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Category: blaze media
Charlie Kirk kept asking America to argue back
I knew Charlie Kirk. He was my friend, and that friendship changed my life. When he was assassinated on September 10, 2025, I did what you do when your own words fail. I went back to his.
“Charlie Kirk, in His Own Words” is the result. It gathers his social media posts, curated one by one from 2011 to the day he died, and weaves in never-before-seen photographs and testimonials from the people who loved him.
Charlie Kirk understood that when speech is controlled, power concentrates and people learn to keep their real thoughts to themselves.
I am not making a dollar from this book. All proceeds go to Carry the Torch, the nonprofit I founded in his honor. This book is a gift, my thank-you to a man who spent his life telling young people the truth.
The selections are Charlie unfiltered, saying exactly what he believed and inviting anyone who disagreed to come and say so to his face.
Freedom of speech and an invitation to debate
Free speech was one of Charlie’s clearest instincts in public life. He treated the First Amendment as a safeguard for ordinary people — especially those without power, status, or institutional cover.
He understood that when speech is protected, a country can argue, correct itself, and stay honest; when it is controlled, power concentrates and people learn to keep their real thoughts to themselves.
He also understood how censorship spreads: It rarely begins with the average person. It begins with a claimed emergency, a claimed harm, a claimed moral cause — and then the boundaries tighten.
Kirk liked the part of politics where you cannot hide — a microphone, a chair, a crowd, and a clock. Debate forced clarity: it made people define terms, defend claims, and sit with the consequences of their own logic.
Campus debates mattered to him for another reason too — universities were supposed to be places of open dialogue, and he watched that promise shrink under administrators who treated disagreement as harm. But when students still showed up, argued back, and kept listening, he saw proof that the story wasn’t finished.
His respect for debate was not limited to his own side. He wanted arguments in daylight. No censorship. No cowardice. No hiding.
The quotes that follow show what that commitment sounded like in Charlie’s own words — on free speech, censorship, disagreement, and the obligation to make your case rather than silence the other side.
RELATED: WaPo ordered to rehire anti-white radical fired over Charlie Kirk assassination comments
ISABEL INFANTES/AFP/Getty Images
Free speech as birthright
5 million followers! Thank you all.
And thank you @elonmusk for liberating this critical platform.
After spending three days in England, I truly mean this with renewed importance: May we always protect free speech as one of our most sacred American birthrights.
Government limited by rights
The First Amendment was written precisely to hamstring the government!!
They work for us. They serve us. We the People, the citizens, are the sovereign. Never forget that.
Chapter by chapter
Thank you, President Trump, for acknowledging the amazing work our @TPUSA team is doing on thousands and thousands of college and high school chapters. There is a whole new generation of free speech warriors rising up, with more every passing year.
Platform censorship
Twitter censored and banned the leader of the free world from its platform.
We should never forget just how wildly absurd that really is.
Questioning is essential
When you’re not allowed to question something at the risk of being banned, censored, or “cancelled” — it’s not science, it’s propaganda.
A double standard
The Packers and Eagles are scheduled to play this Friday in Brazil, where X has just been banned in a sweeping crackdown on free speech.
So let me get this straight…
The MLB took away the All-Star game from Atlanta because Georgia passed voting integrity laws.
The NCAA boycotted North Carolina because it had a law to keep mentally ill men out of girls’ bathrooms.
Thirty years ago, the NFL took the Super Bowl away from Arizona because voters didn’t vote to make MLK Day a paid holiday.
Why is the NFL bringing its road show to Brazil while the country is at war against free speech?
Young voters moved
Our Prove Me Wrong campus debate clips were seen 2.1 billion times this semester on TikTok, IG, X and YouTube.
The vast majority of those were viewed by 18-29-year-olds, and the Kamala campaign never knew how to counter.
YOUNG PEOPLE SHOWED UP FOR TRUMP
Refused to debate
This election brought the realignment we didn’t see coming. It was the Biden Basement Realignment.
Does it make sense now why Democrats hid in basements? Why they refused to debate?
Run on nothing, say nothing, debate nothing, just hide and harvest.
RELATED: Randi Weingarten fought Texas to let teachers celebrate Charlie Kirk’s murder. It didn’t go her way.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Nigeria’s future
Daniel Ogoloma (@Dcogoloma) was my debate partner at the Oxford Union, taking a stand against a large majority of the house as we took the negative position on the resolution “Trump Has Gone Too Far.”
Offstage, we spoke about the future of Nigeria. He is a very talented young man and Nigeria will be lucky to have him.
Debate over censorship
Today I moderated a debate between Dave Smith and Josh Hammer on Israel. It was very fiery, fun, and mostly peaceful.
Debate is the way forward, not name-calling or censorship. At the end agreement was found between both Dave and Josh on many important things.
A chair caused ‘trauma’
The University of Arizona is offering “mental health services” because I sat in a chair and took questions for 2 hours yesterday on the campus quad.
College administrators are more worried about conservatives expressing their views on campus than they are [about] Hamas supporters who want to kill Jews.
America, circa 2023
Editor’s note: This article is excerpted from “Charlie Kirk, in His Own Words,” compiled by Christy Edwards (Post Hill Press). Reprinted by permission.
Censorship, Charlie kirk, Debate, Double standard, First amendment, Free speech, Government, President trump, Rights, Social media, Speech, Truth, Opinion & analysis
Your VPN might be spying on you. Here’s how to find a better one.
Is your Virtual Private Network spying on your browser activity? According to a bombshell study by private email provider Proton, many VPNs installed in the U.S. are actually tracking users instead of helping them. Even worse, some of these offenders are registered to companies in China. Here’s what you can do to keep yourself safe.
VPNs are meant to encrypt your web traffic so that third parties — like your internet service provider, digital marketers, and hackers — can’t see which websites you visit. In order for this to work, though, a user has to trust that the VPN installed on his device does what it claims to do, and the VPN provider then has to deliver on its promise to shield web activity from outside sources.
Many Americans are being tracked by the VPN on their devices, and they don’t even know it.
Proton says that many VPN providers are failing to fulfill their side of the bargain.
In a statement published to its website, Proton says, “After a months-long survey of over 7,000 mobile VPN apps around the world, Proton has found that 85% of those downloaded in the U.S. contain trackers, and around a quarter of those actively track users’ physical location.”
Many of the trackers were found to send data back to foreign nations, including China, Russia, Israel, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Even more alarming, some of the tested VPNs were either outright owned by organizations based in China, or they were registered to shell companies intended to provide a facade of security.
In other words, many Americans are being tracked by the VPN on their devices, and they don’t even know it.
Unfortunately, Proton didn’t list all of the VPNs that are most likely to spy on users. The company also makes its own VPN service, which it’s trying to promote over competitors, regardless of their actual stance on user privacy. That said, if you use a VPN on your phone, tablet, or computer, it’s a good idea to understand how it works and whether or not you can trust it to shield your web activity from prying eyes.
RELATED: How to escape the surveillance state: Use a VPN
How to find a trustworthy VPN
There are several important factors to look for when shopping for a VPN you can trust.
Free vs. paid VPNs: Some VPNs on the App Store and Google Play offer completely free options where users don’t have to pay a cent to get VPN protection. Don’t trust these apps. If you pay nothing, you are the product, and your data is the monetization mechanism. Always choose a paid option instead. Remember that real protection is never free.RAM only: Like a computer, VPNs can have two types of storage options. VPNs with hard disk drives can save data in perpetuity, while VPNs that run on RAM-only servers physically can’t collect long-term data. Instead, the data is wiped from the server every time it’s rebooted, ensuring that your information isn’t retained.Registered country: VPN providers must operate according to the laws and regulations of the country where they are registered. If that country is allowed to collect company data like China, or spy on user activity like Russia, your browsing activity is not safe or protected. On the flip side, Panama, Switzerland, and Spain have some of the best reputations for maintaining user privacy.Open source: Open source software generally means that the source code for an app or service is made public for the sake of transparency and sometimes for modification. When it comes to VPNs, open source options allow third-party security groups to look through the code and verify its ability to properly encrypt and protect user data. This way, you know unequivocally if a service lives up to its promises.
