Apple built its company around protecting users’ privacy and security. Outgoing CEO Tim Cook even called privacy a “fundamental human right.” Unfortunately, Apple’s secure walled garden has crumbled in recent months, all thanks to a rise in software bugs and security features that don’t work as advertised. Now, a new threat rears its ugly head as reports claim that Apple’s VPN-like service, iCloud Private Relay, doesn’t actually mask users’ IP addresses at all.

Apple was proud to show off a string of privacy-focused features for iCloud+ subscribers during WWDC in 2021. One of them was Hide My Email, a perk meant to hide your email from websites, marketers, and other groups online. Unfortunately, as one man found out when he threatened the girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel, Hide My Email isn’t foolproof. Apple actually has the keys to the original sender and can hand these over to a government agency upon request. Even worse, a bug uncovered several months later proved that Hide My Email doesn’t actually hide users’ email addresses from anybody, despite claims otherwise. So much for privacy.

Apple’s missteps keep piling up, and it’s clear that the company is in desperate need of a reboot.

Now another feature shown off that same day — iCloud Private Relay — doesn’t work as advertised either. The service was meant to function as a VPN lite for Safari. While it didn’t stop apps from seeing the IP address on your device, it blocked websites from viewing this information while browsing the web in Apple’s Safari web browser — or at least that’s how it was supposed to work.

Just as Hide My Email didn’t actually hide email addresses, a new report claims that iCloud Private Relay doesn’t hide IP addresses either in some cases.

The problem stems from a bug in Apple’s web browser engine called WebKit that bypasses iCloud Private Relay and exposes the user’s real IP address when a website requests to verify a passkey saved on the device when logging in. Even worse, other browsers that use Apple’s WebKit on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS are susceptible to the same flaw, turning this into a widespread problem in Apple’s ecosystem.

RELATED: Don’t be fooled: This Apple privacy feature won’t protect your identity

itsarasak thithuekthak/Getty Images

How to protect your IP address from an iCloud Private Relay leak

The good news is that there are two things you can do to protect yourself.

Since the problem is connected directly to passkeys, accounts that rely on a username and password to gain access should not trigger an IP address leak. That means if you have an account protected by a passkey and you wish to keep your IP address private, delete the passkey from your phone and use conventional login methods until the problem is fixed.Third-party VPN services are not affected by the bug. That means if you use Proton VPN, ExpressVPN, or a comparable alternative that is properly configured and enabled, you don’t have to worry about iCloud Private Relay giving away your IP address.

Is there any hope that Apple will pull itself together?

Apple is currently looking into the issue, but that hasn’t stopped a lawsuit from taking hold. A class action was recently filed, accusing Apple of false advertising and fraud, among other charges. The case is very similar to the recent feud over delayed Apple Intelligence features, where the company ultimately paid a $250 million settlement to make it go away.

At this point, Apple’s missteps keep piling up, and it’s clear that the company is in desperate need of a reboot. Luckily, new blood is on the way. This fall, CEO Tim Cook will step down from his role and turn the reins of leadership over to John Ternus, the current senior vice president of hardware engineering and an Apple veteran who started his career in 2001 under Steve Jobs. While there’s no way to know how Ternus will handle his new responsibilities, tech aficionados are excited to have a “product guy” back in control, whereas Tim Cook’s background was primarily in operations as the chief operating officer before his promotion by Jobs.

This is also a big year for Apple’s software teams. All major releases of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and WatchOS later this fall are quality-of-life updates meant to squash bugs, improve performance, and refine the user experience for years to come. So far, beta testers agree that the new updates are a big improvement from current iterations, but time will tell if this experience carries over to the masses. Hopefully, there are also some privacy and security improvements under the hood to reverse course on Apple’s current downward spiral.

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​Apple, Ios, Privacy, Security, Tech 

Whoever controls crime data can shape the political debate. The Trump administration has already reversed some of the changes the Biden administration made to federal crime and gun data, including information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But politicization of data at the FBI and Justice Department still deserves attention.

Gun-control activists have long tried to “debunk” what they call the “good guy with a gun myth” as they push for stricter gun control laws. The federal government and much of the media have reinforced that argument by downplaying evidence that armed, law-abiding citizens stop public attacks.

Armed civilians stopped 52.9% of active-shooter attacks over the past 12 years.

Even the most dramatic defensive gun uses rarely get national news coverage. One rare example of news coverage was in August of this year, when Jordan Salinas shot at a gunman who was shooting at vehicles outside a Twin Falls, Idaho, In-N-Out fast-food burger restaurant. As one news story noted, Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack Johnson said that “the death toll would have undoubtedly been higher without the quick-thinking actions of Salinas and the off-duty cop.”

