When the United States military disables ad trackers on troop smartphones because Iranian agents might use them to inflict harm, you know a technology has outgrown its original sales pitch.

The same surveillance system tracking American soldiers is tracking ordinary Americans too. The difference is that the military has finally decided that it’s too dangerous to ignore.

Stopping the insanity requires cutting off the flow at its source.

An ad tracker is a small piece of software code placed inside apps, websites, and operating systems. Its official job is simple. It monitors what you click and what you buy. It tracks where you scroll so companies can serve you personalized ads for running shoes, air fryers, lawnmowers — or just about anything else you might buy. To make this work, your phone generates a unique string of numbers called a Mobile Advertising ID. Think of it as a digital name tag stuck to your lapel. Every time you check the weather or browse a dating app, your phone broadcasts this ID along with your location, network data, and browsing habits to hundreds of middleman companies in milliseconds.

This brings us to the absurd reality of the modern web. You are forking out hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of dollars for a handheld surveillance device that sells your habits to anyone with a corporate credit card.

Horror stories

The immediate danger for most people is financial exploitation. In 2024, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services received tens of thousands of complaints from Americans who clicked social media ads offering $6,400 gift cards for groceries, only to find their actual health insurance plans canceled or swapped without their consent. Everyday shoppers thought they were signing up for relief money. Instead, aggressive lead-generation companies took their data and enrolled them in alternative plans to collect broker commissions. People showed up to pharmacies only to discover their life-saving insulin was no longer covered because an algorithm flagged them as easy targets for a predatory Facebook ad.

Medical privacy vanishes just as quickly. Consider the Meta Pixel, a piece of tracking code embedded directly into hospital websites and patient portals. Novant Health and Duly Health and Care both faced major legal actions after tracking pixels on their patient platforms routed sensitive personal health data directly to social media servers. Duly Health settled its lawsuit for $1.88 million after allegations that the code transmitted details about patient appointments, diagnoses, and treatments to advertising networks. If you look up an uncommon medical condition on a hospital portal, your phone’s advertising ID instantly links that health status to your social profile, resulting in targeted ads for treatments popping up alongside photos of your nephew’s birthday party.

RELATED: In this big Texas city, garbage trucks have joined the surveillance state

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The system tracks physical locations just as efficiently as web traffic. Federal Trade Commission enforcement actions against data brokers like Gravy Analytics and Mobilewalla revealed a rather robust market for precise geographical data harvested directly from cell phones. Commercial tools like Babel Street’s Locate X take these mobile advertising IDs and map them onto real-world coordinates. In one documented test, investigators used commercial advertising records to trace an individual device from a private residence in Alabama to a local hardware store, a church, and finally an abortion clinic in Florida. In modern-day America, you don’t need a warrant, a badge, or a court order to track someone across state lines. With an ad-tech subscription and a corporate login, you’re good to go.

How to take back your privacy

Every American with a smartphone should care. The reason is straightforward. By default, they’re enrolled in a passive location-tracking network. Apps like MyFitnessPal, Tinder, and run-of-the-mill mobile games collect spatial coordinates and transmit them into open ad auctions billions of times every day. That data is aggregated and packaged, then sold to third parties who build permanent location profiles on millions of citizens. Your phone tracks each visit to a counselor, a house of worship, a divorce lawyer, or a hospital, turning your daily routines and commutes into an open book for commercial entities.

Stopping the insanity requires cutting off the flow at its source.

On iPhone, open Settings, go to Privacy & Security, select Tracking, and toggle off Allow Apps to Request to Track. Then go to Apple Advertising at the bottom of the Privacy menu and disable Personalized Ads.

On Android, open Settings, select Privacy, tap Ads, and choose Delete advertising ID. Deleting this ID wipes your existing profile tag and forces apps to stop sharing your location with advertising brokers.

The steps are simple, but the principle is even simpler. If the Pentagon doesn’t trust strangers to know where its people are, you probably shouldn’t want strangers knowing where you are either.

