Coldcard, one of the better-known hardware wallets in the Bitcoin world, shipped a firmware bug that weakened the secret keys protecting customers’ money. By Saturday afternoon, Galaxy Research had identified three waves of suspected theft totaling 1,367.05 Bitcoin, worth about $88.6 million, across 4,585 addresses.

That is the observed damage, not necessarily the final bill. Galaxy’s method spots a particular attacker’s habits on the public Bitcoin ledger. The researchers warn that another thief could change a few details and blend into ordinary wallet traffic, making additional thefts much harder to count. An address is not the same thing as a person, either, so 4,585 addresses does not mean 4,585 victims. The actual number of people robbed remains unknown.

The danger had not passed by Saturday evening. Galaxy warned that exploitation was ongoing and said it had sent roughly 600 suspected attacker holding addresses to federal investigators, compliance teams, and independent cyber investigators.

Coinkite says it must assume somebody used artificial intelligence.

Coldcard gave the same warning Sunday: “The threat remains real and ongoing”.

If your Coldcard generated the seed words for your wallet on affected firmware, do not assume that installing an update makes the existing wallet safe. It doesn’t. Coinkite, the company behind Coldcard, says users must install corrected firmware, create an entirely new seed, verify it, and move their Bitcoin.

If that’s you, move it carefully. Panic is how a security emergency becomes a second security emergency.

That’s the first lesson for us all.

What a Coldcard actually does

Bitcoin never sits inside a Coldcard. The coins remain on Bitcoin’s public ledger. The device protects the private keys that authorize a transaction, while a 12- or 24-word seed phrase is the master backup from which those keys can be recreated. Whoever can reconstruct that seed can spend the money. The Coldcard documentation explains that its devices generate BIP-39 seeds and derive wallets from them.

Coldcard appealed to the sort of Bitcoin owner who takes security seriously. It is Bitcoin-only, which keeps the codebase narrower. It can sign transactions while separated from an internet-connected computer, passing a partially signed Bitcoin transaction by MicroSD card or QR code. Its firmware can be inspected, and its current models use dedicated secure-element chips to guard secrets. Those features are the core of Coinkite’s security pitch, and they address real risks.

An air gap helps prevent malware on a laptop from reaching into the signing device and stealing a private key. The Coldcard can examine and sign a transaction without handing that key to the online machine. Signed transaction data comes back across the gap; the private key does not. That is how the company’s offline signing workflow is designed.

The air gap did not stop this attack.

The attacker did not need to connect to the Coldcard, crack its PIN, break into a safe, intercept a MicroSD card, or trick the owner into approving a transaction. The vulnerable wallets were in trouble from the moment their seed phrases were created.

The keys looked random. They weren’t random enough.

Bitcoin security depends on numbers so large and so unpredictable that guessing the right one is, for all practical purposes, impossible. A properly generated Coldcard seed was intended to have at least 128 bits of entropy. Think of entropy as the size of the field an attacker must search. At 128 bits, the field is absurdly large.

Coinkite now estimates that affected Mk2 and Mk3 seeds had roughly 40 bits of effective entropy. Later Mk4, Mk5, and Q devices mixed in additional material, but the company estimates that affected seeds from those models reached only about 72 bits. Coinkite published those preliminary figures in its technical account of the bug. Block’s independent engineering analysis is even less comforting: On later devices, only 32 bits from the secure-element digest reached the software generator’s state, and hashing the resulting output could not manufacture entropy that was never there.

RELATED: Your private chatbot data is at risk. Here’s what to watch for

Moor Studio/Getty Images

Here is the short version. In March 2021, Coinkite changed the code used to create wallet seeds while integrating the same elliptic-curve library used by Bitcoin Core. The cryptographic library was sound. The plumbing was not. A call that was supposed to reach the Coldcard’s hardware random-number generator instead resolved to MicroPython’s deterministic software fallback, seeded largely with a device identifier and timing values. Coinkite says the vulnerable change reached seed generation in its 4.x firmware; Block traces the underlying code change to March 1, 2021.

The software fallback supplied the rng_get() function the build expected, with the same signature as the intended implementation. The hardware code was present in the finished firmware, so earlier reviews confirmed that it existed. They did not verify that the seed-generation path actually reached it. A preprocessor check also asked whether a setting existed, not whether the setting was enabled. Nothing in the build process caught the mismatch, and seed creation kept calling the deterministic fallback. Coinkite’s explanation is unusually candid about how its review missed the failure.

That’s our second lesson. Even a savvy company doesn’t inherently rise to the security of the tech.

The code was available for inspection from the start. Coldcard’s March 2021 announcement even promoted reproducible builds that let developers compare the published source with the firmware binary. The vulnerable seed path remained in released products for more than five years.

With the search space cut down, an attacker could generate candidate seeds offline, derive their Bitcoin addresses, and compare them with the public blockchain. A match reveals a spendable key. No contact with the victim is required. Block describes a wallet address or public key as a validation oracle for candidate seeds.