Just since the beginning of 2025, there have been 15 such defensive gun uses where police have made similar statements about armed civilians acting to save many lives.

The CDC recently restored information on defensive gun use that it removed from its website in 2022 after gun-control advocates privately pressured agency officials to take it down.

Until May 2022, the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report that the agency had co-sponsored. The report reviewed studies that produced widely varying estimates of defensive gun use. It cited an estimate of 108,000 defensive gun uses annually, but warns that “108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.”

The report noted that estimates from national surveys ranged from about 500,000 to more than 3 million defensive gun uses per year.

Mark Bryant, the founder of the Gun Violence Archive, was among gun control advocates who complained that gun-rights advocates had cited the estimates so often to “stop [gun control] legislation.”

The CDC has now restored its link to the National Academies report, but it misleadingly says the report puts defensive gun use at only 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses annually, not what the report itself says, as the national survey estimates that specifically ask about defensive gun use range from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, though even that fails to note that the lower estimate involves just handguns.

The FBI has also demonstrated how badly federal data can understate defensive gun uses.

The FBI defines an active shooter as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” The category can include an attack in which a gunman fires at a single person and misses, but it generally excludes shootings connected to other criminal activity, such as robberies or fights over drug turf.

I have seen these problems with federal data firsthand. Until January 2021, I served in the U.S. Department of Justice as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs. Part of my job involved evaluating the FBI’s active-shooter reports. During my time at DOJ, I discovered that the FBI had missed or misidentified numerous cases in which armed civilians stopped active shooters.

RELATED: The FBI’s new active-shooter report has a surprise

Kyle Mazza/Anadolu/Getty Images

Unfortunately, the problem has continued with the newest report that was released on July 30. The FBI reports that armed citizens stopped only 16 of the 408 active-shooter incidents it identified from 2014 through 2025 and only two of the 34 active shooting cases in 2025.

The Crime Prevention Research Center, which I run, has identified many additional cases that the FBI either missed or misclassified, and we maintain an updated list of these incidents.

Our numbers tell a dramatically different story. From 2014 through 2025, the CPRC identified 615 active-shooter incidents and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them. We excluded another 35 cases in which a law-abiding armed citizen stopped the attacker before he could fire a shot.

That means armed citizens stopped 36.6% of the active-shooter incidents we identified over those 12 years. During the most recent five years, the figure rose to 42.5%. That rate is about 10 times the roughly 4% rate indicated by the FBI’s data.

The difference becomes even larger when we examine only places where law-abiding citizens can legally carry firearms. We shouldn’t expect armed civilians to stop many attacks in places where the law prohibits them from carrying guns. In locations where citizens could legally carry firearms, our data shows that armed civilians stopped 52.9% of active-shooter attacks over the past 12 years. And it is increasing, with 58.3% in 2025.

The FBI has missed so many defensive gun uses that I find it hard to believe these omissions are simply accidental — particularly because the agency has failed to correct mistakes I previously brought to its attention.

Fortunately, no one needs to take my word for it. The CPRC lists the individual cases and links to the underlying sources, so anyone can examine the cases and compare our list with the FBI’s data.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​Cdc, Crime data control, Fbi, Guncontrol advocates, Doj, 2nd amendment, Active shooter, Armed citizens, Gun control, Gun violence, Opinion & analysis 

With tensions in Iran still boiling and our national debt hitting $40 trillion, it’s time to take a hard look at the military’s budget. We should preserve what the military needs to be capable and prepared — and cut the waste.

One little-known program has not only failed its mission but also driven excess government spending. The good news is that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has already announced a review. The bad news? This program is so fundamentally defective that it should be abolished outright.

Every actor in the system profits from the abuse.

In the summer of 2024, a “socially disadvantaged” small business won two Defense Logistics Agency contracts worth more than $34 million. The firm then handed 95% of one contract’s value to Lockheed Martin and 94% of the other to a subsidiary of Leonardo DRS, two of the world’s largest defense contractors. The disadvantaged firm did little more than sign the paperwork and collect a fee.

The arrangement broke no law. It followed the standard business model of the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development Program, the federal government’s oldest identity-based contracting scheme — and one of Washington’s most durable corporate welfare rackets.

In January, Secretary Hegseth announced that the Pentagon would take a “sledgehammer” to the program and ordered a line-by-line review of every small business sole-source and set-aside award above $20 million. As he put it: “In many, many instances, these ‘socially disadvantaged’ businesses, they don’t even do work. They take a 10%, 20%, sometimes 50% fee off the top and then pass the contract off to a giant consulting firm.”

