Here in Portland, we’ve had a bad week of wildfire smoke. It’s been at DON’T GO OUTSIDE levels. You literally feel the ache in your chest. Your eyes begin to burn.

This recent event brought to mind the Great Portland Smoke-Out of 2020, which followed the most devastating and deadly wildfires in Oregon history.

I went to relax in a lounge chair by the hotel pool. But as I lay there, I noticed the sky slowly change from blue, to a dull yellow, and then to a reddish gray.

Thanks to that ordeal, people know what to do during smoke events. They stay inside. They wear masks. They seal their doors and windows.

One thing I noticed during this year’s wildfire emergency: There’s been little talk about what anyone could have done to prevent it.

After 2020, Oregon spent nearly $200 million on wildfire prevention and preparedness. The state promised more prescribed burns, more fuel reduction, and more resilient forests. Six years later, there’s plenty of bureaucracy devoted to wildfire, but it’s hard to tell what any of it has accomplished.

Liberals hardly even talk about “climate change” anymore. Whatever you thought of that explanation, at least it implied there was a problem to fix.

Now, we just call it “wildfire season.” As if it’s an inevitable part of the cycle of life. It comes every year. Like the snow melts in the mountains. Or the leaves change in the fall.

We’ve normalized the burning of our state.

Worst year ever

In 2020, we were already dealing with riots; and then COVID lockdowns; and then terrible fires; and then dense walls of smoke descended on Portland.

The first day of smoke was bad. The second day was nightmarish.

I woke up that day at 6 a.m. I could already feel the burning in my lungs. I’d had serious respiratory problems in the past, so I made the immediate decision to evade the coming smoke by whatever means necessary. I jumped out of bed and quickly packed a bag.

I clicked on the radio and consulted various smoke maps on my laptop. Northeastern Oregon still looked clear, so I got in my car and started driving east toward Pendleton, 200 miles away.

Surely that was far enough. I could stay there for a couple days, until the smoke cleared.

As I passed through downtown Portland, the smoke was as thick as fog. As I continued east, through the Columbia Gorge, the smoke was so dense you couldn’t see the Columbia River, 50 yards to your left.

The air smelled toxic. The smoke blocked out the sun. You couldn’t tell what time it was by the ambient light. You had to look at your watch.

They didn’t see it coming

In Pendleton, I could finally see blue sky. But according to the weather radar on my phone, the smoke was right behind me. I remember that the teenage employees at the Pendleton Burger King didn’t know anything about it. I had to explain to them that in an hour they’d be engulfed.

I got back in my car and drove farther east to Boise, another 200 miles. When I got there, the skies were clear. I had outrun the smoke. And hopefully outdistanced it as well.

I checked into a hotel. I thought, OK, I’ll just hang out here for a couple days.

I went to relax in a lounge chair by the hotel pool. But as I lay there, I noticed the sky slowly change from blue, to a dull yellow, and then to a reddish gray.

How could the smoke have caught up with me? I had driven here at 80 mph!

The next day I drove to Pocatello and the day after that to Salt Lake City.

Salt Lake was a ghost town because of COVID. There, I checked into an eccentric-looking two-star hotel. It was the only place open.

RELATED: Is America still a ‘first world’ country? Not compared to Japan

UCG/Bloomberg

Salt Lake City

The smoke eventually arrived in Salt Lake City too, but only faintly. It wasn’t the suffocating soup it was in Oregon.

I kept thinking, One more day, and I’ll head back. But then I’d check the air quality in Portland, and it was still “extremely hazardous.”

On Facebook, my Portland friends were hunkered down, taping up their windows, sealing their homes. They were stuck inside with their kids, their pets; nobody was going outside. They put on brave fronts on Facebook, but I could tell they were losing their minds.

In SLC, I was just bored. I walked around a lot. My hotel was full of weirdos. Some of them lived there. They appeared unaware that the world was on fire.

In my room, I had the Weather Channel on continuously. By now, I was an expert at tracking smoke. My laptop bookmarks were everything from obscure NOAA wind maps to meticulous air quality websites based in Switzerland.

Throughout all of this, I kept thinking: This can’t last more than another couple days. But in fact, it lasted eight more days.

Finally, when the sky was visible in Portland, I began the long drive home.

Homecoming

It took days to air my apartment out. At first, I felt survivor’s guilt. My traumatized friends and neighbors looked like they’d been through a war.

Of course, this recent smoke event wasn’t nearly as bad as the Great Portland Smoke-Out of 2020. This one only lasted four days. Most people didn’t bother to tape their doors and windows shut. But they could have. They know how. They’ve done it before.

