President Donald Trump mocked climate alarmists on Saturday after another one of their doomsday scenarios was shown to be utter nonsense.

The admission by scientists that prompted Trump’s derision is but the latest in a long series of embarrassments for those activists keen to use climate prophecies as an excuse to socially engineer human beings and regulate society.

Narrative collapse

The imagined threat of anthropogenic climate change has driven numerous public officials, scientists, and impressionable people bonkers in recent decades.

While Western politicians sacrificed energy security and hobbled industry in hopes of slowing natural phenomena and defeating the arch-villain carbon dioxide (plant food), similarly minded scientists proposed blotting out the sun; “culling” the emission-generating human population with a deadly pandemic; reducing or eliminating meat consumption; putting the population on a diet of bugs, weeds, and micro-algae; and having fewer children.

‘Climate Activism has been used by Dumocrats to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Polices, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs.’

This madness has been driven and exacerbated in large part by bogus claims and laughably wrong predictions. In most cases, all that’s required to debunk such claims is time and a functional set of eyes.

Failed Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, for instance, said at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009 that new research indicated there was “a 75% chance that the entire North Polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”

Just as Gore was wrong about a 20-foot rise in the global sea level “in the near future,” polar bear drownings, and the snows of Kilimanjaro, he was wrong about the future of Arctic ice.

A paper published late last year in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters concluded that over the past 20 years, “Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005.”

RELATED: Bizarre academic paper about releasing ticks resurfaces amid surging bites

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images

If, perhaps, Gore confused the Arctic with the Antarctic, he’d still be wrong. Antarctica has enjoyed a massive gain in ice mass — at a rate of 119 billion tons per year from 2021 to 2023.

Polar ice is hardly the only planetary feature alarmists mistakenly suggested would fall victim to climate change.

Alarmists suggested in a 2017 study and elsewhere that climate change posed an existential threat to the world’s coral reefs and that “immediate global action to curb future warming is essential to secure a future for coral reefs.”

While dutifully claiming that “climate change mitigation” was still essential, researchers admitted in 2024 that “widespread and diverse coral species all exhibit the potential to adapt to the changing climate.”

Former Jeffrey Epstein associate Bill Gates is one of the few alarmists to admit to having pie on his face.

Gates alleged in a 2021 work of climate alarmist agitprop that if humanity failed to eliminate so-called greenhouse gas emissions, “climate change will keep getting worse, and the impact on humans will in all likelihood be catastrophic.”

After years of fear-mongering, he apparently felt compelled to admit that he too had gotten it wrong.

Gates noted in October that the “doomsday view of climate change” that says “cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization” and that “nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature” is wrong.

UN wrong, again

The United Nations, like Gates a longtime proponent of climate hysteria, was recently confronted with evidence that it too is wrong.

The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project, an outfit led by a committee of top climate scientists, admitted in a study published last month in the journal Geoscientific Model Development that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case future emissions scenarios are “implausible based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends.”

Taking into account the world’s future population, emission trends, energy sources, climate policies, and other factors, researchers have cooked up various climate scenarios for use in scientific modeling and activist propaganda.

In the early 2010s, such researchers developed a set of four scenarios for climate modeling, called “representative concentration pathways” or RCPs. The most extreme of these was RCP8.5.

The number 8.5 here signals the level of radiative forcing — the extra heat supposedly trapped in the Earth’s system, expressed in watts per square meter — projected by the year 2100.

The IPCC projected in 2013 that under this scenario, there would be a temperature rise of 4.3°C by 2081-2100 when compared to the pre-industrial period.

Government of Canada

RCP8.5’s successor, “shared socioeconomic pathway”-8.5, projected warming of 4.4°C by 2081-2100, with a “very likely” range of 3.3°C to 5.7°C, the Carbon Brief reported.

It was all nonsense.

Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, noted, “The four scenarios were never apples-to-apples. They were four different fruits from four different trees. Yet, over more than a decade and in tens of thousands of papers, RCP8.5 was treated as where the world was headed and the other three scenarios — but especially RCP4.5 and 2.6 — as a world with climate policy interventions.”

