What is wrong with man? Every political philosophy begins with an answer to that question. Scripture’s answer changes everything.

As New York celebrated the victories of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s endorsed candidates this week, I recalled something he said after his own victory last fall: “Praise be to Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful.” Predictably, much of the conversation has centered on his politics and, as we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, his public invocation of Allah.

Government can restrain the effects of evil. It cannot regenerate the human heart.

Those discussions are important, of course. But I found myself thinking about something else.

Gratitude reveals theology because we instinctively thank the one we believe governs reality. Some thank fortune. Some thank the market. Some thank government. Some thank the universe. Some thank themselves.

Our gratitude reveals what we ultimately believe about reality.

New York’s mayor publicly thanking Allah does more than express personal devotion. He is acknowledging a theological authority. Theology never stays inside the sanctuary. Eventually, it walks into the courtroom, the classroom, the legislature — and the voting booth.

Theology inevitably shapes our understanding of human nature. That understanding eventually produces a political philosophy.

Most Americans assume we are arguing about taxes, health care, immigration, education, or economics. We are not. Beneath every political argument lies another question.

What is wrong with man?

Every political philosophy answers it.

If man is basically good, then his deepest problem lies outside himself. The system is broken. The economy is broken. The institutions are broken. Change the system, and people should improve with it.

That assumption helps explain socialism’s enduring appeal. If people are basically good but trapped inside unjust structures, then changing those structures becomes the highest moral priority. Build a better system, and society should improve.

Scripture begins somewhere else.

Jeremiah addresses the heart: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick.” Jesus locates murder, theft, adultery, greed, envy, and slander in the heart as well. Paul affirms the same conclusion when he writes in Romans that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

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If Scripture is right, no political system can solve mankind’s deepest problem.

The reformers understood that sin had not merely damaged humanity but corrupted every faculty of our being. We still bear God’s image and remain capable of astonishing courage, creativity, generosity, and sacrifice. But we are also fallen.

Those convictions profoundly influenced the political imagination of the men who framed the Constitution. The framers did not write the Constitution for basically good people. They wrote one for sinners.

They divided power through checks and balances because they knew power does not sanctify fallen people. It magnifies them.

Their greatest political achievement was not trusting themselves. As a result, the framers collectively produced a document better than they were.

Checks and balances are not expressions of political optimism. They reflect theological realism. They acknowledge that no office, no election, and no majority vote can cure what Jeremiah identified in the human heart.

The same view of human nature should shape how we think about wealth. Whenever someone accumulates great wealth, someone inevitably says, “Think what we could do with all that money.”

Elon Musk’s extraordinary wealth has simply made that argument impossible to ignore.

“Think what we could do with all that money.”

Notice what is quietly assumed. We imagine our compassion is purer, our judgment sounder, and our motives less corrupted.

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When Mary poured perfume worth nearly a year’s wages on Jesus’ feet, Judas objected.

“Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?”

On the surface, it sounds compassionate, practical, even responsible. Then the apostle John adds one sentence that changes everything.

“He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief.”

John does not debate Judas’ proposal. He exposes Judas’ motive.

There is a kind of generosity that costs us nothing because it spends someone else’s resources. Judas voiced it. John exposed it. Every generation repeats it.

Before we recognize Judas in someone else’s politics, we ought to recognize him in ourselves.

When I stand before God, he will not ask me what others did with their resources. He will ask what I did with mine.

That question reaches far beyond money. It reaches into our families, churches, communities, opportunities, and even our suffering. How we steward each of them reveals our theology.

Politics asks, “Who should control this?” Stewardship asks, “Lord, what would you have me do with what you have entrusted to me today?”

Good government, the rule of law, checks and balances — all of those things matter. But they can only restrain the effects of what Scripture says is already there. They cannot create what Scripture says is missing.

Government bears the sword. Christ bore the cross.

Government can restrain the effects of evil. It cannot regenerate the human heart.

Only the gospel can make sinners new.

We do not merely need a better system. We need a new heart.

​Opinion & analysis, Zohran mamdani, Political philosophy, Religion, Faith, Gospel, Human nature, Elon musk, Judas iscariot, Socialism, Elections 

Lawmakers never tire of devising new ways to undermine digital privacy and First Amendment rights, always under the guise of “protecting kids.”