Now that you know what to look for, you should have a good idea if the VPN on your device works as advertised. If for any reason you suspect your VPN is collecting, storing, or sharing your data, remove it from your device immediately. You’re better off not having a VPN at all than to trust one that’s actually compromising your safety, security, and privacy.
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Vpn, Security, Privacy, China, Russia, Tech
Illegal immigrant’s love triangle with ‘loving mother’ takes deadly turn after secret affair exposed to girlfriend: Police
New allegations are emerging about the illegal immigrant from El Salvador accused of killing a Virginia mother after she purportedly exposed their affair to his girlfriend.
As Blaze News previously reported, 42-year-old Carmen Lizet Puch was found brutally stabbed to death around 6:45 a.m. on Aug. 17 at the parking lot of Difficult Run Park in Great Falls, Virginia.
‘All very premeditated.’
The Fairfax County Police announced in an August statement that 19-year-old Alexis Cedillos-Campos was arrested “in connection with the homicide” of Puch.
At the same time, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security identified Cedillos-Campos as an illegal alien who had been released into the United States under the Biden administration.
“The Biden administration hand-delivered Alexis Antonio Cedillos-Campos to the streets of Fairfax County,” the DHS stated. “Cedillos-Campos is a criminal illegal alien from El Salvador who was arrested by CBP in 2024, after illegally crossing the Biden administration’s open border near El Paso, TX.”
The DHS said Cedillos-Campos was released into the “interior of our country” after his arrest.
Cedillos-Campos knew Puch because they both worked at the Bitez restaurant in Herndon, sources told WRC-TV.
The suspect and victim were reportedly in a love triangle.
Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis stated last month, “There are other aspects of that intimate relationship that involve other people.”
“We have video footage of our suspect at the restaurant where he worked with our victim, arming himself with a fixed-blade knife, taking a pair of black latex gloves, taking a water bottle, and then off he goes with the intent to do harm and kill the victim,” Davis said, according to the New York Post.
Davis noted, “All very premeditated.”
Davis claimed Cedillos-Campos stabbed Puch multiple times and then attempted to burn the victim.
“No one deserves to be treated the way that our victim was treated,” Davis said. “And she was stabbed repeatedly – repeatedly – by our 19-year-old killer.”
“He ended up syphoning gasoline from his motorcycle,” Davis continued. “He filled the water bottle with gasoline after he dumped the water.”
Police said the suspect doused Puch with gasoline and tried to set her on fire, but was unsuccessful.
Cedillos-Campos was taken into custody in Prince George’s County on Aug. 19, and he attempted to flee from officers when confronted by police, prosecutors said.
WTTG-TV reported Cedillos-Campos was arrested in Maryland by officers with the Prince George’s County Police Department and the U.S. Marshals Service and extradited to Virginia.
Cedillos-Campos was charged with second-degree murder. WUSA-TV reported that Cedillos-Campos is being held without bond.
WRC-TV reported, “The night of the homicide, Cedillos-Campos left work early, upset that Puch ‘sent screenshots of their affair’ to Cedillos-Campos’ girlfriend, according to the criminal complaint.”
The witness told authorities that he overheard a phone conversation between Cedillos-Campos and Puch in which they made plans to meet, according to the criminal complaint.
A witness informed police that the suspect said he was going to kill Puch, court documents said.
The criminal complaint said Cedillos-Campos allegedly called the witness to say “he did it” before hanging up — which the witness interpreted to mean he had killed Puch.
WUSA reported, “Investigators say Cedillos-Campos confessed to a Fairfax County Police detective that he lured Puch to a Great Falls Park parking lot to kill her after she revealed their affair to his girlfriend.”
Puch was described by officials as a “loving mother of a 3-year-old girl,” according to the New York Post.
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Crime, Murder, Love triangle, Alexis antonio cedillos-campos, Carmen lizet puch, Crimes of passion, Illegal immigration, Dhs, News
Video: Gun-toting, elderly Florida woman opens fire in police station. Things don’t end well for her.
An elderly Florida woman carried a gun into a police station last week, and video recorded the scary moment when she opened fire inside the Port Orange Police Department lobby.
Police told WPEC-TV the incident took place around 8:30 a.m. Thursday.
‘Sad situation … but also, as a mother with a child in daycare down the street, I appreciate the swift response and keeping everyone safe!’
Police told the station 71-year-old Linda Croteau entered the lobby with a handgun, pointed it at employees, and fired toward an evidence room where staff were present.
A male is then heard ordering her to put the gun down, but video shows her shaking her head “no” back and forth.
Croteau then exited the lobby with the gun and walked toward the parking lot, where civilians and responding officers were located, police noted to WPEC. It appears the male who ordered her to put the gun down was in communication with officers outside.
Officers outside repeatedly ordered her to drop the gun, but Croteau continued advancing toward them, the station said.
“Drop it! Drop the gun! Drop it! Drop it! I’m gonna shoot you, drop the gun!” one officer yelled at her.
Officers fired several rounds and stopped when Croteau dropped the gun, police told WPEC.
Police said officers continued ordering her to surrender, the station noted, adding that video from the police department shows Croteau on the ground and reaching for the gun before officers fired again.
Officers provided medical aid, and Croteau was taken to a hospital, where she later died, WPEC said.
Police said, “Earlier this morning, we learned that Linda Croteau passed away. Our thoughts are with our officers, employees, Ms. Croteau’s family, and everyone else affected by the shooting.”
More from the station:
Police initially said there was no threat to the community and that all officers and employees were safe and accounted for. The department’s lobby remained closed during the investigation.
Port Orange police released video and audio from the incident in an effort to promote transparency and dispel misinformation.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating the shooting, WPEC reported.
“Sad situation,” one commenter wrote before adding “but also, as a mother with a child in daycare down the street, I appreciate the swift response and keeping everyone safe!”
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Florida, Police-involved shooting, Fatal shooting, Elderly woman, Police shoot woman, Police station, Port orange, Gun, Crime
Federal agents find fentanyl, meth, and heroin in minivan at US-Mexico border, CBP says
A 28-year-old man has been arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border after federal agents allegedly discovered more than half a million dollars’ worth of illicit drugs.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection told Blaze News that the arrest followed the inspection of a 2005 Chrysler Town and Country minivan on Thursday.
‘We are actively saving lives and dismantling the operations of criminal organizations.’
The van was trying to enter into the U.S. at the Del Rio Port of Entry between Texas and the Mexican city of Ciudad Acuña, according to CBP.
A CBP officer referred the vehicle to a secondary inspection, whereupon packages of alleged drugs were discovered through use of a nonintrusive inspection system and canine examination.
The packages included 4.45 pounds of alleged methamphetamine, 8.81 pounds of alleged heroin, and 12.69 pounds of alleged fentanyl, CBP claimed.
CBP estimated the street value of the alleged drugs to be about $557,589.
Homeland Security Investigations special agents arrested the 28-year-old male driver and initiated an investigation, while CBP seized the suspected drugs.
The driver is a U.S. citizen, CBP says.
RELATED: MILLIONS worth of METH seized in leek shipment at US-Mexico border, CBP says
“By stopping these hard narcotics before they can enter our country, we are actively saving lives and dismantling the operations of criminal organizations,” said Del Rio Port Director Liliana Flores.
“We will continue to maintain a high state of readiness to address all threats attempting to enter the United States,” she added.
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Customs and border protection, Methamphetamine, Fentanyl, Us-mexico border, Politics
Legendary video game company threatens the White House — and gets results
The Donald Trump administration is used to getting sued, but having a legal run-in with the makers of Tetris likely wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card.
It has become par for the course for musicians to lash out at the White House over the use of their music in promotional videos, but a recent release from the administration brought new challenges.