Hegseth has diagnosed the disease, but a contract review will not cure it. Several administrations and Congresses have tried to fix the 8(a) program. But all of them have failed because its own incentives reward the abuse. Congress cannot regulate those incentives away; it wrote them into the program’s design. The only reform that will work is to abolish the 8(a) program entirely.

Congress created the modern program in 1978, when it amended Section 8(a) of the Small Business Act to steer noncompetitive and set-aside contracts to firms owned by “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.” The SBA promptly defined that term to cover nearly every racial and ethnic minority group while excluding white Americans. Lawmakers promised that nine years of preferential treatment would turn these firms into independent competitors. Nearly half a century later, the program has produced the opposite: a permanent class of pass-through firms selling access to the defense giants.

A Claremont Institute investigation found the same pattern under administrations of both parties. In 2011, under President Obama, EYAK Technology LLC subcontracted $2.6 million of a $2.9 million Army manufacturing contract — 91% of its value — to L3Harris Technologies.

Between 2009 and 2025, L3Harris received 47 subcontracts from 8(a) firms through the Department of Defense under prime contracts worth nearly $1 billion, and eight of those subcontracts exceeded 90% of the prime contract’s value. General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and other giants worked the same racket.

Reforms to the program keep failing because enforcement would require a small army of compliance officers. Even worse, every actor in the system profits from the abuse.

RELATED: Want to squeeze Iran? Trump has one clear move

EDUARDO SOTERAS/AFP/Getty Images

The 8(a) firms earn millions and face no pressure to build real capability. The defense giants pad their bottom line by accessing set-aside contracts they could never win directly. The contracting agency fills its procurement needs and hits the SBA’s small-business goals on paper. Nobody at the table has a reason to flip it over. The structure rewards dependency, not the development the program promises.

The program’s defenders blame a few bad actors, but the abuse flows from the design itself. Any program that confers preferential treatment on a favored class will produce the same result.

When government channels public money to a group in the name of solving its problems, the intended beneficiaries grow more dependent while middlemen and incumbents prosper at the taxpayer’s expense.

The Trump administration has made some encouraging early moves. The SBA demanded three years of financial records from participants and suspended roughly 1,000 firms that failed to produce them. Secretary Hegseth’s contract review shows the same willingness to act.

But audits and reviews leave the machine intact, and the next administration can switch it back on. As long as the program exists, the incentives will win.

Congress and the administration should stop trying to perfect the unreformable. After 48 years, the 8(a) program has failed its stated purpose and wasted taxpayer dollars while enriching prime contractors, pass-through firms, and the bureaucracy that certifies them. Secretary Hegseth should swing his sledgehammer through the program’s foundation and shut it down for good.

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

​Peter hegseth, National defense, Pentagon, Welfare, Subcontractors, Sba, Lockheed martin, Congress, Trump administration, Defense logistics agency, Business development program, Incentives, Opinion & analysis 

In less than a year, BlazeTV’s Sara Gonzales has become the queen of H-1B fraud-busting in the state of Texas. The Lone Star native’s on-the-ground investigations into ghost offices and suspected visa mills have prompted Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to freeze H-1B hiring at state agencies, led Attorney General Ken Paxton to hit nearly 30 North Texas companies with investigative demands, and put Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito on the ground in Dallas.

The trail has led Sara mainly to Indian-run IT firms and staffing shops — the same kind of companies that dominate Texas H-1B filings.

As a result, she has become the target of fierce backlash by several Indian media outlets and Indian-American circles that accuse her reporting of being racist, defamatory, and harassment. Sara has infiltrated many a WhatsApp chat where opponents circulate her videos and organize campaigns to downvote and report them.

Her haters, however, will likely be enraged to discover that at the GOP’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas, it was conservative Indians who wanted to talk to her the most.

“They kept coming up to me and saying hi and how they love that I’m exposing fraud. They’re like, ‘Sara, you’re the best woman in the world,”’ she recounts gleefully.

Sara then displays several photographs from the RNC with her Indian fans beaming alongside her.

“They encouraged me to go even harder on all of these fraudsters,” she adds.

But the support came with something even better: advice.

“They gave me more tips, which was very helpful, which of course we’ll be following up on,” Sara says.

“It’s just so funny how I always get accused of being racist, but turns out Indians love your girl.”

Her reporting has never been about race but about ensuring the law is followed, Sara explains.

“[My Indian fans at the RNC] realize I have no ill will towards them because if they love me, it’s clear that they’re doing things the right way,” she says.