The KIDS Act — the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act — is the latest piece of smug political branding and virtue-signaling to dress up heavy-handed federal overreach in the gentle language of child welfare. Lawmakers considering this legislation should ask a simple question: Could its broad and vague provisions someday be wielded by their political opponents to muzzle speech they favor?

Children deserve real and meaningful protection in the digital age. But true safety comes from empowering parents and holding actual bad actors accountable under existing laws.

Congress should reject the KIDS Act and defend the constitutional rights of all Americans.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) and Ranking Member Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) claim this latest “safety package” is about “empowering parents, establishing safety as a default, strengthening privacy for children and teens, increasing transparency around data brokers, and holding Big Tech accountable.”

Washington has heard this pitch before. Wide-ranging digital legislation is routinely sold as a privacy measure even when it undermines privacy.

As Taxpayers Protection Alliance research director David McGarry wrote in December, “Consensus [around digital safety legislation] remains elusive, and for good reason. The regulation of the internet is shot through with difficulties.”

The Kids Online Safety Act proves the point. McGarry observed, “Seeing the imprudence and constitutional vulnerabilities of the bill, its supporters have continuously trimmed and reshaped the legislation, each time declaring that this time — finally — the bill had been rid of its deficiencies. Each time, however, the amendments proved wanting, and further efforts to amend KOSA were undertaken.”

That analysis applies just as well to the current version of KOSA included in the KIDS Act.

Supporters claim the latest version removes the “duty of care” requirement that would have forced platforms to withhold poorly defined categories of online content from underage users. But the bill still targets broad categories of constitutionally protected speech.

Digital platforms are instructed to “establish, implement, maintain, and enforce reasonable policies, practices, and procedures” addressing supposed harms to minors, including the “use of … alcohol”; “threats of physical violence so severe, pervasive, or objectively offensive that such threats impact a major life activity of a minor”; and “financial harm caused by deceptive practices.”

RELATED: Digital tyrants want your face, your ID … and your freedom

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Those terms are vague and dangerously elastic. What counts as the “use” of alcohol? Could a platform face scrutiny for allowing video clips featuring champagne toasts? Could a joke between friends be treated as a threat of physical violence? Because “deceptive” remains undefined, virtually any online transaction or promoted product could become a federal enforcement hook.

This minefield of liability makes a mockery of the First Amendment and chills expression across the digital domain.

The bill’s most insidious provision involves age verification.

On paper, the KIDS Act says it does not mandate age verification. That language sounds reassuring, but it functions as a legislative bait and switch. The bill imposes a legal standard holding tech platforms liable for content if they “know or should have known” a user’s age.

Consider the real-world meaning of “should have known.” If a company faces massive legal penalties or federal lawsuits for failing to determine a user’s age, it will feel compelled to verify the identity of everyone who logs on — children and adults alike.

That creates a de facto mandate requiring adults to upload driver’s licenses, biometric data, or government IDs just to read a news article, browse a forum, or use a search engine. Web users would be asked to hand over their most sensitive personal information to corporate databases that have repeatedly proved vulnerable to data breaches and foreign hackers.

Age verification on this scale is not a “best practice,” as the bill’s language suggests. It is constitutional malpractice.

The KIDS Act also responds to alleged online harms by expanding federal bureaucracy and spending more taxpayer dollars. It establishes a asinine array of busywork for busybodies: Federal Trade Commission and Health and Human Services studies, a four-year National Institutes of Health longitudinal study, public awareness campaigns, and a new “Kids Internet Safety Partnership” inside the Department of Commerce.

RELATED: Age verification laws do not make us safer

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This amounts to a major expansion of taxpayer-funded bureaucracy tasked with creating a “playbook” for more age verification.

Supporters will note that lawmakers stripped the highly controversial “duty of care” provision from previous versions of KOSA and retained explicit protections for data encryption. But removing the worst elements of an inherently broken bill does not transform it into good policy.

Children deserve real and meaningful protection in the digital age. But true safety comes from empowering parents with robust tools, advancing media literacy, and holding actual bad actors accountable under existing criminal laws.

It does not come from turning the internet into a surveillance state where adults must show their papers to browse the web.

Congress must reject the KIDS Act and protect both the Constitution and the digital domain.