Like I said, Portlanders are accepting this. Like they accepted mask mandates. Like they accepted transgender children.

They even named our new WNBA team the Portland Fire. It’s almost like they’re asking for it.

​Climate change, Mask mandates, Transgender children, Portland fire, Oregon, Lifestyle, Blake’s progress, Wildfire 

As a professor who has spent his career among left- and far-left academics, I have watched them justify discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and political outlook for decades. So I was not surprised by the Jason Arday story.

Cambridge professor Jason Arday resigned from his tenured position last week, and almost immediately the academic left began demonstrating why the controversy matters far beyond one professor.

Human beings need redemption. Redemption does not come from DEI administrators or university bureaucracies proposing to cure discrimination with more discrimination.

Arday became an academic celebrity when Cambridge appointed him professor of sociology of education in 2023. He was celebrated as the youngest black professor ever appointed at the university.

Now he has resigned amid allegations of plagiarism and serious questions about claims concerning his academic and professional record.

Arday disputes the broadest accusations against him and has acknowledged some errors. Cambridge, meanwhile, is reviewing the process by which he was appointed. The obvious question is whether ordinary safeguards failed — and whether the university’s diversity priorities had anything to do with that failure.

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion” is not simply the old affirmative-action idea of giving a candidate a chance. Equity ideology goes further. It treats unequal outcomes as presumptive evidence of injustice and then demands institutional action to manufacture more equal outcomes, even when differences in interest, preparation, achievement, or merit may explain the disparity.

But something even more revealing happened after Arday’s resignation: the defense of the system that produced him.

The Guardian interviewed black British academics who acknowledged problems with Arday’s conduct but argued that the extraordinary attention paid to his case reflected something darker. White academics commit misconduct too, they argued. Why, then, had Arday become a national story? Some suggested that the political right was weaponizing his case against diversity and black academics more broadly.

Professor Kehinde Andrews went further, connecting the controversy to what he considered a more important story: black academics losing jobs as British universities make cuts.

That response illustrates the DEI worldview almost perfectly.

Andrews himself is among five black academics threatened with redundancy at Birmingham City University as it moves to eliminate its master’s program in black studies and global justice. He has described the move as an “erasure” of black studies.

RELATED: Cambridge star Jason Arday was the perfect DEI success story. Is that why nobody questioned him?

Simon & Schuster; Anselm Ebulue/Bloomberg/Getty Images

But notice what is actually being eliminated: a specific degree program, not black students as a class.

There is also another relevant fact. The university says the program suffers from low recruitment. The master’s program reportedly has eight students.

If a university eliminates a program that attracts too few students to justify its costs, we do not need racism to explain what happened. We have economics.

British universities are facing a serious financial crisis. Programs and faculty positions are being cut across numerous disciplines.

Yet the circular logic of oppression studies kicks in immediately: Elimination is proof of racism, and racism is proven by the elimination. No other explanation is allowed.

DEI reverses the burden of proof. If members of a designated oppressed group suffer an adverse outcome, the outcome itself becomes evidence of oppression.

That is precisely the intellectual habit that created many of these programs in the first place.

For decades, universities created entire academic programs around increasingly specialized forms of identity studies. Taxpayers and students subsidized them. The programs produced graduates, some of whom became professors who taught the next generation why universities needed those same programs.

The reasoning became wonderfully circular: We need professors in these programs because we have these programs, and we need these programs because professors in these programs tell us how urgently society needs them.

There are two inconvenient participants in this arrangement: the student and the taxpayer.

Students eventually ask what they are receiving in exchange for tuition, years of their lives, and often considerable debt. If the degree will not improve their prospects, why not study the same subjects independently for the price of a library card?

Taxpayers eventually ask why they should subsidize programs unable to attract enough students to sustain themselves.

Calling the resulting budget cuts “racism” does not answer either question.

Nobody is prohibited from studying whatever subject he wishes. If there is enormous demand for these programs, their advocates are free to establish private institutions devoted to them.

But that would expose the programs to a test they have largely avoided: persuading enough people voluntarily to pay for what they offer. If they fail that test, they go bankrupt.

Public subsidy is more comfortable than market judgment, especially when the program can always explain its own weakness as further proof that society needs more of it.

The Arday controversy therefore reveals something deeper than questionable hiring practices or plagiarism allegations. It exposes the circular reasoning at the heart of DEI.

RELATED: Warning: This college course may be bad for your brain

Andi Purnomo/Getty Images

But there is an even deeper mistake.

DEI correctly senses that something is wrong with human beings. People really do hate. They really do discriminate. They really do exploit one another. Human history provides more than enough evidence. Human beings hate their neighbors.

