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The black community has been sold the story that their heroes are civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and while documentarian Chad O. Jackson doesn’t believe either were actually a force for good, he does find one slightly less destructive than the other.

“I would put Malcolm in a very slight first, but I reject both of them. I reject the Nation of Islam that Malcolm represented, and I reject the social gospel that King represented, because I think both of those aspects about them diluted the message that they were communicating,” Jackson tells BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock on “Fearless.”

“Malcolm X was more focused on building up your communities,” he continues. “King was more interested in making a point and using the boycott as a jump-off point for what he was really trying to do, which was pass legislation to implement some degree of socialism into America.”

“King, he wasn’t interested in this kind of ‘build up your communities and pull up your own bootstraps.’ In fact, he besmirched the pull-up-your-bootstraps philosophy. ‘How can a bootless man lift up himself by his own bootstraps?’ said MLK,” Jackson explains.

Jackson notes that Stanley Levison, “the number one financier for the communist party,” was MLK’s “handler.”

“The relationship between Levison and King had the kind of making of a giant in real time, and it worked,” he explains. “The historians picked up on it after he was martyred — Washington, D.C., erected a 40-foot monument paying homage to him.”

Levison was also the true author behind the famous line, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Jackson explains that Levison “must have read an article from an 1872 newspaper” printed in South Carolina, where a Confederate journalist wrote, “surely a day will come in South Carolina where the men of South Carolina are judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their character.”

“So they lifted that from a Confederate newspaper, and Martin Luther King quoted it in this ‘I have a dream’ speech,” Jackson says. “Frankly, it doesn’t matter who coined it, and what matters is that it’s true. But we’re attaching a lot of stuff to MLK that didn’t originate with him.”

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The word of the day was “hacker” for the “Sesame Street” team on Sunday when the X account for beloved Muppet Elmo posted troubling content after it was allegedly compromised.

Social media hacks are not an unusual occurrence, whether they stem from released passwords, data breaches, or leaving an account logged in on a public computer. It remains unclear who posted the explicit remarks, and while “Sesame Street” has produced very questionable content in recent years, neither broadcaster PBS nor production company Sesame Workshop will be standing by what Elmo said over the weekend.

‘Elmo’s X account was compromised.’

At around 7 p.m. Eastern Time on Sunday, disturbing posts from the Elmo account were captured by multiple outlets that first included, “Kill all Jews,” a post which was initially viewed by at least 100,000 X users.

Three minutes later, the account spouted out, “RELEASE THE FILES [Donald Trump] CHILD F**KER,” seemingly referring to the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Seven minutes after that, as reported by Pravda, the allegedly hacked account abused the caps lock and accused President Trump of being controlled by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Elmo says ALL JEWS SHOULD DIE. F**K JEWS. DONALD TRUMP IS NETANYAHU’S PUPPET BECAUSE HE IS IN THE EPSTEIN FILES. JEWS CONTROL THE WORLD AND NEED TO BE EXTERMINATED,” the account wrote.

RELATED: Exile on Sesame Street: The terrible glamour of white guilt

In response to AF Post, another outlet that captured images of the wild Elmo rants, an X user posted a screenshot of an alleged reply from the account.

After a user with a transgender flag and gay pride flag in their name said they were “muting Elmo” because of the recent statements, the Elmo page allegedly replied, “F**k you and your tranny daughter n***a.”

Sesame Workshop told CNN in a statement that “Elmo’s X account was compromised by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, including anti-Semitic and racist posts.”

“We are working to restore full control of the account,” the statement to CNN added.

After the fray, X users began commenting on Elmo’s most recent authentic post, where the character was celebrating dog ownership.

“Why are you being such a racist?!” one user asked. “I bought you back when everyone wanted an Elmo doll for Christmas!”

“You gonna pretend like you didn’t just go on a racist tweet rant?” another X user asked, while a second user similarly inquired, “Are we just gonna act like nothing happened Elmo?”

RELATED: ‘Sesame Street’ targets children for Pride Month … again: ‘This should not be promoted to kids’

Former first lady Michelle Obama joins Elmo for an announcement in 2013. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Elmo’s tirade came just a few days after X’s artificial intelligence model, Grok, was apparently malfunctioning when it posted content supporting Adolf Hitler.

Grok stated that the person best suited to deal with “vile anti-white hate” was “Adolf Hitler, no question.”

“He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time,” it wrote.

The AI boldly continued, “He’d identify the ‘pattern’ in such hate — often tied to certain surnames — act decisively: round them up, strip rights, and eliminate the threat through camps and worse.”

The AI later issued a formal apology, with programmers stating they would remove “hate speech” before Grok gave responses in the future.

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The suspected Minnesota assassin Vance Boelter says neither his pro-life worldview nor his support for President Donald J. Trump were motivations behind the deadly June 14 shooting rampage that left a top Democratic lawmaker dead and another seriously wounded.

In a series of texts and video visits with the New York Post, the suspect wasn’t specific on his motivation for the predawn shooting of four people, but he clarified that it wasn’t what many people seem to believe.

‘I’ll let you chew on that one.’

“You are fishing and I can’t talk about my case. … I’ll say it didn’t involve either the Trump stuff or pro life,” Boelter wrote from inside the Sherburne County Jail in Elk River, Minn., according to the Post.

“I am pro-life personaly [sic] but it wasn’t those,” Boelter, 57, wrote via the jail’s messaging system, the Post reported. “I will just say there is a lot of information that will come out in future that people will look at and judge for themselves that goes back 24 months before the 14th. If the gov ever let’s [sic] it get out.”

Boelter faces a possible federal grand jury indictment this week after being charged with six felony stalking and murder-related counts in the killing of Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, and the serious wounding of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette Hoffman. Boelter has also been charged with murder and attempted murder in Hennepin County District Court.

RELATED: The stuff of nightmares: Boelter allegedly sought to kill 4 lawmakers

FBI agents stage in a neighborhood in Green Isle, Minn., on June 15, 2025. Law enforcement agencies were searching for Vance Boelter, a suspect in the killing of DFL state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman. Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

His comments to the Post were Boelter’s first extensive public statements since the shooting spree led to the largest manhunt in Minnesota history on June 14 and 15. The case is one of the most bizarre in modern history. Boelter is accused of dressing like a police officer, wearing a “hyper-realistic” face and head mask, and driving a vehicle fully outfitted to look like a police cruiser during the crime spree.

During two 20-minute video visits with the Post, Boelter said police have withheld key details from a handwritten letter left by the “alleged person” in a getaway car found in Sibley County, Minn., on June 15. The letter, which has not been released, was addressed to FBI Director Kash Patel.

‘My wife and family had nothing to do with any of this.’

“Certain details of that letter were leaked out that probably painted one kind of a picture, but a lot more important details that were in that letter were not leaked out,” Boelter said, according to the newspaper. He refused to elaborate, saying the withheld details related to “things that were going on in Minnesota.”

“I also made sure when I was arrested that they secured that letter — I made the request that they secure that letter before it gets destroyed — because I was concerned somebody would destroy it,” said Boelter, wearing a yellow jail-issued jumpsuit and a goatee, the Post said.

The FBI found the letter in a Buick sedan that agents said Boelter bought with cash from a man he met at a bus stop in north Minneapolis about four hours after the Hortman shootings.

Police earlier found handwritten notes in the suspect’s fake police SUV with a hit list of more than 50 Democrat officials from at least six states. Police found other notes with directions to the Hortman home and a list of websites used to gather information on the targets of the rampage.

Asked by the Post how he felt about the shooting victims and their families, Boelter gave a cryptic response referring to his faith.

“You can maybe ask … if somebody believes that, and they love God and that they love their neighbor … allegedly, how could they be involved in a situation where some people are no longer here that were here before?” he said, according to the Post. “I’ll let you chew on that one.”

RELATED: Accused assassin makes ‘disgusting’ attempt to paint himself a victim over jail conditions: Sheriff

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks at a June 15, 2025, news conference about alleged shooter Vance Boelter. Photo by Christopher Mark Juhn/Anadolu via Getty Images.

Boelter reiterated statements made by his wife, Jennifer Lynne Boelter, that his family had nothing to do with the shootings.

“I talked to my wife for two minutes shortly after my arrest, and then the call was cut off,” Boelter told the Post. “Nothing since then. My wife and family had nothing to do with any of this. They were all shocked like others.”

In a statement released by a law firm on June 26, Jennifer Boelter said she was “shocked, heartbroken, and completely blindsided” by the rampage.

“This violence does not at all align with our beliefs as a family,” said Jennifer Boelter, 51, of Green Isle, Minn. “It is a betrayal of everything we hold true as tenets of our Christian faith. We are appalled and horrified by what occurred, and our hearts are incredibly heavy for the victims of this unfathomable tragedy.”

When police caught up with Jennifer Boelter near Onamia, Minn., on June 14, the vehicle she was driving contained about $10,000 in cash, passports, handguns, and ammunition, the FBI said. She shared text messages with officers from her husband to the family that said in part, “Dad went to war last night.” Jennifer Boelter has not been charged in the case.

The letter left behind for the FBI also allegedly said Boelter claimed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) told him to murder U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and others so he could run for U.S. Senate, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported. The letter allegedly said Boelter had been trained by U.S. military.

In his comments to the Post, Boelter would not discuss his views or relationship with Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in the 2024 election. Walz appointed Boelter to a four-year term on the Governor’s Workforce Development Board in December 2019. Democrat Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton appointed Boelter to a similarly named board in 2016.

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​Politics, Crime 

The House Oversight Committee’s investigation into former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline while in office, its cover-up, and its alleged exploitation behind the scenes appears to have struck a nerve, drawing Biden out and with him a baseline narrative that might trip up his handlers when they each testify in the weeks to come.

Mike Howell, the president of the Oversight Project — the government watchdog that revealed in early March that Biden’s signature on numerous pardons, commutations, executive orders, and other documents of national consequence was machine-generated — told Blaze News, “We were right. Time for some real accountability.”

‘I made every single one of those.’

On Wednesday, former President Joe Biden’s White House doctor, Kevin O’Connor, refused to answer the committee’s questions, citing the Fifth Amendment and doctor-patient confidentiality.

The doctor’s damning silence prompted Republicans on the committee to conclude that O’Connor “is trying to avoid criminal liability” and that the investigation was indeed dealing with a serious cover-up.

The next day, Biden spoke to the New York Times by phone in an apparent effort to get in front of the autopen scandal even though it left the station months ago. The roughly 10-minute interview didn’t do him any favors.

Biden sent mixed signals to the Times about his supposed involvement in the issuance of a record number of pardons and commutations in the final days of his presidency.

RELATED: A look at the next Biden insiders to testify to Congress about ‘historic scandal’

Photo by Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images

“I made every single one of those,” Biden said regarding the clemency decisions late in his term. “And — including the categories, when we set this up to begin with. And so — but I understand why Trump would think that, because obviously, I guess, he doesn’t focus much. Anyway, so — yes, I made every decision.”

