Category: blaze media

This past Father’s Day weekend, an article on fatherhood in the New York Times went viral.

However, it wasn’t about a great father. It was about a woman who transitioned and calls herself a father.

“You might be thinking, ‘Really? In the year of our Lord 2026, this is what the New York Times is talking about? I thought we were over this madness. I thought we realized and successfully stigmatized roping kids into being sources of affirmation for gender delusion,’” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey says on “Relatable.”

The headline reads, “To my daughter, my gender was never complicated.”

The article contains cartoons to help describe the relationship between “father” and daughter, including one where the daughter asks, “How long did you have breasts for Dad?”

“What a tragic, tragic line for a child to utter. The daughter is later shown at school with friends where a friend says, ‘You can’t grow a beard. You’re a girl.’ And the daughter responds, ‘My dad did, and he was a girl,’” Stuckey explains.

“And this is supposed to prove that this is super simple. Or maybe it proves that it is so delusional that a child who still believes that there is a fat man that can circle the universe in one night, fit down their chimney, and put presents under the tree like that. They believe it because they believe all kinds of fantastical things,” she continues.

But the New York Times isn’t the only publication to do the opposite of celebrating fatherhood.

“There was also this piece in the Toronto Star: ‘A modest proposal: Why it’s time to abolish Father’s Day,’” Stuckey says, pointing out that the article is a bit of a “bait and switch.”

In the article, the author laments the pressure put on children to buy gifts, claiming that the real gift is quality time.

“If your problem is materialism, that’s one thing. Or you just think it’s, you know, a made-up reason to buy Hallmark cards, that’s fine,” she says, adding, “But the title, we need to abolish Father’s Day, or we need to abolish Mother’s Day, another thing that I’ve heard in the past due to some undue burden that’s just perpetuating this idea that celebrating fathers and positive fatherhood is not something that we need to do.”

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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.

​Fatherhood, Fathers day, New york times, Relatable, Gender transition, Children, Family, Allie beth stuckey, Relatable with allie beth stuckey 

For the first time in more than 40 years, privately developed nuclear reactors are switching on in America.

On June 4, Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0 reactor went critical at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory. Valar Atomics followed on June 18, producing heat from a reactor core inside a tentlike structure in the Utah desert. The Department of Energy called it “the rebirth of America’s nuclear industry.”

‘Nuclear in America has been defined for too long by delays, by companies that said they would and then didn’t. … Today is the first of those commitments delivered.’

President Trump has long been skeptical of large traditional reactors, saying they tend to get “too big and too complex and too expensive.” But he bet big on small modular reactors, pledging to “approve new reactors” and “slash the red tape.”

In May 2025, Trump signed four executive orders and set a deadline: at least three new small reactors online by July 4, 2026 — the nation’s 250th birthday.

The Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program followed, fast-tracking 11 new designs and sidestepping the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s traditional licensing process, which previously took more than 20,000 hours to complete. Oversight was placed with the Energy Department instead.

Antares CEO Jordan Bramble put the stakes plainly: “Nuclear in America has been defined for too long by delays, by companies that said they would and then didn’t. We said criticality in 2026, electricity production in 2027, and power to the warfighter in 2028. Today is the first of those commitments delivered on the schedule we set.”

Chief nuclear officer at Ocean Atomics Nick Touran summed up the pace: “We haven’t done anything this fast, basically ever.”

RELATED: Oil industry warns Trump about gas price SHOCK coming soon: Report

Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

The reactors look nothing like today’s massive plants, which average 44 years old. Radiant’s design uses small nuclear fuel balls — its chief nuclear officer compared them to gobstoppers — built to be mass-produced and deployed anywhere from military bases to disaster zones. A third reactor still needs to go critical before July 4 to fulfill the president’s pledge.

This month, the Trump administration also announced $17.5 billion in loans to build 10 large-scale conventional nuclear plants using Westinghouse technology. Construction is targeted to begin by 2030.

Idaho National Laboratory Director John Wagner made the bigger ambition clear: “The goal was never just criticality. The goal is 400 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2050.”

Critics aren’t sold. Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists called the race “essentially an exercise in public relations,” warning that slashing regulations undoes decades of safety lessons. “This is taking us back to the 1950s, and that is not progress.”

The program skipped public comment periods and environmental reviews — which the DOE said were unnecessary.

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​Blaze news, Executive orders, Nuclear capacity, Nuclear reactors, Censors, Trump administration, Energy, Nuclear energy, Politics 

Two of the conservatives on the Supreme Court have sided with the three liberal justices to rule against the president’s decision to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook while a lawsuit continues.

President Donald Trump has been trying to fire Cook since 2025 after she was accused of committing mortgage fraud through evidence gathered from the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

‘Today’s decision is an unprecedented incursion on the executive branch.’

On Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh ruled against the president being allowed to fire Cook while the litigation continued. Four other conservative justices dissented.

“Not only the fact of independence but also the appearance of independence is key to the Federal Reserve’s design,” wrote Roberts in the majority opinion.

He went on to assert that the president had not followed due process in firing Cook, which he indicated should have included offering an explanation for her removal, allowing her to respond, and setting up a deadline for the response. However, he also said in a footnote that the president could fire Cook if he tried again and followed due process.

The president responded in a post on Truth Social.

“The Cook Lawsuit, having to do with her suitability in sitting on the Board of the Federal Reserve, was sent back by the Supreme Court on a strictly procedural basis,” Trump wrote, “we will take appropriate action immediately to make sure that someone who has committed wrongdoing will not be making vital decisions concerning the Welfare of the United States of America!”

Roberts said the ruling was necessary to maintain the independence of the Federal Reserve and to assuage the public.

“Any change in that scheme must come from Congress, not the courts,” Roberts continued. “That is why we cannot accept the government’s contentions in this case. To do so would allow the president to remove a member of the Federal Reserve at any time, for any reason, without any notice before, and without any judicial check after.”

Justice Clarence Thomas called the arguments for the independence of the Federal Reserve unconstitutional.

“Today’s decision is an unprecedented incursion on the executive branch,” Thomas wrote in the dissent.

“Many do not share the court’s rosy appraisal of the past century. But if the court prefers an independent Federal Reserve Board, then its issue is not with the president but with the Constitution,” he added.

RELATED: Warsh approved to replace Powell as Federal Reserve head — and even 1 Democrat supports him

Cook responded in a statement Monday that accused the president of acting out of political motivation.

“It was an attempt to remove me on a manufactured pretext because I refused to bow to political pressure and continued to set interest rates based only on what would best serve the American people,” she wrote.

She has denied the allegations and has not been charged with any crime.

While the president has been demanding that the Federal Reserve lower interest rates, he has backed off on that campaign after some metrics showed inflation climbing to 4%.

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​Federal reserve, Mortgage fraud, Supreme court, Politics, Lisa cook, Donald trump 

The alleged victim of a recent physical attack outside a Texas bar said her assailants yelled “free Karmelo” — and now three females face assault charges, the Dallas Express reported.

The alleged “free Karmelo” exclamation presumably was in reference to Karmelo Anthony, a black male who earlier this month was sentenced to 35 years in prison for murdering Austin Metcalf, a white male, at a high school track meet in April 2025.

‘Any credible threat, any attempt to organize violence, and any effort to intimidate members of the community will be taken seriously and investigated appropriately.’

Ciarrianne Fuller, 21, and Alana Mumphrey, 25 — both of Longview — and Dejae Shalyn Brown, 26, of Pittsburg, were listed in Gregg County Jail records on warrants for assault causing bodily injury, the Express said.

Fuller was arrested Tuesday, the Longview News-Journal reported, adding that Brown and Mumphrey surrendered to law enforcement and were booked into jail Thursday afternoon; all three were released on $20,000 bonds.