Despite numerous scientists stressing that the alarmist scenario was not only unlikely but misleading, the RCP8.5 scenario “came to dominate the literature to a degree that is impossible to overstate,” Pielke said.

“RCP8.5 accounted for more than half of all RCP references in the 2018 U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, nearly 60 percent in the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere, and about a third of all RCP references in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report,” Pielke wrote. “By early 2020, researchers were publishing studies invoking RCP8.5 at a rate of roughly 20 per day. So far in 2026, studies using RCP8.5 (or its even more extreme successor, SSP5-8.5) are being published at a rate of ~30 new studies per day.”

Now, the scientific community must contend with the acknowledgment that this scenario is bogus.

Science journalist Maarten Keulemans noted in a post that has been translated from its original Dutch, “The IPCC acknowledges what has been circulating for a long time: The highest disaster scenario, 8.5, no longer aligns with reality. WHAT CONSEQUENCES this has. ALMOST EVERYTHING YOU READ ABOUT CLIMATE FUTURE IS WRONG.”

Keuleman suggested further that this admission effectively torpedoes claims that global surface temperature will increase 4-5°C by 2100; summers will all hit 104°F and agriculture in Western Europe will be unsustainable by century’s end; tuna, swordfish, and other marine creatures will go extinct; there will be millions of climate refugees every year; and that there will be no more Winter Olympics by 2040.

Trump similarly weighed in, stating, “GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”

“For far too long Climate Activism has been used by Dumocrats to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Polices, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs,” the president continued. “Unlike the Dumocrats, who use Climate Alarmism nonsense to push their GREEN NEW SCAM, my Administration will always be based on TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT!”

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​Bill gates, Carbon, Climate, Climate change, Climate hysteria, Emissions, Global warming, Greenhouse gas emissions, Population control, President donald trump, Science, Scientists, United nations, Climate activism, Politics 

Democrats committed earlier this year to ideologically flipping the Georgia Supreme Court, where eight of the current nine justices are appointees of Republican governors, but they hit a major snag: Georgia voters.

Democrats’ plan was to oust a pair of incumbents in the May 19 election, replace them with a pair of pro-abortion radicals, then, in 2028, similarly knock out the trio of GOP-appointed justices who will be facing re-election.

‘The people of Georgia have made clear that they want to keep politics out of Georgia’s courtrooms.’

Charlie Bailey, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Georgia, said in April that his party was investing a historic sum in the campaigns of former Democrat state Sen. Jen Jordan and personal injury attorney Miracle Rankin, noting that “it’s the most money that the Georgia Democratic Party has spent in judicial races in 20 years.”

In addition to outside money, the liberal challengers enjoyed the support of outsiders, including pro-abortion groups and former President Barack Obama.

Obama, who endorsed both Jordan and Rankin, issued a reminder on Tuesday afternoon that “the decisions made by state supreme courts touch every part of our lives” and implored voters to “get this one right.”

RELATED: Trump accuses Democrat governor of MASSIVE election fraud; officials say it was a printer error

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Twice-failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris also weighed in from afar, telling Georgia voters to back Rankin and Jordan, whom she characterized as “extraordinary leaders.”

Just as Democrats wasted millions of dollars on the unlawful, Obama-backed redistricting power-grab in Virginia — which the Old Dominion’s Supreme Court torpedoed on May 8 — their court-flipping scheme in Georgia similarly proved to be a humiliating failure.

Georgia Supreme Court Justices Sarah Warren and Charlie Bethel, the Republican-appointed incumbents whom Gov. Brian Kemp threw his support behind, handily crushed their Democrat-backed challengers.

With over 95% of the expected votes in, Warren secured over 350,000 votes more than Jordan, beating the former Democrat lawmaker 59.3% to 40.7%.