​Tech, Smartphone, Security, Privacy, Ad tracker 

Remember when the gasoline engine was living on borrowed time?

Automakers were announcing ambitious electric-vehicle plans, governments were setting targets and deadlines, and consumers were repeatedly told that the future of the automobile had already been decided. The only real question seemed to be how quickly we would get there.

Gasoline vehicles weren’t merely going to lose market share. At some brands, they were supposed to disappear.

Cadillac was among the most aggressive. The company said it planned to become an all-electric brand by the end of this decade. Its own website still declares that every new Cadillac model introduced in the United States by the end of the decade will be electric.

Something interesting happened on the way to that all-electric future: People kept buying gasoline-powered cars.

So many, in fact, that Cadillac is preparing a whole new generation of them.

Revving up

GM CEO Mary Barra confirmed this summer that Cadillac’s next generation of internal-combustion vehicles will begin arriving in 2027. The lineup is expected to include a new CT5 sedan and new versions of the XT5 and XT6 crossovers. The XT6 is particularly interesting because Cadillac discontinued it after the 2025 model year. Now it’s coming back with a gasoline engine.

The XT5 got a reprieve too. Cadillac had been expected to kill the gasoline-powered crossover but instead extended production of the current model and approved a new generation for the U.S. market. Cadillac said it was making “necessary adjustments” to its portfolio to meet customer demand.

There’s that word again: demand.

Because while automakers have been adjusting their product plans, American EV sales have been sending a message of their own.

Money talks

Look at August. Despite a record increase in hybrid sales, Kia sold just 712 EV6s, down 60% from August 2025. Hyundai sold 28 Ioniq 6 sedans — yes, 28 — a 97% decline. Its much more popular Ioniq 5 fell 51%.

Ford’s numbers were even more dramatic. Mustang Mach-E sales fell 72.5% to 1,989 vehicles. Ford sold only 148 F-150 Lightnings, down 95% from the same month last year.

Honda sold 1,788 Prologues, down about 81% from August 2025. Honda has already confirmed that Prologue production will end after the 2026 model year.

Subaru’s Solterra dropped almost 87%, although that one comes with a major caveat: Subaru’s newer Trailseeker and Uncharted EVs helped push the company’s total EV sales up for the month, and limited Solterra inventory may have contributed to its collapse.

That’s why I wouldn’t judge the EV market by one model or even one month’s sales. Some of these vehicles are being discontinued. Others are being replaced. And August 2025 is an unusually difficult comparison because buyers were rushing to take advantage of the federal EV tax credit before it disappeared.

Market correction

But zoom out and the picture is still striking. According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, battery-electric vehicles accounted for 10.1% of new-vehicle sales in August 2025. One year later, their share had fallen to 6.2%. Overall new-vehicle sales weren’t collapsing either. August sales were actually up 1.5% from the previous year on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis.

So Americans didn’t suddenly stop buying cars. They became less interested in buying EVs.

That doesn’t mean the electric car is dead. Far from it. Cadillac currently offers five EVs, and manufacturers continue to spend billions developing electric vehicles. Some individual EVs are selling well, and Subaru’s August numbers show exactly why you have to be careful about declaring an entire technology a failure because one nameplate plunges.

But that’s very different from what consumers were being told just a few years ago.

The industry’s transition to EVs was often presented as inevitable and, more importantly, imminent. Gasoline vehicles weren’t merely going to lose market share. At some brands, they were supposed to disappear.

RELATED: Is charging your EV really cheaper than buying gas?

Bloomberg/Getty Images

Sales force

Cadillac is a wonderful example. It didn’t merely say it wanted to sell more EVs. It said it planned to be all-electric by the end of the decade. Now the company is developing another generation of gasoline-powered Cadillacs that will arrive with only a few years left on that clock.

Why? Because car companies eventually have to sell cars.

Consumers don’t buy corporate transition plans. They buy vehicles that fit their lives, budgets, and driving habits. For some people, that’s an EV. For others, it’s a hybrid. And plenty still want an ordinary gasoline-powered car or truck. Manufacturers are finally acknowledging that reality.