​Age verification, Big tech, Child welfare, Congress, Digital privacy, First amendment, Kids act, Online safety, Opinion & analysis, Parents, Surveillance state 

Blaze News readers spotted this problem from a mile away when we covered Ring’s creepy AI-powered surveillance features earlier this year. Ring should have seen it coming too, given the company’s penchant for spying on everything within viewing distance of its nearest camera — at least that’s what this new class-action lawsuit alleges. According to the suit, Amazon Ring is collecting and storing photos of passersby without their consent, and if the court finds for the plaintiff, the company will pay up to the tune of $5 million.

The lawsuit

In the class-action lawsuit filed by a Virginia man, Ring is charged with violating the privacy of millions of Americans through AI-powered facial recognition and analysis features included in many of its cameras embedded in video doorbells, mounted outdoors, and even placed inside homes.

The sad truth of the modern world is that mass surveillance is nothing new.

The suit specifically goes after Ring’s Familiar Faces feature, which is designed to detect the faces of “friends, family, and frequent visitors over time.” Once a familiar face is identified, Ring owners receive a notification that tells them which person is at the door.

In order to pull off this trick, Ring cameras allegedly must scan the faces of everyone who walks by and compare them with the facial images saved in its system. This includes friends and family members as well as complete strangers who have no idea that the camera mounted nearby is analyzing their likeness with AI. Just like that, a feature built for user personalization is now a potential tool for creating AI-generated profiles of vast numbers of unwitting Americans who did not agree to participate in Ring’s alleged public surveillance operation.

Even more problems for Ring

The lawsuit doesn’t even take into account Ring’s known spy-like feature called Search Party. Billed as a helpful tool to find lost pets, Search Party taps into a vast network of Ring cameras in a specific area to scan for lost dogs, cats, and other critters, identify them, and help owners bring them back home.

The concern here is that finding lost pets is merely the tip of the iceberg. If Ring’s surveillance dragnet can find animals, it can also scan for people, subverting privacy and crossing ethical boundaries. Even worse, a leaked email from Ring founder Jamie Siminoff admitted that mass surveillance was the true purpose of Search Party all along, concealed under the guise of stopping crime in neighborhoods.

According to Siminoff, Ring doesn’t use captured footage without users’ consent, stressing that “sharing has always been the camera owner’s choice.” This is only half true. While Familiar Faces is locked behind a manual setup process that requires users to opt in, Search Party is enabled on supported cameras by default; you must disable it manually in the Ring app to limit Ring’s spying capabilities.

RELATED: Shadowy companies are selling access to your smart TV — and its data

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Unfortunately, if the allegations are true, the anonymous people who walk in front of Ring cameras with Familiar Faces or Search Party enabled don’t get a choice in the matter, and images of these people are recorded, stored, and analyzed directly on Ring’s servers, often without their knowledge. Absent opt-in or opt-out options for these pedestrians, we come to the crux of the lawsuit.

Today’s spyware could be even more dangerous with AI

The sad truth of the modern world is that mass surveillance is nothing new. CCTV, which was first deployed in Nazi Germany to watch V-2 rocket launches from a safe distance during World War II, became a mainstay of American public security by the 1980s. Past is prologue. Fast-forward 40 years, and the powers that be have found an array of creative ways to spy on us — warrantless FISA investigations, smart TVs, smart glasses, and the list goes on.

Throughout these privacy violations, mass surveillance captured plenty of footage, but it used to take time and effort for real people to pore through it all and give it meaning. Today, AI can do all the image analyzing for governments, corporations, and bad actors in record time, allowing underground organizations to identify and monitor Americans so efficiently that it would make Communist China blush. The facade of privacy and online anonymity in America is effectively gone.

Thankfully, we still have some rights in this country, and one way we hold offenders accountable and test claims for truth is through our legal system. The class-action lawsuit against Ring was filed in June, and now the two parties have the option to settle or go to trial. While we wait, you can read the complete lawsuit here.

​Tech 

A Republican-sponsored bill wants to make sure no money goes toward censoring Americans’ speech online.

Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.) is credited with making key additions to the text that people who feel they have been blacklisted online will surely appreciate.

Prohibitions on any form of deplatforming, deboosting, demonetizing.