Coinkite says it must assume somebody used artificial intelligence to inspect old versions of its public firmware and find the flaw. The company also says it had recently asked a leading AI model to review the code, and that model missed the bug.

Our third lesson is that all “leading” AI models are not the same.

After the bug became public, an Aug. 2 Reddit post supplied a vivid but limited demonstration. The poster said Claude Code found the broken path after receiving only a generic instruction to check for vulnerabilities and thinking for eight minutes. The screenshot shows the model distinguishing the correct hardware TRNG path from the broken ngu.random software PRNG path. It does not show the full prompt, model version, checked-out firmware revision, internet permissions, or complete session transcript. The post supports rapid AI-assisted reproduction, not a claim that Claude Code discovered the original exploit or that the thief used it.

Bitcoin Optech separately reports that several developers reproduced the attack with help from frontier AI models. AI involvement is plausible. The attacker’s identity and tools remain unknown.

‘I did everything right’

The ledger gives us totals. It does not show the years people spent building those balances.

Canadian entrepreneur Jonathan Goodman says 18.25245043 Bitcoin disappeared from his wallets between 9:36 and 9:43 p.m. on July 29. His Coldcard sat in a bank safe-deposit box, he said, while his backup keys were kept in a different safe. The device had never been connected to the internet. When he opened a watch-only wallet from his cottage, he saw the withdrawals. Goodman put the loss at more than $1.6 million Canadian and said he was filing reports with police and the Ontario Securities Commission.

“Perhaps the hardest part about this is that I did everything right,” he wrote.

Bitcoin to 1 Mil (@1MillionBTC2025) said 1.3 Bitcoin accumulated over seven years was gone; the post included no transaction record. Bitcoin commentator Oliver Velez said he followed “every accepted rule of Bitcoin self-custody” and still lost a material amount. These are public self-reports, not independently verified claims. They arrived amid the large pattern of theft Galaxy had already found on-chain.

One particularly grim account began on Reddit and then spread across X. A 39-year-old poster said he had spent eight years accumulating two Bitcoin as protection against inflation and hoped the money would provide a cushion before age 50. The Reddit post did not include a transaction ID, and commenters questioned its authenticity, so it should be treated as unverified. The story spread because it resembled losses that were already visible on-chain.

RELATED: Are you inhaling microplastics?

solar22/Getty Images

The rush to escape creates its own hazards. X user lunymoon13 said he moved funds toward a temporary hot wallet after hearing the warning, sent a successful test, and then discovered the remaining stack had been drained. The cause of that loss has not been established. Even with the clock running, verify the destination and backup before moving the rest.

The backlash includes people who did not lose funds. Chris Masterjohn said he had bought two Coldcards but never used them. Responding to a developer’s review of the commit history, he wrote, “Will never touch the company again.” The same post blamed competitive pettiness for the code change. The developer analysis documents the broken call path; it does not establish that motive.

Who is affected?

The important question is where the seed was created, not which device holds it today. Moving a weak Coldcard-generated seed into a Ledger, Trezor, software wallet, or newer Coldcard does not strengthen it. Block specifically warns that an exported seed remains vulnerable after import into another wallet.

Coinkite’s latest advisory identifies Mk2 or Mk3 firmware 4.0.1 through 4.1.9 as affected. Block’s engineering team includes version 4.0.0, which Coinkite publicly released on March 17, 2021, in the vulnerable range. That discrepancy should be resolved in the promised formal review. Until then, the safe course is to treat any Mk2 or Mk3 seed generated on a 4.x release before fixed version 4.2.0 as potentially affected. Also affected are Mk4 or Mk5 seeds generated before standard version 5.6.0 or Edge version 6.6.0X, and Q seeds generated before standard version 1.5.0Q or Edge version 6.6.0QX. Coinkite initially said the newer models were unaffected, then expanded the warning after further investigation. Its current advisory supersedes that early assessment.

There are two important qualifications. Coinkite says a seed created with at least 50 fair, independent, private dice rolls has at least 128 bits of outside entropy and is not endangered by this particular bug alone. A strong, unique BIP-39 passphrase also puts another barrier between an attacker and the funds. A short quotation, reused password, patterned phrase, or one clever dictionary word does not count. Even users with strong passphrases are being told to replace affected seeds as soon as practical.

The device PIN is not that passphrase. It protects access to the physical Coldcard. It does nothing against somebody who has reconstructed the seed elsewhere. Coinkite’s advisory makes the same distinction.

What affected Coldcard owners should do now

The blunt answer: Move the Bitcoin out of the wallet controlled by the affected Coldcard seed. Installing new firmware does not repair that seed. A strong passphrase may buy time, but it is not a repair either. Coinkite says the money must move to an entirely new seed.

Use Coinkite’s official advisory, not a link in an email, direct message, or reply. The emergency creates perfect working conditions for phishing and fake “recovery” services.

The cleanest exit is a new seed generated on a different hardware wallet with current firmware. Do not import the old Coldcard words. That carries the vulnerability into the new device. Even Coldcard’s Sunday statement pointed customers toward Bitkey, Ledger, Trezor, Jade, and BitBox.