The Express said a woman publicly identified on social media as Sammie Lee alleged that several females attacked her after leaving Whiskey J’s in Longview during the overnight hours of June 20 into June 21.

According to the Express, Lee alleged in her public post that the females shouted “free Karmelo” and said they planned to target “the smallest white girl they could find.”

Lee said she had not interacted with the three females prior to the assault, the News-Journal reported, adding that Lee posted photos on social media showing her injuries.

The Express said it asked the Longview Police Department for additional comment and clarification regarding if investigators have confirmed Lee’s allegation that the suspects yelled “free Karmelo” — or if they’ve uncovered any motive for the alleged assault — but the paper said it didn’t immediately receive a response from police.

RELATED: ‘You can’t look me in the eyes, but you can stab my f**king son?!’ Austin Metcalf’s dad humiliates Karmelo Anthony in court

Longview Police Department spokesperson LaDarian Brown did say police are in communication with the FBI about the case because of online conversations “concerning retaliation, division, and attacks between members of our community,” the News-Journal reported.

“Any credible threat, any attempt to organize violence, and any effort to intimidate members of the community will be taken seriously and investigated appropriately,” Brown added, according to the News-Journal.

Racial tensions have surrounded the Karmelo Anthony case since its beginnings more than a year ago:

Shortly after Metcalf’s stabbing death, Anthony supporters went viral on social media, with one declaring that “Austin Metcalf got exactly what he deserved — point blank, period.”A high-profile Anthony spokesman reacted to Anthony’s indictment last year by calling for a fight against “white supremacy” and blasting “bigots” and “racists.”At the start of Anthony’s murder trial early this month, the prosecution dismissed all prospective black jurors — and one of the prospective black jurors acknowledged he’d have a “hard time putting a brother in jail.”After Anthony’s murder conviction, Democrat U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas threw shade at the Metcalf family, saying that “black women, especially black women who have black male children, live in fear and agony every single day — a fear and agony that, I promise you, the Metcalfs probably never spend a day living that way.”In addition, a white-hating agitator claiming Anthony was “legally lynched” is a criminal, disgraced ex-judge.

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​Assault, Texas, Longview, Bar, Physical attack, Karmelo anthony, Free karmelo, Race, Racial tensions, Arrests, Crime, Austin metcalf 

In a recent demonstration, the Muslim community of Dearborn, Michigan, took to the streets, marching and chanting in a way that has renewed many Americans’ concerns about immigration in this country.

Videos of the scene in Dearborn, Michigan, a town which has found itself near the center of the national debate about immigration due to its high concentration of Muslims, began emerging Sunday morning.

‘There are no American flags, but there are flags of many other countries.’

The march was described as an “Ashura procession.”

In a video originally posted by Brendan Gutenschwager and later circulated by other accounts, hundreds of Shia Muslims can be seen marching down the street, making hand gestures and salutes, chanting, and waving a number of flags.

RELATED: Comedian infiltrates Dearborn, Michigan — and the stories he returns with are WILD

None of the flags, as some people observed, were American flags. All appeared to be foreign flags, some of which have words written in a foreign script.

Many observers were distressed by this demonstration of apparently unassimilated Muslims who have gained a foothold in America.

Ned Ryun, the CEO of American Majority, wrote, “If you look at this and don’t immediately conclude that mass remigration must happen, and happen quickly, you are a moron guilty of suicidal empathy.”

Replying to Ned Ryun, Elon Musk voiced similar thoughts on the video and made a chilling observation: “There are no American flags, but there are flags of many other countries. Those whose loyalty is to another country over America are, by definition, traitors and must be expelled immediately.”

Gad Saad addressed President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, saying, “Does this concern you at all? If yes, what are the remedies?”

Eric Daugherty pointed out that this is not what assimilation looks like: “TERRIFYING: Dearborn Michigan just went maximum Islam, flooding the streets and making clear they’re here to conquer, not assimilate. This is why Islam needs to be repelled! Islamist flags waving, THEY WANT TO END THE WEST.”

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Republicans in Alaska were dealt a significant blow Friday after a court intervened to keep a Senate challenger on the ballot.

The Superior Court for the State of Alaska in the Third Judicial District has ruled that Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a challenger to Republican incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, must be restored to the primary ballot for U.S. Senate.

‘The Division’s application of a “good-faith” test to Mr. Sullivan’s declaration of candidacy is not supported by the US Constitution, Alaska statutes, or the Division’s implementing regulations.’

Judge Thomas Matthews held that the Alaska Division of Elections unlawfully imposed a “good-faith” candidacy requirement on J. Sullivan — a requirement that does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, Alaskan statutes, or division regulations.

J. Sullivan, a 69-year-old retired teacher, reportedly registered as a Republican earlier this year and entered the race to oust Sen. S. Sullivan on May 29, just before the deadline for filing.

In response, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Alaska Republican Party filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the state’s division of elections, respectively.

After Alaska Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (R) requested an investigation into J. Sullivan’s eligibility, Carol Beecher, the director of the Division of Elections, concluded that J. Sullivan had not filed a genuine “good-faith” candidacy and instead sought to confuse voters by placing two candidates with nearly identical names on the ballot — deeming him ineligible to seek the office of senator.

He has also been accused of coordinating with Democrat operatives. Sen. S. Sullivan told CNN earlier this month that J. Sullivan’s candidacy was effectively a Democratic effort to “cheat.”

J. Sullivan appealed the division’s decision to the Superior Court, where Judge Matthews ruled in his favor.

RELATED: Will the real Dan Sullivan please stand up? Alaska GOP works to keep another Dan Sullivan off the open primary ballot

Matthews affirmed that J. Sullivan met all the qualifying criteria set out by the Constitution, and therefore Alaska could not impose an additional requirement on his candidacy. The court further concluded that Sullivan’s alleged motives or political affiliations did not bear on his constitutional eligibility to seek office.

“The Division’s application of a ‘good-faith’ test to Mr. Sullivan’s declaration of candidacy is not supported by the U.S. Constitution, Alaska statutes, or the Division’s implementing regulations. As such, the Division’s decision to exclude Mr. Sullivan from the primary ballot is without a legal basis,” Matthews determined.

Matthews argued that ballot design — not exclusion — is the proper remedy for concerns over voter confusion.

“The Division may also design the ballot to facilitate fairness, simplicity, and clarity. But those tools are different from the complete exclusion of a candidate.”

The state has appealed the decision to the Alaska Supreme Court, with oral arguments scheduled for Monday. Unless the state high court intervenes, J. Sullivan will appear on Alaska’s Aug. 18 nonpartisan primary ballot.

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The Supreme Court has given an answer to one of President Trump’s appeals in a case related to, in the words of his legal team, the E. Jean “Carroll hoaxes.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Trump’s appeal in the case Trump v. Carroll.

‘The American People stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll Hoaxes.’

There were no noted dissents in the message declining to take up the case.

Trump appealed an earlier decision in which a jury in a civil case found that “Carroll was sexually abused by … Trump at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1996” and that he “defamed her in statements he made in 2022,” according to the Second Circuit.

RELATED: Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll faces criminal perjury probe involving Democrat mega-donor: Reports

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

President Trump has denied the allegations related to the case.

At the end of 2024, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the jury’s decision to award E. Jean Carroll $5 million in damages.

In a statement provided to the Associated Press, Trump’s legal team said, “The American People stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll Hoaxes. President Trump will keep winning against Liberal Lawfare, as he continues to focus on his mission to Make America Great Again.”

The Supreme Court’s denial on Monday applies to only one of Trump’s appeals in cases concerning Carroll.

Trump is appealing a second decision to award Carroll $83.3 million in a second defamation trial, though this case has not yet made it before the Supreme Court.

At the beginning of the month, President Trump’s counsel informed a clerk at the Supreme Court that the present case would be appealed and requested that the two cases be considered together given that they are closely related. The two cases were not considered together.