The appropriations bill, H.R. 8595, contains text specifically designed to prevent NGOs and nonprofits from aiding tech companies in online censorship.

This includes prohibitions on any form of deplatforming, deboosting, demonetizing, suppressing, or otherwise penalizing lawful speech online in the United States.

Funds also cannot be used to affect advertising, sponsorship, payment, or revenues on the basis of lawful online speech.

Additionally, no programs can help, directly or indirectly, “create, disseminate, share, or operationalize any blacklist or similar designation system.”

Mike Benz, director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, described portions of the bill as prohibiting NGOs, contractors, or subcontractors from supporting or helping a foreign government looking to wield censorship laws on platforms like X, Meta, Google, or YouTube.

RELATED: The empire cannot drone-strike its way out of decline

Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg/Getty Images

However, among many of the appropriations in the bill, which includes money to the Offices of Inspector General, the State Department, and the Treasury Department, are appropriations to a series of organizations most Americans are likely are not aware of.

Many of these organizations are spending money in a way most Republicans would not approve of either, even if they are not even in the realm of censorship.

This includes appropriations for the National Endowment for Democracy, which has a stated goal of supporting “projects of nongovernmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 100 countries.”

The organization’s board of directors includes several sitting U.S. House members and senators.

Appropriations also go to the Israeli Arab Scholarship Program, which “funds scholarships for Israeli Arabs to attend institutions of higher education in the United States.”

RELATED: DYSTOPIA NOW? UK will scan ‘all content’ on users’ phones without face scan or uploaded ID

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

The Center for Middle Eastern-Western Dialogue Trust Fund also gets support in the bill, an organization that has historically served as “a bridge between Iranian and U.S. scholars and experts by including Iranian citizens in its conferences when possible.”

It also pushes dialogue on topics including “the Caspian Sea and its neighbors, unity and diversity in Iraq, and the future of Afghanistan.”

Other appropriations are provided to the East-West Center, which has a “lush 21-acre campus” in Hawaii that “promotes better relations and understanding among the people and nations of the United States, Asia, and the Pacific.”

At the same time, the Asia Foundation has a “Strategy 2030” program that aims to “build inclusive, future-ready economies.”

The House will hold a final passage vote on the bill this week.

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​News, Gop, Republicans, Foreign aid, Ngos, Nonprofits, Social media, Tech 

A Florida man arrested for allegedly bragging about sexually abusing his young foster child also fostered 23 other young boys with his gay husband, police say.

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said in a media briefing that 51-year-old John David Ballard was arrested after police received a cyber tip on May 7.

‘By his own statements, he was using these kids for his sexual pleasure.’

Ballard had allegedly admitted on the messaging app Kik that he had been sexually abusing the 7-year-old boy in his care.

Gualtieri said the messages were explicit, graphic, and “gross.”

Ballard allegedly admitted to the conversations to deputies when they served a search warrant on his phone in June. He also told officers that he’s “into some really weird stuff” after they found videos of bestiality on his phone, according to police.

Deputies allegedly found dozens of graphic child pornography images that included victims as young as 2 months old.

The investigation expanded when investigators discovered that Ballard and his husband, Bradley Borsuk, were very active in the foster community. The couple had fostered 23 young boys between 2017 and 2023 and had adopted five children between 2015 and 2023, according to police.

All of those boys were between ages 4 and 12 years old.

Gualtieri said officers had spoken to most of the boys, some of whom were now young men, and said some had described “concerning behavior” in the ongoing investigation.

Some allegedly said that Ballard would punish them by making them undress and stand in front of a window, and others said Ballard watched them take baths or showers.

Gualtieri said Ballard and his husband had even authored a book described as an adoption journal.

On June 17, Ballard was arrested and charged with 20 counts of possession of child pornography and five counts of sexual activity involving animals.

Ballard’s husband has not yet been arrested, and authorities are still considering what to do with the four adoptive children they have living in their home.

RELATED: Woman admits to horrific child sex abuse charges and bestiality — will testify against husband

“This is really a very difficult case, because it involved the betrayal of trust that the Child Welfare System puts into people who volunteer to help the most vulnerable among us. And those are children who have been abused, abandoned, and neglected,” the sheriff said.

“One thing that is really maddening about the situation is the fraud that Ballard committed on others by holding himself out as this model foster and adoptive parent,” Gualtieri added. “By his own statements, he was using these kids for his sexual pleasure.