Warren said in a statement following her decisive victory, “Today, the people of Georgia have made clear that they want to keep politics out of Georgia’s courtrooms. The Supreme Court of Georgia is a nonpartisan court by constitutional design, and I am thankful that it will stay that way.”

Bethel, a former Republican state senator, had a closer race but still came out on top, taking 51.1% of the total vote.

Whereas his challenger, Rankin, demonstrated on the campaign trail that she was sensitive and receptive to the ideological fads of the day, Bethel made clear on the campaign trail that he remains “committed to following Georgia law without respect to my personal preferences or the popular sentiment of the day.”

According to AdImpact, over $4 million was blown on ads across the two races.

Kemp congratulated the victors and stressed that “the Democrats are not going to take their foot off the gas heading into November, and neither will we. Keep Choppin’!”

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​Barack obama, Brian kemp, Charlie bethel, Democratic party, Elections, Georgia, Georgia supreme court, Jen jordan, Judiciary, Justices, Kamala harris, Miracle rankin, Politics, Sarah warren 

Today’s youth have never known life without a phone or internet access, and it shows.

Countless students have told me they are unable to be authentic with their parents or friends.

I rarely see a group of young people without phones in their hands. Texts, DMs, and Snaps are the norm for communicating, often creating shallow relationships and a false sense of community. This shallowness makes young people vulnerable to exploitation, which is why we must sound the alarm on the danger of using AI for friendship.

Nothing can, or ever will, replace the authentic, real love and hope found in other human beings.

As someone who regularly speaks on college campuses and has three young kids, I have seen firsthand the younger generation’s deficiency in forming personal connections. The lack of face-to-face interaction has made it difficult to engage with people outside the digital world — from avoiding job applications or being reluctant to introduce themselves to strangers to a general rise in anxiety in everyday life.

It’s no wonder we have a loneliness epidemic plaguing today’s youth. Between 17% and 21% of people ages 13 to 29 reported feeling lonely, according to a World Health Organization study, with the highest rates among teens.

In the midst of this epidemic, a growing number of young people are turning to AI for friendship. One study found that 25% of people under 30 are turning to AI for companionship. This number shows just how integrated AI has become in the lives of younger generations. We are watching youth learn to connect to machines at the age when they should be learning to connect with people, and the cost is becoming impossible to ignore.

The connection AI provides is not genuine. It is a synthetic, fleeting companion that doesn’t produce understanding, empathy, or relatability. And the more that teens use AI, the more trouble they have identifying what an authentic connection looks like.

Younger people, like everyone else, feel the need for an outlet. Many students have told me they struggle to be open and honest with their parents or friends. They think they will be judged, lectured, or misunderstood. They are afraid to expose their insecurities for fear of rejection or judgment, so they turn to the false sense of connection in AI. But it’s an illusion. The real world is so much richer and fulfilling than the temporary relief technology provides.

For many who seek comfort in AI, the end result is a feeling of further isolation and a realization that they have failed to build genuine relationships. They are left feeling even emptier than before.

We need to counteract this false narrative and teach our kids how to build lasting relationships with other people, not machines. Our children need to understand that AI cannot replicate or replace human connections.

RELATED: Meet the ‘femosphere’: Angry young women who love to hate men

Guoya/Getty Images

Life can get tough. Sometimes we face mountains we don’t think we can climb or situations we can’t take on alone. But there are communities out there that can help those who are struggling.

I am no stranger to loneliness myself. I felt depressed and alone enough that I almost ended my own life when I was 21. Suicide is not the solution to depression or loneliness — and neither is AI. What helped pull me out was not a program or chatbot, but something far greater and far more real: my faith in Christ and the real community of people in my life.

Jesus himself spent his time surrounded by his disciples and people seeking belonging. Human beings are hardwired to be part of a community. Parents need to show their children that there are churches, neighbors, peers, and many other people in the world whom they can lean on.

AI is not our friend. Nothing can, or ever will, replace the authentic, real love and hope found in other human beings. And that is a connection that does not require a Wi-Fi signal or password.