‘Sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again.’
Before the Labor Day weekend, the White House officially unveiled a new website and a new way to promote its most prized legislative pillars.
“ARCADE.GOV,” the administration posted on X, linking to a new batch of point-and-click games released on the official government website.
Among the five games was a parody of Flappy Bird and games about deportations and making America healthy again.
At the same time, the White House launched the game Build the Wall, which the Tetris Company was not too happy about. As one could imagine, users build a wall along the southern border in a game that looks, allegedly, strikingly similar to a classic game of Tetris.
Tetris posted on an image on social media on Friday that said, “At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them.”
A caption for the post added, “P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’. P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.”
At the time of this writing, Build the Wall no longer appeared on the White House arcade, but can still be seen in the administration’s promotional video on YouTube.
RELATED: EU regulators just slapped these top US companies with an invasive new ultimatum
The remaining games included Flappy Bill, where gamers fly a bald eagle down the national mall.
Rio Run has users policing the southern border, instructing them to “patrol the line along the river. Pick up every crosser in the lot [and] never double back over the line.”
Through either user error or the site not working, Blaze News could not get the controls to work; therefore, no one got deported.
Supply Line has users “sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again.”
Punch seed oils, junk food, candy, artificial colors, and items that need to have their labels checked off the assembly line to save the children of the cafeteria.
Lastly, Trump Savings Tycoon has users filling their kids’ Trump accounts by catching gold bars and money with a net. The first turn saved $150,500.
If only it were that easy in real life.
RELATED: ‘Pendragon’ takes the long road to King Arthur — and makes it worth the journey
While the website is not much more than a clever way to get people talking about the administration’s core values — and there is a promise of more to come — the Trump White House may have more cease-and-desist letters coming in relation to the same project.
The administration’s X post features a startup video that many may recognize as being similar to that of Microsoft’s Xbox.
As well, the YouTube video features a similar boot-up to Sega’s and the accompanying music of Sonic the Hedgehog. However, perhaps American Microsoft and Japan’s Sega are a little less hostile toward the administration than the Russian creators of Tetris.
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Video games, White house, Tetris, Xbox, Sega, Tech
Tragedy strikes University of Iowa marching band during college football home opener
The exciting return of college football turned tragic in Iowa City last weekend after a band member collapsed in the heat and suffered catastrophic brain injury.
The hometown University of Iowa Hawkeyes were set to take on the Huskies of Northern Illinois on Saturday in the first matchup of the 2026 season for both teams.
‘Music was the language of his soul.’
Temperatures reached a scorching 94 degrees, and the Hawkeye marching band announced that they would “forgo” the halftime performance on account of the heat.
At about this time, Derek Phillips, a third-year student at Iowa and a member of the marching band, suddenly collapsed.
In a post on Instagram, Phillips’ family confirmed that he suffered “sudden cardiac arrest” that resulted in “severe” brain damage. As a result, the family “made the heartbreaking decision to remove life support.”
According to the Daily Iowan, life support was removed Monday.
Matthew Holst/Getty Images
“Derek brought so much light, humor, and kindness into this world,” the family statement said. “He was a phenomenal musician — whether he was playing jazz, singing his heart out, or marching under the lights, music was the language of his soul.”
The statement added that Phillips is “comfortable, surrounded by family, and enveloped in the music he loved so much.”
The family requested users who knew Phillips to post memories of their time with him, and many friends and former bandmates responded graciously.
“He made me laugh so much, definitely an unforgettable person,” wrote one user.
“Derek was one of the kindest individuals I have ever met. I am going to miss you so much man,” said another.
“Derek was one of the first people that I talked to during auditions, and being able to joke with him throughout the season were some of the highlights of my summer,” wrote yet another user.
The Hawkeyes, who were favored by 31.5 points, ultimately trounced the Huskies, 40-0.
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College football, University of iowa, Politics
Jason Whitlock: Lindsay Clancy has become the OJ Simpson of angry housewives
The debate surrounding Lindsay Clancy has become about far more than one criminal case. While prosecutors argue that Clancy intentionally killed her three children, many supporters have rallied around the Massachusetts mother as a victim of mental illness, postpartum struggles, and impossible expectations placed on women.
While the supportive response from such a large number of women has confused Americans, Dre Baldwin believes he has the answer as to why it’s happening.
“Lindsay Clancy is to overwhelmed mothers what O.J. Simpson was to the angry black person in 1995,” Baldwin tells BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock on “Fearless.”
“People didn’t identify with O.J. Simpson because they thought O.J. didn’t kill Nicole and Ron Goldman,” he explains. “They identified with O.J. Simpson because they were angry black people who felt like America as an institution and the police as an institution had been terrorizing black people.”
Like Clancy has become a symbol for postpartum mothers, “O.J. was a symbol for some get-back for black Americans.”
“That’s why people celebrated when he got found not guilty,” Baldwin says.
“It’s the same thing that a lot of women, mothers who see themselves as overwhelmed housewives who are doing too much, and this is not the role that was supposed to be for them,” he continues. “And they just feel themselves being overwhelmed through all the challenges of motherhood and being a wife and taking care of a home.”
While Baldwin doesn’t believe these moms would ever actually murder someone, let alone their children, he does believe that Clancy is being propped up as a “symbol of ‘somebody is finally seeing this.’”
“And if it means a woman beating a murder charge, then so be it. The same way that people looked at people celebrating O.J. with incredulity back then, 30 years ago, is the same way that many people are looking at this Lindsay Clancy case and her supporters today,” he adds.
Whitlock couldn’t agree more, commenting, “That’s a brilliant take.”
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Dre baldwin, Jason whitlock, Lindsay clancy, Mental illness, Motherhood, Oj simpson, Postpartum, Women, Blazetv show
The New York Times is grasping at straws
The New York Times’ reporting on AI is like its reporting in general: partisan, erroneous, sensationalist, and misleading in the extreme.
The tone is apocalyptic, characterizing AI as an imminent threat, much like the Times’ characterization of Iraq’s alleged WMDs. Worse still is the wokeness of it all, the politicization of AI, in which everything — including the survival of the United States — depends on the wisdom and selflessness of the anointed.
Consumer protection, monopoly, economic opportunity, enforcement of existing law, the Constitution — about these things, the Times is silent.
Call it a sign of the times, or a sign that the Times is in decline, because when the supposed newspaper of record soft-pedals the work of rationalists and effective altruists, the result is propaganda with a corporate caption.
That the Times not only “skews left” but skews its coverage in favor of specific policies, that it champions export controls on technology, and that it portrays Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei as a champion of AI safety are reasons the paper reads like a rag with a games section.
Safety is the watchword of the Times’ emphasis on control. All other issues, such as liberty, opportunity, privacy, and democracy, are irrelevant. Or so the Times would have us believe. But first we must believe that AI is a doomsday device, that it is more destructive than the hydrogen bomb and cleaner than the neutron bomb, that it can end mankind not with a bang but a whimper.
Such is the reasoning of rationalists and effective altruists, whose views the Times legitimates.
Whatever else these views are, they are not politically neutral. But because the Times puts “safety” first, and thus sacrifices liberty on the altar of security, there is no room for criticism.
Consumer protection, monopoly, economic opportunity, enforcement of existing law, the Constitution — about these things, the Times is silent. So is Anthropic, which is no accident.
The two, the Times and Anthropic, would use export controls to stifle competition, not promote it. The two would restrict the sale of Nvidia chips to China. Never mind that China continues to buy these chips through intermediaries or on the gray market. Put aside, too, the fact that export controls only serve to goad China into subsidizing the manufacture of its own chips. Or that companies like DeepSeek and Huawei have their own chip ambitions.