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​Florida man, Foster children, Foster child abuse, Child sex abuse, Gay couple, Lgbtq, Crime 

The day-to-day status of negotiations may be uncertain, but the Trump administration appears to be doing everything it can to reach a deal and end the conflict with Iran.

The war had solid support from Trump’s more Fox News-oriented voters, but it remained unpopular with much of the country. It cost Trump several high-profile supporters. It also earned him the favor of political operators who previously despised him. Several figures who had declared themselves “Never Trump” suddenly discovered a strange new respect for the president once they believed he was willing to launch another regime-change war in the Middle East.

Stop allying with neoconservatives. They will always betray you in the end.

Those fair-weather allies are now melting down over the prospect of peace between America and Iran.

In his farewell address, George Washington warned the fledgling republic that foreign entanglements were dangerous to freedom and independence. He encouraged commerce with all nations but cautioned against permanent alliances and favored nations. Washington understood that favoritism toward a foreign power would invite foreign influence and lead some citizens to mistake loyalty to an ally for loyalty to the United States.

No event has vindicated that warning more clearly than the war with Iran.

Trump immediately stood out in conservative politics by taking three positions that were popular with the base and dangerous to the establishment. He opposed open borders, unfettered trade, and endless regime-change wars.

Republican politicians, conservative pundits, and Washington think tanks loathed him for all three positions, but especially for the third. Endless conflict created job security and enormous income streams for permanent Washington. The war class did not appreciate a reality television star barging in and threatening the gravy train.

Many neoconservatives abandoned the GOP once they realized Trump was not going away. Others stayed because the war-hawk establishment had deep roots in the Republican Party. They realized they could gain more influence by pretending to convert to the MAGA movement and working from within to steer policy.

Several figures who swore they would never support Trump began presenting themselves as his greatest champions, hoping they could define what MAGA should become.

When the war with Iran began, these neoconservative champions viciously attacked anyone who pointed out that the conflict contradicted Trump’s previous foreign policy. They invented slurs to brand opponents as traitors to the president and insisted that total ideological conformity was the only acceptable position.

RELATED: The empire cannot drone-strike its way out of decline

ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

The strategy worked for a time. It drove many anti-interventionists away from their previous support for Trump. That made it even more revealing when Trump moved to end the conflict and his new allies suddenly attacked him in blind rage.

America and Israel entered the conflict with very different goals. For the United States, the only real concern was preventing Iran from gaining the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. It is unlikely an Iranian nuke could threaten the U.S. directly, but keeping hostile regimes from obtaining that capacity is a legitimate goal.

Israel saw Iran differently. For Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran was an existential threat that had to be taken off the table entirely. His goal was always to collapse the current Iranian regime, replace it, or let the country become a failed state.

As Marco Rubio indicated after the war began, Israel insisted on starting the fight knowing it would force the United States to join. The two allies were out of step from the beginning, so it is no surprise that Netanyahu has done everything possible to disrupt the peace process and achieve every military objective he can while still under the protection of American arms.

The reaction in Israel to Trump’s pursuit of peace has not been gratitude. The president’s popularity there has plummeted, and headlines accusing him of betraying Israel have appeared across the country’s newspapers. One Israeli media figure even suggested America deserved another 9/11-style terror attack so the public would be frightened back into fighting Iran.

Hardcore Israel supporters in America have reacted no better. Figures such as Ben Shapiro, who briefly departed the Never Trump camp to push for war, are now turning back against Trump. At times they try to hide their anger by blaming Vice President JD Vance for the peace deal, but no one is fooled.

Neocons pushed relentlessly for a conflict that had little to do with American interests. Once they got their war, they expected military escalation to force Trump into the wider regime-change conflict they desperately desired.

Very few presidents would have had the fortitude to exit the Iran war after realizing it was unwise. Trump did. The neoconservatives will never forgive him for that outrage.

It turns out all the rhetoric about loyalty to Trump was a farce. The neoconservatives always hated Trump and his voters, despite their change in tone after his second election. Many pundits who praised Trump’s decision to bomb Iran had tried to replace him with Ron DeSantis in the primary. The people who believed their rhetoric and followed their lead were foolish. They are notably silent now that the neoconservatives are losing their minds and turning on the president.