Carroll herself, however, is not out of the woods yet.

Blaze News previously reported that Carroll is facing a criminal perjury probe after stating under oath that she received no outside funding for her legal fees. This claim, however, has been called into question after links to billionaire Democrat mega-donor Reid Hoffman were exposed.

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​Defamation, E jean carroll, Scotus, Supreme court, Politics, Donald trump 

Samuel Bateman, the self-described “prophet” who led a sect of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the Arizona-Utah border town of Colorado City, was sentenced in December 2024 to 50 years in prison for horrific sexual crimes against children as young as 9 years old.

Bateman, who was originally convicted on federal charges along with 11 of his adult followers, was convicted again on Friday — this time on a triplet of state child abuse crimes.

‘I just trusted myself.’

Quick background

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints fragmented in the early 2010s after its polygamist leader, Warren Jeffs, was sentenced to life in prison for raping two little girls he claimed as “spiritual wives” — one of whom ultimately bore his child.

Bateman presented himself as Jeffs’ successor, formed a splinter sect, and began amassing followers in Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, and Utah in 2019. According to the second superseding indictment filed against him in May 2023, Bateman told recruits that he had “impressions of Heavenly Father’s will” and was doing “Uncle Warren’s” will.

In addition to having sexual relationships with various adult female followers, several of whom he impregnated, Bateman convinced his followers to give their children to him as “brides” to sexually abuse. He victimized at least 10 children.

The Justice Department noted at the time of Bateman’s sentencing that the perverted cult leader would regularly force his victims to participate in individual and group sexual activities — both with other adults and children.

RELATED: ‘I’m furious’: Pete Buttigieg says his family was targeted by ‘cruel, politically motivated hoax’

Colorado City, Arizona. George Frey/Getty Images

In at least one instance, Bateman gave one victim to an adult male cultist to be sexually abused. In another instance, Bateman transmitted a live video stream of child sexual abuse to his followers.

Bateman and his cronies transported the victims over state lines to facilitate the nightmarish abuse, which continued until his arrest in September 2022.

On Aug. 28, 2022, Arizona Department of Public Safety troopers spotted a GMC Denali dragging along a wooden trailer on Interstate 40. After someone alerted authorities to having seen children’s small fingers moving in the gap of the rear trailer door, troopers pulled over the vehicle in a Flagstaff parking lot and discovered three kids between the ages of 11 and 14 in the boiling-hot trailer.

The unventilated trailer contained a bucket for a toilet, a trash bag, and camping chairs to sit in.

After Bateman’s initial arrest, his followers bailed him out, enabling him to return to his home in Colorado City, where FBI subsequently re-arrested him two weeks later.

False prophet convicted again

Just days after telling an Arizona jury that he is “a kind and loving father” who doesn’t ever “willingly harm anybody,” Bateman was convicted Friday on three state counts of child abuse in connection to the trailer incident, the Associated Press reported.

During his trial concerning his endangerment of three minors — specifically his placement of kids in an enclosed cargo trailer, surrounded by unsecured objects, and without ventilation or seat belts — Bateman admitted that he knew the girls were in a sweltering-hot trailer for hours with virtually no ventilation but downplayed the severity of the conditions.

“I just trusted myself as a driver,” the convicted sex offender said. “I asked God to bless me every time we hopped in that vehicle.”

Bateman, who claimed ahead of the trial that the state had insufficient probable cause to search the trailer, claimed that the girls were free to get out of the trailer whenever they stopped and that he was “shocked as could possibly be” when he learned that they were still trapped in the trailer when troopers pulled him over.

Eric Ruchensky, deputy county attorney at the Coconino County Attorney’s Office, told jurors, “It’s common sense that you don’t carry people in a trailer designed for cargo on a hot day with no ventilation.”

Each of the child abuse counts comes with a mandatory prison sentence between four and eight years, further ensuring the cult leader will die behind bars.

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​Cult, Mormon, Arizona, Utah, Rape, Child abuse, Pedophile, Politics 

It’s been 20 years since Al Gore scared the world and dropped the climate film “An Inconvenient Truth,” which detailed all the catastrophes that would befall us.

And while he still claims he was right — the receipts tell a much different story.

“His predictions … none of them came true,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray comments.

“The Arctic sea ice, remember that? Supposed to be gone completely. … You might notice if you look, the polar ice caps in the Arctic are not gone. They have not disappeared. They are there,” he says.

“How about the melting glaciers and the snows of Kilimanjaro?” he asks, adding, “Still there.”

The film warned that there would be a “rapid retreat of the snow on Mount Kilimanjaro and that the Glacier National Park glaciers would be gone” by now.

“In fact, in Montana, where the park is, they used to have signs that read, ‘These are disappearing soon, so make sure you enjoy and take a picture.’ And they finally took the signs down in 2020 because it wasn’t happening,” Gray says.

Sea levels were also supposed to rise and cause catastrophic flooding, making the Westside Highway in New York disappear.

“The reality is the Westside Highway is still there. The sea levels have not risen 20 feet. In fact, global sea levels have risen nine inches since 1880,” Gray explains.

“But right now there’s gradual retreat occurring rather than rapid city sinking inundations of these places. In other words, what’s happening is the opposite of what he predicted. The opposite. The sea levels are actually receding now,” he continues.

Gore also claimed that carbon dioxide and emissions would see a rapid unchecked rise in atmospheric CO2 levels past the 500 parts per million mark and that hurricane activity would rapidly increase.

Neither of those happened either.

“He was hysterical about everything, and he won an Oscar for it, and he won a Nobel Prize for it in 2007, and he got virtually nothing right,” Gray says, emphasizing, “Nothing.”

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​Al gore, An inconvenient truth, Arctic sea ice, Climate, Crisis, Glacier national park, Melting glaciers, Pat gray, Sea levels, Pat gray unleashed 

In Columbus, Ohio, a retailer allegedly traded food stamp benefits for a glass bong and wine. In Rochester, a salon owner exchanged benefits for manicures. A U.S. Department of Agriculture employee allegedly sold $36 million worth of EBT access codes to various shops.

Federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program spending totaled $101.7 billion in fiscal year 2025 — roughly $279 million every single day.

‘SNAP dollars, federal tax dollars, used to buy drugs and guns.’

Throughout 2025, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. granted waiver requests by nearly two dozen states restricting soda, energy drinks, and candy — affecting roughly 13.5 million recipients.

RFK Jr. framed the case: “We cannot continue a system that forces taxpayers to fund programs that make people sick and then pay a second time to treat the illnesses those very programs help create.”

Last Monday, a federal judge blocked five of those bans. Biden-appointed U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled only Congress can redefine what counts as food — with zero medical exemptions even for plaintiffs managing diabetes and kidney issues.

The remaining states’ restrictions stay in place during the appeal.

Rollins called it the work of “an activist judge.” “SNAP is for food — not sugar bombs fueling obesity, diabetes, and skyrocketing healthcare costs for low-income families,” she posted on X Tuesday.

RELATED: Trump DOJ charges illegal aliens in Boston with nearly $1.5 million in welfare fraud

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

The full scale of what SNAP has become was on display at Thursday’s House fraud hearing. Chaired by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee focused heavily on state-level loopholes and systemic gaps.

Burchett asked why 21 states refused to hand over SNAP data — even after the agency identified $3 billion in potential fraud, including benefits to 186,000 deceased individuals and 442,000 with fake Social Security numbers. “There’s no cohesive force between the two,” he said.

“The computers just don’t hook up.”

USDA Inspector General John Walk testified that in one California operation dubbed “Mic Drop,” over $2 million in SNAP benefits were used to buy crack cocaine from gang members. “SNAP dollars, federal tax dollars, used to buy drugs and guns.”