I don’t have a problem with electric vehicles. Build good ones. Make them affordable. Improve the charging network. Give consumers enough range and enough choices, and let them decide whether an EV works for them.

What I object to is deciding the answer first and expecting the customer to fall in line afterward. The auto industry spent years telling us where the market was going. Now the market is talking back. And judging by the gasoline-powered Cadillacs headed our way, somebody in Detroit is finally listening.

​Auto industry, Electric car, Electric vehicles, Ev market, Gasoline engine, Ev tax credit, Cadillac, Mary barra, Hyundai, Kia, Ford, Lifestyle, Automotive 

Men have always found reasons to avoid difficult fights — but today this has gotten worse, and it’s not exactly their fault.

The biggest problem with men these days, Todd Erzen of the “Steve Deace Show” explains, is that “they keep finding reasons not to fight in a culture where there are fights everywhere.”

“You’re not supposed to just randomly do it because it’s your style, your thing. You’re supposed to do it because the Lord identifies good and evil, and you are a servant of the good,” he continues.

“You must, as a man, vanquish evil,” he adds.

However, BlazeTV host Steve Deace points out that even in Genesis 3, “There’s not a whole bunch of guys preemptively looking to take on evil.”

“The opposite is often true. We wait until we’re cornered. We wait until we’ve suffered enough,” he explains.

“So that’s not new. That’s not unique,” he adds.

And even the founding fathers were not prepared to attack the “first time their God-given rights were violated.”

“They spent 10 years thinking about it, talking about it, negotiating it. Then when the redcoats start putting armed soldiers in their homes and calling it the ‘Quartering Act,’ they’re like, ‘You know, guys, we might be at a point of no return here,’” Deace says.

“I promise you, we’re not the first generation of men late to the party. That’s been every generation of men. Every single one,” he continues.

“We’re sinners,” he adds.

What is new, however, Deace explains, are the phones that never leave our hands.

“It’s these phones. We have never had at our instant disposal more opportunities to dissuade us from our priorities than the current technology of this world provides,” he says, adding, “Now that is what is new.”

Want more from Steve Deace?

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

​Founding fathers, Steve deace, Men, Good, Evil, Genesis, Todd erzen, Technology, Blazetv show 

Philip Anthony Mitchell — founder and lead pastor of Atlanta’s 2819 Church — catches flak for speaking out about the dangers of radical Islam, but he does it boldly anyway.

The ideology, he told BlazeTV host and Lakepointe Church pastor Josh Howerton on a recent episode of “Live Free,” is “incompatible” with both Christianity and Western fundamentals — and yet it continues to be embraced in American cities and legislatures in the name of “inclusion.”

But if the church doesn’t contend, our “children and grandchildren” will suffer greatly under the “antichrist monotheism” that is Islam, Mitchell warns.

To crystallize the gravity of that threat, he offered a harrowing analogy pulled from his days as a college student.

“When I was in college … my roommates and I, we had pet snakes,” says Mitchell.

“This one first python we had … she only ate rats … and I remember we would toss the rat in the cage. That python, Josh, would sit in the corner of the cage in the darkness, and that rat would just run around the cage,” he recounts.

The python’s eerie stillness created a “false sense of security.”

“That rat would even run on top of the python and off the python thinking … ‘I’m safe in here,”’ says Mitchell.

“That python would then stare at that rat, and at an opportune time, it would lunge at top speed, coil that rat up, and then squeeze the life out of that rat until it was dead and then swallow that rat hole.”

The rat’s fate, he says, is what’s in store for America — especially her Christian population — if it doesn’t start recognizing radical Islam as the deadly python it is.

“[Radical Islam] is like a python sitting in the corner. It’s just sitting there while we are running around acting like we have a false sense of security — until the day comes when it lunges, and then it wraps its grips around all of our systems, all of our policies … and then chokes the life out of Christianity, chokes the life out of Western fundamentals, chokes the life out of everything,” says Mitchell.