Write down and verify the new backup. Check the wallet fingerprint and receive address on the new hardware screen. Send a small test transaction. Once it arrives at the correct wallet, move the rest. Keep the old backup until the transfer is confirmed, but never enter it into a website or give it to anyone offering help.

Do not throw away the affected Coldcard. The company says the device could become important if stolen funds are recovered. That is not an announcement that recovery has happened. Keep the device secure.

Coinbase as an emergency bridge

Public threads are full of shaken owners asking whether they should park their Bitcoin on Coinbase or another exchange. If the choice is between leaving money under a seed that thieves are actively searching and using an established exchange while a replacement wallet arrives, temporary exchange custody may be the less dangerous option.

It is still a trade. In a hosted Coinbase.com account, Coinbase controls the private keys. Coinbase Wallet is a different, self-custody product, so make sure you know which one you are using. Coinbase’s agreement says withdrawals can be subject to outages, downtime, and company policies, and Bitcoin held there does not have FDIC or SIPC protection.

Anyone choosing Coinbase should secure the account before sending money. Coinbase calls two physical security keys its highest-security two-factor setup. Get the Bitcoin deposit address from the official app or a manually typed Coinbase URL, verify the network and address, send a test, and then move the balance. Do not follow deposit instructions from an email, text message, phone call, or direct message.

What owners of other hardware wallets should do

Do not move Bitcoin merely because another company’s hardware wallet failed. Ask where your seed came from.

If Ledger, Trezor, Jade, BitBox, or another wallet generated the seed and that seed never came from an affected Coldcard, this particular bug does not apply to it. Check for notices from your own manufacturer, use only its official firmware tools, and keep the seed backup offline. Do not type the words into a computer or website to “check” them.

If an affected Coldcard created the seed and you later imported it into another device, move the Bitcoin. Changing hardware does not add randomness to an old seed.

RELATED: Thousands of lawyers caught using AI — and it’s only getting worse

DAVID MAIALETTI/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

Multi-signature owners have one more question: Could the affected Coldcard keys meet the spending threshold without the other devices? Galaxy says wallets where the answer was no were protected from this attack, but the weak Coldcard key should still be rotated. Do not build a complicated multi-signature wallet in the middle of a panic. For large balances, though, a planned setup using keys from different manufacturers prevents one broken generator from holding the entire stack hostage.

If the Bitcoin is already gone, preserve the wallet addresses, transaction IDs, amounts, dates, screenshots, device and firmware details, and records showing how you acquired the coins. Report the theft to local law enforcement and to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. The FBI says transaction hashes, receiving addresses, amounts, and timestamps are the most useful details, and it warns that services promising to recover stolen cryptocurrency for an up-front fee may be running a second scam. Recovery is uncertain, but a prompt, detailed report gives investigators something to trace.

An air gap is not magic

The published analyses describe a failure in Coldcard’s secret generation, not a break in Bitcoin’s ledger or signature algorithm. The product failed at the most basic point in the custody chain: making a secret that nobody else can guess.

“Don’t trust, verify” sounds good on a T-shirt. In practice, verifying this bug required following a function call across libraries, build settings, and linker behavior. Almost no ordinary customer can do that, which is why customers bought the little plastic signing device in the first place.

Final lesson? Public code does not inspect itself. An air gap protected the secrets from the internet. It could not save secrets that were too predictable at birth.

Coinkite has released fixes and migration instructions. In its Sunday statement, the company said it halted shipments, destroyed its remaining Coldcard inventory manufactured with vulnerable firmware, and had begun working directly with customers. Its lawyers may coordinate with law enforcement, and a technical postmortem is coming. The statement did not say that stolen funds had been recovered or describe a reimbursement plan.

The company still owes customers a full account of how this passed review, how many people were harmed, and what it plans to do for those who trusted its product with the savings of a lifetime.

Check where your seed came from. If affected Coldcard firmware created it, move the Bitcoin to a new seed created somewhere else. If another wallet created it, do not turn one company’s failure into a rushed mistake.

​Bitcoin, Tech 

Some people turn to deliveries, others choose Uber; in China, regular people can sell their faces.

Both face-selling and face-stealing are on the rise in China, with significant controversies coming out of some high-profile cases.

‘Coffee break? Between meetings? Turn those extra minutes into edge-of-your-seat moments.’

On Chinese websites like New Claw, regular people can upload their photos to license their likeness for AI and subsequent use in films, TV shows, or video games.

The platforms feature catalogs of user images, from self-taken photos or studios. Producers or filmmakers can then browse faces by age, gender, and descriptive categories like “supermodel.”

On these websites, Rest of World reported, users can earn anywhere between $15 and $700 for their likeness to be used in AI content. Users do have the choice about where their faces can appear and what kind of content they are used in.

One website called ID.actor focuses on legal protections for one’s likeness as its main selling point.

“In the AI era, your face is an asset,” the website reads when translated. “Let your face go from ‘stolen by AI’ to ’empowered by AI.'”