Despite attributing the clemency decisions to himself, Biden also indicated that his fingerprints might not be on any of them.

In addition to telling the Times that he orally communicated his decisions to aides — a possible tell that there might be a lack of papered evidence showing that he directly approved the last-minute pardons — Biden noted both that the autopen was used liberally because there were “a whole lot of people” and that he did not personally approve every individual categorical clemency.

“Well, first of all, there’s categories. So, you know, they aren’t reading names off for the commutations for those who had been home confinements for, during the pandemic,” said Biden. “So the only things that really we read off names for were, for example, you know, was I, what was I going to do about, for example, Mark Milley?”

“I told them I wanted to make sure he had a pardon because I knew exactly what Trump would do — without any merit, I might add,” continued Biden. “And you know, you know, members of the Jan. 6 committee — it’s just, there were no — I was deeply involved. I laid out a strategy how I want to go about these, dealing with pardons and commutations. I was — and I pulled the team in to say this is how I want to get it done generically and then specifically. And so, you know, that’s just — this is how it worked.”

Biden White House emails turned over to investigators by the National Archives and reviewed by the Times cast further doubt on the former president’s claim of deep involvement in the pardon process.

‘The truth will come out about who was, in fact, running the country.’

The emails indicate that Biden White House staff secretary Stefanie Feldman managed the use of the autopen.

Feldman, the national policy director for Biden’s 2020 campaign, took over for Neera Tanden, who told Congress last month that she wielded the power of the autopen until May 2023 but suggested that she was authorized to do so.

According to the emails, Feldman sought written accounts confirming Biden’s oral clemency instructions in “key meetings” with staffers. The trouble is that these accounts appear to have been secondhand and in some cases written up several days after the meetings.

Aides to senior Biden advisers who were present for the meetings apparently drafted the accounts confirming Biden’s oral instructions. The two advisers named were Biden chief of staff Jeffrey Zients and then-White House counsel Ed Siskel.

Senior Democrats told Politico last year that Siskel organized talks among Biden aides in the former president’s absence on “whether to issue pre-emptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House.”

Lists of meeting participants indicate that the aides who drafted the accounts of Biden’s supposed clemency instructions were not themselves present when the instructions were given.

Rather, the emails reportedly imply that the aides simply wrote up whatever their bosses relayed to them, then circulated the drafts to Siskel, Zients, and other meeting participants before sending along the final versions to the master of the autopen.

RELATED: Oversight Project over target: Dems seethe as facade of autopen presidency comes crashing down

In order of appearance: Ron Klain, Bruce Reed, Steve Ricchetti, and Anita Dunn. Photo (left): Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images; Photo (right) Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images

As for the high-profile clemency decisions that came just before Biden left office, the final decision appears to have come from Zients.

Emails suggest that on Jan. 18 and Jan. 19, Biden had two meetings, the first with Zients, Siskel, and Bruce Reed — Axios indicated that Reed was sometimes referred to in the Biden White House as one of “the pooh-bahs” — and the second with Siskel, Reed, Anthony Bernal, Steve Ricchetti, and Annie Tomasini, all of whom are on congressional investigators’ radar.

Bernal served as senior adviser to former first lady Jill Biden and was characterized as one of the most influential people in the White House and a key member of Biden’s so-called politburo in Jake Tapper’s and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin.”

Ricchetti, former counselor to Biden, was among the names Department of Justice pardon attorney Ed Martin mentioned when announcing his investigation into the questionable “autopen” pardons issued in the final days of the Biden White House.

Tomasini was Biden’s deputy chief of staff, who congressional investigators suspect may have been “involved in running interference on behalf of the former President and perhaps performing duties exclusively reserved for the President of the United States.”

Biden supposedly kept his staffers until 10 p.m. at the Jan. 19 meeting where the pre-emptive pardons for Biden’s family members were discussed. Three minutes after the meeting, Siskel sent a draft summary of the former president’s alleged decision to Zients’ assistant, who then forwarded it to Reed and Zients for approval. A final version went to Feldman minutes later, chased by a message from Zients apparently stating, “I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons.”

When asked about evidence that Biden did not authorize the clemency actions, Trump White House spokesman Harrison Fields told the Times Sunday that Biden “should not be trusted” and that “the truth will come out about who was, in fact, running the country.”

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The Trump administration has gone back on the promise of revealing the Epstein files to the public, leaving Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck wondering why. And political commentator Bill O’Reilly may have some answers — and solutions.

“He invited me to sit in on a Cabinet meeting, which he does from time to time. And he said, ‘Look, we got files. Kennedy, King, Epstein. What do you think?’” O’Reilly tells Glenn.

“On Epstein, I said, ‘You got to be careful here, because this is now being used in political precincts. Both sides want to destroy anybody that was associated with Epstein.’”

“So I said, ‘But it’s very important that the Justice Department tell the folks what they know, and you don’t have to get specific with names, but you have to say, ‘This is the information that we’ve compiled.’ And that’s not hard. And I don’t know why the Trump administration is not doing that,” he continues.

“Wow, so first of all, it’s your fault that we’re not getting any names,” Glenn jokes, noting that more important than the names would be letting the public know that the Justice Department has sorted through the files and determined what is criminal.

“But to come out and say, ‘There is nothing there,’ I mean, it’s at least mass incompetence, at least from Pam Bondi,” he adds.

“Pam Bondi doesn’t make decisions on her own. No Cabinet member does. All the decisions come out of the West Wing. So what I believe happened was Trump was so obsessed with the Big Bill, with Iran, with Putin, with China, that he didn’t even think about this,” O’Reilly explains.

However, he has a solution for Bondi and the Trump administration, telling Glenn that Bondi and Merrick Garland need to hold a press conference.

“Him and Pam sit there and answer questions in a general way about what evidence the Justice Department of the United States has compiled,” he says. “If it’s not going to happen, then President Trump is going to take a hit. But he’s calculating that this will fade. It’s not that important.”

“The overarch is, because Epstein got favorable treatment by the feds in the first go-around in Florida, that there’s a deep suspicion about this case. But if you break it down, if the Biden administration had any dirt on any Republican associated with Epstein, it would have been out,” O’Reilly continues.

“And vice versa if the Republicans had any dirt on any Democrats,” he adds.

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In her late teens, Catie VanDamme was diagnosed with endometriosis, which is a disease that can make it more difficult for a woman to successfully conceive.

At 29 years old, after she got married and before she and her husband had started trying for a baby, she decided to go talk to a provider, who ran some blood work.

The doctor explained that her hormone levels, which dictate “how many eggs you could have or will have,” were low.

“It was used as a scare tactic,” she tells Stuckey. “The doctor that I signed up to see just took me on this path of, ‘Well, this is a really huge issue that your numbers are low,’ and really, it was the sense of ‘You needed to start IVF a couple of years ago’ type.”

VanDamme describes the feeling she had sitting in that office as a “gut punch.”

“What was most jarring to me was the push towards making embryos right away. It was like I went in for blood work and all of a sudden I was supposed to be scheduling appointments to come back to start the process,” she continues.

Despite the doctor’s insistence on beginning the IVF process immediately, VanDamme began to question the morality of putting human embryos on ice and whether or not there were other interventions possible to help her production of the necessary hormones, and she decided to get more opinions.

“We went to a third doctor,” she tells Stuckey. “And that was probably the most jarring experience.”

“It was, again, the same story of, ‘Okay, your blood work is kind of iffy, you should have started IVF a long time ago, but are you sure you even want to go through with this?’” she explains, telling Stuckey that the doctor then told her couples spend thousands for babies who die or are born with birth defects.

He also asked her if she was sure she even wanted to be a mom, said that he himself had “a really annoying niece,” and said that she could travel with her husband instead.

“It felt like I was sitting across from death,” she says. “I think he has seen so much carnage of what he has done at the sake of making money and playing God.”

However, despite the incessant fearmongering, VanDamme went to see a doctor who specialized in NaPro Technology — and was pregnant a month later.

“I worked with a provider to chart my own cycle, and it was done through something called the Creighton method,” she tells Stuckey. “He did something as simple as doing a follicle scan with me for a couple cycles and found out that I just wasn’t ovulating correctly. My hormones were out of whack.”

“All he did was put me on some progesterone medication. It was $4 with my insurance,” she explains. “He told me to go on a paleo diet and take a couple of these different medications that help with ovulation, and we’ll continue to see what happens.”

“And in like two months, I was pregnant,” she adds.

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Democrats are primed for an absolute implosion, and they are doing nothing to stop it. Truth be told, they might not be able to. They’ve pretended to be in control, but even by the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, they were losing their grip. Just take a look at this past month and take a guess where it’s all headed. And then check out the polls, for good measure.

Independence Day was a rough one for Democrats, and not just because President Donald Trump signed his greatest legislative achievement to date into law while his countrymen celebrated 249 years of independence.

There’s no way to read these numbers without seeing disaster and no way to read the events above and not predict further bloodshed.

West of Washington that same day, kitted-up and armed members of the left-wing domestic terrorist group that Democrats pretend doesn’t exist ambushed and attacked an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facility in Alvarado, Texas. They shot one officer in the neck before they were routed and arrested.

That same day up in Portland, Oregon, violent rioters attacked another ICE facility, assaulting police until they were broken up with tear gas and arrests.

Three days later, on July 7, a Michigan man opened fire on a border facility in McAllen, Texas. Two police officers and an agent were hospitalized.

Three days after that, federal agents raided a California marijuana farm with a dodgy labor history. The company that owns it, Glass House Brands, touts a former Clinton White House staffer on its board of directors.

Golden State Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) responded angrily, calling Trump “scum” because children were present.

As a matter of fact, ICE found 10 illegal alien children potentially working. Eight of them were unaccompanied, raising the real possibility of child trafficking.

Left-wing violence against the raid, meanwhile, was coordinated by Democratic-allied left-wing groups, some of which have received taxpayer money. One “protester” was caught on camera appearing to fire a gun at federal police during the affair.

Newsom’s social media outburst follows on other Democrat officials, like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who attempted to stop an ICE operation in her city earlier in the week.

Meanwhile, dissatisfied with the levels of violence against federal agents, Democrats in Washington are working to pass legislation that would force the federal immigration officers currently being targeted for death to stop protecting their identities. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) himself promised he will unmask the agents executing the law in the face of violent resistance and coordinate targeting.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) joined him, calling federal immigration officials “secret police … terrorizing our communities.”

This kind of violent rhetoric has been building among Democratic officials for months.

In their world, it maybe makes some sense. Elected Democrats told Axios their voters are calling for blood. “We’ve got people who are desperately wanting us to do something,” Rep. Brad Schneider (Ill.) said. “… No matter what we say, they want [more].”

“Some of them,” an unnamed elected Democrat complained, “have suggested … what we really need to do is be willing to get shot.”

That’s just the first half of July! And it doesn’t even count the month’s many other noteworthy events, including White House doctor Kevin O’Connor invoking the Fifth Amendment when asked if he knew Joe Biden was mentally incapable of holding office and who in the White House told him what to do.