It only requires showing up.

​Teenagers, Ai, Loneliness epidemic, Ai friendship, Christianity, Human interaction, Young people, Internet, College students, Opinion & analysis 

The president likes him “a lot,” but Georgia voters still have to prove they agree.

Sitting U.S. Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) took home the most votes in the Georgia GOP primary for U.S. Senate on Tuesday, but it was not enough to secure an outright nomination.

’28 more days of putting the hammer down!’

Collins was first in the primary, but since he did not garner 50% of the vote, he will have to go head-to-head against runner-up Derek Dooley in a runoff election on June 16. Collins finished with nearly 41% of the vote, while Dooley had about 30%, according to CBS News.

“Thank you, Georgia. Love y’all. 28 more days of putting the hammer down!” Collins wrote on X after securing the most votes in the primary.

Collins was considered the favorite as a MAGA-style Republican and led polls by an average of 11.5 points between April and May.

The 58-year-old also received an unofficial endorsement from President Donald Trump in February, but it is unclear how much that endorsement helped him.

A video posted February 19 showed Trump telling supporters, “He’s a friend of mine. He’s a good guy.”

“I like him a lot,” Trump added.

RELATED: Early red flag for GOP? Democrats rack up massive Q1 fundraising hauls

Megan Varner/Getty Images

The video garnered nearly 1 million views on X, but subsequent polls showed Collins’ lead shrank from about +25 in mid-February to just +14 by the end of the month.

Still, Collins was considered to be Trump-aligned, having similar views on immigration and spearheading the Laken Riley Act. As well, Collins voted against aid to Ukraine in October 2023, but voted in favor of Israeli aid the same month.

Dooley, a former football coach for the Tennessee Volunteers, was consistently second or third in polling and was endorsed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (R).

Dooley put out a statement late on Tuesday thanking his voters for their support.

“This campaign has been about putting the people of Georgia first and sending a new type of leader up to D.C. who’s in it for the right reasons, and that’s to serve,” Dooley wrote on X.

“Let’s get to work and win this runoff!” he added alongside a photo that featured Gov. Kemp.

RELATED: Georgia man allegedly threatened to kill Pam Bondi and stab Kristi Noem’s eyes out ‘with a dull knife’

Megan Varner/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Third place went to Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter (R-Ga.), a former pharmacist and mayor who received approximately 25% of the vote.

Other candidates included businessman and real estate developer John Coyne, as well as Jonathan McColumn, a retired U.S. Army Reserve brigadier general and pastor. Both got less than 5% of the vote.

The winner of Collins vs. Dooley will face off against Democrat Senator Jon Ossoff in November. Ossoff went unopposed in the Democrat primary and has been in office since 2021.

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​2026 midterms, Brian kemp, Democrat, Earl carter, Georgia, House of representatives, Israel, Jon ossoff, Mike collins, News, Politics, Republican, Trump, Ukraine 

Every time you drive through an intersection, pass a police cruiser, or pull into a parking lot, there’s a growing chance your vehicle is being logged into a database you never agreed to join.

Across the country, cities are rapidly expanding automated license plate reader systems — networks of cameras that record where vehicles travel, when they appear, and increasingly, what makes them unique.

The San Jose lawsuit argues that vehicle tracking data can already be shared across jurisdictions and searched broadly.

Whose ‘safety’?

Much of the backlash now centers on Flock Safety, the largest automated license plate reader company in the United States. The company says its cameras operate in more than 5,000 communities, connect to over 4,800 law enforcement agencies across 49 states, and process more than 20 billion license plate reads every month.

Supporters call it a powerful crime-fighting tool.

Critics see the foundation of a nationwide vehicle surveillance network.

And now the legal fight is escalating.

In San Jose, California, residents and the Institute for Justice have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the city’s massive automated license plate reader program, arguing that constant vehicle tracking without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment.