He acknowledges the polarizing nature of this warning, but the risks are too steep to stay silent.

“People are going to push back against this one moment right here, Josh, I just invite them to come back to this podcast five years from now, 10 years from now, if the Lord tarries, 20 years from now, and see did God not raise up true voices to warn America that this is coming to your own detriment,” he forewarns.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Join BlazeTV+ and start watching Josh today at blazetv.com/JOSH. Use promo code JOSH to get $20 off your subscription.

​Christianity, Islam, Josh howerton, Philip anthony mitchell, Blazetv show 

Conservative blogger Erick Erickson published an essay last week on Substack, “The Midwestern Führerbunker Driving the Right Off a Cliff,” maligning the Claremont Institute, one of our donors, and a few of our fellows and alumni.

Claremont Institute senior fellow Steve Hayward published the first in a promised series (“Is Conservatism in Crisis?”) on his Political Questions Substack, criticizing the tone, rhetorical tactics, and substance of Erickson’s essay. As Hayward shows, Erickson relies on guilt-by-association smears and innuendo that let the juxtaposition do the arguing.

It’s clear that Erickson wants merely to cherry-pick the document to stoke outrage with his readers.

Many of his citations come from untrustworthy and hostile sources, like the Guardian, which has published numerous hit pieces against Claremont. Erickson’s essay is a mile-wide, inch-deep bit of motivated reasoning.

At the top of his essay, a headnote by Erickson explains that he “worked on this for weeks.” We could have cleared up a lot of Erickson’s errors during those weeks had he followed the standard journalistic practice of reaching out to any of the parties or organizations he named for comment. He did not.

By his own account, Erickson let AI find the sources for his claims: “I wrote the piece and Claude found the links relevant to my claims. When Claude thought I was making weak claims or arguments, it challenged me to improve and clarify my writing and claims to match information in provided linked [sic].” That may explain why so many of his sources come from hostile outlets.

As a result, some friends of Claremont who are not close students of the internecine social media wars on the right are confused. I write to offer some clarity. The short version: Claremont’s mission remains, as it was when we were founded in 1979, “to restore the principles of the American founding to their rightful, preeminent place in our national life.”

The core of that work remains what Harry Jaffa called “the scholarship of the politics of freedom.” Many of our critics mistake the application of that scholarship to present circumstances for abandoning our principles.

Answering every insinuation in Erickson’s essay would be tedious; correcting the most serious is not. Consider four of his claims: about a donor, about a fraternal organization, about an essay in the American Mind, and about Nick Fuentes.

Erickson’s first target is Charles Haywood, a retired industrialist and philanthropist who runs the Worthy House website, where he routinely reviews, in spirited fashion, books on all manner of topics. Readers of Haywood know that he has a dim view of the prospects for the medium-term survival of the current American regime. He has constructed his city in speech, what he hopes will be a successor regime, in his “Foundationalist Manifesto.”

Erickson regards Haywood’s “Manifesto” as too statist. He wants us to gasp with him at Haywood’s deprecation of democracy. What Haywood favors, however, would not have been foreign to thinkers and statesmen from the American founding up through the turn of the 20th century: a republicanism with aristocratic elements, like elections and representatives rather than direct popular involvement in decision-making.

RELATED: Trump picked the wrong way to fight fake news

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Erickson objects that Haywood assigns to the central government “unlimited means,” but fails to include the rest of the sentence, which reads in full, “In pursuit of its limited ends, it will have unlimited means.” Claremont has always thought that the political philosophy of the founding, properly understood, should guide our constitutional analysis and reform. Haywood’s assessment is not the same as Claremont’s position, and reasonable people can dispute it.

But it’s clear that Erickson wants merely to cherry-pick the document to stoke outrage with his readers.

This outrage is a setup to suggest that because Haywood donates low six figures annually to Claremont and has an honorific “advisory” title common in the think tank philanthropic world, Claremont’s mission is now being subverted in favor of Haywood’s foundationalism.

