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, with many on the left trying to deflect blame onto the right.

‘The right uses beer cans for target practice. The left uses people they disagree with.’

One random troll got the attention of the vice president when he brought up a video from celebrity Kid Rock wherein he shoots at cases of Bud Light after its doomed marketing agreement with a transgender-identifying influencer.

“This is how MAGA responded after Bud Lite had the audacity to feature a trans influencer in their ads. So spare us your bulls**t about violent rhetoric from the left, [JD Vance],” wrote the user who claimed to be a liberal U.S. Marine veteran.

Vance fired right back.

“I call upon all of our supporters to stop the violence against innocent beer cans,” he responded. “And I call upon all left wing radicals to stop inciting violence against innocent people.”

Others pounced on the exchange to fill out Vance’s argument.

“He shot cans. Not people. That’s the difference, dips**t,” activist Matt Van Swol replied.

“F**king moron doesn’t know the difference between shooting beer cans and people,” another detractor replied.

“The right uses beer cans for target practice. The left uses people they disagree with. We are not the same. Carry on,” one response reads.

RELATED: Here’s how many Americans were actually offended by the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad

Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

“Yes, using an inanimate object for target practice is THE EXACT SAME THING as shooting a father to death in front of his family. You miserable moron,” another response reads.

“You can pry these empty beer cans out of my cold, dead hands,” another user joked.

“This led to so much uncalled for violence against beer cans. I saw one guy crush one with his foot. I’m still a mess from watching it. This has to stop,” another jokester added.

A Blaze News request for comment to Kid Rock was not immediately answered.

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

​Jd vance twitter, Political violence, Political rhetoric, Kid rock, Politics