Where DEI goes wrong is in believing that the human heart can be remade by dividing people into oppressors and oppressed, redistributing positions and honors among groups, and endlessly rehearsing grievances about historical injustice.

That experiment cannot redeem humanity. At best, it rearranges power. At worst, it gives old human vices a new moral vocabulary.

And we are watching it fail.

The problem is not merely institutional. It is human.

If the problem is the human heart, the solution will not be found in another diversity office, another identity-studies program, or another attempt to manufacture equity.

Christianity has always offered a more radical diagnosis and a more radical cure.

Human beings need redemption. Redemption does not come from DEI administrators or university bureaucracies proposing to cure discrimination with more discrimination.

It comes from Christ.

​Black british academics, Discrimination on race, Diversity priorities, Identity studies, Plagiarism allegations, Professor jason arday, Academic left, Cambridge university, Opinion & analysis 

New York police said they were able to identify and arrest the suspect of a brutal rape of a 90-year-old woman only five hours after the horrific assault.

29-year-old Jonathon Rivaldo allegedly broke into the woman’s unit at the Dayspring Apartments in Corning on July 13 at about 2 a.m.

‘He’s been in prison for the better part of the past 12 years for nonviolent offenses.’

Steuben County District Attorney Brooks Baker said it was the most disturbing case of his entire career.

Rivaldo is from Rochester originally, and police said they believed he was in the Corning area to visit his family. He had served more than four years for aggravated vehicular assault in Monroe County.

He had also been released from prison for only three days before the horrific attack, according to police.

Baker said it was a random attack and that Rivaldo did not know the victim prior to the incident.

A week after the alleged assault, the woman died from her injuries.

Prosecutors added a second-degree murder charge to the slew of charges he already faced: first-degree assault, second-degree assault, robbery, third-degree intimidating a victim and petit larceny.

“He’s been in prison for the better part of the past 12 years for nonviolent offenses,” Baker added. “He has no prior sex crimes.”

Baker said there had only been two stranger rapes in Corning during his career, which began in 1994.

RELATED: ‘Completely evil’ man sentenced to decades for tying up and raping elderly Ohio woman

Rivaldo allegedly got in more trouble while awaiting trial.

He was additionally charged with possessing a makeshift cutting instrument at the Steuben County Jail, a felony.

He will be represented by Steuben County public defender Terry Baxter.

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​Brutal rape, Elderly woman, Murder, New york, Crime 

I’m tired of the “exposing the left” phase of conservative politics. I’m ready for the “implement what’s right” phase. Anyone want to join me?

For the past two weeks, President Trump, congressional Republicans, and conservative media have focused relentlessly on Anthony Fauci and the damage done during COVID. Fine. Fauci deserves scrutiny.

This is what medical freedom requires: informed consent, transparent data, meaningful long-term follow-up, and an absolute rejection of mandates or coercion.

But Fauci is no longer in charge. Republicans are.

That’s why it is maddening to watch the same party denounce Fauci while refusing to confront the policies and products that defined his era. Trump continues to praise the COVID shots. Republican senators confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz, who disciplined soldiers in the military for not getting the COVID shots. And the Trump FDA is moving forward with Moderna’s dangerous mRNA influenza vaccine for adults 50 and older.

If the lesson of COVID is merely that Fauci was bad, then we learned almost nothing.

The real question is whether government will once again approve and promote a novel platform without demanding the kind of evidence skeptics were told not to ask for last time.

Respiratory viruses present a difficult vaccine target because they mutate rapidly and immunity can wane. Critics of the COVID vaccination campaign have argued for years that these characteristics can produce disappointing or even counterproductive results under some conditions — concerns I have written about again and again.

Even Fauci acknowledged part of the underlying problem. In a 2023 paper, he wrote that current vaccines against respiratory viruses often produce “incomplete and short-lived protection” and that genuinely better vaccines would require “outside the box” thinking.

That should have prompted humility. Instead, the federal government is now considering another mRNA respiratory vaccine, this time for influenza.

The problem is not that every vaccine is bad. The problem is that after COVID, regulators should be demanding unusually strong evidence before expanding the platform into another mass-market respiratory product.

The evidence deserves scrutiny.

A 2025 Cleveland Clinic preprint, which I highlighted, reported that employees who received that season’s influenza vaccine experienced a higher cumulative incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza during the study period. The preprint was observational, not a randomized trial, and it should not be treated as the final word. But its findings are exactly the kind that should trigger more investigation, not less.

RELATED: What happened to RFK Jr.’s red line on risky vaccines?