“This is not about race, at least for me,” Sara continues. “Now it does seem to be about race for some of the Indians who attacked me in the comments of these photos.”

“Who’s the real racist?” she asks.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​H1b fraud, Ken paxton, Rnc, Sara gonzales, Blazetv show 

A 17-year-old Florida male is a person of interest in the murder of his 16-year-old girlfriend, who reportedly was seven-months pregnant.

The Columbia County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday that police arrested the 17-year-old male and that his girlfriend was found dead in a friend’s apartment a day earlier, WJAX-TV reported.

‘The pain of losing them is something I don’t think words can ever truly explain.’

Dominique Santonio Hill of Lake City is charged with tampering with evidence related to an investigation of what police are calling the murder of Ashia La Shai Moore at the Palm Villa Apartments in Lake City, the station said.

Police said they responded to a well-being check and discovered Moore dead on the floor from an apparent gunshot wound, WJAX reported.

She was seven months pregnant, the station said, citing a news release.

As the investigation progressed, police said they identified Hill — who was Moore’s boyfriend — as a person of interest, WJAX said, adding that authorities arrested Hill on charges of tampering with evidence.

Officials said Hill is being held at the Columbia County Detention Facility without bond.

RELATED: Teen accused of shooting 16-year-old girlfriend 22 times as she lay on her back bleeding is released on bond

Police are asking that anyone with information to contact the sheriff’s office at 386-719-2005, WJAX said, adding that those who want to remain anonymous can call Crime Stoppers of Columbia County at 386-754-7099 or go to www.columbiacrimestoppers.net.

“Ashia, who we lovingly called Shia, was only 7-months pregnant with her precious baby boy when that monster took both of their lives from us,” close family friend Gigi Reighns told First Coast News. “We lost not only Shia, but an innocent baby who never even got the chance to see the world. The pain of losing them is something I don’t think words can ever truly explain. Shia was such a beautiful soul.”

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​Crime, Florida, Murder, Pregnant 

On August 15, two Americans on a UFC fight card said the quiet part out loud.

Prelim winner Tresean Gore had just secured a decision that cost him two front teeth. With a mouth full of blood, he told Joe Rogan that he no longer smoked weed, drank, or watched porn and that Jesus Christ had saved his life and soul.

King Solomon foresaw the day of physical failure: ‘If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small.’

On the main card, winner Jalin Turner’s first statement to Rogan was also a profession of faith.

Professing athletes are not new. Tim Tebow, Harrison Butker, and the Oklahoma women’s softball team have all said the same thing in public: Prowess and its rewards are not solely their own doing.

Toga-clad therapist

Gore and Turner moved us for a narrower reason. During our Bible study, we had been talking about the decline of masculinity among Christian men. When those men surrender responsible, loyal, trustworthy headship — as Scripture defines it under God the Father and His Son — instead of becoming humble, they disappear, leaving a hole that the spirit of the age fills.

American Christian men have forgotten, or were never taught, that their King was the strongest man who ever walked the earth, physically and spiritually. Jesus is the pattern for both. Following Him should produce men who pursue strength of body as well as strength of soul. Too many church leaders have taught the opposite. They have offered a Jesus who is only mild, never mighty: a toga-clad therapist who affirms all and judges none. That is not the Christ of the Gospels, and it is not the men who preceded and followed Him.

Other than Christ, no man in the Bible is without sin. God shows us these men so we will learn that Christianity requires faith, repentance, and obedience — not a clean record. Adam shifted blame. Samson and David yielded to lust. David’s sin was worse than just appetite: he deceived, murdered, and committed adultery. Scripture hides none of it.

Restored to strength

It also does not hide what these men were and what they did. Blind Samson pulled down a Philistine temple with his hands. David defended his flock against wild animals, then dropped Goliath with a stone. His elite guard, the Gibborim — Josheb, Eleazar, Shammah, Abishai, Benaiah — were remembered in 2 Samuel because they could fight. Four times God tells Joshua to be “strong and courageous.” Joshua then defeats 31 kings on the way to the promised land. God preserved Moses’ vigor at 120 (Deuteronomy 34:7); fed Elijah strength for the desert road (1 Kings 19:7-8); and promised through Isaiah that those who wait on the Lord will not faint (Isaiah 40:29-31).

The God of mercy and love is the same God who trained David’s hands for war and his fingers for battle and helped him bend a bow of bronze (Psalms 18:32-34 and 144:1). In 1 Peter 4:11, the apostle directs all who serve God to do so with the strength that God provides. All these men knew sin, fear, and confusion. Faith restored them to strength and courage for God’s glory. It did not restore them to softness.