Long Lyu, operations lead at New Claw, told Rest of World that “whether actors and models choose to license their faces on our platform or not, AI has already disrupted the industry.”

Lyu added, “Selling the rights to their photos gives them a way to earn, while continuing their careers offline.”

RELATED: Televised poker is blowing the cover of its best players — on purpose

Qilai Shen/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The main use for AI likeness in China has reportedly been for the category of “microdramas.”

These are wildly popular in the communist country and are available through a dedicated app created by TikTok parent company ByteDance. The platform Hongguo is specifically designed for the Chinese minidramas.

In the United States, Peacock is jumping on the microdrama craze in categories like “Romance, Billionaire, College [young adult] Romance, Fantasy, Action, and more.”

The platform describes the content as “mini-bursts of drama with maximum intrigue,” which are designed to be watched quickly and are “built to binge.”

“All you need is a little spare time,” Peacock says. “Coffee break? Between meetings? Turn those extra minutes into edge-of-your-seat moments.”

According to Chinese website People.CN, about 128,000 AI microdramas were launched in the first quarter of 2026. This accounts for more than 95% of the content in the genre.

RELATED: Robot teacher program gets scandalous — as link to sex doll company revealed

ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images

Face-stealing has also become a significant problem with the increase of face-selling; hundreds of lawsuits popped up in China over the unauthorized use of likenesses.

Hongguo was recently accused by two influencers of stealing and altering their faces for use in a microdrama that garnered 40 million views.

“I was genuinely shocked. It was clearly me,” said Christine Li. “It was so obvious that they used a specific set of photos I took two years ago,” she said about her social media pictures, per France24.

Rest of World also reported that the Guangzhou Internet Court in China has already heard approximately 700 cases related to AI face theft in the last three years.

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​China, Artificial intelligence, Likeness, Intellectual property, Tech 

Republicans were able to reach an agreement to vote Todd Blanche’s nomination through the Senate Judiciary Committee despite some senators’ concerns about the president’s “anti-weaponization fund.”

Blanche’s nomination for attorney general passed the committee Tuesday with a vote of 12 to 10 along party lines. It will now go before the entire Senate, which is controlled by Republicans.

‘Well, there’s nothing we could do to rein in the president, when he said he likes the fund, wishes it still exists.’

Democrats blasted the holdouts for caving on their demand that the Trump administration agree in writing to abandon the fund.

“To state the obvious, Mr. Blanche’s statement on the slush fund and the IRS immunity agreement are not signed by the parties to the settlement agreement and are therefore unenforceable,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee.

“The parties could still sue to enforce the agreement and the cop-beaters fund can easily be revived with a new order from the Department of Justice 15 minutes after Mr. Blanche is confirmed as attorney general,” he added.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, one of the previous dissenters, told reporters afterward that they got the assurance they needed to approve the nomination.

“Well, there’s nothing we could do to rein in the president, when he said he likes the fund, wishes it still exists,” he said. “But the fact of the matter it’s dead, and that’s all we could do under these circumstances.”

President Donald Trump had excoriated Cornyn and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) for stalling the nomination in order to seek assurances that the fund was dead. Tillis is retiring, and Cornyn was defeated by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Republican primary runoff this year.

RELATED: Trump administration DEFIES ultimatum from Clinton judge on anti-weaponization fund

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas enthusiastically supported the nomination.

“America is safer today because Todd Blanche is serving at the Department of Justice. Now it’s time for the Senate to confirm him,” he wrote on social media.

Passing the Senate is complicated by the absence of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has been hospitalized for weeks and is reportedly in a rehabilitation facility over health issues.

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​Todd blanche, Senate judiciary committee, Donald trump, John cornyn, Dick durbin, Politics 

Late last month, Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the chatbot Claude, agreed to a whopping $1.5 billion settlement resolving copyright claims over its acquisition and use of millions of pirated books to develop its AI models, making it the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history.

According to court documents, Anthropic’s Project Panama involved the purchasing of millions of physical books in bulk, which hydraulic cutting machines then sliced the spines off of so that the pages could be fed into high-speed scanners to train Claude.

The remnants of the books were then shredded — and that’s the part that disturbs Glenn Beck the most.

“The book is not discarded; it’s shredded. … It’s destroyed on purpose because now the digital copy is now considered enough,” he warns.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn imagines a future where physical books are a thing of the past and the terrifying implications of such a dystopia.

Digitally preserving all books is a “fine goal” as long as it doesn’t involve the destruction of physical books, says Glenn.

But Project Panama did not appear to share that restraint. Not only did internal Anthropic planning documents that surfaced in court filings describe the operation as an “effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” but employees were also explicitly told: “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

And the books they went after weren’t just any titles sitting on a Barnes & Noble shelf. Reporting shows Anthropic heavily pursued older, used, and out-of-print volumes, including obscure and hard-to-find titles.

“These rare, rare bookstores started getting phone calls [asking] … ‘Do you have these titles? … We’ll buy all of them,” Glenn summarizes.