Dawn Royal of the United Council on Welfare Fraud testified: “One address — a one-bedroom efficiency — had 27 SNAP and 12 Medicaid beneficiaries. … This is the program we have fostered.”

Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) pressed Democrat witness Gina Plata-Nino, SNAP policy director at the Food Research and Action Center, on whether taxpayers should fund soda:

Gill: “Are you that ideologically dug in that you want our tax dollars paying for sugary sodas that you will not, in a straightforward way, admit that sugary sodas are not healthful for the American people?”

Plata-Nino: “I think that focusing on soda, when people are going hungry is —”

Gill: “Do you need data to determine whether drinking soda is healthy? … Do you believe that perhaps drinking sodas every day is healthy?”

Plata-Nino: “The worst health outcome is hunger.”

After doubting that hunger could be satiated “with Coca-Cola,” Gill then asked if her organization is funded by companies that profit from SNAP. Plata-Nino said she could not comment.

Gill pressed further: “Yes. And they’re profiting off of your advocacy. Do you think that that’s a conflict of interest? I think most people think that’s a conflict of interest. I know you don’t want to answer.”

Plata-Nino did not answer.

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​Amy berman jackson, Food stamps, Robert f kennedy jr, Snap program, Tim burchett, Waste, Politics, Fraud 

Three-time NFL Pro Bowl running back Chris Johnson revealed some horrific news in a TV segment that aired Monday morning.

The 40-year-old explained that what began as weakness in his right hand turned out to be a life-threatening illness.

‘I still think the same. I still dream. I still love my family.’

Johnson and his wife, Brittany, figured he had some sort of lingering ailments from his NFL career that were popping up, so the former Tennessee Titans star went in for tests.

“I first noticed weakness in my right hand,” Johnson said. “At first, it was little things like my grip didn’t feel right, and I wasn’t as strong as I’ve always been.”

Johnson told “Good Morning America” that after thorough testing, “They finally came down with a diagnosis of ALS,” or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The Orlando, Florida, native said he was told about a medication that might extend life by a few months, but that it was time to prepare for the worst.

“Then they told us to get our affairs in order. It was hard hearing that,” Johnson told host Michael Strahan, who is an NFL Hall of Fame player.

In fact, Johnson’s words to Strahan came through a voice program that he controls with his eyes. Johnson recorded his voice shortly after his diagnosis, and therefore the text-to-speech audio sounds like him.

However, losing his voice is just one of the physical results of his illness.

RELATED: Christian fan says she was ejected from Detroit Tigers game over pro-Jesus shirt: ‘I have the right to wear that’

– YouTube

“I can’t even hold a cup if I try, and that’s despite being diagnosed relatively early and doing everything we can, including participating in multiple experimental treatments,” Johnson said.

The former East Carolina athlete urged early detection, more research, and enhanced treatments to give people a better chance than what he has available to him.

As for his wife, she told the ABC program that she thought what Johnson was going through was the result of years of clashes on the football field. Johnson retired in 2017.

“I thought because of football and, you know, his career, that it had to be something with that,” she told Strahan. “Maybe a pinched nerve or something along those lines, but never ALS.”

RELATED: Caitlin Clark gets fist to the throat as WNBA primed to explode: ‘She’s a straight white basketball player’

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

Strahan asked several questions pertaining to how much their life has changed, and Johnson explained that he wants to continue his fight simply to “make more memories” with his kids and “just be their dad.”

“At first, you’re in shock. Then you realize you have two choices: You can give up, or you can fight. I chose to fight,” the father stated.

Despite losing his voice, Johnson said he wanted viewers to know that the illness hasn’t changed how his mind works.

“People sometimes look at the physical disability and assume you’re not still the same person inside. I still think the same. I still dream. I still love my family. My body just doesn’t cooperate.”

Johnson had a total of 9,651 rushing yards and 55 rushing touchdowns in 10 years in the NFL. He still holds one of the fastest 40-yard dash times in NFL Combine history.

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The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a big defeat on Monday to conservatives seeking to prevent Election Day from becoming little more than an “abstraction.”

The high court ruled 5-4 that the “federal election-day statutes do not prevent Mississippi from counting absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days thereafter,” adding that “nothing in the federal election-day statutes requires ballots received by election day.”

‘Today’s decision compounds these vulnerabilities.’

The case in question, Watson v. Republican National Committee, was the result of a years-long battle over a COVID-era Mississippi law passed by the Magnolia State’s Republican trifecta that permits the counting of mail-in absentee ballots postmarked by the date of the election but received up to five business days after Election Day.

Republicans were wary, in part, because mail-in voting is starkly polarized by party and “the late-arriving mail-in ballots that are counted for five additional days disproportionately break for Democrats.”

While it has narrowed since 2020, the partisan divide in mail-in voting remained substantial in the 2024 election — which helps explain why so many Democrat-aligned groups have defended the practice and the Mississippi law.

In 2024, the RNC, the Mississippi GOP, and several individuals sued Mississippi’s secretary of state and other state election officials, arguing that federal law bars Mississippi from counting absentee ballots received after Election Day.

RELATED: Stopping the steal: Sen. Lee, Republicans demand Election Day integrity ahead of SCOTUS fight over ‘rolling’ ballot counts

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In October 2024, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor. Last year, however, the state asked SCOTUS to get involved and reinstate its post-Election Day grace period.

Mississippi maintained that late counts are acceptable as “federal election-day statutes require only that the voters cast their ballots by election day” — that “an election requires ballot casting — not ballot receipt.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who delivered the majority opinion, wrote that “this is not a case about the Constitution. We do not consider the scope of Congress’ authority to regulate federal elections. The sole question before us is whether counting ballots postmarked by election day, but received up to five days later, violates the federal election-day statutes.”

Barrett answered that the existing statutes “do not preempt Mississippi’s law.”

“As we have said before, the federal election-day statutes ‘simply regulate the time of the election,'” wrote Barrett.

While the relevant federal statutes determine when the electorate must make its choice, Barrett noted that “choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received.”

“The framers recognized the difficulty of crafting election laws ‘applicable to every probable change in the situation of the country,'” Barrett wrote in her conclusion, citing the Federalist No. 59. “So instead of constitutionalizing election law, they decided that ‘a discretionary power over elections’ needed to be lodged ‘somewhere.’ … Suffice it to say, that power was not lodged in this court. The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose.”

Justice Samuel Alito — who dissented along with Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh — torched his liberal and nominally conservative colleagues’ arguments in a lengthy takedown, emphasizing at the outset that “if ballots received after election day are added to the set of ballots that dictate the election’s outcome, the electorate’s choice does not occur on election day, and the federal election-day statutes are violated.”

“The acceptance of these late-arriving ballots effectively postpones the date on which the electorate’s choice is made, and federal law precludes that postponement,” added Alito.

He further emphasized that for most of America’s history, the expectation was that votes were received and American elections were decided on Election Day.

“Two centuries of historical practice reinforce the proposition that holding an ‘election’ on a particular day means that poll workers had to receive the ballots by that date,” wrote the conservative justice. “From this country’s founding until the late 20th century, election-day ballot collection was the near-uniform practice, with only a few, late-arriving exceptions.”

Alito noted this was the case “even when the Civil War took soldiers hundreds of miles from their usual polling places.”

In his scathing critique of the majority’s opinion, Alito also accused his colleagues of attempting “to fend off two centuries of American election practice” and noted that “when Congress enacted the three election-day statutes, having the ‘election’ on a particular date meant that ballots would be collected by that date.”

Alito stressed that the ruling not only “threatens to produce lamentable consequences” and a “slurry of troubling election-law questions,” but “leaves open opportunities for voter fraud that may further undermine Americans’ faith in the integrity of this country’s elections.”