RELATED: How to renew American scientific research
BSIP/UIG/Getty Images
Chatham House similarly concludes that hardware export controls alone will not stop China’s advancements in AI. If the controls were effective, policymakers would not have to continually redraw them: banning this or that chip, policing third-country affiliates, responding to smuggling networks, only to authorize new sales anyway. The result is not a technological blockade but a prolonged game of whack-a-mole, which encourages China to be more self-reliant at our expense.
Consider, too, the expense of having the Bureau of Industry and Security involved in this issue in the first place.
Like most government agencies, BIS has a reputation for dysfunction, little productivity, and low morale. Perhaps the New York Times should do a series of stories on BIS instead. Or maybe the paper should stop printing nonsense about “AI safety,” as the term is a catchall for more regulation and higher prices.
A newspaper committed to rigorous journalism would interrogate the interests served by these narratives, confront the failures and contradictions embedded in them, and give serious attention to workers, consumers, civil liberties, democratic accountability, and America’s capacity to out-innovate its rivals.
Instead the Times too frequently amplifies the assumptions of the powerful leftist institutions and woke agendas it should be challenging.
Anthropic, New york times, Propaganda, Constitution, Ai, China, Nvidia, Woke, Opinion & analysis
Mamdani’s taxpayer-funded communist propaganda machine EXPOSED
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has cultivated a network of social media influencers to amplify his policies online, and BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is warning that it follows a pattern seen in failing socialist movements throughout history.
“I regret to inform you … that the Muslim commie mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, has been rolling out his next phase of this communist takeover plan. And you now, I’m just going to predict it’s not going to go well,” Gonzales says.
Mamdani has begun implementing his city-run grocery stores, which Gonzales notes will “effectively run real grocery stores out of business.”
“He’s like, ‘We’re pricing everything lower.’ Real grocery stores can’t do that. It’s only the government. It’s only the government that when they’re playing with someone else’s money, when they’re playing with your money, they can do things like that,” she says.
“And then once you’ve got that, once you’ve got that government control, well, a real communist wants to control the way that people think. And so as we’ve seen time and time again in all these other communist countries, they have to control the airwaves,” she continues.
And Mamdani, Gonzales says, “has done this quite masterfully.”
“He’s turning up the communist propaganda machine,” she explains, noting that the Columbia Journalist Review first exposed Mamdani for recruiting “a bunch of TikTokers and social media influencers to get his message out.”
“They created this Signal group, and the Signal group gets all the talking points from the socialist overlords,” she says.
The group receives talking points and clips they’re instructed to use in their posts.
“America is fighting for its life right now. Meanwhile, New York City is just living in Zohran Mamdani’s Disney Channel movie, ‘Mayor of Uncontrollable Joy.’ I’m not like jealous or anything though,” one TikTok influencer said in a video.
“Luckily Republicans are freaking out because there are mini-Mamdani’s popping up all over the country,” she said.
“You deserve hope-core everywhere, not just New York,” she added.
“These people are getting paid for it,” Gonzales says.
And according to an expose from the New York Post, it’s getting funded by the taxpayers.
“The taxpayers are paying for good messaging and PR for their mayor. Now, money is always bad to these communists. You hear about all this dark money: ‘dark money, evil billionaires, evil trillionaire, Elon Musk.’ It’s always bad unless you can use other people’s cash to push your communist agenda,” Gonzales says.
“And by the way, this is not like a small amount of money that we’re talking about. Some of these people are getting paid up to $20,000 to do this,” she adds.
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New york city, Zohran mamdani, Influencers, Social media, Communism, Taxpayers, Grocery stores, Blazetv show
Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer appeals directly to Trump after mistrial — but there’s a major problem
The attorney for Lindsay Clancy is begging the most powerful man on the planet to intercede on behalf of his client.
On Friday, Judge William Sullivan of Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts declared a mistrial in Clancy’s case after jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict about whether to hold her criminally responsible in the deaths of her three children. Her defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, did not deny that she strangled the three children but argued that she acted out of postpartum psychosis and overmedication rather than criminal malice.
‘Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady, the type of person she is, what she’s been through.’
The case has captivated the nation, and even President Donald Trump weighed in on it. “She did a horrible, horrible thing. Can’t be worse,” he said shortly after the mistrial was declared, adding that there will be a “price to pay.”
“It’s going to be mental institution or jail or something.”
During the trial, Reddington described Clancy as “one heck of a mother” who “loved her children.” Outside of court, he claimed that “she’s very concerned about women’s rights” and “the fact that women are pretty much marginalized.”
Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz has not yet announced whether the case will be retried.
RELATED: Gloria Steinem is gone. Lindsay Clancy is still here.
On Tuesday, Reddington appeared with George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America” and indicated that he might be willing to entertain a plea deal:
I’m willing to listen to Tim. I’ve known Tim for 30 years. He’s a very hard-charging prosecutor, a conservative gentleman. I hope, however, after sitting through this trial and seeing the evidence that was presented from the government as well as from the defense that he would revisit that issue and hopefully would be able to work something out that would be acceptable to both sides.
Reddington also called upon Trump to step in and “pardon” Lindsay Clancy:
I’d like to say that perhaps Donald Trump, who felt compelled to speak out about this case, may very well, Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady, the type of person she is, what she’s been through, and consider a pardon.
It is unclear how Trump might be able to pardon Clancy, even if she is convicted.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts charged Clancy, not the federal government. If Cruz decides to retry the case or reach a plea deal, it will still be a state case and not a federal one, so all pardoning powers will rest with the governor of Massachusetts.
Blaze News reached out to the White House and to the office of Gov. Maura Healey (D) for comment.
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Donald trump, Good morning america, Lindsay clancy, Massachusetts, Politics
Deceptive slop is now junking up our favorite map apps. Don’t be fooled.
Apple Maps has come a long way since it replaced Google Maps on iOS in 2012. Detailed roads, precise directions, and a visually pleasing interface are just some of the perks you can expect. Unfortunately, Apple decided that its navigation app needed the worst feature found in Google Maps, and there’s no way to turn it off.
When Apple ditched Google Maps for its own app on iOS 6 (yes, 6, which launched in 2012), it was a complete mess. Roads were missing, directions were inaccurate, and the satellite view showed jagged and misshapen spans of highway. Ditching Google for its own map service was one of the worst decisions executed under Tim Cook’s new leadership.
‘Mobile ads suck.’
However, instead of throwing in the towel, the company spent years improving the mess it made. The result was a surprisingly complete navigation system that addressed all previous issues and turned Maps into a reliable road companion that works as you’d expect. In fact, once the bugs were stomped out, Apple Maps became a cleaner and prettier alternative to Google Maps, just as Apple envisioned.
Unfortunately, that’s all about to change.
Although Google is known for many things, its core business is all about ads. It’s an ad company, with more than half of its annual revenue attributed to this category. Google ads show up everywhere — in online searches, webpages, and even in some of its apps, like Google Maps.
Apple, on the other hand, is a hardware company that has since dipped its toes into services to expand its bottom line. It is not an ad company, but that hasn’t stopped Apple from taking the plunge into Google’s arena.
Apple Maps Ads/Apple
Much to users’ chagrin, Apple has brought ads to the Apple Maps experience for the first time. Now, when you search for a place — like a fast-food restaurant or a grocery store — Maps will offer up the expected list of locations, plus new paid options.
These show up as “Suggested Places,” making them sound more like friendly recommendations, but don’t be fooled.
These are paid placements added by companies trying to get your attention and your money.
On the bright side, ads don’t show up with every search in Apple Maps — just the ones where Apple has a relevant paying partner. Still, it’s sad to see Apple inject ads into its services for a bit of extra revenue, where the high prices of its devices once sufficed.
RELATED: New hack poses biggest iPhone threat in 19 years: What you can do
Xaume Olleros/Bloomberg/Getty Images
The late Steve Jobs likely would’ve disapproved. He even once went on record to proclaim that “mobile ads suck,” largely because they disrupted the user experience. Apple’s most recent former CEO, Tim Cook, believed differently. According to Mark Gurman, Cook said “digital advertising is not a bad thing. What is not good is vacuuming up people’s data when they’re not doing so in an informed basis. We try to put the user in the driver seat there to own their data.”