A judge later ruled that Anthropic’s destructive scanning of lawfully purchased books qualified as fair use under copyright law. The court reasoned that converting legally acquired print books into digital copies for internal use was transformative, with the destruction of the original books supporting that conclusion because Anthropic was not retaining both physical and digital libraries.

While destroying books may be legal, it’s certainly infuriating to a great many bibliophiles and history buffs.

“Men and women who have dedicated their lives to protecting books, to protecting history, these rare books — they were obviously outraged. When I read the story, I was outraged,” says Glenn, noting that some of the titles Anthropic destroyed “were the single remaining [copies] left … in the world.”

While Glenn wants American AI companies to build “the smartest systems on Earth” using books, he doesn’t want tangible copies destroyed, especially when those copies are rare or out-of-print titles.

“Books are civilization’s memories. Scan them, learn from them, preserve them — but never confuse scanning with shredding,” he pleads.

The destruction of physical books is something Glenn has warned about for years, which is why he always urges his audience to “buy paper copies.”

“A book is a witness,” he says. “Once it’s printed, it can’t quietly change overnight. Nobody can sneak into your library at night and rewrite page 247; nobody can update chapter 5 while you’re asleep.”

Not so with digital files.

“I’m not claiming Anthropic is secretly changing books. I’m saying something more simple and much more dangerous: Without the original, there is nothing left to check against the file,” says Glenn. “The original is the referee. You destroy the referee and eventually somebody else decides what the score was.”

“That’s not paranoia. This is history. You cannot destroy the original because any digital copy can be changed, and you have nothing to check it against.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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​Glenn beck, Artificial intelligence, Anthropic, Claude, Book burning, Blazetv show 

Yet another white woman who devoted her time and energy to welcoming third-worlders into Europe has wound up dead, apparently at the hands of the very sort of military-age foreigner she was trying to help.

The corpse of a 38-year-old Scottish woman who was volunteering with a refugee support group in Greece was discovered on July 18, stuffed into a suitcase in an abandoned building in Athens.

‘The testimony of the wife has been crucial.’

The Hellenic Police announced on Sunday that investigators were able to lift the victim’s fingerprints despite the body being found in a state of advanced decomposition. With the fingerprints and the help of both Interpol and American authorities, police identified the victim as Elisabeth-Jane Ross of Edinburgh.

Ross, who previously volunteered with the refugee assistance group One Heart, entered Greece on June 26 and was staying in the port city of Piraeus until July 10, when she left for an unknown destination.

On Thursday, police arrested Sharif Ahmadzai, a 26-year-old Afghan national, on suspicion of robbing and murdering Ross. They seized a replica pistol and a knife at his residence.

The Afghan — a super lightweight boxer who made his way by boat to Greece in 2016 after first making stops in Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey — allegedly used Ross’ bank cards to make withdrawals and used her phone to contact her friends and family in an apparent attempt to mislead them about her whereabouts and demise.

Ahmadzai, who with his Christian wife runs a refugee-support ministry, was allegedly also caught by surveillance camera leaving Ross’ address and wheeling around what appears to be the same suitcase in which the victim’s body was discovered.

RELATED: Asylum-seeking boyfriend of American mother flees Ireland after her brutal murder

Afghan and Syrian migrants descend on the Greek island of Lesbos in October 2015. Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto/Getty Images.

The suspect’s wife, an American named Alaina Hall, is said to have reported Ahmadzai to the police after Ross was identified as the victim, reported the Independent. After becoming concerned about Ahmadzai’s absence from their home on the evening of July 15, Hall — who has a child with the suspect — checked a shared location tracking app and discovered that he was at Ross’ apartment, where the victim is believed to have been killed, according to the Daily Mail.

A police source told the Times (U.K.), “The testimony of the wife has been crucial. Without her and CCTV evidence, we would not have been able to find this man.”

According to the now-scrubbed website for the couple’s refugee support organization, Hall met Ahmadzai in 2016 when volunteering in a migrant camp.

The Afghan, whom the Hellenic Police claim has admitted to killing Ross, is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday.

Ross’ body was discovered just days after the discovery of the remains of 43-year-old American mother Jamey Carney in Ireland. The prime suspect in the murder of Carney is 28-year-old Ahmad Al-Saqar, Carney’s romantic partner and a Middle Eastern asylum-seeker who fled the country on a plane bound for Turkey.

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​Afghanistan, Migrants, Asylum-seekers, Murder, Greece, Politics 

Recently, someone on X.com said that Japan was the last “first world country” left on earth. I felt an instinctual agreement when I read this statement. America no longer feels very “first world” to me. Not lately.

When the three worlds concept was first invented — in 1952, during the Cold War — America was the definition of “first world.”

Everywhere you looked you saw competence, excellence, and cultural cohesion.

America, most of Western Europe, Japan, Korea, and a few other prosperous nations were “stable capitalist countries with the highest literacy rates, life expectancies, and living standards.”

Communist countries, especially those controlled by the Soviet Union, were considered “second world.” They had modern amenities but limited freedoms. Living conditions were significantly lower. And the governments were coercive and authoritarian.