“When someone votes by mail, it is harder for officials to verify the identity of the person requesting and completing the ballot. Mail voting also presents a greater opportunity for voter manipulation, a more vulnerable chain of ballot custody, and a diminished ability to detect improprieties in real time,” wrote Alito. “Today’s decision compounds these vulnerabilities. Allowing absentee ballots to pour in over the days and weeks after election day, by which point preliminary election returns are being publicly reported, creates greater opportunity for fraud and risks further undermining the public’s confidence in election integrity.”

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​Election, Fraud, Republican, Samuel alito, Supreme court, Politics 

“Drill, baby, drill” are the words Donald Trump chanted to a cheering crowd in Pennsylvania just two years ago. For many people in the Keystone State, that was music to their ears as the state is second largest in America for fracking.

Fast-forward two years, and the issue has become a focal point of the 2026 gubernatorial race, and it absolutely should be, because what is happening in Pennsylvania right now is nothing short of a policy abomination.

‘Drill, baby, drill’ isn’t just a slogan. For Pennsylvania, it’s a lifeline, and Harrisburg keeps cutting it.

I’m a Pennsylvania girl. I know this is what’s going on in my community, I’ve seen decisions in Harrisburg impact people throughout the commonwealth in real time, and right now, working families are hurting.

For one, electricity bills have surged across Pennsylvanian homes in recent years, with the average household getting double-digit rate hikes and higher summer costs impacting family budgets. Utility shut-offs climbed toward four million households nationwide in 2025. Pennsylvanians alone are being squeezed dry every time they flip a light switch.

Here’s the kicker: Pennsylvania is sitting on a gold mine. The Marcellus Shale formation underlies roughly two-thirds of the state and holds an estimated 250 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. We are an energy exporter. We produce more natural gas than almost any state in the nation. We should be flush with affordable, reliable power.

RELATED: Drill, baby, drill: Oil tech expert reveals why Trump’s toughness on the industry is actually good

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Instead, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) is writing strongly worded letters.

The crisis in Pennsylvania isn’t a political messaging problem that a few stern letters to utility executives can fix; it’s a supply crisis.

Demand is exploding, with PJM, the operator managing the grid for 65 million people across 13 states, is projecting a razor-thin energy surplus of just .2 gigawatts for the coming delivery year. This is despite a recommended safety buffer of nearly 20%.

And what has Shapiro done to actually address supply? He’s strangled it.

His so-called “Lightning Plan,” which was touted as a bold, all-of-the-above energy strategy, is anything but. Critics have correctly identified it as a disguised carbon tax through his Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction Act. His administration has maintained a moratorium on new drilling in state parks and state forests. His regulatory environment has made permitting a slow, grinding nightmare for the very energy producers who could relieve the pressure Pennsylvanians are feeling every time they open their utility bill.

The situation regarding the natural gas sector also paints a clear picture of the situation. The industry employs roughly 120,000 workers in Pennsylvania today, less than half of what it employed a decade ago. The important thing to note is that we still have the resources and the workforce, yet we don’t have a governor willing to get out of the way and let Pennsylvania be the energy powerhouse it’s supposed to be.

While Shapiro holds press conferences and plays whack-a-mole with rate hike requests, the fundamental problem compounds. Threatening grid operators and appointing “watchdogs” doesn’t put one dollar back in Pennsylvanian families’ pockets. It’s a press release masquerading as a plan, engineered for headlines not results. That’s because we have a governor with one eye on Harrisburg and the other on a future presidential run.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Stacy Garrity gets it. On day one, she pledges to lift the moratorium on new drilling sites, call a special session to fast-track energy permits, and in her words, “drill and frack our way out” of Pennsylvania’s fiscal hole. That’s not recklessness. That’s leadership. It’s the kind of no-nonsense energy policy that built this state and can ultimately save it.

Pennsylvania doesn’t have an energy crisis because it lacks resources. We have an energy crisis because we’ve had leadership that talks affordability while making production harder, slower, and more expensive at every turn. Sounds counterintuitive right?

“Drill, baby, drill” isn’t just a slogan. For Pennsylvania, it’s a lifeline, and Harrisburg keeps cutting it.

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​Opinion & analysis, Pennsylvania, Drilling, Energy, Josh shapiro, Electricity, Opinion 

Radical Muslim Democrat Darializa Avila Chevalier appears to be headed for Congress, despite having publicly advocated for extremist and anti-American positions.

And Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck is extremely concerned.

“She has called for abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, and abolishing all borders. She clarified her position on defunding the police by writing that her vision means ‘ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever,’” Glenn explains.

“She retweeted posts saying, ‘Yes, literally abolish the border,’ and, ‘All deportations are wrong.’ She has called the United States an effing disgrace. Referred to the U.S. as occupied Native American land and joked about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag,” he continues.

“She wrote favorably about communism. She wrote, ‘Seize the means of production.’ That’s a quote. She called for nationalizing all of the utilities, nationalizing all the pharmaceutical companies, and seizing all properties from landlords. She wrote that pyromania associated with anarchism is intriguing,” he adds.

Avila Chevalier even criticized Bernie Sanders and AOC for being “too pro-Israel” as well as retweeting that “Israel doesn’t exist.”

“And she wrote that black and Arab men fetishize ugly colonizing women,” Glenn says.

Avila Chevalier is also a founder of Columbia University Apartheid Divest. The organization’s stated goal is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” and it is admittedly seeking “community and instruction from the militants in the global South.”

“Our intifada is an internationalist one. We are fighting for nothing less than the liberation of all people. We reject every genocidal, eugenist regime that seeks to undermine the personhood of the colonized,” the organization’s statement reads.

“How does she possibly serve? How can she raise her hand and say, ‘I will protect and defend the Constitution of the United States’ when she has said these things?” Glenn asks.

“That oath is not just part of the ceremony. That is a sacred oath,” he continues, adding, “It is legally binding, and it is made so people like her cannot serve.”

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​Aoc, Bernie sanders, Congress, Glenn beck, Israel, Zohran mamdani, Communism, Islam, The glenn beck program, Darializa avila chevalier 

Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that can infect any nucleated cell in any warm-blooded animal and can cause a wide range of health complications — some fatal, such as miscarriage or inflammation of the brain.

This singled-celled parasite, which can survive up to a lifetime in a human body, is stereotypically associated with crazy “cat ladies” due to its presence in cat feces — cats are its only known definitive hosts — and its association with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and suicidal behavior.

‘Toxoplasmosis is just getting left behind.’

Despite its association with “cat ladies,” the parasite is an equal opportunity invader. A study published last year noted, for instance, that the rapidly dividing asexual form of the indiscriminate parasite can “colonize and proliferate” within testes, decapitate sperm, and cause “oxidative stress leading to male infertility.”

A study published on Thursday in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases warned that toxoplasmosis, the virus caused by the parasite, is not receiving sufficient attention from the scientific powers that be — certainly not the level that might otherwise be warranted by its impact and pervasiveness.

“Toxoplasmosis continues to be one of the most common parasitic infectious diseases affecting humans, and the leading intraocular infection worldwide,” said the study.

Toxoplasmosis chronically affects nearly one-third of the human population and is present in every country around the globe. South America is home to the highest rates of infection, with some regions reporting up to 80% of their adult populations afflicted. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 40 million people are infected with the parasite in the United States.

RELATED: Foreign ‘Fauci acolyte’ and his African crony charged with smuggling monkeypox onto American soil

Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

“Yet, the condition receives limited attention on health agendas,” continued the researchers.

In a comparison of data provided by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, researchers found that “toxoplasmosis research was funded at a level of $177 per disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) for the period 2018–2024, compared with research on trachoma and Chagas disease, at $283/DALY and $337/DALY, respectively.”