As for what new CEO John Ternus believes, we don’t know yet. He just took the reins of the company at the start of September, and he has a lot of work ahead. That said, ads in Apple Maps just launched, so unless Ternus is adamant about their removal, they’re not likely to go away anytime soon.
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Apple, Maps, Google, Ios, Tech
Dolly Parton never had to leave her husband to find herself
When Dolly Parton came to Nashville in 1964, finding a husband was the last thing on her mind. She was 18 years old, newly arrived from the mountains of East Tennessee, and clear about what she had come to do: “I was here to become a star.”
Then a young man with sky-blue eyes drove past the Wishy Washy Laundromat.
Reading about Parton and Dean makes you suspect we’ve forgotten how to disagree inside a marriage.
Parton was outside waiting for her clothes when 21-year-old Carl Dean spotted her, called something out the window, circled the block, and came back. She talked to him because he was “drop-dead handsome,” but she was also surprised that he looked at her face while they talked — “a rare thing for me,” she joked in her 1994 autobiography, “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business.” More seriously, she remembered that Dean “seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”
Dean came back every day for a week. When Parton finally had a day free for a real date, he took her to his parents’ house, where his mother was putting supper on the table.
“Fix this girl a plate,” Dean announced. “She’s the one I’m going to marry.”
‘In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)’
This was news to Parton, since Dean hadn’t yet told her he loved her. But two years later, on Memorial Day 1966, they married in Ringgold, Georgia. The marriage lasted until Dean’s death in March 2025, just shy of 59 years.
By then, the penniless girl doing her laundry at the Wishy Washy had become one of the most famous women in the world, while Dean had spent most of those years avoiding the public attention that followed his wife everywhere. Parton liked crowds, travel, and attention; Dean liked cars, tractors, and staying home. She became so famous that strangers took tour buses past their house; he was so private that some fans suspected she had invented him.
Their marriage is particularly interesting at a time when we’re accustomed to hearing divorce described in the language of personal liberation. Celebrity divorce announcements that once might have contained at least a trace of embarrassment now tend to read like graduation speeches: Two people have decided to “choose themselves,” embark on “new chapters,” and continue their respective “journeys.” Whatever else has happened, we’re assured that tremendous personal growth is underway.
Parton would have been an excellent candidate for this kind of liberation. She was financially independent, professionally ambitious, frequently away from home, surrounded by attractive men, and married to someone whose personality and interests were almost comically different from hers. They had no children, and by the time divorce became commonplace, she certainly didn’t need a husband to support her.
‘Just the Way I Am’
Yet there is remarkably little sense in Parton’s accounts of her marriage that staying with Dean required surrendering some essential part of herself. Few entertainers have constructed a public identity as singular or pursued a career as independently as Dolly Parton did. She managed it while remaining married to the man she met outside a laundromat at 18.
The potential conflict between marriage and career appeared before the wedding. Fred Foster, the head of Parton’s record label, asked her to postpone getting married because her career was beginning to move, and he worried that a husband might hurt her appeal to male record buyers. Parton told him she would wait, then she and Dean secretly drove to Ringgold to get married anyway.
Her mother went with them, having made Dolly a white eyelet dress and veil and wrapped a little white Bible in lace and field flowers for her to carry. At the courthouse, an official offered to marry them on the spot, but Parton balked. “I want to get married in a church,” she told him.
That presented a problem: They would have to wait until Monday and couldn’t afford a motel for the weekend. So they drove back to Nashville, returned three days later, and were married at Ringgold Baptist Church. Their honeymoon lasted about two hours: Dean had to work the next morning, while Parton had to get up at 3 a.m. for a television appearance.
The competing demands of Carl and career didn’t go away after the wedding, but the couple arrived at an arrangement that would probably horrify anyone who thinks a healthy marriage requires sharing all one’s interests. Dean eventually owned an asphalt-paving company and wanted almost nothing to do with show business. According to Parton, he saw her perform only once.
‘I Will Always Love You’
“My marriage is separate,” she once explained. “I have my life on the road and my life with Carl. He has seen me perform, once. But we have our own life at home — without music people.”
Their differences extended to ordinary domestic life. Parton was spontaneous; Dean liked routine. She spent money; he was frugal. She wanted more physical affection than he naturally gave. She traveled constantly while he preferred staying home. None of this prevented Parton from describing the arrangement with considerable satisfaction.
“It works out well between me and Carl,” she wrote. “We both get what we really want. We both have the freedom to come and go and do as we please.”
As she also put it in her autobiography, “Carl is the only man I could live with all of the time, because I don’t.”
Freedom comes up repeatedly when Parton talks about her marriage, but not in the way the word is usually used in discussions of unhappy marriages. She and Dean weren’t free from each other. They seem to have felt remarkably free with each other.
That required trust. Parton spent much of her professional life around men, and rumors about her love life were inevitable. Sometimes friends or relatives actually approached Dean to tell him his wife was involved with somebody else.
“Well, I would think less of any man that didn’t fall in love with her,” Dean would respond.
Parton believed he could take the rumors in stride. “He knows that I will always come home,” she wrote.
RELATED: Dolly Parton is dead at age 80
Rich Fury/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
‘Mommie, Ain’t That Daddy?’
This wasn’t a marriage without jealousy or hurt. Dean was badly shaken early in their relationship when he learned that Parton had been sexually involved with another man before him, an experience that helped inspire her 1968 song “Just Because I’m a Woman.” A few years later, a pretty bank teller began paying so much attention to Dean that he developed a newfound enthusiasm for trips to the bank. Parton poured her jealousy into writing “Jolene.”
Jealousy may have been an inevitable byproduct of the mystery each retained for the other. “They say that opposites attract, and it’s true,” Parton told People in 2015. “We’re completely opposite, but that’s what makes it fun. I never know what he’s gonna say or do. He’s always surprising me.”
She had said much the same thing more than 20 years earlier. “I am still learning about him to this day,” she wrote. “I think that’s the way a relationship should be.”
Reading about Parton and Dean makes you suspect we’ve forgotten how to disagree inside a marriage. He didn’t like show business; she built her life around it. He liked routine; she liked spontaneity. She spent; he saved. She wanted more affection than he naturally gave. Yet neither seems to have taken every difference as evidence of incompatibility — or proof that the other was preventing some truer self from emerging.
Carl didn’t ask Dolly to give up the career she wanted, and Dolly didn’t demand that Carl become part of the Dolly Parton enterprise. He didn’t have to learn to love awards shows, and she didn’t have to stop touring. They seem to have understood something increasingly unfashionable: You can be profoundly different from the person you married without having married the wrong person.
Dean also believed in Parton’s ambitions before there was much evidence that he should. When money was still tight, the couple bought 75 acres in Brentwood, Tennessee. Parton told him they needed the land for privacy because someday tour buses would drive past their house.
“He accepted that notion without question, showing that he had faith in my dream too,” she recalled. “This made me love him even more.”
‘Here You Come Again’
The tour buses eventually came, but Dean never showed much interest in joining the attraction. In her autobiography, Parton recalled a visit he made to the set of “Nine to Five,” where Jane Fonda met him without initially realizing that the handsome stranger was Dolly’s husband. Fonda later told Parton that she had praised Dolly to him, saying how sweet she was and how much she enjoyed working with her.
“Well, she’s an angel,” Dean said.
Fonda agreed.
“No, you don’t get it. She’s a real angel.”
Parton was touched when Fonda repeated the conversation. “It’s just like him to say it to somebody else, figuring I’ll never hear about it.”
Dean had known her before the rest of the world did, meeting her on the day she arrived in Nashville with a load of laundry and the certainty that she was going to become a star. Almost 50 years later, Parton credited their meeting to something more than luck. “God has been good to me,” she said in 2014. “He gave me Carl Dean. And that was the perfect man that I needed.”