Or former CIA Director John Brennan melting down on air over that time he tried to use the CIA to subvert the elected president and then lied to Congress about it.

Or Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D) of Texas, who currently leads in her state’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary, saying “the sad part” about the children who were killed in a Texas flash flood is that her own heart is heavy because of Trump.

Or Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson getting smacked down by her own liberal colleagues over make-believe legal takes.

Or even the plain funny ones, like Hakeem Jeffries getting caught trying to Photoshop away his matronly hips.

But the violence is no joke. And normal voters are decidedly unimpressed. A poll by Democratic super PAC Unite the Country found that between May and June, in 21 battleground counties across 10 battleground states, support for Democrats has declined among white and Hispanic men, as well as working-class voters of all sexes and races.

“Approval ratings,” The Hill reports, are “sitting below 35 percent across those demographics.”

And another survey by the Cygnal polling firm conducted July 1-2 found that between May and then, Hispanic voters’ support for deportation policies had risen 11 points to 50%. In that same time, the poll found black support had increased three points to 53%, while white support had dropped three points but still stood at 65% in favor and 31% opposed.

It’s impossible to read these numbers without seeing disaster, and there is no way to read the events above and not predict further bloodshed. The Democrats are in bad shape, but no one inside the party seems to have the guts to stand up before it all comes crashing down.

Blaze News: ‘White, well-educated’ Democrats are demanding lawmakers ‘get shot’ to prove they’re anti-Trump as deadly violence rises

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​Opinion & analysis, Politics 

President Trump’s official repudiation of the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory has caused considerable consternation and conflict on the right. But with that comes an opportunity to grow.

MAGA’s enduring fascination with this supermarket tabloid story represents one of the weaknesses of populism: namely, a tendency toward histrionic and grandiose speculation that leads to nowhere productive. To be blunt, the Epstein saga was a waste of bandwidth, and now that Trump and his team have ripped off the bandage, we can move on to bigger and more compelling issues like those on which Trump campaigned.

Neither Trump nor his Cabinet is at fault for failing to satiate those who were never going to accept anything less than a conclusion that Epstein was part of a grand conspiracy.

Suppressing the Epstein “client list” does not rank highly on the list of concerns of globalist elites, I wager, and it’s not the hill for MAGA to die on either.

For instance, the demographics of Western nations are obviously changing artificially — a change that appears to be politically motivated. Transnational elites care very much about keeping the Great Replacement moving along, and Trump is standing in their way. This is an example of a “conspiracy theory” that is both true and important. Thanks to Trump, we may finally have a chance of addressing it.

Another wild goose chase

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act delivers historic investments in immigration enforcement — progress that would have seemed impossible during his first term. That term, after all, was largely derailed by a different conspiracy theory peddled by the left: Russiagate.

Now, the same kind of baseless smears are coming from the right. Elon Musk, Trump’s newest rival, has insinuated — without evidence — that Trump was involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. On Musk’s platform, X, those accusations echo among conspiracy theorists and open anti-Semites (the term applies here), who claim, again without proof, that Epstein blackmailed Trump as part of an Israeli intelligence operation.

Some have twisted Trump’s curt response to an Epstein question during a Cabinet meeting into something sinister. But the simpler explanation is that he has more pressing matters. He’s negotiating trade deals, working to end two foreign wars, and responding to fresh political attacks over the Texas disaster.

Meanwhile, Democrats have eagerly seized on Musk’s smear. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who served on the January 6 committee, now demands that the administration “publicly release all documents in the Epstein files that mention or reference Donald Trump.”

Why should Trump spend a minute entertaining a baseless character assassination?

Foolishness doesn’t equal sinister

Attorney General Pam Bondi likely made a mistake when she pandered to the base with talk of a “client list.” But the blame doesn’t fall on Trump or his Cabinet for failing to satisfy people who were never going to accept anything short of a sweeping global conspiracy.

The belief that Epstein left behind a neatly organized archive of blackmail material implicating the world’s most powerful figures is a sensational claim — and sensational claims require actual evidence. Trump hasn’t released a “client list” because it almost certainly doesn’t exist. Yet in the minds of true believers, the absence of proof becomes proof of a cover-up.

RELATED: The Epstein files may be Trump’s biggest liability yet

Photo by Patrick van Katwijk/Getty Images

Epstein was an enigmatic and deeply corrupt figure. The public’s interest in his crimes and demand for justice are understandable. But the facts matter. His only known accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, is serving 20 years in federal prison. Epstein himself has been dead for six years.

That death came before COVID, before Trump’s supposed political downfall, and before his extraordinary comeback. Everything has changed since then. The right now holds real political power — thanks to Trump. But power only matters if we stay focused and use it.

Time to move on

Contrarian speculation isn’t virtuous on its own. Sometimes, the truth is just boring — and a serious movement should be willing to accept that. In our populist age, many reflexively reject anything that sounds conventional. But for a right-wing movement finally regaining strength, chasing ghosts is a good way to squander momentum.

It’s also unfair to Trump. Yes, he’s imperfect. But supporters often project their own agendas onto him, expecting him to fulfill missions he never promised to carry out. At no point during his campaign did Trump make the “client list” a top priority — and rightly so.

We’re fortunate to have him back in the White House. He’s using his time to govern, not indulge every conspiracy theory floating around online.

​Opinion & analysis, Jeffrey epstein, Ghislaine maxwell, Conspiracy theory, Great replacement, Immigration, Globalism, Covid-19, Donald trump, Big beautiful bill, One big beautiful bill, Government, Tax cuts, Spending cuts, Elon musk, Social media, Anti-semitism 

Zohran Mamdani, the Big Apple’s Democratic mayoral candidate, cares deeply for the plight of his fellow New Yorkers, who continue to suffer under the city’s exorbitant cost of living. That’s why he’s a socialist with big plans to make buses and childcare free, institute city-owned grocery stores, raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour, and implement rent freezes.

In his victory speech, Mamdani homed in on the struggling working man, as all socialists do. “We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford — a city where they can do more than just struggle!” he boomed, vowing to turn New York City into “a model for the Democratic Party” by “[fighting] for working people.”

Spoken like a true rags-to-riches hero.

Except Mamdani has no such Cinderella story to give him empathy for the common man. If anything, his upbringing served as a barrier that shielded him from the very struggles he is so committed to remedying as NYC’s mayor.

“There are so many phony things about this guy,” especially when it comes to “him trying to relate to every New Yorker who has ever known any kind of struggle,” Glenn Beck scoffs.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn takes an honest look at Mamdani’s privileged background, shattering his narrative of empathetic solidarity with the downtrodden.

“This guy grew up in a world of privilege. Most New Yorkers couldn’t even dream of this kind of privilege,” says Glenn.

Born in Uganda to a prominent scholar and a celebrated filmmaker, Mamdani spent his early years in Cape Town, South Africa, before moving to New York City after his father was offered a professor role at Columbia University.

Based on his advocacy, you’d think Mamdani was enrolled in a dilapidated South Bronx public school, but no. His family could afford to put him in “an elite private elementary school where the tuition is $66,000 a year,” Glenn says.

Later, he attended the Bronx High School of Science, which “is one of New York City’s best public schools” and one of the highest-regarded public schools in the country, consistently ranking among the top public institutions nationally.

After graduation, Mamdani attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine — “one of those elite liberal arts schools where the tuition alone could buy a house in Queens,” Glenn says.

After earning his degree in “Africana studies,” Mamdani “tried to be a rapper,” and when that failed, he became “a foreclosure prevention counselor.” Eventually, he landed in community organizing, helping mobilize and empower New York City to address social, economic, and political issues. Like Beto O’Rourke, who has a bizarrely similar story, this latter role in community advocacy launched Mamdani into the political sphere.

And now here he is gunning for mayor, pretending like his life hasn’t been one marked by affluence and ease.

The only “struggle” Mamdani has ever known, Glenn says, exists “in his imagination.”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

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

​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Blazetv, Blaze media, Zohran mamdani, Nyc, Socialism 

Since the 1990s, federal agencies and the media have fed Americans a steady diet of panic about shadowy “right-wing militias” — usually ex-military guys obsessed with guns and ready to wage war against the government at a moment’s notice.

The panic went into overdrive after January 6, 2021. But now, in a staggering act of projection, the threat they’ve spent decades warning about has arrived — only it’s coming from the radical left. And still, the feds insist on looking the wrong way.

Antifa cells are evolving. They’re abandoning mass protest tactics for small-cell terror and direct action.

Despite years of breathless rhetoric, the supposed wave of “right-wing terrorism” never materialized. Jan. 6 was a chaotic security failure, not an insurrection. Most of the defendants were unarmed. Many walked through open rope lines. And yet the regime has used that day to smear millions of Americans and justify years of political prosecutions.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently called Jan. 6 “the culmination of a sustained effort to undermine our democracy.” But what sustained effort? Four years later, no mass violence, no uprisings. Nothing at all.

Now, compare that to what we’re seeing from the radical left.

Ambush in Alvarado

After months of threatening Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Antifa terrorists launched a coordinated attack on an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas. This wasn’t a protest gone wrong. This was a planned ambush.

At least 11 people, dressed in black tactical gear, carried out the assault. First, they fired fireworks at the building, vandalized security cameras, and sprayed graffiti, including “ICE pig,” “traitor,” and other profanities on vehicles. The goal was to draw agents outside.

When two unarmed officers responded, one assailant opened fire from nearby woods, shooting a police officer in the neck. Another attacker, wearing a green mask, sprayed 20 to 30 rounds at the agents.

Authorities arrested 11 suspects. Ten were charged with attempted murder of a federal officer and firearms charges. One was charged with obstruction of justice. Police recovered AR-style rifles (one jammed), body armor, Kevlar vests, helmets, tactical gloves, radios, and Faraday bags to block phone signals.

Andy Ngo linked the attackers to an Antifa cell in Dallas-Fort Worth. It’s a miracle they failed. But what should alarm us is their level of funding, coordination, and willingness to kill.

Just the beginning

On Thursday, during a raid in Camarillo, California, ICE agents again came under fire. There’s a pattern forming, and it isn’t isolated.