Poor countries in places like Latin America and Africa were “third world.” These countries suffered entrenched poverty and deeply corrupt, criminal governments.

Which way, Western man?

It seems that America and most of the other first world countries have begun to slide downhill toward second world status.

The citizens of Western nations have watched helplessly while their homelands have been transformed by mass immigration. Can you be a first world country if a large portion of your population just arrived from the third world?

Not to mention the growing presence of Soviet-style socialist/communist ideologies in many of these countries.

In America, we might be one election cycle away from having a Mamdani-style socialist running for president.

Land of the Rising Sun?

Japan has problems too. But having visited there in 2023, their problems are nowhere near our problems.

From the moment I arrived in Tokyo, I felt a sense of safety and order as well as an uplifting feeling of civic and cultural pride.

The city itself was spectacular. The arts were thriving. The technological advancement was instantly apparent. You felt like you were in a science-fiction movie.

At the same time, the past was celebrated and preserved: shrines, torii gates, beautiful parks. Everywhere you looked you saw competence, excellence, and cultural cohesion.

Plus, Tokyo natives were friendly and helpful. If you were lost, were on the wrong train, or had accidentally deviated from some local custom, a Tokyo-ite would appear and cheerfully assist you.

The ‘Japanese Wives Club’

In Kyoto, I met a bunch of male, English-speaking expats. They called their group the “Japanese Wives Club,” as most of them were married to local women.

I expressed my admiration for Japanese society to these guys. They assured me there were plenty of difficulties and drawbacks to living in Japan.

But when I asked them if they would eventually leave, they all said no. They liked their Japanese wives. They liked their adopted home.

One guy said he’d recently returned to his hometown of Denver to visit family. Denver was a dump. He wouldn’t even consider moving back there.

RELATED: Japanese soccer fans show Texas what being a good foreign guest actually looks like

Charlotte Wilson/Getty Images

Oh thank heaven …

Later in my trip, I stayed in a small village outside Tokyo. Here, there was one grocery store, one café, a few restaurants. And a 7-Eleven.

Being American, I mostly frequented the 7-Eleven. It was immaculately clean and full of exotic snacks and beverages.

But I couldn’t figure out the coffee machine. The first time I tried it, I made such a mess the proprietor — a very old, very skinny Japanese man — came out from behind his counter and began scolding me in Japanese.

After more harsh words, he demonstrated step by step how to work the coffee machine.

The next morning, I returned to the 7-Eleven. When I approached the coffee machine, that same old man watched me with deep suspicion.

But I had paid attention when he showed me which buttons to push. It was actually quite easy. And when I brought my coffee to the counter, he smiled approvingly. So I wasn’t a complete moron! Good for me!

He and I developed a relationship. He was very helpful. He gave me discounts. Not personal discounts, that would be dishonest. But the posted discounts I wasn’t aware of because they were written in Japanese. Two mini pizzas and a Hello Kitty soda … only 400 Yen!

After four days, I had barely scratched the surface of the most colorful and technologically advanced 7-Eleven I’d ever seen.

Return to the darkness

When it came time to go home, I packed my bag and went to the train station in the center of the town. I had been in Japan a total of three weeks, and I had loved every second of it. But now I had to leave!

I stood in the tiny village square, where I felt TOTALLY SAFE, where everyone wanted to HELP ME, where I had become FRIENDS WITH THE CRANKY 7-ELEVEN guy. There was no #metoo, no BLM, no Antifa, no cries of “racism,” no protesters, no nose rings, no LGBTQ flags. Everything worked, nothing was graffiti-ed, no vending machines had been kicked in or destroyed …

I sat down on a little bench, in that little square, which had been lovingly constructed to create a sense of peace and serenity.

I sat down on that bench, and I started to cry. I had to go back. I had to go back to broken America. And all I could do was cry.

​Antifa, First world, Japan, Mass immigration, Racism, Lifestyle, Culture, Blake’s progress, Communism 

Too many people scare themselves into silence by making courage more complicated than it is.

For years, women such as Jennifer Sey and Riley Gaines have carried the hopes, safety, and opportunities of girls on their shoulders. We applaud them, share their interviews, and call them brave. Then we tell ourselves that we could never do what they do.

The next voice does not have to be famous. It may have to be yours.

That’s easy. Speaking when the consequences belong to us is much harder.

Only four years ago, Gaines was a college swimmer preparing to graduate and attend dental school. She had no national platform, political résumé, or plan to become one of the country’s most recognizable advocates for women’s sports.

Hundreds of female swimmers were forced to compete against and share a locker room with Lia Thomas. Gaines became the name people remember because she decided that what happened required more than private disapproval.

Now we see the television appearances, speeches, photo shoots, merchandise, and crowds. We see a confident and articulate woman who has become exceptionally good at public advocacy.

What we forget is that she had to begin before she felt ready.

I know that temptation.

Nearly five years ago, at 18, I helped pass Iowa’s Save Girls Sports law, which bars male athletes from competing in women’s sports. I wrote articles, gave interviews, posted information online, and spoke at the state Capitol.