They renewed their vows for their 50th anniversary in 2016. Dean rarely spoke publicly about their marriage, but for the occasion offered his own assessment: “I wouldn’t trade the last 50 years for nothing on this earth.”
Dean died in March 2025 at 82 after a long illness. Parton later said she had neglected her own health while “watching over Carl.” Shortly after his death, she released “If You Hadn’t Been There,” thanking the husband who, as she put it, “made me dream more than I dared.”
Parton hardly sacrificed herself to marriage. She became rich, famous, independent, and unmistakably Dolly Parton. She just never seems to have thought that becoming herself required getting rid of Carl Dean.
Celebrity, Divorce, Dolly parton, Husband, Lifestyle, Marriage, Love, Culture, Carl dean, Music, Movies, Entertainment, Appreciation
Crypto won’t lend. That’s exactly the point.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) put his hesitation about the Clarity Act into one theory: “Crypto is not going to be loaning any money for small businesses.”
He is exactly right. And that is why his objection misses the point entirely.
Washington’s biggest financial institutions are blocking competition under the pretense of protecting the community banks while simultaneously outpacing them on technology.
A regulated stablecoin cannot lend. Federal law requires the issuer to hold a dollar of Treasury bills and cash for every digital dollar in circulation. That makes a stablecoin a payment instrument, a faster wire, not a bank. Lending, the hard local work of judging character, collateral, and cash flow, stays exactly where it has always lived: with bankers.
The digital dollar moves the money. The community banker still decides who deserves the credit. Those are different businesses, and the Clarity Act keeps them different on purpose.
If stablecoins were draining the deposits that fund small business loans, the damage would show up in the numbers. It does not. The FDIC has recorded seven consecutive quarters of domestic deposit growth, through the fastest stablecoin expansion in history. When the White House Council of Economic Advisers modeled the disputed yield provision this spring, it found a lending effect of two hundredths of one percent, largely because nearly nine of every 10 stablecoin dollars sits in Treasury bills that recirculate into the banking system as deposits.
The money is not leaving the system. It is running a lap and coming home.
Community banks are not waiting to be told any of this. Several are already live on stablecoin services through their digital banking providers, with early adopters reaching about 1,670 banks and credit unions nationally. A consortium model has been built specifically so that when money goes digital, the community bank keeps the deposit rather than surrendering it to an outside issuer. State banking associations across the country have backed this infrastructure for their members. The institutions closest to the small business customer are not running from this technology. They are installing it.
The institutions running from it, loudly, sit on Wall Street. And they are only running in public. Privately, the biggest banks are spending tens of billions of dollars a year building token networks of their own while their lobby campaigns work to keep everyone else out of the field. When the largest player in an industry warns that a new tool will hurt the small player, the useful move is to check what the large player is quietly building while it talks.
Washington’s biggest financial institutions are blocking competition under the pretense of protecting the community banks while simultaneously outpacing them on technology. The cost falls on the small institutions the objection claims to protect.
Sen. Cornyn has spent a quarter-century on the unglamorous machinery that makes American law work: courts, procedure, institutions, the rules of the road. The Clarity Act is that kind of work. It draws jurisdictional lines between regulators, sets disclosure duties, and writes the market rules that let a community bank adopt a payment technology without betting the charter on a lawsuit.
RELATED: China is building power. America is still debating it.
Yuan Hongyan/VCG/Getty Images
His own objection contains the answer: because crypto does not lend, it does not threaten the lenders. It threatens the wire transfer, the correspondent fee, and the three-day settlement delay, luxuries no American small business will miss.
The real threat to community banking is four decades of consolidation, compliance costs that fall hardest on the smallest charters, and a technology gap against Wall Street’s $10 billion and $20 billion annual technology budgets. Killing the Clarity Act treats none of that. It keeps America’s small banks in the waiting room while the biggest institutions operate on themselves.
American small business does not need Washington to ban a payment rail. It needs its hometown banks free to use one. September 15 is the vote that decides which it gets.
Banking law, Clarity act, Crypto, Digital banking, Fdic, Federal law, Regulators, Sen john cornyn, Small businesses, Stablecoin, Technology, Treasury bills, Wall street, White house, Opinion & analysis
Starlink needs a reality check
We should all be for vision and ambition.
Few have demonstrated the power of both better than Elon Musk. SpaceX has transformed the economics of space launch, while Starlink has shown that low-Earth-orbit satellites can deliver broadband connectivity on a remarkable scale. There is plenty to admire.
Starlink says it has a new ambition: not simply to fill coverage gaps, but to become a ubiquitous communications platform — potentially offering broadband, mobile service, handsets, and even operating systems.
This audacious vision runs headlong into the forces that have constrained telecommunications for decades: the laws of physics, economics, and regulation.
The laws of physics don’t bend to stock prices. The laws of economics don’t care about hype. And regulators don’t care how disruptive the pitch sounds.
The first reality check is physics.
Starlink’s strength of remote area coverage to fill gaps becomes a limitation in cities. Terrestrial networks divide coverage into thousands of cells, enabling repeated spectrum reuse and capacity scaling. Satellite beams cannot match this granular spectrum efficiency.
The next challenge is buildings. Satellite signals do not penetrate shopping malls, offices, apartment blocks, or underground space. People spend much of their time indoors, places that require terrestrial networks, small cells, Wi-Fi, fiber, and other ground-based infrastructure.
This is not a satellite model failure; it just demonstrates that no single network can do it all. Different networks have strengths and weaknesses: The ability to fill coverage gaps is not the same as providing reliable, nationwide capacity. SpaceX says it plans to build a terrestrial component. This will likely strengthen its network, but it does not make satellites a substitute for terrestrial networks.
Then comes the law of economics.
Telecom has an elusive holy grail: the fourth operator. Regulators and competition authorities routinely argue that markets need four or five mobile networks. Yet mobile markets around the world are consolidating toward three, and sometimes two, operators — including sophisticated markets such as India and China. Why? Because mobile networks have enormous fixed costs.
Operators must acquire spectrum, obtain permits, build sites, and continually upgrade networks as traffic grows — all while consumers expect more data for less money. Starlink is not immune to this reality. It has added demand surcharges for some customers, pushing broadband prices as high as $1,500 per month in some markets.
The fourth-operator dream has another inconvenient history. Starlink acquired 65 MHz of spectrum from EchoStar for $19.6 billion. That spectrum came from DISH Network, which spent years trying to make itself the fourth nationwide U.S. mobile operator but could not get the economics to work
Starlink has advantages DISH did not, including its satellite network, capital, and global customer base. But it still must overcome the conundrum of continuously absorbing more traffic while keeping customer prices low.
RELATED: Big Tech gets the network. You get the bill.
Baona/iStock/Getty Images
Then there is the law of regulation.
Telecommunications is not a “move fast and break things” industry. Spectrum is governed by complex national, technical, and international rules. Deployment requires coordination with other spectrum users, permitting, environmental reviews, zoning, rights-of-way, and state public utility commissions.
SpaceX has already experienced this reality. When California regulators objected to aspects of SpaceX’s launch plans, the company moved activity to Texas. Internationally, governments can be even more consequential. Turkey, for example, has not allowed Starlink to operate within its borders.
Spectrum creates another obligation. Public spectrum is not an ordinary asset. It is allocated according to set conditions, often including build-out or use requirements.
Finally, there is the law of the market.
Investors love news: big ambitions, disruptive narratives, barbs, and vibes. SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said on the company’s first earnings call that she expected Starlink to win “quite a few” customers from AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile and that SpaceX “definitely” intends to build a terrestrial component. The comments rattled some telecom investors. Such statements are catnip for traders: the market can trade on the story long before the network exists. It is a familiar asymmetry: incumbents must respond to the threat today, while Starlink can promise to deliver the network tomorrow — or never.