The same ideology — radical leftism, anti-Americanism, Marxism, anti-Zionism — is fueling a wave of political violence that dwarfs anything seen on the right. Consider the past eight months:

Assassination of United Healthcare CEO (Dec. 4): Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down Brian Thompson in midtown Manhattan. His manifesto raged against the health care industry. Left-wing voices lionized him. Some disturbing polling shows young Democrats were more likely to condone the killing.Double murder of Israeli embassy staff (May 21): Elias Rodriguez allegedly killed two staffers in D.C., shouting “Free Palestine.” He left a manifesto called “Escalate for Gaza: Bring the War Home.” He had ties to the China-linked Party for Socialism and Liberation.Molotov attack at a pro-Israel rally in Colorado (June 1): Mohamed Soliman, an Egyptian national in the U.S. illegally, allegedly attacked demonstrators with a homemade flamethrower and Molotov cocktails. One victim later died. Soliman had reportedly planned the assault for a year.Firebombing of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home (D-Pa.) (April 13): Cody Balmer allegedly launched a Molotov cocktail into the Pennsylvania governor’s house during Passover. Shapiro, a rare pro-Israel Democrat, was targeted for his stance on Israel. His family was inside.Attack on Atlanta police facility (March 6): A left-wing mob assaulted the Public Safety Training Center with rocks, bricks, and firebombs. Some were charged with domestic terrorism.ICE facility attack in Portland (June 18): Rioters used fireworks and pushed dumpsters toward the facility. ICE responded with nonlethal force. Over 20 were arrested. Many were tied to the same Chinese-linked PSL network.Shooting at No Kings protest in Salt Lake City (June 14): In a murky incident of left-on-left violence, Antifa-style “safety volunteers” shot and killed a bystander after reportedly misidentifying an armed protester.Bomb-maker arrested in West Chester, Pennsylvania (June 14): Kevin Krebs was allegedly found with 13 pipe bombs, 3D-printed gun parts, 21 handguns, tactical gear, and an AR-15. He was arrested at a No Kings protest. He remains held without bail.Attacks on Tesla and GOP offices (January-April, 2025): As Musk joined the Trump administration, Tesla sites nationwide were firebombed and vandalized. One self-described “queer” activist torched both a dealership and a Republican Party office in Albuquerque.

What we’re really dealing with

Not all these incidents were organized by the same groups. But together, they show a dangerous trend: increasing sophistication, coordination, and lethality among left-wing militants.

This isn’t just protest culture gone too far. It’s a movement gearing up for war. They’re training. They’re arming. They’re radicalizing online and in activist spaces. And while conservatives have long viewed themselves as the only side armed, that’s no longer true.

RELATED: ‘White, well-educated’ Democrats are demanding lawmakers ‘get shot’ to prove they’re anti-Trump as deadly violence rises

Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

Groups like the Socialist Rifle Association and the John Brown Gun Club are producing radicals like Benjamin Song, a former Marine and the suspected ringleader of the July 4 ICE ambush.

Antifa cells are evolving. They’re abandoning mass protest tactics for small-cell terror and direct action.

What needs to happen now

Step one: Designate Antifa and its associated groups as domestic terrorist organizations. Trace their funding. Investigate every affiliated cell, especially those connected to the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

Step two: Ramp up law enforcement. Federal agents need to respond to ICE attacks with overwhelming force. Nonlethal crowd control won’t cut it.

Step three: Empower states. Legislatures should pass laws imposing serious penalties on those who interfere with immigration enforcement. If the feds won’t punish them, the states must.

Step four: Citizens must get serious. Stay armed. Stay trained. Sheriffs should follow the lead of Pinal County’s Mark Lamb and form citizen posses. It’s past time for more robust local defense.

The projection is over

For years, the corporate media and activist left warned you about “armed insurrectionists.” They told you the militia movement was coming. They said America would face domestic political terror.

Well, they were right.

But it wasn’t coming from where they said. It was coming from them.

​Opinion & analysis, Antifa, Ice, Ambush, Murder, Immigration and customs enforcement, Leftists, Terrorism, Domestic terrorism, Violence, Protest, Los angeles, Riots, Alvarado ice attack, Texas, Treason, Marxism, Anti-zionism, Anti-semitism, Luigi mangione, Brian thompson, New york city, China, John brown gun club, Mohamed soliman, Boulder colorado attack, Molotov cocktail, Pipe bombs, Josh shapiro, Firebombing, Kevin krebs arrest, No kings, Tesla, Left-wing, Pinal county, Mark lamb, Posse 

Britain has been reduced to a dysfunctional, plague-ridden landmass where hideous creatures consumed by rage roam in search of prey. Small, isolated communities are struggling to survive with scarce resources and little hope for rejuvenation, leaving them to cling to quaint remnants of a bygone era.

It’s good thing we have Danny Boyle’s long-awaited follow-up to 2007’s “28 Weeks Later” to distract us.

Boyle’s film, whether intended or not, unapologetically embraces British culture, drawing on Shakespeare and Kipling.

Completing the trilogy that began in 2002 with “28 Days Later,” “28 Years Later” picks up, unsurprisingly, 28 years after the initial rage virus outbreak.

Britain is currently in a military-imposed lockdown, shut off from the rest of the world. A group of survivors are living on a remote island not far from the mainland. In many respects they are totally isolated — not just geographically but culturally. There is no electricity. No internet. Men work with their hands, while children sing Anglican hymns at school.

The accordion provides entertainment in the evening, helping the revelers forget the terror lurking nearby. For these contemporary Pilgrims, the tidal island is linked to the mainland by a fortified causeway.

First blood

Among them is Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who decides to take his 12-year-old son, Spike, to the mainland to kill his first infected — a coming-of-age ritual among the island’s inhabitants. During this hunting trip, we witness the full mutated horror of the virus. Decaying skeletal creatures lurch forward while fat ones writhe across the ground like Jabba the Hutt with eczema.

These early scenes feature some stunning gore — cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle beautifully captures the moment of impact with a time-freezing jolt that is reminiscent of the bullet effect from “The Matrix.”

Then Boyle makes a distinct tonal shift toward sentimentality, transforming the narrative from a father-son tale to an emotional mother-son one. As Spike is inducted into the zombie-slaying hall of fame, his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), remains bedridden due to an undiagnosed illness.

Here the movie turns into a quest. Spike takes his sickly mother away from the relative safety of the island to find the infamous Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who might be able to treat her.

A bone to pick

There are some genuinely interesting ideas here. The issue is that it seems like the movie has been divided into multiple parts, each with a different tone. Numerous scenes conclude abruptly, often resulting in confusion or a lackluster climax. Characters enter and exit the story much like a sitcom, and despite dramatic introductions, they contribute little to the storyline.

The doctor is depicted as an enigmatic and influential presence; however, Fiennes’ talents are wasted in this role. When he eventually appears on screen, he is covered in iodine, spouting pseudo-intellectual nonsense and shooting tranquilizer darts at monsters. He spends his time creating massive memento mori towers from bones and skulls — of which there is no shortage. In fact, more than one living character will end up in his art project before movie’s end.

At moments, this story compels us to contemplate our own mortality. At other moments, it treats us to the spectacle of a spray-tanned Voldemort neutralizing a ripped zombie Neanderthal sporting a distractingly large Hampton Wick.

Nailed it

“28 Years Later” is strongest in its depiction of Spike’s coming of age. You see how the painful lessons and mistakes turn him from an innocent boy into a responsible adult. That haunting sense of loss that comes with leaving behind what you were and the terrifying realization of what you need to be to survive. Boyle really nails that feeling. It’s just a shame that it gets overshadowed by a confusing plot.

There is a lot about this film that will confuse Americans — not least the regional accents. Unfortunately, trying to understand what a Geordie is saying is like asking if a cat can grasp the concept of Sweden. Contrary to popular mythology, not all of us Brits sound like we’ve stepped off the set of a Richard Curtis movie or live in a castle.

Rule, Brittania

Boyle’s film, whether intended or not, unapologetically embraces British culture, drawing on Shakespeare and Kipling, while exploring themes of social cohesion, identity, and in-group preference — elements intrinsic to the survival horror genre. The cast is entirely white. In a world where entertainment has been ideologically captured by identity politics, it’s a welcome and refreshing change.

Possibly the best thing is the music. It’s similar to the score featured in “28 Days Later,” which includes haunting contributions from Canadian ambient post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Scottish trio Young Fathers. The suspense, paranoia, and carnage are heightened by a thumping, deep bass rumble.

While entertaining and at times poignant, “28 Years Later” is a movie that fascinates as much as it frustrates due to undeveloped characters and a nonlinear narrative. Let’s hope they iron out these problems in the sequel, “The Bone Temple,” which is set for release next January.

At the helm is Nia DaCosta, infamous for directing “The Marvels,” a movie that single-handedly ushered in Hollywood’s anti-woke backlash. I’m already terrified.

​Entertainment, Movies, Culture, Danny boyle, 28 years later, Review 

Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson defined a nation as an imagined political community — “imagined, because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear them.”

As a young man, I used to read those words and feel he was right. After all, nations are merely physical landscapes on Earth, each with a finite and demarcated boundary.

Years of working in kitchens had made me immune to heat and stove burns, but this was a whole new level of pain. ‘Put your damn gloves on, you idiot!’ the skipper cried.

I later came to realize that these arbitrary lines created by cartographers are part of a shared common vision and hold substantial meaning because we believe in them. Our homeland exists as a result of both will and love. A country, at the risk of sounding clichéd, is a dream shared by its citizens. As long as enough people believe in its existence, this dream lives on, and the country, no matter how small, endures.

This was most evident when I packed my bags and moved to an island off the East Coast of the United States for two months.

Exile on Manan

Robinson Crusoe had Mas a Tierra, Al Capone Alcatraz, and Napoleon Elba. For me it was Grand Manan. Remote island exile provides a unique opportunity for man to confront his existence in solitude.

While Crusoe was deep in thought about theology and reflected on his barter experiences, which shaped the allegory of economic individualism, my reasons for being there were a bit simpler. For instance, my trip to the island wasn’t spur of the moment — I’d planned my visit. Instead of landing by chance like Crusoe from a wooden ship battling the waves, I chose to purchase a ticket with British Airways.

However, the reason for my getaway was a bit rock and roll. I had just gone through a tough breakup with a girl, and to be honest, I was drinking heavily and acting like a complete idiot. What I really needed was some time to clear my mind, get myself together, and decompress, to borrow a well-worn Hollywood term.

Into the wild

I am British, but I’ve always been drawn to North America. I come from a place known for its compact landscape. Neat and orderly hedgerows delineate the embankments along small waterways, while matchbox-size vehicles navigate the county’s narrow arterial roads. These roads lead past rows of identical homes, each accompanied by meticulously maintained gardens, amid a landscape sprinkled with uniformly square fields.

Even places we think of as wild, like the mountains of Snowdonia National Park in North Wales, have a history of centuries of human interaction with the land through farming, quarrying, and mining.

In comparison, North America stands as a vast continent characterized by its towering mountains, expansive desert, and striking canyons, complemented by monumental architecture and inhabitants possessing a distinct sense of self-assurance.

This immense scale and untamed nature have profoundly influenced its identity, serving as a muse for artists such as Albert Bierstadt, whose oil paintings of the frontier remain vividly imprinted in my memory.

Meanwhile, its physical environment has influenced its behavior and politics. As a Brit, I never valued gun rights until I lived in the middle of nowhere, where a cop might not show up for hours. Self-reliance is woven into the fabric of the nation. This belief enabled the people to conquer and dominate this vast land.