Jim WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

A Canadian study of the 2018-2019 flu season likewise found negative vaccine effectiveness in certain age groups and discussed the possibility that vaccine mismatch interacted with pre-existing immune imprinting.

And a 2005 JAMA Internal Medicine analysis questioned whether rising influenza vaccination coverage among the elderly could explain the decline in influenza-related mortality over previous decades.

None of those papers, standing alone, proves that influenza vaccination is harmful. Together, they underscore a simpler point: The science of respiratory virus vaccination is complicated, and regulators should stop pretending otherwise.

That is especially true for mRNA.

Newly released material from Fauci’s files shows that Nobel laureate Drew Weissman warned Fauci in February 2021 about mouse data showing lipid nanoparticles reaching the placenta and fetus after administration during pregnancy.

Animal data does not automatically predict human harm. But it does raise obvious questions about biodistribution — questions that should have been answered aggressively before officials demanded public confidence in the platform.

Now the FDA’s briefing document for Moderna’s mRNA influenza vaccine shows another reason for scrutiny. In the agency’s review, grade 3 systemic reactions were substantially more common among mRNA vaccine recipients than among recipients of a conventional influenza vaccine.

That does not establish that the product is broadly unsafe. It does establish that the newer platform is more reactogenic in the trial population, and it makes the quality and duration of the safety database more important, not less.

The FDA document also acknowledges that the available safety database is too small to detect rare adverse events such as myocarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and other neurological events.

That is not an accusation. It is the limitation of the evidence the FDA itself describes.

And this is where the political hypocrisy becomes impossible to ignore.

RELATED: My son’s disease progressed while the FDA waited

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Republicans cannot spend one week demanding accountability for Fauci and the next tell Americans to trust the same institutional habits that made the COVID era so destructive: compressed debate, zero transparency, contempt for dissent, and an assumption that uncertainty should be managed through public relations campaigns rather than openly discussed.

Myocarditis after mRNA COVID vaccination is a recognized adverse event, although public health agencies continue to describe it as “rare” and concentrated most heavily among adolescent and young adult males. Whatever one believes about the overall risk-benefit calculation, that experience alone should have permanently raised the evidentiary bar for another mRNA product intended for broad use.

This is what medical freedom requires: informed consent, transparent data, meaningful long-term follow-up, and an absolute rejection of mandates or coercion.

It also requires conservatives to stop treating Fauci as a substitute for governing.

Fauci is yesterday’s issue. Trump and congressional Republicans have the controls now. If they believe the COVID era was a catastrophe, then prove it by changing the rules that made it possible. Demand stronger safety evidence. Protect informed consent. End coercive vaccination policy. Force regulators to disclose uncertainty rather than bury it. Otherwise, all the hearings, subpoenas, and Fauci outrage amount to nothing more than political theater.

The point of exposing past mistakes is to stop repeating them.

​Anthony fauci, Opinion & analysis, Medical freedom, Republicans, Mrna vaccines, Donald trump, Covid-19, Transparency, Consent, Mandates, Flu, Congress 

Washington has forced local television stations to compete in a 21st-century media market under rules written for the 20th century.

Americans pay the price whenever outdated regulations make it harder for local broadcasters to invest in better news coverage, stronger emergency alerts, and new technology.

The future of local television should not be determined by regulations written before streaming, smartphones, and digital competition transformed the media landscape.

The Federal Communications Commission has now taken an important step toward fixing that mismatch by replacing a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach with a more flexible, fact-based review process.

The principle is simple: Regulation should respond to today’s marketplace, not yesterday’s assumptions.

Local television still matters. Americans rely on hometown stations for storm warnings, election coverage, school closings, and stories that national outlets rarely cover. Yet, like local newspapers before them, many stations face serious financial pressure.

More than half of U.S. television stations operate at a loss even as they continue providing essential public service.

To survive, broadcasters need investment. They want to upgrade transmission systems, strengthen emergency alerts, expand local journalism, and deploy next-generation broadcast technology.

But investment requires scale, and investors are understandably reluctant to fund companies that federal policy artificially prevents from reaching more than 39% of American households.

That ownership cap was created for a different era, when Americans watched one of three television networks and broadcasters dominated the video marketplace.

The market changed. Washington’s rules did not.

Americans now consume news and entertainment on smartphones, tablets, laptops, streaming services, social media, and podcasts. Broadcasters compete with Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, cable networks, and digital platforms capable of reaching essentially every American.

Local broadcasters, however, remain constrained by a federal ownership cap designed before the internet transformed the media business.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has warned that America should not repeat the mistakes made with local newspapers.

That warning deserves attention.