I also felt overwhelmed and badly underqualified. I was called a bigot and a transphobe. I received harassment and death threats. Being compared to a Nazi was not how I expected to spend my senior year of high school.

Over time, I learned to make peace with the insults. If someone cannot acknowledge the difference between a man and a woman, that person’s condemnation says more about his relationship to truth than it does about me.

But my 18-year-old self had not learned that yet.

During one of my first interviews, on BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey’s “Relatable” podcast, I admitted that something had to be done but insisted that plenty of people were better equipped to do it.

Stuckey answered with a sentence I have carried ever since: “God doesn’t call the equipped. He equips the called.”

That is what I love about Sophie Cunningham. The WNBA guard did not deliver a complicated manifesto when she defended women’s spaces. She stated a basic truth plainly.

“I think that I am here to extend love,” Cunningham said. “But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

When reporters pressed her, she did not retreat into qualifications or issue the ritual apology expected of public figures who violate progressive etiquette.

“I think I said what I said.”

That’s it. It’s that simple. And the answer resonated because it stripped away the excuses people use to stay silent.

RELATED: How the WNBA’s hottest star became the left’s newest headache

Michael Hickey/Getty Images

Men and women are different. Girls deserve privacy, safety, and fair competition. Saying so may provoke anger, but the argument itself is not difficult.

Cunningham’s example is more than a headline or slogan. It reminds ordinary people that public courage does not begin with a perfect résumé, a media strategy, or complete confidence.

It begins when someone decides that fear of criticism cannot carry more authority than the truth.

Games will end. Records will fall. Statistics will be forgotten. Cunningham’s willingness to speak when silence would have been safer may outlast all of them.

She was not obligated to speak because she is famous or because her platform is large. She was obligated because girls were being asked to surrender their rights to a lie.

The same obligation does not belong only to athletes, activists, or people with television audiences.

You do not have to be Riley Gaines, Jennifer Sey, or Sophie Cunningham. You do not have to consider yourself the smartest, bravest, or most articulate person in the room. You do not have to feel qualified.

You do have to stop using those doubts as permission to do nothing.

God does not ask for perfection. He asks for obedience. Again and again, He accomplishes more through willing people than they imagined themselves capable of doing.

Thank you, Sophie Cunningham, for showing how simple the first act of courage can be: Tell the truth, withstand the reaction, and refuse to take it back.

The next voice does not have to be famous. It may have to be yours.

​Activists, Advocacy, Ainsley erzen, Allie beth stuckey, Female athletes, Iowa, Riley gaines, Save girls sports, Sophie cunningham, Truth, Wbna, Women’s sports, Opinion & analysis 

Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D) recently held a town hall in Houston where he discussed what black voters would supposedly get in return for supporting him over Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in the Texas U.S. Senate race.

During the town hall, Talarico appeared to agree that convicting the person who murdered Austin Metcalf was a “tragedy.”

‘It’s a satanic strategy to deny truth in all aspects of life.’

“What is a tragedy is that James Talarico would rather side with dangerous criminals than keep Texas communities safe,” National Republican Senatorial Committee regional press secretary Samantha Cantrell told Blaze News.

Talarico — the Democratic Senate candidate and part-time Presbyterian seminarian who has attempted to use Scripture to justify abortion, fought to keep the Bible out of school, taken money from an associate of dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and championed keeping male athletes in women’s sports — fielded several questions during the recent town hall, including one from a black identitarian named Amanda Meredith.

Meredith, who said she is a Navy veteran, complained about perceived “over-policing” in black neighborhoods, claimed that police shut down her Juneteenth event prematurely, and suggested that the “craziness in this country has gotten worse” under the Trump administration.

“Our people getting killed left and right. Karmelo Anthony’s case is just a f**king tragedy,” Meredith said while Talarico nodded in apparent agreement.

At no point did Talarico challenge the identitarian speaker.

Karmelo Anthony, a black teen, savagely murdered Austin Metcalf, a white teen, at a high school track meet last year. In early June, Anthony was convicted of murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison. A month later, Anthony’s attorney filed an appeal and requested a new trial.

RELATED: Female attackers yelled ‘free Karmelo’ according to alleged assault victim; 3 suspects arrested

The identitarian whom Talarico nodded along with at his town hall said in a video shared to Instagram after Anthony’s sentencing, “To the mother of Karmelo Anthony, I’m so sorry that the system failed your boy.”

In the video, Meredith also accused local authorities, including police and prosecutors, of being “hateful”; claimed that Anthony was “simply defending himself” when he fatally stabbed his unarmed victim; suggested “we don’t get justice here”; and said that she was preparing to leave the U.S. with her son to avoid being “terrorized by the white people in this country.”

After Meredith concluded her rant at his town hall — in which she also suggested that her life in America is more traumatic than the time she spent in Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern nations — Talarico thanked her, apologized on behalf of law enforcement for supposedly shutting down her Juneteenth event an hour or two early, and criticized police.

“Thank you. Thank you for your question, and thank you for your service. This is unacceptable,” said Talarico.