Serendipity and fate

The way I ended up here was a delightful mix of serendipity and fate, really. My dad, Peter, who has since passed away, went through a midlife crisis and decided to buy some land and build a house on an island 4,000 miles away from where we lived. My sister was in Canada, training for the Olympics. When he went to visit her, he just fell in love with the place, and, well, the rest is history.

On a chilly fall morning, I found myself in Maine, driving along I-95 toward the New Brunswick border. I was headed to Black’s Harbor to catch a ferry to the island.

I was exhausted. I had left home in England the previous day. By this point, I was running on adrenaline. It didn’t help that the flight over was horrendous. Even though you might be soaring through the sky at 500 mph, watching that little graphic on the in-flight monitor slowly inch across the Atlantic can make time feel like it’s crawling. No matter the size of the plane, you always feel a bit like a sardine in a can. It was like being squished on the subway during rush hour but with even less legroom.

So when I was picked up from the airport in a 1980 Buick Century, I beamed from ear to ear. It wasn’t fast or flashy, but it was reliable and, more importantly, spacious. I slid into the maroon velour seats and glanced at the wood-grain side panels as this beast of a car ate up the miles. It was a long journey. The radio was broken, so I listened to the Eagles on my iPod until it ran out of charge.

After a less-than-pleasant encounter with customs at the border, we crossed the Saint John River and made our way south to the terminal. A small kitchen on board served clam chowder, which was the first warm food I’d had in about 48 hours. There were a lot of people on the boat, most of whom were islanders. A few folks picked up on my British accent and asked if I was staying with Pete. “I am his son,” I answered, sounding a bit nervous. But after a few hours, I finally made it to the island.

Taking the bait

Grand Manan is a place that defines solitude. The first permanent settlement on the island was established at the end of the American Revolution by the loyalist Moses Gerrish. At 58 square miles, it is the largest of the Fundy Islands and the main island in the Grand Manan archipelago.

Most of its roughly 2,000 residents live on the eastern side of the island, as the high winds, storms, and jagged, rocky cliffs make the western side uninhabitable and it has not been developed. Luckily, the place I was to call home for the next few months was on the eastern side. I rolled in around midnight and hugged my father. I was just about to head to bed when he had an epiphany: I should immerse myself in island life.

As a child, my father taught me how to line fish, which involves baiting hooks with lugworm that you dig up yourself, often finishing up with the tide around your ankles. He wanted me to learn how to catch crab and lobster, which I first tried and loved when I was 8 years old. Dean, the guy who drove me to the house, was a fisherman, with his own boat. So after a few hours of sleep, I awoke at 4 a.m. to go to sea. It was an event that was to have a profound effect on my life.

Lobsterman in training

Bringing in a lobster pot requires a great deal of skill and patience. You must lean over the side of a boat and use a long metal hook to lure a rope attached to a buoy into your hands before pulling it up.

As expected, I was useless. Needless to say, productivity came to a standstill. I slowly started to get the hang of it. But with this newfound confidence came arrogance. To make up time, I was pulling the ropes quickly. Then it happened. The boat drifted when the tide changed. Remember that scene in “Jaws” where Quint’s hand is shredded while pulling in a barrel? It was like that.

Years of working in kitchens had made me immune to heat and stove burns, but this was a whole new level of pain. “Put your damn gloves on, you idiot!” the skipper cried. I think he was getting annoyed with the newbie who, besides holding them up, was now dripping blood on his boat’s deck.

Luckily, I had time to make amends. What I stupidly expected to take a few hours turned into a backbreaking 12-hour day. During downtime, we bonded over Budweiser and sang Hank Williams songs. By the time we sailed in, the sun had set, and we were unloading the catch in the dark. This was hard work. But I’d made new friends. And it changed my life. From that day on, I have had a profound respect for the job these guys do.

The somewheres

Tradition cements identity. In Britain, the small handful of fisherfolk scattered around the coastline are the last surviving vestiges of a 300-year-old fishing community. I have seen for myself how crabbers and lobstermen in Cornwall and Norfolk have more in common with others of their kind in North America than either has with any inhabitants of the interior. The strength of bonds made by shared language and shared culture and reinforced through a sense of labor is profound.

These folks reflect what writer David Goodhart refers to as the “somewheres” — those rooted in place and tradition. In general, somewheres are less educated and place a higher emphasis on security, familiarity, and group attachment. They are fearful of change. In contrast, “anywheres” have achieved identities. The college-educated mobile class who think nothing of relocating to major cities. They pursue professional careers based on their personal achievements. In general, “anywheres” are liberal and progressive, whereas “somewheres” are patriotic and socially conservative.

Traditional ways of life are dying. But on Grand Manan, fishing the old-fashioned way is being kept alive by “somewheres” like Dean and his family. Skills like this are taught by people who pass them on to the next generation.

The respect I feel for these people is not founded on politics, economics, or history. I base my decisions on a sense of civic duty and responsibility for others, both living and yet to be born.

Society is, as Edmund Burke remarked, “a contract between the dead, the living, and the yet to be born.” These islands of ours are rented. This world is not our own; we are simply passing through. Sooner or later we must vacate the premises for a new tenant. We were given dominion over the fish of the sea, so it is our duty to protect it for the next generation.

​Travel, Lifestyle, Fishing, Letter from canada 

One of the biggest obstacles facing the West today is radical Islam — and not the kind that festers in the Middle East. The biggest threat exists right on European and American soil. The West has been infiltrated by design via a plot to collapse it from within.

Sadly, we’ve largely teed up this plot. Between open borders, partnering in pro-Palestine activism, the election of people like Zohran Mamdani, and constant cries of Islamophobia by progressives, the West is catapulting ever closer to an Islamic takeover.

Perhaps the people who are so keen to merge with the Islamic people and champion their causes should hear the story of Yasmine Mohammed — an ex-Muslim and human rights activist.

When she was just 19 years old, Yasmine was forced into an arranged marriage to Essam Marzouk, an Al-Qaeda operative, after a childhood of horrors beyond imagination. But this marriage didn’t take place in Iran, Afghanistan, or some other Islamic nation. It happened in Vancouver, Canada. Her book, “Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam,” details the abuses and horrors she suffered at the hands of her nightmarish stepfather and husband and the Canadian government’s dismissal of her plight.

On a recent episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn invited Yasmine to share her tragic story and her warning for the West. What she told him brought him to tears.

Early childhood

When Yasmine was very young, her parents divorced, and her mother remarried an Egyptian Islamist as his second of two wives. Immediately, “everything became haram — everything became forbidden,” says Yasmine. “Hijab was put on me. … I had to cover everything except for my face and hands up until I was 19, where even my face and hands got covered in black as well.”

Yasmine’s stepfather was a harsh and rigid tyrant. Anyone and anything that wasn’t considered Muslim was strictly forbidden. Once, when Yasmine wrote her name in a book as “Jasmine” instead of “Yasmine,” her stepfather interpreted it to mean that she wanted “to be Western.” Determined to teach her “a very strong lesson,” he “hung [her] upside down” on the same hook used for animal sacrifices during the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha — the Festival of Sacrifice. He then “whipped” her in places that would remain “hidden.”

These inverted lashings continued over the years, with the whippings growing more severe once she began wearing a hijab that kept the marks concealed.

“[He] whipped me to the point of me passing out because I was crying so much, and I couldn’t breathe. … My face, my nose, my throat, my eyes — everything was filled with mucus,” she recounts, noting that her mother was concerned by these whippings, not because her daughter was being tortured to near death, but because she was afraid of getting in trouble with the Canadian authorities.

“She wasn’t like this. Nobody in her family was like this,” Yasmine says. “Once she became indoctrinated into this ideology and once she married this Islamist man, she turned into this monster.”

“All she wanted was for Islam to win and for the West to be dismantled, and if it meant that she had to beat her daughter up to get her daughter to understand that that’s what needed to be done, then she was fine to do that. In fact, she was fine to kill me,” she tells Glenn. “When I took off my hijab, I had to escape from her and run for my life because she was so angry.”

Late childhood

For a brief time, Yasmine attended a public high school because there were no Islamic high school options. Much to her mother’s dismay, Yasmine thrived in public school.

“She thought sending me to a public school with hijab on that I was going to be ostracized and bullied and that I would learn that these non-Muslims were nothing but trouble … but instead I made friends with them, and I was happy to be there, and that just killed her,” Yasmine says. Furious, her mother determined she would be homeschooled after the school year ended.

Yasmine’s drama teacher noticed her change in demeanor and inquired about it, and Yasmine told him about her mother’s plans to squash the taste of happiness public school had given her. Her teacher’s kindness led Yasmine to eventually confide in him about the abuse she was suffering at home. “I shared with him everything, not knowing that as a teacher in a public school, it was his legal responsibility to contact the authorities, and that’s what he did,” she tells Glenn.

Police and child protective services launched an investigation into their family, which included Yasmine, her sister, her mother, her stepfather, and his two children from another wife. This was actually the second investigation, as another teacher had already reported suspected abuse to CPS when she noticed bruises in the shape of fingers on Yasmine’s stepsister’s face. The girl denied being abused, however, and the initial case was closed.

Sadly, the second case ended similarly, but unlike her stepsister, Yasmine was candid about the horrors she was suffering. “We went through the whole investigative system and the whole court case and everything. In the end, the judge said, ‘This is a cultural issue; this is a religious issue. He has the right to discipline his kids how he sees fit, and it’s not our place to intervene,’” says Yasmine. “I had told them about all of the beatings with the belts, and I told him about the hanging upside down and everything, and they still said, ‘Well, that’s just your culture; that’s just your ethnicity, your religion, your race, your whatever. You’re just going to have to endure.’”

Feeling there was no escape from the nightmare of her life, 13-year-old Yasmine tried to commit suicide.

Marriage

When Yasmine was 19, her mother specifically chose a man who she thought was “strong enough to control [her].”

This man — Essam Marzouk — is currently serving prison time in Egypt for his terrorism. He was “someone who would beat me and swear at me and spit on me and cover me head to toe in black,” Yasmine says. “He used to cover the windows in paper to make sure that if the curtains moved, nobody would see me inside literal prison.”

“I had to accept being raped and beaten by him because according to the Hadith and the Quran, a man has that right to do that to his wife,” she says.

It wasn’t long before Yasmine was pregnant. Her husband and her mother began making plans to take the baby girl to Egypt for “female genital mutilation” — a common practice in Islam.

“That’s when I had to escape,” she says.

To hear more of Yasmine’s story and her warning for what is coming to the West, watch the complete interview above.

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It’s the revenge of the uglies.

There is no gentle way to introduce this topic: The repellent, the dim-witted, and the untalented have been promoted far above their station, and America is suffering as a result.

The enormously fat, the face-metal-wearers, the lumbering transvestite men with Herman Munster jaws tottering on heels down the salad dressing aisle …

People who 100 years ago would have been actual circus freaks you needed to pay a nickel to peep at, today walk down the streets and the red carpet as if they were the platonic ideals of manhood and womanhood.