“Key gaps persist across basic science, diagnostics, therapeutics, prevention, and implementation research,” said the study. “No licensed human vaccine exists. Serological testing is widely available, but expensive for low-income scenarios and poorly standardized, complicating surveillance and estimation of the burden of disease. Treatment protocols lack robust comparative evidence, particularly for congenital and ocular toxoplasmosis. Environmental monitoring of oocysts remains technically demanding and absent from national programs.”

“What we’re seeing is that while there are these improvements occurring in the fight against other neglected tropical diseases, toxoplasmosis is just getting left behind,” senior author on the paper Justine Smith, an ophthalmologist at Flinders University, told Gizmodo.

The researchers criticized the prevailing notion that the infection is “a zoonosis that is an unavoidable consequence of everyday human-animal interactions,” stating that “accumulated evidence indicates otherwise: toxoplasmosis has well-characterized pathways of transmission and is preventable and controllable.”

In hopes of addressing the “research deficit” and challenging the parasite status quo, the researchers proposed that the World Health Organization — which the U.S. officially withdrew from in January — officially designate toxoplasmosis as a “neglected tropical disease.”

According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NTDs are called “‘neglected’ because they generally afflict the world’s poor and historically have not received as much attention as other diseases. NTDs tend to thrive in developing regions of the world, where water quality, sanitation, and access to health care are substandard. However, some of these diseases also are found in areas of the United States with high rates of poverty.”

An official NTD designation would prompt the WHO to mobilize global resources to tackle the parasite and unlock new funding streams for prevention and control measures, research, food safety measures, and environmental surveillance tools. The researchers noted further that an official designation “would facilitate technical guidance for Ministries of Health, helping Member States integrate toxoplasmosis into mother-child health programs, food safety systems, and primary-care protocols.”

“That sort of recognition translates through to researchers being funded to work on things like vaccines, diagnostics, and curative drugs,” Smith told Gizmodo. “There is no commercially available vaccine against toxoplasmosis. And the drugs we give patients can limit a flare-up of the disease, but there is no drug that cures it at this point.”

While bullish on the WHO designating toxoplasmosis as an NTD, the researchers conceded that doing so “could strain resources that are already limited and dilute the efforts underway in existing programs for other NTDs.”

Infection with toxoplasma gondii can result from foodborne transmission, animal-to-human transmission, mother-to-child transmission, and blood transfusions.

The CDC says that to reduce risk of infection, Americans should:

freeze meat for several days before cooking; use a food thermometer to cook food to a safe internal temperature high enough to kill the parasite; avoid consuming unpasteurized goat milk, raw oysters, mussels, or clams; cook or rinse fruits and vegetables under water before eating;wear gloves when gardening or touching soil that may be contaminated with cat excrement;wash hands with soap any time that they might be contaminated with cat feces; andchange their cat’s litter box daily.

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​Parasite, World health organization, Insanity, Health, Sperm, Politics 

Growing up just outside Galway City, life in the West of Ireland was exactly what the postcards promised. It was a beautiful place, with generous people and a great spirit.

I use the term was deliberately. That Galway, and the Ireland it represented, is officially dead and buried — a lot like the Irish language itself.

Liberals love to romanticize this migration by drawing parallels to Ireland’s own history of exodus.

Galway recently elected its first black mayor, Helen Ogbu, a Nigerian-born former social worker. The local and international media immediately fell into a state of rapturous, celebratory euphoria, framing it as a textbook example of a modern, inclusive Ireland, complete with a self-congratulatory pat on the back for everyone involved.

But beneath the surface-level applause and the performative progressive high-fives, the mood on the ground isn’t exactly celebratory. These rapid-fire changes are fueling a deep dread about what being Irish even means any more, besides holding the right passport.

Demographic rewrite

While Rotimi Adebari, another Nigerian, became Ireland’s first black mayor back in 2007 in Portlaoise, Galway’s latest civic milestone cements a broader trend. This is less a blending of cultures than a demographic rewrite.

For anyone who remembers the not-so-old days, these lightning-fast shifts feel like the systematic gutting of everything we used to call home. It’s a brutal reality that local broadcasters prefer to completely ignore, though American commentator Tyler Oliveira recently traveled to Ireland to document this unfolding madness firsthand.

As his dispatches note, almost a quarter of Ireland’s population is now foreign-born. Watching the footage, it’s impossible not to recall Donald Trump’s infamous 2015 declaration regarding immigration in America: “They’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems. … They’re bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.

Trump was speaking about the U.S. southern border, but looking at the insanity unfolding in Dublin and parts of the rural West, he might as well have been describing modern Ireland. The influx has brought an undeniable undercurrent of low-IQ degeneracy from parts of Africa and the Middle East, fundamentally altering the safety of communities that used to leave their front doors unlocked.

Locals only

Ireland is gripped by a crushing homelessness crisis, but if you look at the people actually sleeping in cardboard boxes in city centers, they are far less likely to be from foreign lands than born-and-bred locals.

There’s a sickening irony to the history here. Our ancestors, including my own family in the West, fought, bled, and died to kick the British Empire out, only for the current generation to willingly open the gates to a different kind of conquest.

To be fair, it wasn’t the ordinary Irish people who made this choice, but a political class utterly beholden to Brussels and the EU bureaucracy. When Angela Merkel opened the floodgates in 2015, a cowardly, compliant Irish government offered to take its share of the burden, setting off a chain reaction that has left the country unrecognizable.

The magnet pulling people in is a bizarrely generous welfare state. While working-class Irish citizens struggle to put food on the table, the system rolls out the red carpet for foreign arrivals. In Oliveira’s documentary, one migrant casually admits to receiving a €1,200 monthly cash allowance. To an outsider, €1,200 (roughly $1,400) a month might not sound like an extravagant fortune, but when it is paired with free housing, medical care, and education, it means you are essentially being subsidized by the Irish taxpayer to do absolutely nothing.

Kick me, I’m Irish

Liberals love to romanticize this migration by drawing parallels to Ireland’s own history of exodus. When Conan O’Brien visited his ancestral home in Ireland, he spoke about the real courage it took for generations of Irish people to cross the Atlantic for a better life, noting, “People leave not because they think: ‘Hey, I just want to go have fun in America.’ They leave because they have to.” The pro-immigration lobby uses this exact sentiment as a shield, arguing that today’s arrivals are just the modern equivalents of the 19th-century Irish.

They’re not. That comparison is utter nonsense. The historical Irish diaspora weren’t greeted by a waiting welfare check, free medical cards, and state-subsidized housing; they stepped off the boats into starvation, hostile “No Irish Need Apply” signs, and manual labor that regularly killed them. Furthermore, modern migration has become a cynical game of regional arbitrage. As Oliveira’s interviews reveal, many migrants openly admit to using Portugal as a soft entry point into the EU, obtaining papers there before immediately making a beeline for Ireland’s superior welfare benefits.

What we are witnessing is the absolute, spectacular failure of Western liberalism. Notice that his toxic brand of pathological altruism doesn’t exist in Africa or Asia. It is an exclusively Western suicidal pact — a bizarre cultural mental illness where nations willingly subsidize their own erasure while smiling for the cameras. Ireland is simply the latest country to gladly sign its own death warrant, completely convinced that disappearing is the ultimate form of progress.

​Lifestyle, Migrants, Immigration, Europe, Ireland, Nigeria, Welfare state, Letter from ireland 

If you’re not familiar with the power of a simple yellow pencil and what it can teach about economics, freedom, and the limit of government power — then Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck is here to help.

“I’m holding a pencil. Yellow, six sides, little pink eraser at the top. And we’ve used these our whole life,” Glenn begins.

“The cedar comes off a mountain in the Pacific Northwest. It’s cut by a steel saw. That steel came from an iron ore in Minnesota, smelted with coal hauled by the rails by people who are long dead,” he says.