San Jose deployed nearly 500 cameras across the city, creating one of the largest systems in the country. These cameras do far more than capture license plates. They can log vehicle color, make, model, bumper stickers, roof racks, and other identifying details. Over time, that creates a searchable history of a driver’s movements and routines.

According to the lawsuit, thousands of government employees may be able to access portions of that data.

Supporters argue these systems help solve crimes and recover stolen vehicles. Critics argue the scale changes the equation entirely. A few cameras targeting specific criminal investigations is one thing. Constant mass collection of vehicle data is something very different.

That distinction is beginning to resonate with the public.

Bipartisan backlash

In Pine Plains, New York, residents erupted after discovering plans to install Flock Safety cameras without public approval. Town meetings quickly turned contentious after reports surfaced that officials had tried to minimize public attention around the rollout. Residents demanded answers, and eventually the proposal collapsed under public pressure.

What’s striking is that Pine Plains is a town of only about 2,200 people.

This is no longer just a debate happening in large cities with major crime problems. Smaller communities are beginning to push back too.

And the backlash is becoming bipartisan.

Conservative-led states including Montana, Idaho, and Arkansas have recently enacted laws restricting how governments can access or retain certain surveillance data. At the same time, Democratic-led cities in states including Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, and Washington have terminated or reconsidered contracts with Flock Safety over privacy concerns.

No context

The concern goes beyond ordinary policing.

Civil liberties groups like the ACLU argue that once large-scale tracking systems exist, the data can easily be shared across agencies and repurposed far beyond the original justification. Reports have already surfaced showing local agencies conducting searches connected to federal immigration enforcement requests.

That’s where the conversation changes.

Law enforcement requires judgment. Context matters. Algorithms don’t understand context — they simply record and flag behavior mechanically.

And modern automatic license plate reader systems do far more than issue tickets.

Over time, they can reveal where people work, worship, shop, protest, or whom they regularly associate with. Once collected, that information rarely stays confined to one agency or one purpose.

RELATED: Flock Safety: Is any driver safe from its AI-powered surveillance?

Anadolu/Getty Images

Court fight

The San Jose lawsuit argues that vehicle tracking data can already be shared across jurisdictions and searched broadly. Privacy advocates worry that such systems could eventually be used for purposes far beyond local policing.

That’s why the court fight matters.

If courts side with cities, expect rapid expansion: more cameras, more interconnected databases, and broader information sharing between agencies.

If courts push back, it could force lawmakers and cities to rethink how these systems operate — or whether they should operate at this scale at all.

Most Americans support law enforcement and want safer communities. But they also expect constitutional protections to keep pace with technology.

Right now, many residents feel those protections are lagging badly behind.

Cities are deploying powerful surveillance systems first and answering questions later. Oversight remains inconsistent, and public transparency is often limited.

That’s fueling distrust even among people who might otherwise support the technology.

I brake for mistakes

There’s also a practical problem policymakers rarely acknowledge: These systems are not infallible.

Databases can be hacked. Searches can be misused. False matches happen. And when systems scale rapidly, those risks scale with them.

Several lawsuits around the country already involve drivers who were stopped or investigated after incorrect plate matches or flawed data.

In Europe, camera-based enforcement has already expanded well beyond speeding tickets. Cities in the United Kingdom now use extensive automated camera systems tied to congestion charges, low-emissions zones, and traffic enforcement programs. Critics warn that once these systems become normalized, their use tends to expand.

Tracking the trackers

Expect more legal challenges ahead.

Expect more public fights at city council meetings.

And expect this issue to move increasingly into national politics as more Americans realize how much vehicle tracking technology has quietly expanded.

At its core, this debate is no longer just about traffic cameras or stolen cars.

It’s about whether Americans are comfortable living in a country where their movements on public roads can be continuously logged, stored, and searched without a warrant.

More and more people are starting to decide they aren’t.

​Flock safety, Law enforcement access, Law enforcement agencies, License plate reader, Lifestyle, Surveillance databases, Vehicle tracking data, Vehicle data collection, San jose, Align cars 

A 25-year-old man has been arrested after police said they found human remains buried in his backyard while they were searching for his missing father.