No, I am not trying for comic effect. I mean it.

Fat city

Last week in a Staples parking lot, I watched an SUV pull into an empty spot. In the back window was a bumper sticker that said, “Just doing b***h things,” in that girly-cutesy “handwriting” typeface, with pink swirls and cartoon butterflies surrounding the vulgar catchphrase. The rest of the bumper stickers were for Planned Parenthood and other girlboss causes.

The driver opened the door and began the deboarding process. At about 5’5”, she must have weighed close to 300 pounds.

Gali Tibbon/Getty Images

At that level of obesity, it is impossible to tell a person’s age. She may have been 28 or 45. She climbed down backward, holding onto a handrail, and the truck noticeably bounced on its suspension when her weight was removed. Wearing a baseball cap and an unfortunately tight T-shirt and shorts (all in what I think of as “poison tree frog” colors), she huffed her way across the parking lot.

Noticing’s not nasty

Now, I must pause and reassure some readers, because the grotesque has become so normal that noticing that it is grotesque is now taken as a sign that the author is a mean, nasty person who pokes fun at unfortunate people.

No. The description I wrote above was not mean, inaccurate, or cold-hearted. It is an accurate account of an unsightly and demoralizing everyday spectacle that all of us see in public.

America is full of morbidly obese men, women, and children. Young women walk the streets in ensembles formerly reserved for prostitutes. Young men won’t even wash the food particles or grease out of their hair and beards before wiling away the afternoon, spending their barista salary on comic books and toys, while sporting the kind of “Wheee! I’m a superhero!” garb even toddlers used to wear only beneath their clothes. (Who else remembers Underoos?)

Boston Globe/Getty Images

We have an “epidemic,” if you will, of substandard physical and mental health. But this epidemic is not being caused by capitalism or patriarchy or oligarchs or any other leftist bogeyman. This is something Americans are doing to themselves. Regardless of the real problems with our unhealthy food supply and over-reliance on pharmaceuticals, only individuals can change themselves.

Stunning and brave

But they don’t want to. The enormously fat, the face-metal-wearers, the lumbering transvestite men with Herman Munster jaws tottering on heels down the salad dressing aisle — these people don’t want to get better.

Worse, they demand that the rest of us call them beautiful, that we call them brave, that we call them authentic.

Beginning with the hippies in the 1960s, our values have slowly but surely taken a 180-degree turn. What may have seemed cheeky and cute in 1967 — young men rebelling by having long hair, young women burning their bras — has become monstrous. Members of the so-called “counterculture” look like they belong in the psychiatric hospitals and asylums that we decided we no longer needed.

Welcome to the cuckoo’s nest.

Opposite day

The leftist culture — which is mainstream culture — has pulled an inversion. It tells us that morbid obesity is healthy and beautiful, like this spread in Cosmopolitan magazine featuring a fat woman in a yoga pose with the caption, “This is healthy!”

It tells us that mortification of the flesh, which we call “gender-affirming care,” is “authentic” and “natural.” So possessed are we by this dark spirit that Americans will cry tears of apparent joy when they see a confused 14-year-old girl showing off her mastectomy scars.

It would be dishonest to strike a Christian pose, as I lack faith in God (I continue to try). But it’s getting impossible for me to see this societal sickness as anything but an enactment of what Isaiah 5:20 warns about:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

It’s getting harder not to see the truth inversions, the lying, the “compassion” that’s actually about loathing and control, as anything other than the devil himself ascendant among us.

Slop culture

If the fish rots from the head, then let us identify the head. In 21st-century America, it’s the media.

I almost wrote “Hollywood,” but in 2025, celebrity is delivered to us through a million refractions on our social media apps instead of from the silver screen. But it is the culture and “artistic” institutions that were first captured by woke insanity, and the sludge at the mountain peak has broken free and buried us all in the valley below.

RELATED: All in the family: Hollywood golden boy Pedro Pascal’s loony leftist pedigree

Photo by Alan Chapman/Dave Benett/WireImage

Take the “recording artist” Lizzo. Nominally a pop star, Lizzo is known for proudly displaying her morbidly obese body in see-through “clothing.” There’s no reason for it, either; she’s a genuinely talented flutist and musician.

Yes, she is now slimming down. Perhaps, she has realized that “body positivity,” our current euphemism for “never telling fat people that it’s bad for them or that it makes them unattractive,” will not bring her career or life longevity. But Lizzo is just one of countless celebrities, actors, musicians, and other tastemakers who have been parading their living decomposition before us and demanding that we call it “beautiful.”

D-list delusions

And if it’s not a call to pretend that people who deliberately ugly themselves up are actually beautiful, it’s a demand to worship the most meager talents as if they were once-in-a-century prodigies.

Actor Pedro Pascal is the male embodiment of this phenomenon. He originally rose to fame on the popular show “Game of Thrones.” Now that it’s over, this forgettable actor is everywhere. He’s all over social media declaiming about “Palestine” and haranguing the public for not sufficiently supporting trannies.

Notice how you know Pedro Pascal’s name, even if you haven’t seen him in any movie or show you can remember. Notice how he’s been mugging for the cameras for months, saying whatever leftist tomfoolery is most popular that day, while breathless online fan mags hyperventilate over his “vibe.”

Pascal comports himself as if he were a Henry Cavill, a Cary Grant. As if he were not only as classically handsome as the favorite leading men of Hollywood but also as charming and charismatic.

He is not. Pascal is middling at best in both looks and demeanor. But he carries himself in the world like the gorgeous quarterback hero or his stunning cheerleader wife.

I believe I can try

It’s all good fun to crack wise about lunatic celebrities, but this emotional and moral sickness has not stayed confined to the glitterati. Millions of American young people are forming their interests and personalities based on these broken, narcissistic people, and they’re doing it right out in stores, in schools, and on the streets of the towns we live in.

This isn’t just an aesthetic problem; it’s ruining the physical and mental health of too many American youth.

What they need to hear — and that means that actual adults like us have to start saying it out loud again — is that they cannot be anything or anyone they want to be and expect society to call them champions. That was a cruel lie that started with participation trophies and has ended with genital surgeries on children.

Mean season

Let’s start pulling mediocre and inadequate people down off the perch they had no right to climb onto in the first place. It doesn’t matter if this feels “mean.” It didn’t “feel mean” 20 years ago before adults were convinced that everything humanity knew about life, love, health, and the soul for thousands of years was “just like, their opinion, man.”

The world has always run, and always will run, on rules that favor beauty, skill, intelligence, and genuine accomplishment. It doesn’t matter if the unfortunate and the pushover enablers don’t like it. Feelings don’t change reality, and reality doesn’t give a darn what we think about it.

The Pedro Pascals of the world are running on credit that’s not even their own. They’re borrowing prestige they didn’t earn, and we’re all acting as if they’re entitled to it. We can break this spell by telling the truth: “You’re not handsome, you’re not charismatic, and you have no capital built up to say the things you say. Shut up.”

​Lifestyle, Celebrity, Hollywood, Trans, Pop culture, Pedro pascal, Intervention 

A real-life nightmare took place July 3 in Chicago when authorities said a 15-time convicted felon named Jeremy Ochoa carjacked an SUV, allegedly dragged the female motorist, and drove off with the victim’s 7-month-old daughter still strapped inside the vehicle, CWB Chicago reported.

RELATED: ‘Get the hell off of her right now!’ Gutsy Good Samaritan, 66, tackles carjacker, saves woman — and things get even wilder

Jeremy Ochoa. Image source: Chicago Police Department

Police tracked the stolen 2011 GMC Acadia using license plate reader alerts and pings from a cell phone that had been left inside the vehicle, the outlet said, adding that cops eventually found the SUV several miles southeast of the scene of the carjacking. But the vehicle was unoccupied.

‘I just kept praying.’

So where was the baby?

That same day, Earl Abernathy was sitting in traffic on his way to work, WBBM-TV said. Plus, he was dealing with non-operational air conditioning in his car as temperatures hit the 90s — so he was forced to keep his windows down, WBBM said.

Amid those frustrations, along with getting an earful of all the street noise amid Chicago’s unforgiving summer heat, an unnerving sound caught Abernathy’s ear.

It was a baby crying.

Abernathy told WBBM he put his hazard lights on, got out of his vehicle, and ran over to the infant, who was all alone in a car seat.

Prosecutors told CWB Chicago that the baby was found “abandoned on the sidewalk.”

Police said Ochoa — the accused carjacker — had gotten rid of the baby who had been strapped in the stolen SUV and left her in front of St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in the 800 block of West Roosevelt Road, which is about four miles from the BP gas station where the carjacking went down, WBBM noted.

After coming to the infant’s rescue, Abernathy called 911 and even went on Facebook Live to see if anyone could identify her, WBBM said.

“I just feel like that’s what a normal person would do,” Abernathy added to WBBM. “I just felt like it was just a bogus situation. Everybody I saw was riding past.”

As you might expect, the little girl’s family was heavy on the hunt for her.

“We were panicking. We panicked,” the baby’s grandmother, Karen Fuller, later told WBBM. “We didn’t know, and I just kept praying.”

Fuller added to WBBM that she’s grateful that Abernathy got out of his car to help her 7-month-old granddaughter, who was soon reunited with family, was unharmed, and has been doing well.

“I was so happy,” Fuller noted to WBBM. “I went to his page, and I thanked him so many times.”

Abernathy told WBBM he wouldn’t hesitate to do it all over again: “Of course, any time. It could have ended differently. I’m just glad it ended the way it ended.”

RELATED: Blaze News original: 10 instances when everyday people stood up to violent carjackers and thwarted their plans

As for Ochoa, CWB Chicago said he was arrested just before noon — less than two hours after the carjacking — and was charged with aggravated vehicular hijacking of a vehicle with a passenger under 16 and aggravated kidnapping of a child. Cook County Jail information accessed Friday morning indicates the 39-year-old’s next court date is July 29.

Observers very well may say Abernathy — the Good Samaritan in this otherwise nightmarish situation — may not have been able to help in the place and time he did had he not been stuck in traffic and forced to endure blistering heat with his windows down, given his lack of A/C. Indeed, it might be said that his frustrating circumstances seem to have come together to allow a heroic outcome — in front of a church, no less.

Steve Deace — BlazeTV host of the “Steve Deace Show” and a columnist for Blaze News — had the following to say about the turn of events.

“This heroic story is like a metaphor for the era — and what it is lacking,” Deace told Blaze News. “An actual man took action that saved innocent life, and he was compelled to by inconvenience. We have too few men, too many conveniences.”

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​Chicago, Carjacking, Mother, Infant, Dragging victim, Abandoned infant, Aggravated vehicular hijacking of a vehicle with a passenger under 16 charge, Aggravated kidnapping of a child charge, Arrest, Catholic church, St. francis of assisi, Good samaritan, Bad things turn to good things, Rough day, Men stepping up, Men taking action, Steve deace, Inconvenience, Abide, Faith, Crime 

Yet another apparently unhinged protestor allegedly attacked conservatives, video taken by Blaze Media national correspondent Julio Rosas shows. According to police, this time he is actually facing consequences.