Starlink deserves both praise and scrutiny. Its satellite network is extraordinary, and direct-to-device connectivity will fill coverage gaps. But disrupting the mobile market is not the same as replacing mobile carriers, just as owning spectrum is not the same as building a nationwide network.
The laws of physics don’t bend to stock prices. The laws of economics don’t care about hype. And regulators don’t care how disruptive the pitch sounds. The markets may react to the statement, but seriously competing for customers at scale will require a robust terrestrial network. Starlink has already shown that hard things are possible. It has not yet shown how it can do this.
Broadband connectivity, Elon musk, Market dynamics, Mobile service, Network limitations, Regulation, Spacex, Starlink, Terrestrial networks, Mobile carriers, Economics, Opinion & analysis
Sex-positive no more: Why this sexologist changed her mind on porn
For years, Dr. Debra Soh viewed pornography as little more than harmless entertainment for consenting adults. Today, the neuroscientist and sex researcher sees it very differently.
“I used to write for a very well-known men’s magazine that features nude women. I was a regular columnist for that magazine,” Soh tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey, noting that her views have changed “a lot” since then.
“Millennials, we grew up with internet porn. I don’t think we were as negatively affected as Gen Z, say, but I do think there are some effects there,” she says.
Soh explains that literature shows that “early exposure to pornography” can lead to “negative outcomes like hypersexuality [and] greater propensity for risky sex.”
“So that means having sex with many people, having unprotected sex, being under the influence of drugs and alcohol when having sex,” she says, noting that it also changes the way men and women view the opposite sex.
“Even if it’s not in a sexual interaction, just how men potentially view women more generally. And that sounds like such a cliche, but at the same time, I don’t see how that would not be the case because what we consume is going to affect the way we view ourselves and the way we view other people,” she continues.
And viewing porn, Soh points out, “tends to be associated with boredom, lack of meaning in life, anxiety. So these are issues that need to be addressed, as opposed to society telling people, ‘Oh, you can watch as much porn as you want and it’s not unhealthy.’”
And pairing society’s obsession with technology, increased amount of doomscrolling, and neutral attitude toward pornography, more and more kids are being exposed to pornography at younger ages.
“I’m concerned that their exposure to this at such a young age is actually going to increase the likelihood that they’re going to find these bizarre things sexually arousing or these acts enjoyable because they’re pairing it with early sexual development,” Soh says.
“The average age that kids see porn now is 12. And that age is getting younger and younger,” she adds.
Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Gen z, Kids, Millennials, Neuroscientist, Pornography, Technology, Internet porn, Dr debra soh, Blazetv show
Are antidepressants zombifying American culture?
Why are things the way they are?
Why does it feel like things were better before?
Having a society of people walking through life in a drab stupor will, believe it or not, have strange impacts on the way the world goes.
No, that’s not exactly right. Everything — emphasis on thing — wasn’t better before. Well, maybe it’s the people then. Yes, that’s it — the people. Why does it seem like people were better before? No, that’s not it either. Not quite. People weren’t better before. There have always been the wicked and the evil and the lazy and the annoying. The world has always had problems.
Well, what is it then? What is it that I am feeling, you are feeling, and we all are feeling? Why does everything feel “off” for lack of a better word?
There’s a lot of answers, and a lot of them are pretty good. Answering questions this big is like looking at an object at a table from different directions. There are multiple correct descriptions of what is sitting in front of everyone, and all the answers help paint a clearer picture.
Ostinato of apathy
But is there an answer, a detail, a fact, or an X factor that sits under all the other things and runs like an ostinato through seemingly unrelated domains connecting the dots in a strangely unifying way?
Perhaps.
And if I were to try to list a single X factor that weaves like a thread through all the various forms and domains of decline, descent, malaise, and dysfunction, I might conclude that the fact that connects all these problems is something insurance covers, doctors prescribe, and we are all supposed to nod along with.
SSRIs and other forms of antidepressant medication.
I saw a video recently of an extended family. In a self-satisfied, joke-y sort of way, they all listed the medications they were on. It wasn’t a real joke, it was clear they were all actually on these things, but the video was joking about how funny it is, or something. Like many things TikTok, the tone was a plain, mundane, nihilistic, uncapitalized “lol.”
Of course, TikTok isn’t real life. But it isn’t exactly fake life either. This family of drug-dependents might be a bit of an exaggeration, though not necessarily a fabrication. Spiritually, the video is correct. More people are on these drugs than ever before, and that’s an undeniable fact of reality.
Drugs not hugs
This kind of thing didn’t exist when I was young. Drugs existed, both legal and illegal ones. Prescription drugs to help you be less depressed existed too. There were jokes and themes about Prozac in the 1990s, and before my time, in the midcentury, they were juicing disturbed people up on all sorts of stuff too. But the prevalence of them, overuse of them, and unabashedly flippant taking of them was nowhere near what we see today.
When I was young, the only people who were on this stuff were people who were decidedly “messed up.” Those who had genuinely tried to commit suicide or were really on the brink. And it wasn’t a good thing, and it wasn’t used flippantly. It was serious stuff. Somewhere in the last few decades, this attitude changed.
SSRIs and other antidepressants are the X factor under so much of the general malaise and dysfunction in our perplexing and seemingly decaying culture. At first, it doesn’t really make sense, or it just seems like a bit of a stretch because people think these drugs just “make people happier,” but that’s not exactly what happens. Even if they do seemingly “make people happier,” or at least less depressed, that isn’t the only thing they do.
RELATED: Want to be a man of action? Start a family
Ian Tyas/Getty Images
Dead inside
Listen to people who have been on these drugs describe how they make you feel. The picture isn’t exactly a rosy one. It’s better than suicide, but it isn’t normal. A very common observation you hear from people is that they make you feel dead or like you don’t care about anything. They also lower libido and what might be described as general drive.
These drugs don’t only impact one’s happiness. They bleed out and into all these other things, and when you have people taking them at the scale we do in the U.S., the culture shifts in ways that are unintelligible and confusing to those of us not on anything. Having a society of people walking through life in a drab stupor will, believe it or not, have strange impacts on the way the world goes.
Because of all this, our society is more full of de facto zombies than ever before. No wonder young people feel listless. No wonder achievement and striving for greatness seem naive or corny.
No wonder people aren’t partying.
No wonder the birthrate is in the tank.
No wonder the Democratic Party has become what it is when so many of its voters exhibit depression and anxiety.
No wonder everyone dresses like slobs.
No wonder there is a general apathy that bleeds through everything we see and hear.
No wonder the interior design is bland and factory-like.
No wonder everyone feels like tomorrow is going to be worse than today.
No wonder — to answer our first question — things are the way they are.
Antidepressants, Ssris, Family life, Psychiatry, Overmedication, Lifestyle, Culture, Depression, Anxiety, Health, Make america healthy again, Democratic party, The root of the matter
What does it mean to be an American when half the country no longer shares the creed?
What does it actually mean to be an American?
This question sits at the center of the right and left’s diametric opposition on matters of immigration and citizenship. But the divide wasn’t always this sharp. For decades, says BlazeTV host Nick Freitas, the idea of an “American” was essentially “creedal.”
“It’s the idea that ‘well, if you kind of believe in the general idea of what America is, well, then you too can be every bit as much an American as anyone else,’” he explains.
But as the country becomes increasingly ideologically divided on national identity, the question of “what is an American?” demands a real answer.
On this episode of “Making the Argument,” Freitas provides exactly that by outlining the three things that decide who is an American — and how that differs from a true countryman.
“This is going to be controversial,” he warns.
Freitas highlights JD Vance’s recent speech, in which he argued that a creedal definition (i.e. “agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence”) is an insufficient standard because it’s both “over-inclusive and under-inclusive.”
Freitas agrees. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) doesn’t share the founding principles of the Declaration, he points out, and the Democratic Socialists of America aim to “overthrow the United States Constitution as it currently exists,” but that doesn’t mean their candidates and voters are not technically Americans. At the same time, there are foreigners who genuinely support America’s creed, but that also does not make them Americans.