The Marion County Sheriff’s Office sought a search warrant for Andres Bahamon’s home in Dunnellon after he allegedly sent a photo of his dead father to his mother in Germany.

Investigators claimed to have found what they believe to be blood on the door frame, a bullet casing on the floor, and bullets inside the home.

The family of the man’s father, 43-year-old Andres Bahamon-Prada, said he had been missing since May 7, according to an arrest warrant, but police began searching for him on Saturday.

When they searched the home Monday, they found an area of freshly disturbed dirt and detected the odor of decomposition. Buried in the dirt was a large rolled-up carpet with human remains.

Investigators claimed to have found what they believe to be blood on the door frame, a bullet casing on the floor, and bullets inside the home, according to the arrest warrant.

Bahamon was identified as a person of interest and arrested on Monday. He was charged with tampering with evidence and held at the Marion County Jail with no bond.

The suspect’s mother had forwarded the alleged photo of the dead man to Bahamon-Prada’s mother and told her to call law enforcement. Bahamon also allegedly threatened to kill his mother when he found out the photo had been given to the police.

The victim’s mother also told police that Bahamon told her the victim was “evil” and a “junkie.”

The suspect was located at the RaceTrac gas station in Ocala.

RELATED: Video shows what happens when a man tries to carjack an armed dad in Texas — it does not end well for him

Police said they are searching for the father’s missing car, a silver 2007 Infinity M35, and believe the car may have important evidence in the case.

Police have not yet identified to the remains.

Anyone with information related to the missing car is urged to contact the Marion County Sheriff’s Office.

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​Dead father, Florida man, Gruesome discovery, Human remains, Crime 

Los Angeles Police Department Detective Mark Fuhrman, who died last week at 74, played a central role in the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial. But even now, more than 30 years on, that needs clarification. Simpson, the former NFL star and actor, stood trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. In the courtroom, however, the real defendant often seemed to be Fuhrman.

Fuhrman collected key physical evidence, including the bloody glove. So Simpson’s defense team made the detective, not the accused killer, the trial’s main target. Fuhrman had denied using the “N-word,” but the defense proved otherwise and, from that point, argued that he could have planted evidence. On the other side, prosecutor Marcia Clark looked overmatched, and Christopher Darden did little better.

Mark Fuhrman can rest in peace knowing he was right all along.

As a stringer for the Washington Times, I was at the courthouse for the verdict. An airplane circled above towing a banner that read, “If it does not fit you must acquit — bulls**t.” I believed Simpson was guilty, but when the acquittal came down, I felt some relief. This was Los Angeles, where many people believe police do nothing but harass, beat, and kill black people. When that narrative takes hold, the default response is to burn down the city. The gangs were ready. For plenty of others, the verdict was a joke.

Jay Leno joked about Simpson’s new show, “My So-Called Knife,” while others volunteered to help O.J. “find the real killer.” As Fox News later noted, Fuhrman was convicted of perjury, making him the only person connected to the case who was convicted of a crime related to the trial. Yet many of his colleagues still regarded him as a strong detective, and later events helped explain why.

In 1998, Fuhrman published “Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley?” The victim, a 15-year-old girl, was beaten to death with a golf club in 1975. Fuhrman showed how Greenwich police had effectively acted as a private security force for the wealthy Skakel family. They were also badly out of their depth on a murder case and botched the investigation, especially the crime scene.

The murder weapon, a 6-iron, came from a set owned by the Skakels. The evidence pointed strongly to someone in the family. Michael Skakel, then 15, had a reputation for violent behavior, giving Martha reason to fear him. In 2002, he was sentenced to 20 years to life for her murder.

But the Skakels are related to the Kennedys, and in 2003 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote a lengthy article for the Atlantic arguing that Michael was innocent and his conviction and imprisonment were “a miscarriage of justice.”