RELATED: A real nation knows who is in and who is out

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What should we learn from this unwise detour into foreign adventurism?

First, Americans have little interest in extended foreign conflicts. They elected Trump to address crises at home, not to fix the Middle East.

Second, Washington was right about entangling alliances. Israel is its own country with its own priorities. It cares about the United States to the extent that America helps advance those priorities. Entering a war with an ally that does not share your interests is foolish.

Third, neoconservatives are not domestic political allies. They have no loyalty to Trump or the MAGA base and will turn on both the moment either stops serving their purposes.

The lesson is not complicated, but it is expensive. Movements that cannot distinguish temporary agreement from real alliance eventually wake up serving someone else’s agenda in wars they never wanted to fight at all.

Stop allying with neoconservatives. They will always betray you in the end.

​Opinion & analysis, Donald trump, Iran, War, Peace, Negotiation, Neocons, George washington, Farewell address, Congress, Maga, America first, Foreign policy 

Preserving the continuity, vitality, and quality of life of exurban and rural red America should be a top priority for conservative policymakers.

Instead, red America faces a multifront assault on land use and development. Corrupt local Republican politicians and their developer donors are pushing data centers, solar and wind farms, and Section 8 housing for foreign labor. Now, Congress has sent President Trump a uniparty housing bill — the Obamacare of housing — that will open the floodgates for the federal government, globalists, and special interests to force more of that transformation on red communities.

Conservatives need communities that remain intact, counties that can govern themselves, and neighborhoods that are not remade by federal bribes and developer schemes.

After years of negotiations, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.) just sent the largest housing bill in recent memory to the president’s desk. Only five Senate Republicans voted against it. Every Democrat supported it. Trump had signaled he would sign the bill — but only after Congress passes the SAVE America Act.

The bill is being sold as a magic wand to lower housing prices. In reality, it expands the Housing and Urban Development and Federal Housing Administration programs that helped fuel the housing bubble through artificial subsidies.

Conservatives are being told the bill bars corporate ownership of residential homes. But that provision was tacked on at the 11th hour, accounts for only 19 of the bill’s 381 pages, and is riddled with loopholes. Worse, the bill’s main provisions incentivize overdevelopment and Section 8 expansion in red America, negating whatever limited utility the corporate ownership provision might have.

The result is more social transformation than the partial corporate ownership ban claims to prevent.

Obama-style zoning incentives

Section 107 sets the tone by creating a federal zoning standard for “directing local reforms,” including “mechanisms to encourage adoption” of loose zoning rules — all in the name of increasing housing inventory. It also creates a national standard for developers and builders to request special zoning and appeal denials of variances.

That may sound appealing when discussing onerous regulations in blue states. But in red America, already overbuilt since COVID, this bill will create a federal standard that pressures communities to drop one of their few remaining tools of self-defense against the transformation of their neighborhoods.

The rest of the bill offers incentives to communities that follow this national standard. Inevitably, that will encourage localities to rezone not just for housing but also for other uses, including data centers.

HUD should not exist. It certainly should not dictate zoning policy to rural America.

The zoning guidelines would push communities to “reduce minimum lot sizes and setbacks,” increase the number of “duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes,” and promote “transit-oriented development.” Nothing good will come from federal incentives that effectively impose Section 8-style housing and density mandates on suburbs, exurbs, and rural towns.

RELATED: Another tax credit won’t fix what Sunday schools used to teach

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Grant money as a weapon

Ask any conservative living in red America under RINO leadership — which describes much of America — and he will tell you that one of the greatest threats to the character of his county comes from developers working with corporatist GOP politicians, usually their donors, to transform the neighborhood through overdevelopment.

This bill does not directly mandate adoption of the zoning standards. It does something almost as dangerous: It offers local communities and developers incentives that will function like a mandate.

Section 207, written by pro-Hamas Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), creates new competitive HUD grants for states, localities, tribes, and other entities for planning, zoning reform, barrier reduction, and implementation to increase “affordable” housing supply.

Some grants will go toward reducing environmental barriers, which is how Warren got Republicans to support the bill. But much of the remaining criteria is rooted in urbanizing more of America.