“The graphite comes out of the ground in Sri Lanka, and it’s mixed with clay from Mississippi. The little band up at the top, that used to be copper from Chile, zinc from Canada. The yellow paint, the rubber that never once met a rubber tree in its life,” he continues.

“All of these things, thousands of people on five continents that don’t speak the same language, who never met, who’d probably cross the street to avoid each other … these people couldn’t agree on lunch, and they built the pencil,” he adds.

The point, Glenn says, is that “no one was in charge.”

“There’s no department of pencils in a marble building deciding how much graphite Sri Lanka needs to mine this year. Nobody on the planet wakes up at 3:00 in the morning in a cold sweat thinking, ‘Dear God, does Ohio have enough erasers?’ Nobody does,” he says.

“So here’s how you explain capitalism and socialism. If no one is smart enough to plan a pencil, nobody … it just happens. Who exactly do we figure is smart enough to plan an entire economy?” he asks, before citing the economist Friedrich Hayek.

Glenn notes that Hayek “spent his life on this one idea,” which was that “the knowledge that it takes to run an economy doesn’t live in any one place.”

“It’s scattered across millions and billions of heads. It’s the welder who can feel a batch of steel running brittle. It’s the grocer who notices that young families are starting to move in, and they got all these kids, so I better stock up on more diapers. It’s the farmer that can read the sky,” he says.

“None of them could write down what they know. They couldn’t fill it out in a form. They’d lose the form. But they act on it every single day,” he adds.

However, when you introduce a central planner, Glenn explains, even the ones with the most sincere hearts will fail.

“And that’s when the bread line happens. Bread lines are real, and it happens the same way every single time,” he says.

“It’s like a band that only knows one song. That’s what socialism is,” he adds.

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​Capitalism, Economics, Economy, Freedom, Glenn beck, Pencil test, Socialism, The glenn beck program 

If you want to glimpse the future of artificial intelligence, don’t start in Silicon Valley. Start in a South Korean factory.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, South Korea now has 1,012 industrial robots for every 10,000 manufacturing workers — the highest robot density in the world. Put another way, roughly one in every 10 manufacturing “workers” is now a robot.

For now, however, even the world’s most advanced humanoid robots still struggle with tasks that young children perform effortlessly.

That startling figure is one piece of a much larger story stretching from American AI labs to South Korean factories, Chinese assembly lines, and Indian garment workshops.

For most Americans, the AI revolution is something that happens on a screen. We think of ChatGPT writing emails, Claude summarizing reports, or Google Gemini answering questions. The race appears to revolve around Silicon Valley companies building ever more capable language models.

But the next phase of artificial intelligence is becoming much more physical.

Instead of asking how machines can write like humans, researchers are asking how they can move like humans — how they grasp a coffee mug, fold a shirt, stitch a collar, or crack an egg without crushing it.

That challenge has created an unexpected global division of labor: America builds the brains, South Korea builds the bodies, China provides the classroom, while India supplies the teachers.

Together, they’re revealing something surprising: the future of artificial intelligence depends on ordinary human beings.

South Korea: Building the bodies

If robotics has an epicenter, it may well be South Korea.

The country’s dominance in robotics didn’t emerge from nowhere. It grew out of decades spent building some of the world’s most advanced automobiles.

The same expertise that allows South Korean companies to manufacture electric motors, precision steering systems, sensors, braking technology, and other high-performance automotive components translates remarkably well to humanoid robots. Goldman Sachs Research estimates Korean companies could account for roughly 30% of global humanoid robot production by 2035, either by manufacturing robots directly or supplying the critical components that allow them to move.

Yet South Korea’s embrace of automation has also exposed its tensions.

This week, Hyundai workers overwhelmingly voted to authorize strike action after contract negotiations stalled, with robots emerging as a central issue for the first time.

The union isn’t simply demanding higher wages.

It wants guarantees over how artificial intelligence and humanoid robots will be introduced onto factory floors, arguing that workers deserve a voice before machines begin performing jobs currently done by people.

The dispute centers on Atlas, the humanoid robot developed by Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics.

While company executives describe Atlas as a way to perform dangerous, repetitive, and physically demanding work, union leaders see a machine that could eventually replace the people who build Hyundai’s cars.

The disagreement captures the paradox facing much of the developed world.

Countries like South Korea desperately need automation. It has one of the world’s fastest-aging populations and one of its lowest birth rates, creating labor shortages that robots may eventually help fill.

Yet the workers whose jobs are most vulnerable understandably want assurances that they won’t become casualties of the technological transition.

Child’s play

For now, however, even the world’s most advanced humanoid robots still struggle with tasks that young children perform effortlessly.

Finding a coffee pot, identifying its handle, lifting it correctly and pouring without spilling remains astonishingly difficult for a machine.

The bottleneck is no longer the body or the brain. It is experience.

Engineers can now build remarkably capable robot bodies and increasingly sophisticated AI models. What they can’t manufacture is the accumulated experience that allows humans to navigate the physical world almost without thinking. Like a child learning to walk — or an apprentice learning a trade — robots improve only through repeated interaction with the real world.

RELATED: Your child’s new best friend might be a Chinese surveillance device

akinbostanci/Getty Images

China: Generating the experience

South Korea may lead the world in robot density, but China wins on sheer scale.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, China had 2.027 million industrial robots operating in its factories in 2024. It installed another 295,000 robots that year alone, accounting for 54% of global robot demand.

That scale gives Beijing an enormous advantage in the next phase of AI.

Unlike ChatGPT, which learned from enormous quantities of text on the internet, humanoid robots must learn by interacting with the real world. Every object they grasp, every obstacle they navigate, and every task they complete generates valuable information that helps improve future models.

China has more of that real-world classroom than anyone else.

Part of the urgency stems from demographics. After decades of the one-child policy and collapsing birth rates, China faces one of the fastest-aging populations in history. Its working-age population is projected to shrink dramatically over the coming decades, threatening the labor force that powered its manufacturing rise.

Humanoid robots have become one response. Every robot deployed today becomes another teacher for tomorrow’s robots. More deployment generates more real-world data, and better data produces better AI models.

Better models create more capable robots, which in turn generate even more data.

In the race toward physical AI, experience itself has become a competitive advantage.

India: Supplying the trainers

If South Korea is building the machines and China is putting them to work, India is asking who benefits from the knowledge that makes them possible.

Across the country, companies are asking factory workers, construction laborers, delivery drivers, and homemakers to wear head-mounted cameras while they go about their daily routines.

No gesture is too small to escape the camera’s eye: how a garment worker guides fabric through a sewing machine, how a mason carries bricks across uneven ground, how someone folds laundry, washes dishes, packs a lunch.

The recordings — known as “egocentric data” — have become one of the world’s most valuable resources.

Many workers reportedly weren’t told exactly why they were being recorded; in fact, some laughed when cameras were first strapped to their foreheads. That laughter changed to unease as they realized they were teaching machines that might someday replace them.

Labor advocates have raised new questions. If a worker’s lifetime of accumulated skill is converted into an AI dataset worth millions of dollars, should that worker share in its value?

Can consent really be voluntary if refusing to wear the camera could jeopardize someone’s livelihood?

And who owns years of accumulated know-how once it has been converted into a commercial AI dataset?

For perhaps the first time, the routines of ordinary life are becoming economically valuable in their own right.

Skills that were never considered professions — sewing a collar, folding towels, washing dishes, preparing meals, gripping an egg without breaking it, carrying heavy materials safely — are becoming indispensable training material for the world’s most sophisticated robots.

Indian startup Neocambrian AI estimates it could require 100 million hours of first-person human activity before machines approach human-level dexterity.

The irony is impossible to miss.

As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, researchers are discovering just how difficult it is to replicate the quiet competence of ordinary people.

We, robot

The AI revolution has often been described as a triumph of silicon over flesh. Instead, it is becoming a lesson in just how remarkable ordinary human beings really are.