So what does? Freitas highlights three determining tests.
1. “Legally, you’re an American if you have U.S. citizenship.”
2. “Historically, you’re an American if you’ve actually been in this country for any period of time and you can actually draw roots back to it, which actually signifies some sort of continuity within the same place and the same traditions.”
3. “Creedally or culturally, you’re an American if you actually appreciate the various social, political, economic, and theological underpinnings of what created the United States and what has sustained it.”
Combined, these standards, Freitas argues, determine if someone is “comprehensively American” — but it’s the third that ultimately determines who true “countrymen” are.
“The people that I really see as my countrymen are the ones that have come to fully understand what it means to be an American, loves the principles and the philosophies and the traditions, and wants to advance them into the future,” he says. “That’s my countryman — whether you came here yesterday or your family came here 250 years ago.”
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Nick freitas, Citizenship, Immigration, Blazetv host
Trump’s interest-rate fantasy runs into debt gravity
You can have very low interest rates, and you can have debt-driven inflation. You just can’t have both at the same time. That is the reality President Trump refuses to recognize.
At the core of the president’s half-baked plan to resuscitate the economy is a return to the good old days of near-zero interest rates.
The Federal Reserve can set the short-term rates as low as it wants, but the bond markets will continue to rebel and reflect reality.
“We should have the lowest interest rates anywhere in the world,” Trump said last week in response to a reporter’s question in the Oval Office.
“In the old days … if we announced good numbers, interest rates went down. Now, if you announce good numbers, interest rates go up because they’re so afraid of inflation.”
It’s hard to make sense of that statement, but it reflects a grievance Trump has voiced consistently. He wants endless spending for his projects, he doesn’t want the inflation it causes, and he wants to pay near-zero interest on the resulting record debt. Don’t we all?
Perhaps in another lifetime, God will create such an innovative world. In this one, when you have protracted inflation and must sell endless Treasuries to service the debt, you cannot offer near-zero interest to buyers of that debt — especially at a rate below inflation.
We had multiple periods of near-zero interest rates this century, including during COVID. We also spent trillions of dollars we did not have during Trump’s first term and Biden’s presidency. That helped fuel the inflation surge of 2021-22. Prices have continued rising even as the inflation rate slowed, while the debt keeps exploding. Year-over-year inflation has now remained above the Fed’s 2% target for 65 consecutive months, with most months above 3%.
Far from being “artificially high,” as Trump contends, rates have been held artificially low. After the federal funds rate peaked at 5.5% during the inflation fight — a historically unremarkable level — the Fed cut rates six times beginning in 2024. The effective rate now stands at 3.63%, below the long-run average.
So what did the bond market do? The 10-year Treasury yield is roughly as high as it was when the federal funds rate peaked in 2024, and the 30-year yield is at levels not seen since 2007.
The Federal Reserve can set short-term rates as low as it wants, but the bond market will still reflect fiscal reality. There is no way around crushing debt other than cutting spending.
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That was on vivid display late last month when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent instituted a “twist” operation: The government bought back more long-dated Treasuries while relying more heavily on cheaper short-term bills and notes to finance the deficit and the purchases themselves. The goal was to reduce the supply of long-duration debt, support bond prices, lower long-term yields, and exploit the fact that short-term rates remain below 10- and 30-year yields.
The response from the bond market?
After a few hours of lower yields, by the next morning they were back near their pre-announcement baseline.
The 10-year yield is now around 4.75%, higher than at any point since April 2007. Back then, the effective federal funds rate was 5.25% — 162 basis points above today’s rate. The bond market is telling us that long-term rates are not high because the Fed forgot how to cut. They are high because investors demand compensation for inflation, deficits, and debt risk.
There is a simple reason the Fed can no longer wave a magic wand, return rates to near zero, and service the debt on the cheap as it did from the post-9/11 recession through COVID. On September 11, 2001, gross federal debt was about $5.77 trillion, roughly 55% of GDP. In April 2007, before the financial crisis, it was about $8.84 trillion, or 63% of GDP. Today it exceeds $40 trillion and is roughly 123% of GDP.
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The long-term trajectory is even worse, because faster debt growth creates a vicious cycle: Treasury needs more buyers, inflation and fiscal risk force yields higher, and more existing debt rolls over at those higher rates.
After an election fought in part against Bidenflation, nearly $4 trillion in new debt has been added since January 2025. Across Trump’s two terms, roughly $11.7 trillion of gross federal debt has accumulated. There are still more than two years left in his term, and there is no serious plan to bend the trajectory.
Naturally, all this new debt is being accumulated at higher interest rates. But the sheer magnitude of the debt also makes Trump’s dream of permanently cheap money impossible.
We all share Trump’s desire to service the debt on the cheap. He probably should have thought harder about that desire when he pressured Republicans in March 2020 to shut down the country and then pass trillions in new spending. Unfortunately for him and his delayed second term, what goes around in debt comes back around as inflation and higher interest rates.
Bidenflation, Federal reserve, Inflation, Opinion & analysis, Spending, Treasuries, Interest rates, Debt, Joe biden, Donald trump
Stronger security and privacy is coming to Android, but will it come in time?
If you use an Android phone, your device could be in line to get a privacy upgrade. Google’s bringing a new web standard to its mobile operating system to protect your web traffic from potential spies. However, only a small number of devices will have access to it at launch, and there is a caveat that could slow down the rollout indefinitely.
Unless you have a trusted VPN installed on your device, your web traffic is openly visible to a number of third-party groups, namely your internet service provider and your network administrator (if you’re using a public network). On top of that, every website you visit can see your IP address, device type, browser type, and more.
Google’s new tools are meant to make your phone and your apps safer, more secure, and private.
Even as websites have adopted HTTPS encryption to protect the data exchanged within your favorite sites, your ISP still knows every online spot you visit in a given day, month, or year. This allows outside sources to track your activity, both for innocuous and nefarious reasons.
Google’s new privacy upgrade aims to change that.
The new standard, dubbed Encrypted Client Hello, hides your web traffic from outside sources by encrypting destination websites, thus obscuring your browsing habits and making them harder to track. It’s not just the web either. ECH can also protect web traffic within your favorite apps. Furthermore, apps will be subject to Local Network Protection, another new feature that blocks the apps on your phone from scanning your Wi-Fi network for other connected devices without your permission.
Together, Google’s new tools are meant to make your phone and your apps safer, more secure, and private, but how do you enable it? To get ECH up and running on your Android phone, there are several things you’ll need before you’re protected.
First, ECH is only available on devices that run Android 17, which is a relatively small pool of candidates at the time this was published. Users that own a Google Pixel 6 and newer, or a Samsung Galaxy S23 and newer, either already have Android 17 or will get access very soon. To check the Android version on your device, open the Settings app, find the “About phone” section, and you’ll see your Android version under “device details” on Pixel or “Software information” on Galaxy.
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Second – and this one is the big caveat – many of those same groups that can currently track your web activity have to enable ECH before it will work. That means websites, app developers, and internet service providers all have to implement ECH, otherwise your traffic will remain visible, just as it is today. Even worse, these same groups can actively opt out of supporting ECH, rendering the new standard completely useless.
For what it’s worth, Google claims that it’s lobbying “industry leaders, service providers, and app developers to accelerate ECH adoption,” but it faces a difficult road ahead. Since the standard isn’t mandatory, plenty of groups will likely ignore Google’s attempts to make ECH a mainstream part of Android. In truth, the groups that implement it will be the ones that had no interest in tracking users’ browser activity in the first place, while the groups that are monitoring activity will simply ignore ECH altogether.
In this way, ECH is unlikely to offer much privacy to users in the Android ecosystem, at least not anytime soon. If you really want to protect your internet traffic, you’re better off with a trusted VPN instead.
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Android, Google, Privacy, Internet, Internet privacy, Tech