The funds are contingent on adopting plans to rezone and “increase the availability of affordable housing and access to affordable housing.” In practice, this provision places a loaded gun to the head of communities that want to keep out Section 8. Nothing gets between local politicians and grant funds.

Section 208 goes further by granting funds to communities that have already demonstrated measurable progress in expanding housing supply at all costs. Eligibility criteria include localities that build more multiunit housing, reduce lot sizes, create “zoning overlays for mixed-income housing,” and use “local tax incentives or public financing for attainable housing.”

Want to densify your suburb and destroy single-family neighborhoods? This bill is for you.

Then comes the Community Development Block Grant program. Rather than following through on every Trump budget proposal’s promise to abolish this program, the bill expands it. Worse, it creates a zero-sum reallocation within the existing CDBG formula by shifting money from low-growth communities to high-growth communities.

Build more homes, and you get rewarded. Build fewer, and you get punished.

That will either shift more money to blue areas, which make up the lion’s share of places needing more inventory, or incentivize red areas to overdevelop.

Subsidizing the next bubble

No bad housing bill would be complete without provisions expanding the FHA’s authority to extend even more loans to people who cannot afford houses, thereby fueling the next housing bubble.

Section 213 allows the FHA to insure larger loans for apartment buildings, enabling more and bigger multifamily projects to be financed with FHA insurance.

Outside the Northeast, home prices are already beginning to tumble from COVID-era overbuilding, and builders are desperate to sell. In June, 35% of builders cut prices, while 62% used sales incentives to attract buyers. America does not need to expand HUD’s reach into local communities to incentivize what is already happening.

Ironically, this bill is being sold as a way to prevent corporations from transforming neighborhoods by purchasing too many homes. But almost every other provision accelerates an even greater transformation.

Section 1001 supposedly bans very large corporate investors from buying more single-family houses. But it carves out practical exceptions for new construction, build-to-rent developments, meaningful renovation programs, and certain pathways that help renters eventually buy homes.

In other words, the same corporations will enjoy even more subsidies to build Section 8 rentals in the suburbs under the bill’s extremely limited ban than they enjoyed before it.

RELATED: Home builders say immigration reform is essential to ease housing affordability crisis

Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

No one is home

This is why Congress should not rush through a bill of this magnitude on the suspension calendar without debate.

Then again, nobody is home in the so-called conservative movement to flag a bill this large. Obamacare could pass overnight, and the loudest voices on the right might not even notice.

The bill’s supporters claim they are solving a housing crisis. In reality, they are giving HUD, developers, corporate investors, and local Republican sellouts more tools to transform red America.

Conservatives do need homes. They need communities that remain intact, counties that can govern themselves, and neighborhoods that are not remade by federal bribes and developer schemes.

That is the home conservatives must ultimately construct. Where is the bill to expedite that construction?

​Affordable housing, Donald trump, Elizabeth warren, Housing and urban development, Obamacare, Opinion & analysis, Rural america, Section 8, Senate, Tim scott, Red america, Development, Grants 

When Trump won the presidency in 2024, several celebrities made good on their promise to evacuate the United States — but that’s not stopping them from coming back.

Rosie O’Donnell famously fled to Ireland with her 13-year-old child, Clay, immediately after Trump’s win, and returned this June for the Tony Awards.

While O’Donnell had no issues getting back into the States, she made it clear that she was “worried” that it would be “problematic” the first time she returned on a secret trip in February.

“I worried the first time I came back, whether that would be problematic, and I came alone without my child, who is 13 and has autism. She’s my youngest of five,” she told Page Six in an interview. “I wanted to make sure that if anything happened, it didn’t happen in her presence, so it was fine — as it should be.”

O’Donnell explained that Trump “can’t really arrest American citizens without cause” and speaking out against him is “using freedom speech” and “is not a reason to be arrested in America.”

BlazeTV host Jeff Fisher points out that O’Donnell also called Trump an “a-hole and a con man.”

“That’s so surprising for her,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray adds.

But O’Donnell isn’t the only one.

While Ellen DeGeneres also made a big show of moving to the U.K. after Trump’s election, she purchased land in California after the move.

“They’d already sold both their homes in Los Angeles, both their mansions in L.A.,” Gray explains, “and so they had to go back home, and they bought a new mansion in Los Angeles where she spent her birthday this year.”

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