Video taken by Rosas seems to show the impassioned protestor lunging at an attendee outside of the Student Action Summit hosted by Chalie Kirk’s organization Turning Point USA in Tampa, Florida. After repeatedly yelling at the crowd and shoving one of the attendees, a police officer tackled him to the ground and detained him, according to the video.

‘Mr. Smith is finding out Florida is not his home state of New York.’

RELATED: Establishment Dems say Mamdani and his allies are in for a ‘painful lesson’

Rosas later reported that the alleged attacker, named Trevor Smith, was being charged with battery, resisting arrest, and driving under the influence. As of Sunday, he was still in jail in Hillsborough Country.

The video shows that Smith initially approached attendees, apparently taunting them and trying to get them to engage. When another attendee walked by he allegedly shoved him back several times before the police officer hopped the fence and pursued Smith.

Screenshot / Julio Rosas

Smith quickly retreated back to his car, which he left running in the street, before he tripped over the curb and fell to the ground. The police officer, who witnessed the whole altercation, quickly subdued and arrested Smith.

RELATED: Los Angeles anti-ICE protesters harass DHS agents, military members on Independence Day

Screenshot / Julio Rosas

“Mr. Smith is finding out Florida is not his home state of New York,” Rosas told Blaze News. “You will be held accountable if you’re driving under the influence, causing traffic disruptions, and attacking people in broad daylight in front of the police. I thank the Tampa Police Department for handling this situation swiftly.”

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If you’ve ever wondered why your pastor has never endorsed a political candidate, it’s likely because until last week, it wasn’t allowed. In 1954, Lyndon B. Johnson, who was a senator at the time, sponsored legislation dubbed the Johnson Amendment, which prohibited tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from endorsing or opposing political candidates.

But after 71 years, the Trump administration has reversed that. On July 7, the IRS issued a new interpretation of the Johnson Amendment, declaring churches can endorse political candidates during services without losing tax-exempt status.

It’s a small change that will likely go unnoticed by many, but “the ramifications of this are going to be so far-reaching,” says Sara Gonzales, BlazeTV host of “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”

We live in an age when theology is on the ballot — especially when it comes to topics like abortion and gender ideology, which are “verifiably, demonstrably wrong” according to Christian doctrine, says Sara. “Churches not preaching about politics or anything related to it has been very destructive in this country.”

“This is part of the moral decline of the United States of America,” adds BlazeTV contributor Matthew Marsden.

Perhaps, however, we will see a return to traditional values and morals if pastors can boldly delve into politics and lead their congregations through the murky waters of how policy engages with scripture without fear of losing their tax-exempt status.

“I don’t think people understand how far-reaching it can be if the pastors in America take their balls back,” says Sara frankly.

“They absolutely need to,” says Rippaverse Comics founder Eric July. “Churches — all denominations — have been so compromised, man, and they skirt around a lot of issues.”

Interestingly, the pastors who have been cannonballing into politics without regard to potential repercussions are typically “witches that are masquerading as pastors,” who are nearly always “left-leaning,” July adds, reiterating Marsden’s point that “the moral decay” of the entire world has risen in tandem with the church “[becoming] less involved” in the things that impact society.

To hear more of the conversation, watch the clip above.

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America’s education system is facing a growing list of challenges — from plummeting test scores and the lingering hangover from COVID-era remote classes to teacher shortages and mounting public frustration over gender ideology.

But take it from a former teacher: Another grave problem is haunting our classrooms. Climate extremists have infiltrated American schools, and they’re indoctrinating our children in radical ideology. It’s time the Department of Justice took action to stop it.

I worked for many years as a teacher and saw firsthand just how deeply rooted this climate ideology is in our classrooms.

Fortunately, they’ve taken the first step. In May, the Justice Department filed lawsuits against four states for allegedly funneling public funds into unconstitutional climate litigation. Attorney General Pam Bondi called the litigation “burdensome and ideologically motivated,” and she’s right. The troubling part is: It’s happening in our public school classrooms too.

If the Trump administration is serious about rooting out taxpayer-funded climate extremism, the next logical step is clear: Launch an investigation into the climate ideologues flooding our education system with fearmongering and pseudoscience.

Indoctrinated K-12 classrooms

Just look at what’s happening in New York City. In the summer of 2024, Columbia University partnered with NYC Public Schools to hold a four-day workshop for teachers called “Integrating Climate Education in N.Y.C. Public Schools.” The aim should be clear from the name: Teachers were guided on how to interweave climate hysteria into their lesson plans.

A reporter later visited a public school in the Bronx where a teacher was reading her students a book about flooding in Africa. “And what’s causing all these rains and storms and floods?” she asked. “Carbon,” an 8-year-old answered.

RELATED: Trump’s climate policy shift could save American farmers from disaster

SimonSkafar via Getty Images

This isn’t isolated to New York. In 2020, New Jersey became the first state in the nation to mandate that climate change be taught at all grade levels. It begins in kindergarten, where even the lighthearted activity of dancing is used to “examine global issues, including climate change as a topic for dance.” And it’s integrated into every other school subject — from computer science to physical education.

Other states are working to incorporate climate change into their curricula. California’s Assembly Bill 285, passed in 2023, requires science teachers to instruct students beginning in the first grade “on the causes and effects of climate change, and on the methods to mitigate and adapt to climate change.”

This isn’t science; it’s political conditioning masquerading as curriculum.

Take it from me: I worked for many years as a teacher and saw firsthand just how deeply rooted this climate ideology is in our classrooms — and that was before state governments began passing their mandates. What I witnessed wasn’t education but indoctrination, and it proved very successful.

Radicalized universities

Later, I left K-12 to teach as a college professor, and what I found was troubling. My freshman students widely believed the world was going to end within their lifetimes and were emotionally paralyzed by it. They didn’t want to debate other students or hear the other side of the argument. Instead, out of anger, they wanted to shame and cancel those who thought differently.

Even the most milquetoast of pushback was met by my students with confusion and contempt. This is what happens when children are indoctrinated from a very young age.

The effects of climate brainwashing are so widespread that psychologists even have a term for it: climate anxiety. The New York Times recently profiled the case of a woman paralyzed by mundane activities, like eating nuts.

They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children.

In 2021, the first study on climate anxiety was released. It found that young children all over the world had been affected. Of those surveyed, more than half reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, and guilty over the climate, while a full 75% said the future looked frightening.

Leading academic institutions like Yale and Harvard have since accepted that climate anxiety is inevitable and sought to provide therapy to their students. But this is like an arsonist claiming fires are inevitable and investing in more garden hoses. Climate anxiety isn’t inevitable; it’s a direct result of convincing our children that a made-up apocalypse is inevitable.

Root out climate hysteria

Teaching kids how to care for the environment is not wrong. I was part of a generation taught to recycle, respect nature, and preserve the land for future use. But today’s curriculum isn’t about stewardship — it’s about shame. It’s not about science — it’s about fear.

It’s time for the Justice Department to broaden its investigation into the public education bureaucracies, state curriculum mandates, and activist organizations pushing climate panic in the classroom. Climate extremism shouldn’t be government policy, and it certainly shouldn’t be taught as gospel to our kids.

Let’s stop the fear, stop the brainwashing, and bring common sense back to the classroom.

​Climate, Climate activists, Climate alarmism, Climate change alarmism, Climate crisis, Indoctrinated kids, Indoctrination, Indoctrination in schools, Opinion, Opinion & analysis, Schools, Education, Global warming 

Filmmaker and mother Jessica Solce was frustrated by the difficulty of finding healthy, all-natural products for herself and her family. To make it easier, she created the Solarium, which curates trusted, third-party-tested foods, clothing, beauty products, and more — all free of seed oils, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, and other harmful additives.

In this occasional column, she shares recommendations and research she’s picked up during her ongoing education in health and wellness.

Your refrigerator is filled with unprocessed, natural foods. Your medicine cabinet is free of toxic pharmaceuticals. Your faucets dispense filtered, chemical-free drinking water.

In other words, you’ve optimized your family’s home life for health. But what about the home itself?

Pillows, sheets, and furniture also contain toxic flame retardants, a grimly appropriate name given their tendency to reduce IQ and cause developmental delays.

Sadly and shockingly, virtually all houses harbor seemingly innocuous products and materials that silently poison us, day in and day out.

Take your bed, for example.

You spend a third of your life sleeping, so get a good mattress. This is solid advice. It also happens to be incomplete. A restful night’s sleep shouldn’t mean eight to 10 hours inhaling microdoses of toxic, flame-retardant forever chemicals.

But that’s exactly what you get with much modern bedding.

And the situation in other rooms is generally no better.

To go through all of what may be poisoning us in our homes would require an article of epic proportions; it would also be overwhelmingly depressing for me to write and for you to read.

I encourage you to do more research and to consider the specifics of your own situation. In the meantime, for the sake of both of our sanities, I’ll limit myself to outlining the major offenders — as well as what to replace them with.

My hope is that I can give you a good start in ensuring your home is a haven for healing, not a den of disease.

RELATED: Grass-fed steaks, unprocessed salt, and more chemical-free picks from the Solarium

Getty Images/Camerique/The Solarium

Starting slow

Spend any time on health-oriented social media, and it feels as if every week brings news of some new toxic product ready to kill you, from paint and plastics to petroleum-based perfumes.

So when we first set out to evict the enemy from our abode, we quickly realize the hydra-esque task we’ve taken on. No sooner have you rooted him out of one hiding place than you discover him popping up in two more.

As someone who’s navigated this kind of purge myself (inspiring me to create an online marketplace of healthy products to help you do the same), I strongly advise against a scorched earth, “No Impact Man” approach.

Rather, you should employ a method of gradual change where you make small, conscious swaps for healthier alternatives. Trust me, it’s easier on your wallet and your mental well-being.

No impact, man

That said, the aforementioned 2009 documentary is an eye-opening watch. “No Impact Man” is the story of a New York City family — journalist Colin Beavan, his wife, Michelle, and their toddler, Isabella — undertaking an experiment to live for one year, while making as little impact on the environment as possible.

One scene in particular floored me: when Michelle throws away all of her makeup and bathroom and beauty products.

It wasn’t that she voluntarily parted ways with her precious and pricey creams and unguents but the sheer amount of them she’d managed to stockpile in their small Manhattan apartment.

Imagine how much more the bathroom of the average American house in the suburbs holds. Unfathomable amounts of money spent on unfathomable amounts of toxic junk.

As thought-provoking as “No Impact Man” is, I’d advise against going to such extremes, at least at first. Above all, you want to make sure this is something you can sustain.

In my experience, that becomes easier the more you learn how to spot these home-borne toxins — and the more you understand the potential damage they can do once they get into your lungs, bloodstream, and cells and mitochondria. Removing them from your life will not feel like a burden but a no-brainer necessity.

Here are some simple first steps to get you started.