“Too often, we see law enforcement weaponized against black and brown communities in this state,” said Talarico. “We have a deeply broken justice system. We have a deeply broken approach to policing.”

Neither the Talarico nor the Paxton campaign responded to requests for comment.

Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) was among the many critics puzzled by Talarico’s response to Meredith’s commentary, asking “why it was a tragedy for a black kid to go to jail for murdering a white kid?”

“There’s an incredible hostility to truth in a world this secular. It’s a satanic strategy to deny truth in all aspects of life. Men can be women and have babies. We have a Supreme Court justice who can’t define the word woman,” BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock told Blaze News. “When a teenager murders another teenager in front of multiple witnesses, the approved lie is to call the dead teenager the villain and the murderer the victim. Lying is a qualification for politics. Talarico clearly seeks a more important political office.”

Jeff Metcalf, the father of the murdered teen, told Whitlock in mid-June that he has been inundated with death threats and disgusting messages from the murderer’s supporters.

“Just the vile statements from everyone, and ones who are in denial of the truth. That’s the hardest part. It’s like now that the truth has been shown, all the facts have been presented. So all your lies have been debunked, but they still refuse to accept the verdict, the truth, and they’re all hanging their hat on this appeal,” said the bereaved father.

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​Austin metcalf, Brandon gill, James talarico, Jason whitlock, Karmelo anthony, Texas, Anti-white, Politics 

China has a dirty little habit of swiping tech that doesn’t belong to it and passing it off as its own. Why should AI be any different? Latest accusations claim that China stole intellectual property from American AI companies to use in its own platforms, and the Trump administration is poised to take swift retaliatory action.

The whole hubbub started over the prevalence of open-source AI models originating from China. As the costs of major platforms, including Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, continue to rise in the States, U.S. companies that have already integrated AI into their workforce, or that plan to add AI in the future, are looking for new ways to cut costs without sacrificing capabilities. One solution is to fall back on Chinese-made open-source AI, like DeepSeek and Kimi.

‘We have the ability to sanction them because of this theft.’

Open-source AI is more appealing than closed-source platforms for several reasons: It’s publicly available with fewer or no licensing fees. It’s customizable to fit a wider range of applications. It can work on local hardware (laptop, desktop, or servers) without the need to pay for cloud compute. Its local capabilities make it much cheaper and more private. Lastly, although these models are usually slightly less sophisticated than closed models, their open nature gives third-party developers the power to adjust the code themselves and bring it on par with closed offerings.

In other words, open-source models are more affordable and adaptable, and if widely adopted, they could put a financial strain on the frontier AI market or even put it out of business.

Where does Chinese open-source AI come from?

So far, China has been a major proponent of open-source AI, largely for the threat it poses to America’s AI dominance, while platforms in the States have leaned harder into closed-model options.

Here’s the kicker, though. Most of China’s AI models were built on the backs of American AI companies. DeepSeek, for instance, reportedly used OpenAI’s ChatGPT (and other unnamed models) as the basis for its platform through a process called distilling, where answers from larger platforms are reverse-engineered to design smaller, more efficient models that mimic the original. Meanwhile, the newly more capable Kimi K3 was distilled from Claude Fable 5 by Anthropic.

Essentially, Chinese AI platform makers took a shortcut by training off of American frontier AI models and are now trying to flip the script so that American companies rely on their Chinese “innovations” instead of the original platforms that created these AI advancements in the first place.

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Rawf8/Getty Images

Why open-source Chinese AI is a problem

This is an issue for American companies and American security for several reasons:

Theft: Although distillation operates in an ambiguous gray area of legality, what China’s platforms have done equates to theft directly from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and SpaceXAI (formerly xAI).Regulation: Open-source makes AI harder to regulate. Especially now that some advanced AI models can hack into legacy systems without any trouble at all, open-source versions of these would make them dangerously accessible to bad actors.Leadership: Companies that pay for AI platforms essentially fund their future development, ensuring that AI platforms are sustainable as America leads the AI race. Without this funding, American-made AI development slows down, stalls, or flatlines entirely, surrendering the lead to China.Security: Anyone can tamper with open-source code, potentially making companies that use these platforms more vulnerable to sneak attacks, hacks, and malicious code injections.

What’s next?

Reports on what to do about the alleged IP theft are mixed. Axios says that President Trump may ban companies from using Chinese-developed open-source AI models wholesale, immediately cutting off the potential threat these models pose to the nation. However, United States Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent proposed another way, stating, “We’ve seen a lot of talk about open-source models coming and threatening the large language models in the U.S. This administration supports open-source models, but what we do not support is IP theft. If we see, especially, that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft.”

Sanctions appear to be the answer to get China to back off. Whether or not it will work, though, remains to be seen. So far, China is pushing back with the Ministry of Commerce holding firm: “These actions lack factual basis and legal support and constitute double standards in practice, representing typical acts of AI hegemony. China will take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its legitimate rights and interests against any actions that substantially harm China’s interests.”

A tug-of-war over AI sovereignty will no doubt ensue in the coming weeks.

​Open-source ai, Tech