The machine doesn’t know what an ordinary person knows: how tightly to grip an egg, how to instinctively shift its weight while walking across uneven ground.

These are forms of embodied wisdom acquired through years of living in a human body.

Christianity has long insisted that human beings are not merely minds that happen to inhabit bodies. In Genesis, mankind is introduced not simply as a thinker but as a worker — cultivating a garden, naming animals, building a family, and exercising stewardship over creation.

These are not incidental tasks. They are ways human beings express creativity, responsibility, and love.

One of the strangest consequences of the AI revolution is that it is reminding us of the enduring dignity of the same ordinary human work it seeks to replace.

​Ai, Ai race, Automation, China, Culture, Humanoid robots, Hyundai, India, Lifestyle, Robotics, South korea, Workers, Tech 

The debate over autonomous weapons has started from the wrong premise.

Critics ask whether the United States should permit machines to kill. Advocates frame the question as whether we can afford to fall behind adversaries who will deploy such systems regardless. Both sides treat autonomous lethality as a novel moral category that demands a novel governing framework.

The United States will field autonomous systems regardless of whether the public debate reaches a satisfying resolution.

The U.S. military already possesses such a framework, however. It has been used for decades, it scales naturally to autonomous systems, and the public debate would improve considerably if both sides understood these realities.

The military governs the use of force through weapons control statuses, a graduated system that every air defense operator and ground commander knows by three commands. “Weapons hold” authorizes engagement only in self-defense or under specific order. “Weapons tight” authorizes engagement only against targets positively identified as hostile. “Weapons free” authorizes engagement against any target not positively identified as friendly.

A commander sets the status based on mission, threat, and environment, as units within his command may operate under different statuses depending on the situation. The framework already calibrates lethal authority to circumstance. It does not require a soldier to seek individual approval for every trigger pull, because the controlling judgment comes from the posture the commander has set rather than in each discrete engagement.

This structure maps directly onto the problem of autonomous weapons.

The objection that a machine cannot exercise the contextual judgment that distinguishes a combatant from a civilian, a threat from a bystander, has force only in environments where discrimination is genuinely difficult — precisely the condition the weapons control framework already addresses.

The Taiwan Strait and downtown Tehran are not the same operating environment, and no serious framework should govern them in the same way.

Consider the contrast. An autonomous system operating in the Taiwan Strait is tasked with engaging naval vessels in a declared conflict zone where civilian traffic is minimal. Every surface combatant of a certain signature is presumptively hostile and faces a discrimination problem that is nearly trivial. The environment is uncluttered, the targets are large and militarily unambiguous, and the consequences of restraint include the loss of American ships and sailors to adversary missiles that outpace any human operator’s reaction time.

A weapons-free or weapons-tight posture for autonomous engagement in that environment is defensible on the same grounds that justify those postures for human-operated air defense.

The same autonomous system operating in a dense urban environment such as downtown Tehran, where combatants and civilians occupy the same streets, should operate under weapons hold, which requires a human to authorize each engagement. The environment dictates the posture, and the framework already exists to make that determination.

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The Pentagon has, in fact, started to incorporate this framework into existing policy. Directive 3000.09, updated in January 2023, requires that autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. It also requires that the design of such systems confine each engagement to a time frame and geographic area consistent with commander and operator intentions.

The directive presupposes that the appropriate level of human control varies with the system and mission rather than holding constant across all cases.

What the directive does not yet do, and what the public debate has not yet grasped, is connect that variation to the weapons control vocabulary the force already uses, which would render the entire question legible to commanders, policymakers, and the public in terms the military has been employing for generations.

Adopting this approach requires trusting the military to set the posture, which is the crux of the matter for a public institution. The objection that the U.S. cannot trust commanders to calibrate autonomous lethal force responsibly proves too much.

We already trust those same commanders to calibrate human lethal force through an identical framework — one that, when commanders adopt the wrong posture, produces civilian casualties.

An autonomous system governed by the same logic inherits the same accountability structure, because the commander who sets a weapons-free posture for an autonomous system owns the consequences exactly as the commander who sets it for a battery of human-operated interceptors.

A public institution governing an autonomous force must establish this policy explicitly rather than allow it to emerge on a case-by-case basis from procurement decisions and after-action reviews.

The military should state as a matter of doctrine that autonomous weapon systems operate under weapons control statuses set by the responsible commander; that the status a commander may set for a given system depends on the discrimination difficulty of its operating environment; and that the most permissive postures remain available only in environments where the discrimination problem is genuinely simple.

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This codification would accomplish two things that the current ambiguous debate does not. First, it would give commanders a clear and familiar vocabulary for governing systems that would otherwise arrive without doctrinal handholds. Second, it would give the public a transparent standard by which to hold the institution accountable, because a weapons control status is a decision with a name and an owner rather than a diffuse property of an algorithm that no one can identify.

The alternative is not a world without autonomous weapons. Adversaries are building them, the technology is proliferating, and the United States will field autonomous systems regardless of whether the public debate reaches a satisfying resolution.

The alternative to adopting a clear framework is fielding these systems under an ambiguous one, in which the absence of explicit doctrine forces operators and engineers to improvise the hardest decisions in the moment rather than letting commanders govern them in advance within a system the nation has already validated across decades of use.

The military knows how to use lethal force. The framework is sound, familiar, and accountable. The task now is to apply it deliberately to new autonomous systems rather than assume that such systems require the country to invent its ethics of force from scratch.

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

​Autonomous warfare, Drones, Us military, Weapons free, Taiwan strait, Iran, Russia, China, Military drones, Opinion & analysis, Pentagon 

A data center already under attack from locals has announced a move that probably will only make residents more upset.

American company Hyperscale Data Inc. has a data center in Dowagiac, Michigan, that residents say is too loud. A class action lawsuit filed in May says a constant hum from the facility is overwhelming.

‘… create a unique environment for developing and evaluating next-generation AI systems.’

Neighbors said that they can hear the data center’s cooling systems and fans from inside their home, limiting whatever they want to do on their property.

“I’m walking [my son] more than a mile away to get away from the noise,” one man said, per WSBT.

Piling onto this already (allegedly) burdensome data center is a recent announcement that Hyperscale Data will employ Chinese robots at the facility.

Hyperscale and its subsidiary company Omnipresent Robotics are reportedly partnering with Chinese robotics firm Agibot PTE Ltd to get components for 30 OPR-R2 humanoid robots, Data Center Dynamics reported.

Set for deployment in Q3 2026, the bots are intended to support the “development of embodied artificial intelligence applications, autonomous workflows, and advanced robotics systems.”

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Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu/Getty Images

While the OPR-R2 bots are not listed on Agibot’s website, their top model of humanoid bot (the Agibot A2 Ultra) is about five-and-a-half feet tall and just over 150 pounds. It comes with three cameras — head, chest, and waist — a microphone and a speaker.

The bots are described as a “rising star” in the entertainment industry, as well, and are recommended for brand ambassadors and performances.

As workers, the machines will reportedly be assigned to the Omnipresent Robotics’ Model Training Laboratory, where they will work “side-by-side” with data center employees to mimic their movements, also described as real-world training.

“The company believes the integration of humanoid robots with high-performance AI computing infrastructure will create a unique environment for developing and evaluating next-generation AI systems capable of operating in real-world environments,” Hyperscale said, per DCD.

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Hyperscale’s chairman said that the company believes “physical AI” is the future of AI, with “tomorrow’s AI systems” needing to be capable of understanding and interacting in the physical world.

As for the data center itself, it sits at approximately 617,000 square feet and takes about 28 megawatts of power. According to DataCenters.com, there are 12 other data centers within 50 miles of the facility.

Hyperscale Data is currently trading at around 17 cents per share at the time of this writing.

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​News, Data center, Michigan, Chinese robots, Tech