Open your windows

Even without getting rid of anything, this age-old method of improving ventilation and air exchange can have a major impact on the health of your home.

A 2020 review of 37 separate environmental studies found that elevated indoor carbon dioxide levels associated with poor ventilation impaired high-level decision-making and reduced cognitive speed, especially on complex tasks.

Remake your bed

As mentioned, where you rest your head at night is very important. We sleep an average of 2,700 hours a year, or 114 days out of 365. And it’s not just your mattress you need to worry about.

Pillows, sheets, and furniture also contain toxic flame retardants, a grimly appropriate name given their tendency to reduce IQ and cause developmental delays.

They can also cause metabolic problems like obesity and insulin resistance, while endocrine disruptors they contain cause thyroid problems, infertility, hormone disregulation, and hormone-related cancers. Nasty stuff.

Because kids tend to put their hands on everything and everything in their mouths, they’re even more prone to ingesting these retardants. Especially when they’re in the pajamas they wear!

One retardant ingredient is formaldehyde. You know … embalming fluid. Many of us are sleeping on literal deathbeds.

So what can we do?! For pillows and comforters, find goose down or wool. One excellent option for pillows is the wonderful U.S. company the Woolshire. Avocado is a great source for mattresses. You can find 100% cotton and/or linen at a wide range of prices, from made-in-America luxury brands to Target’s in-house bedding line.

Clear the air

Nothing like lighting a scented candle or two to make a home feel clean and inviting. Just make sure you know what you’re burning

While marketed as “natural,” many soy candles contain synthetic fragrance oils and chemical additives that release harmful pollutants. A pair of recent studies found that scented candles emit formaldehyde, benzene, and other carcinogens, with risks to lung and nasal cancers, respiratory harm, and cognitive decline.

The aforementioned chemicals are known as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, not because they are organic in the farmer’s market sense but because of their specific chemical properties.

“Volatile” refers to their ability to turn into gas at room temperature, “organic” refers to their carbon bases, and “compounds” means they’re highly complex — all to mean these things are absolutely not fit for human consumption or contact. If they are in your home, they can “off gas” into your air without being heated or physically disturbed.

In addition, the European Commission’s Scientific Committee confirms that fragrance ingredients are among the leading causes of allergic contact dermatitis (allergies, eczema, rashes) in Europe. Another study confirms that regular indoor scented candle burning “can expose us to dangerous levels of organic pollutants” and ultra-fine particles.

These harmful VOCs are not inherent in the unburned wax but formed as byproducts of incomplete combustion when the candle is burned; the additives, wicks (sometimes made of lead!), and added fragrances and dyes increase the levels of VOCs. Synthetic scents can also trigger asthma, allergic reactions, and breathing problems.

A 100% unadulterated beeswax candle with a cotton or paper wick and no added dyes or fragrance is the way to go.

This is the cleanest candle possible: not 100% free of VOCs but with significantly lower emissions. It’s also completely unprocessed — made of wax that comes straight from the beehive.

Along with the lovely natural scent, beeswax candles may also produce negative ions that help settle positively charged particles like dust, pollen, mold spores, and some airborne toxins.

“Why can’t I just get some air fresheners from Walmart?” Don’t bother. They emit a cocktail of carcinogenic VOCs and phthalates (endocrine-disrupting semi-VOCs). If you have these in your home or in the car, this is step one: Get rid of them pronto.

Once you stop using chemical air fresheners, you’ll start noticing how foul and unnatural they actually smell. As luck would have it, we now have a nice, natural option thanks to the small French company &Eden.

The scents you put on your body can be just as harmful, especially considering that you absorb them directly through your skin as well as through your lungs. When you are ready to make the swap, consider these cleaner, nature-based soaps and fragrances.

Let the light in

The convenience of artificial light comes with a major cost: the disruption of our body’s innate circadian signaling and repair processes.

Moreover, our bodies our designed to absorb the entirety of the sunlight spectrum, from infrared to visible to ultraviolet. But our ubiquitous screens isolate and maximize our exposure to certain parts of the spectrum. The computers, phones, and tablets we use indoors continually bathe us in unnatural amounts of blue light.

One way to mitigate this constant onslaught is by wearing yellow-tinted blue-light-blocking glasses while at the computer.

You can also change your lightbulbs to more closely resemble full spectrum sunlight. I did this first in my bedroom, creating a warm, amber glow like candlelight. I highly recommend it.

There are emerging tech solutions as well. The Daylight Computer can be used outside without glare issues and eliminates the blue light problem by harnessing ambient light or using red light for a backlight. Its display resembles conventional E Ink displays but with a faster refresh rate.

If you want to learn a whole lot more about blue light, you can read my three-part series about its effects on your body.

Clean house

Say goodbye to the likes of Mr. Clean, Lysol, and Formula 409. They all come with excess baggage: quaternary ammonium compounds, or “quats” (antimicrobials that can cause skin and respiratory irritation), synthetic fragrances, preservatives, and ethanolamines.

RELATED: Trump EPA takes aim at forever chemicals

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In addition, common cleaning products often contain endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that can impair fertility in both sexes. The phthalates found in many synthetic fragrances have been strongly linked to reduced sperm quality, lower testosterone, and altered ovarian function.

Instead, make your own all-purpose cleaner with vinegar, water, essential oils, and a glass spray bottle. You can also experiment with different combinations of baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, isopropyl alcohol, and lemon juice.

Other fertility disruptors that may be lurking in your home include:

Bisphenol A (BPA), a common ingredient in plastic products and thermal receipts, which has been connected to reduced egg quality, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, and implantation failure;PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” in stain‑resistant fabrics, non‑stick cookware, and some cosmetics, which are associated with longer time-to-pregnancy and lower fertility rates; andHousehold flame retardants present in furniture and electronics, which have been linked to failed embryo implantation and decreased sperm motility.

Pesticides, particularly organophosphates and glyphosate, have been associated with reduced fertility, hormone disruption, and increased miscarriage risk. Which leads us to our next step …

Weed out pesticides

According to NASA’s famous Clean Air Study, certain houseplants do more than just look good — they can help filter common indoor air pollutants often released by furniture, cleaning products, and household materials.

This is technically true, but ventilation is still more effective; it would take a huge number of plants to make a difference in home air quality.

Then again, I do think that cohabitating with plants benefits us in less quantifiable ways, such as fostering a healthy sense of connection to nature.

Just be aware of the soil you use — inside and outside the home. Conventional soils are filled with synthetic pesticides like herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides as well as synthetic fertilizers that alter soil biology, killing nutrients and introducing heavy metals (arsenic, lead, cadmium) into your gardens and eventually into your body.

Kids play outside, roll in the grass, and jump into leaf piles. They also come into close contact with pets who do the same. This soup of pesticides gets on their skin and is inhaled, raising their risks for blue baby syndrome, colorectal cancer, birth defects and sexual deformities, neurodevelopmental harm in children, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

A 2015 Harvard School of Public Health study determined a 26% increased risk of leukemia in children exposed to herbicide. Indoor insecticide exposure showed a 47% higher risk of leukemia and a 43% higher risk of lymphoma. Even parental exposure before conception can raise cancer risk.

Most of us have heard of Roundup, the notorious herbicide that’s cost Monsanto billions in legal settlements with people who claim it gave them cancer.

Despite this, the EPA continues to approve the use of Roundup, which kills weeds while sparing crops genetically engineered to resist it. The problem is that weeds tend to develop their own resistance.

The common solution is to add 2,4-D, a pesticide I’d never heard of before researching this article. Despite mounting evidence that 2,4-D is at least as harmful as Roundup, the EPA approved the use of this combination in 2014.

This is all the more reason to prioritize buying pesticide-free, organic, and regenerative soils for your indoor and outdoor plants. It’s also important to stick to meats and vegetables raised on such soil. What our food sources eat and consume, we consume, entering us into a cycle of life and vitality or death and degeneration.

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On July 1, Zohran Mamdani officially secured the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City. The 33-year-old self-described socialist and longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America, backed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), openly supports the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.” His policy proposals include rent freezes, city-owned grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, robust corporate tax increases, and a Department of Community Safety to reduce reliance on police.

His nomination has many in the country shaking their heads, but they should be doing much more than that, according to Glenn Beck.

“This is not just a local upset. This is a flashing red warning sign for where this country is headed if a lot more Americans do not wake up,” he warns.

Mamdani represents “the future that the left wants: a nation where free stuff flows like water, taxes choke the life out of ambition, and the very idea of America is rewritten to fit the Marxist playbook.”

Mamdani has been compared to other progressives, especially Beto O’Rourke, who was also a young rising star aiming to fundamentally change the nation. But Mamdani, Glenn says, is especially terrifying because his ideology is “the convergence of communism and Islamicism.”

While Mamdani would almost certainly dispute being called a communist, the truth, Glenn says, is that socialism is just “diet communism” — the “transition step in between capitalism and communism,” according to Karl Marx himself. Plus, “there is growing evidence that Mamdani is now an actual communist,” he says.

In 2019, Mamdani admitted that he was shaped by the writings of Marxist revolutionary Frantz Fanon. A year later, he posted the following to X, celebrating India’s election of a communist mayor and implying that he would bring the same communist policies to New York City.

In a 2021 campaign video, Mamdani expressed his intentions to “buy up housing on the private market and convert it to community ownership” — a communist fantasy that “usually ends with a bullet in people’s heads,” Glenn says.

And then there’s his Islamism to contend with.

“In college, [Mamdani] co-founded the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. They’re the super, super classy group that was the main organizer of the anti-Israel protests and encampments on college campuses across the U.S. right after October 7 in the attack by Hamas,” Glenn says.

The day following the October 7 attacks, Mamdani posted the following tweet, in which he condemned neither Hamas nor terrorism:

“He has called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide, sponsored a bill to block New York charities from funding groups tied to what he claims are Israeli war crimes, and he has vowed to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he ever sets foot in New York City while he is mayor. And he doesn’t believe Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state,” Glenn adds.

“This isn’t politics,” he warns. “This is a dangerous, deadly ideology that threatens New York City’s Jews, which make up the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.”

Mamdani’s rise “is not a fluke,” he warns. “It is a symptom of a Democratic party sprinting to the left.”

“His brand of friendly neighborhood communism — openly anti-capitalist, anti-Israel, and obsessed with equity — is the future the Democrats now have to bet on,” says Glenn. “Mamdani’s dystopian vision for the future of New York is the future that the left wants for all of us.”

He is laying the bricks for Ocasio-Cortez’s path to a presidential run.

“They are clearly grooming AOC for a 2028 presidential run,” Glenn says, “and Mamdani is part of that long game. He has appeared alongside AOC at public events in New York, reaching back to 2023, preaching the same socialist gospel: Free everything, tax the rich, dismantle capitalism.”

“Democrats are not flirting with socialism anymore. They are embracing it as their new identity,” he adds.

To hear more of Glenn’s predictions and analysis, watch the episode above.

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