RELATED: Former LAPD detective: Political correctness and justice are not compatible

KEN LUBAS/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

In 2018, the Connecticut Supreme Court overturned Skakel’s conviction, ruling that his attorney had failed to present alibi evidence effectively. In 2020, a state prosecutor announced that Skakel would not be retried, and the murder charge was dropped.

Skakel then sued the prosecution, and in 2026 he is still denouncing “bold-faced lies.” The Moxley family have never wavered in their belief that Michael Skakel killed Martha, much as the Goldman family never wavered about O.J. Simpson.

In 1997, a jury found Simpson liable in a civil wrongful-death case. In 2007, a federal judge awarded the Goldman family rights to “If I Did It” to help satisfy the $38 million judgment against Simpson. Simpson died in 2024 at 76.

The Moxley case led Fuhrman to ask whether America has “two systems of justice in this country, one for the rich and another for the rest of us.” The same question hovered over the Simpson case.

Mark Fuhrman can rest in peace knowing he was more right than wrong.

​Bloody glove, Jay leno, Kennedys, Los angeles police department, Mark fuhrman, Martha moxley, Michael skakel, Murder trial, Nicole brown simpson, Oj simpson, Perjury conviction, Robert f kennedy jr, Ron goldman, Washington times, Wrongful death, Two systems, Law and order, Racism accusation, Racism, Los angeles, Opinion & analysis 

For the past two years, one image has circulated among defense analysts: a U.S. Navy destroyer firing a Standard Missile-2, which costs about $2.1 million, to intercept a Houthi drone that likely cost $2,000.

Nobody in that chain made a bad decision. The ship had to be defended. But the Navy has now fired more than 200 such missiles in the Red Sea since late 2023 at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Project that math onto future conflicts — Taiwan, the Baltics, the Persian Gulf — and the picture gets alarming fast.

Sophistication matters. Volume matters more. Flexibility may matter most of all.

The standard answer is to demand better technology: lasers, interceptor drones, smarter jamming. But that misses what Ukraine has shown over three years of the largest sustained drone war in history. Much of the technology needed to defeat cheap drones at reasonable cost already exists. What America lacks is the doctrine, procurement flexibility, and industrial base to field it at scale.

What defenders need is simpler: distributed sensors, disciplined targeting, and layered defenses that match the cheapest effective response to each threat.

Ukraine now produces about 1,500 interceptor drones per day. They cost $1,200 and $4,700 apiece, a fraction of the $29,100 to $46,520 Shahed drones they destroy. One in three Russian aerial threats over Ukraine is now brought down by an interceptor drone rather than a missile. Ukraine’s overall interception rate sits around 80%, achieved not through Patriot batteries alone but through layers of cheap, rapidly iterated hardware built by 450 domestic manufacturers.

Ukraine’s advantage is not just volume. It is decentralization. Units, volunteers, and defense-tech firms operate in a flexible ecosystem that lets them adapt systems to terrain, weather, and enemy tactics as conditions change.

The American model moves the other way: centralized requirements, standardized programs, and long acquisition cycles. That system can produce extraordinary weapons. It cannot adapt when the battlefield changes faster than the program office. The United States faces different constraints, especially at sea and across global commitments, but the underlying economics do not change.

As of 2022, the United States was producing roughly 500 to 600 Patriot missiles per year. That stock can be burned through in weeks during a high-intensity conflict. This is not a missile-design flaw. It is the result of three decades of underinvestment in manufacturing capacity and a procurement system optimized for sophistication over volume. America still buys platforms better than it buys kill chains — the linked system of sensors, decisions, and interceptors — and counter-drone defense demands the reverse.

Meanwhile, Russia, working from Iranian Shahed blueprints, scaled launches to more than 44,000 in the first 10 months of 2025, four times the previous year’s rate. The United States is now in an industrial competition and, on current trajectory, losing it on volume.