No donor sets our agenda, and Haywood has never tried. He supports institutions on the right for the work they’re doing, in line with their own missions, to recover constitutionalism and defend the American way of life.

Erickson’s second target is closer to home: me. He indicts my involvement in the founding of a Christian fraternal organization, the Society for American Civic Renewal, and in so doing makes a serious charge that demands correction. One of SACR’s founding documents, writes Erickson, “describes the members as ‘un-hyphenated Americans.’ … The hyphen is there to screen for lineage, and it tells you the racial mindset of the organization.” This is false. The membership requirement for “unhyphenated Americans” is a reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1915 call for immigrants to assimilate and embrace American citizenship without qualification. SACR welcomes trinitarian Christian men of any race or ethnicity.

Fittingly, Roosevelt gave that speech to the Knights of Columbus, itself a Christian fraternal order. Few things are more American than Christian fraternal organizations, which have been around since our country’s founding.

The founding board of SACR in 2020 agreed with the theme of Yuval Levin’s book “A Time to Build.” We thought a decentralized fraternal organization for values-aligned men would be a useful institution in an ideologically divided and institutionally corrupt America. It has been gratifying to see lodges founded in several states, centered on friendship, shared love of country, and the many benefits such networks provide for local collaboration and mutual aid.

Erickson’s charge against the American Mind is more serious still. He claims that “Claremont’s American Mind has published the argument that conservatives must now be willing to commit violence of their own.” The essay in question, Hillsdale College professor Kevin Slack’s 2023 article “The Constitution, Citizenship, and the New Right,” does no such thing. The passage Erickson appears to be describing reads:

Many conservatives have now become convinced that, unless they are willing to allow their churches to be desecrated, their sacred services canceled, their property and liberty taken away, and their children indoctrinated or chemically castrated, they must be willing to engage in violence of their own.

Slack ends with a warning, not a call to arms:

Finally, the use of actual violence, which underlies the enforcement of all laws, including the natural law, has quickly become part of our machinations. And while I sympathize with any defense of natural right, I also fear it. Our first civil war was between states, but this new terrible war would be city against country, neighbor against neighbor, in the aisles of grocery stores, restaurants, and churches. I would not choose to live in this world, but America is fast becoming no country for old men. I still hope that we can appeal to genuine nationalism, celebrating America’s principles and its remarkable achievements, rejecting a false patriotism and tribalism.

In other words, Slack is describing what many conservatives have come to believe, not arguing that they are right. Erickson turns a description into a prescription.

Erickson throws Nick Fuentes and his “groypers” into the mix for good measure in the final third of the piece. He is careful to state that he doesn’t think anyone named so far is “coordinating with Fuentes.” (Quite right! I suspect Fuentes would object to any coordination with Claremont, as he has said publicly that we are untrustworthy because our chairman is Jewish.) But Erickson’s presentation is meant to leave the reader with the impression that this constellation of projects, writings, tweets, and people represents different flanks of a movement to overthrow the American Constitution.

While Erickson’s essay was making the rounds, I was on my way to Mount Vernon with Claremont colleagues to celebrate Constitution Day and honor Charles Kesler with the Salvatori Prize in the American Founding.

The evening featured short speeches from our Washington fellow Matthew Peterson, praising George Washington’s magnanimity and prudence; from our Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding, Glenn Ellmers, on the meaning of the Declaration at 250 after a century of progressivism; and from me, on the significant scholarly, editorial, and teaching achievements across Kesler’s five decades (and counting) of work.

It was an evening celebrating the work of the Claremont Institute and its scholars, surrounded by the Claremont family of alumni, supporters, and friends. That work, not the caricature in Erickson’s essay, is what Claremont is about.

We look forward to a good-faith debate with serious and honest interlocutors — let iron sharpen iron. The stakes are nothing less than the fate of America and the West.

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

​Claremont institute, Erick erickson, Groypers, Knights of columbus, Nick fuentes, West, George washington, Theodore roosevelt, The guardian, Hillsdale college, The american mind, Charles haywood, Opinion & analysis