Washington watched thousands of local newspapers disappear while old business models collapsed and investment arrived too late. Communities never stopped needing local journalism. The economics simply stopped supporting it.

Local television should not be next.

Critics of the FCC’s order warn that loosening ownership restrictions could weaken localism. That is a legitimate concern, but it should be tested against evidence rather than treated as an argument for preserving the status quo indefinitely.

The politics of the moment also matter. Because the reform comes from a Republican FCC, opponents can dismiss it as simple deregulation. Yet media-ownership debates have shifted with partisan control before, and Democrats have supported modernization efforts of their own when they held power.

RELATED: FCC slaps ban on Chinese robots — revealing US plans for unmanned warfighting

John Keeble/Getty Images

Localism should remain the objective. The 39% ownership cap is only one regulatory tool.

There is little evidence that fixing the national ownership limit at 39% — rather than 50%, 75%, or some other figure — produces more local news, stronger emergency coverage, or better community service.

Good public policy should ask whether a regulation produces measurable benefits, not whether it has survived for decades.

If policymakers want stronger local journalism, they should focus on the conditions that make it possible: investment, innovation, modern technology, and financially sustainable business models.

Emergency communications make the point especially clear.

During hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and other disasters, local broadcasters provide information that can save lives. Those capabilities depend on modern infrastructure, skilled journalists, reliable transmission systems, and continuing investment — not on an arbitrary national ownership ceiling.

The FCC’s decision does not guarantee that every station will thrive. Nothing can.

But it gives local broadcasters something they have lacked for too long: greater freedom to attract investment, modernize operations, strengthen emergency communications, and build sustainable local-news organizations.

Government should not freeze one industry in time while every competitor is free to innovate.

The future of local television should not be determined by regulations written before streaming, smartphones, and digital competition transformed the media landscape.

Local communities are best served when their broadcasters have the freedom to grow, compete, and invest in the journalism Americans still depend on.

​Broadcast rights, Fcc, Streaming, Television, Regulations, Tv, Public services, Opinion & analysis 

Last month at a press conference announcing 30% discounts on staple groceries at planned city-owned stores, a reporter asked New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) how he would prevent people from buying up the cheap items for resale.

“Our RFP makes very clear that this is a program for New Yorkers to be able to put food on the table, not a program for people to be able to make a quick buck through reselling,” he replied before passing the question off to Economic Development Corporation chief Jeanny Pak, who floated the idea of using “library-esque cards” to moderate patrons.

Glenn Beck finds the proposal preposterous and deeply ironic.

“You’re going to put out a library card? Do you need a license or any kind of identification to get a library card? The answer? Yes,” he says, emphasizing Mamdani’s and other progressives’ opposition to voter ID requirements.

“So you’re asking for ID. Okay, well, that makes sense because … you have to know who’s coming in. Are they qualified to buy the stuff in your store?” Glenn continues, highlighting the glaring similarities between accessing NYC’s city-owned grocery stores and voting in an election.

He wonders whether or not Mamdani and other NYC officials have considered the inherent sexism and racism in such a proposal.

“I don’t know why they hate women so much, because married women, you’re not going to be able to do it because maybe you’ve changed your name and you don’t have a birth certificate or any other form of ID whatsoever that could prove who you are,” he sarcastically remarks, mocking liberals’ debunked argument that voter ID laws disenfranchise married women.

After the backlash, Mamdani’s team clarified that the “library card-esque” idea was not an ID requirement but actually a voluntary customer loyalty-style card (like supermarket rewards programs) that the private store operator could use to track purchases and limit bulk buying for resale.

But regardless of how they try to frame their fraud prevention initiative, the irony remains.

“So [it’s] like a Costco card, which I have to sign up for and they have to know who I am, because they just don’t hand them out at the door. … Or like an Albertson’s card, where you have to sign up for it,” Glenn says.

Glenn’s head writer and researcher, Jason Buttrill, notes that the mayor’s office has pledged that the cards will be voluntary and free, with no residency, identity, or income check required to get one — which would make them arbitrary and ineffective at preventing fraud.

“If you’re not going to check residency, why even have a card at all? Because you can come from Texas and just say, ‘Yeah, I live in New York. Give me my discount card,”’ he says.

“They know they’re being hypocrites,” says Glenn.

Communism and socialism always fail, he explains, because even after common sense reveals their failures, the government — afraid of losing face and supporters — doubles down, insisting it will eventually find the magic solution that proves the system works.

“Once a communist, always a communist,” says Glenn.

To hear more, watch the video above.

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​Communism, Glenn beck, New york city, Socialism, Voter id, Zohran mamdani, Blazetv show