RELATED: The combination that can renew America’s defense industry

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The tactical lessons from Ukraine are hardly mysterious. Detect early, match the weapon to the threat, and keep defenses mobile. Ukraine’s mobile fire groups — pickup trucks with machine guns and thermal imagers — proved effective enough that Russia rushed to copy them, with limited success. Israel’s Iron Beam laser intercepts threats at roughly $2 to $5 per shot. These systems work.

The problem is that “works in Ukraine” and “enters U.S. inventory at scale” are separated by an acquisition process that takes years, prizes exquisite performance over adequate volume, and was never designed for six-week innovation cycles.

The 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh offers another warning. Armenia’s air defenses collapsed not because drones are invincible, but because Armenia lacked modern, layered defenses. Institutional neglect, not technological inevitability, proved decisive.

None of this means expensive interceptors are obsolete. Advanced threats still require advanced interceptors. And as CSIS has noted, a $2 million missile protecting a $2 billion ship and its crew is rational. The point is not to abandon high-end systems. It is to stop treating them as the first and only answer to every aerial threat and to build the lower tiers of the defense stack with the same urgency we bring to the top.

That means procurement reform that many defense insiders regard as somewhere between very hard and politically impossible. It means accepting lower unit performance in exchange for higher production volume, a trade the Pentagon’s acquisition culture instinctively resists. It means pressuring major defense contractors to share production with smaller, faster manufacturers.

Sophistication matters. Volume matters more. Flexibility may matter most of all.

Ukraine learned that lesson under bombardment, because it had no choice. The United States still has the luxury of learning it in advance.

The danger is that luxury breeds delay.

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On May 8, the U.S. Department of War released an initial batch of over 160 never-before-seen declassified UAP/UFO files, including photos, videos, and reports spanning decades. Additional files are set to be released periodically as more documents are reviewed.

The Christian response to the ongoing file dump has been overwhelmingly cautionary, with several prominent evangelical leaders and figures interpreting the phenomena as demonic rather than extraterrestrial. Many have expressed concern that these revelations could shake foundational beliefs about creation or lead to spiritual confusion.

Rick Burgess, BlazeTV host of the spiritual warfare podcast “Strange Encounters,” is among those concerned that these “alien” files could lead believers astray.

Of all the Christian responses to the UFO files Rick has seen, Rick believes Josh Howerton, senior pastor of Lakepointe Church in Dallas, Texas, has had the best.

He plays a viral clip of Howerton’s biblical response of the file dump and the concept of extraterrestrial life.

“If extraterrestrial life were discovered, that does not destroy your faith,” he declared, saying that Scripture uses the plural (heavens) when talking about God creating the cosmos.

Howerton explained that biblical writers understood there to be “three heavens” — “the sky where the clouds are … outer space, and … actual heaven — throne room of God.”

“So when Colossians 1 says that ‘He created all things in the heavens,’ if there were things that He created in the second heavens (outer space), well, hey guys, we have a category for that. They’re called angels and demons,” he clarified.

“What a lot of people may be calling aliens, the Bible might call things like cherubim, seraphim, angels, archangels, thrones, principalities, demons, and powers,” he added, noting that Satan is unironically referred to in Ephesians 2 as “the prince of the powers of the air.”

Saying that Jesus warned the end of days would mirror those of Noah, Howerton urged Christians to avoid getting sucked into the UFO/alien conversation: “If [demons are] … what we believe [aliens] are, I’m not going to mess with that stuff. One of Satan’s strategies is to get people to devote themselves to myths and endless speculation. … What’s the main thing? To know Christ, live free, and change the world for God’s glory. Don’t start giving level eight attention to things of level 0.002 importance.”

Rick calls Howerton’s response “excellent.”

“Don’t forget that Lucifer and all the demons that went with him, they are supernatural beings. They are not human, and apparently in that supernatural world, angels and demons can do things and appear in various images, things that human beings cannot do,” he reiterates.

Rick believes that Satan and his forces are going to use these UFO/alien files to “rattle the church” and make people “doubt that God exists.”

“There is a great deception coming,” he warns.

To hear Rick’s full breakdown, watch the episode above.

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