RELATED: Do you follow a diluted Jesus — or the full-strength one?

Don Bartletti/Getty Images

The weight of the cross

Then there is Jesus. He walked the land for three years knowing His own people would reject Him and kill Him, and He finished the work. The distances of that ministry are measured in thousands of miles, on foot.

On His last day, He was beaten and scourged, and He marched the Via Dolorosa under a patibulum that likely weighed 65 to 110 pounds. He fell because of pain and blood loss that would put most modern men on the ground before the first step. The contrast is not cute. A church that cannot tell the difference between meekness and weakness will baptize the second and call it discipleship.

We would rather live in the world Jesus describes: among people who worship without shame, who speak of Him as plainly as Tresean Gore and Jalin Turner did, and who pursue the holiness He demands. He is not playing. In the wedding parable of Matthew 22, the man without the garment of faith and repentance is bound and cast into the outer darkness. That is the same Lord who walked those miles.

‘Act like men’

So the question is not whether Christian men should be kind. It is whether they will be men. No more porn. No more anesthesia by weed and liquor. No more sexual chaos. Less devotion to entertainment that mocks the faith and more time in churches where men teach what Paul taught: Put your house in order (1 Tim. 3:1-5; Titus 1:5-9 and 2:1-2 and 6-8), and “be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong” (1 Cor. 16:13).

Drawing on the Old Testament, Jesus does tell His followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them (Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:27, from Proverbs 24:17 and 25:21 and Exodus 23:4-5).

That command is real. It covers the neighbor who hates you, the official who slanders you, even the man who would harm you. It is not a mediation tip. It is imitation of the Father. It is also not a ban on strength. Prayer for a human enemy does not mean pretending he is harmless, refusing to restrain him, or talking to Satan as if he were your neighbor. Scripture never asks anyone to treat the devil as a prayer partner. It does ask men to resist him, to protect the innocent, and still not let hatred become their creed.

King Solomon foresaw the day of physical failure: “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small” (Proverbs 24:10). The next two verses are the gut punch. If you stand by while people are led away to death, God sees, and He will weigh your cowardice.

This is a day of adversity. American Christian men will come up big or small. They will find their strength in God, or they will keep drawing upon a smaller Jesus who demands nothing of their bodies and their nerve. They should pick up where Tresean Gore and Jalin Turner left off: Believe and profess the truth with blood still in your mouth, and then live as if the truth has hands.

​Christian men, Harrison butker, Jesus christ, Joe rogan, Old testament, Porn, Tim tebow, Tresean gore, Oklahoma womens softball, Christian living, Lifestyle, Culture, Health, Bible, Faith 

America’s universities have forgotten what education is for. And they are increasingly willing to treat the God-given right of free speech as something administrators may grant or withdraw.

American higher education received its annual free-speech report card this week. The good news is that the patient has a pulse. The bad news is that we have apparently lowered our expectations to the point where this counts as good news.

Maybe students are beginning to rediscover something their institutions forgot: Hearing an argument does not constitute an injury.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released its 2027 College Free Speech Rankings, based on the experiences of nearly 63,000 students at 261 American colleges and universities. The average university continues to perform badly at one of the activities universities were ostensibly invented to encourage: thinking out loud.

This is an unusual institutional achievement. A hospital that made patients afraid to discuss their symptoms would attract attention. A law school where students feared making arguments would be considered defective. But a university where students learn to keep controversial thoughts to themselves can still issue press releases celebrating its commitment to dialogue.

It is all the art of illusion. Universities tell the public, “We are inclusive,” while students know they may have to self-censor or risk angering professors who control their grades.

I know something about this from the inside. I have taught at Arizona State University for more than two decades. Our motto is “inclusive excellence.” Yet I run a Substack where I document how ASU professors stifle free speech and push DEI and LGBTQ ideology onto their students.

ASU is slipping in the FIRE rankings. This year it ranks 29th out of 261 schools, down from 23rd last year. Its numerical score increased from about 70 to 72, but its grade remains a C-.

Apparently, even grade inflation has limits.

A C- is awful, and ASU administrators should make correcting course a top priority. Instead, they host events like “Queer Animacies.”

The more interesting numbers are buried beneath the overall ranking.

RELATED: When government breaks the law, can you even sue?

DNY59/Getty Images

FIRE reports that ASU remains in the bottom 50 nationally for “openness,” its measure of whether students believe they can discuss controversial subjects freely. Even more striking, ASU’s ranking for “administrative support” fell 107 places in a single year.

Think about that combination. Students attend a university to learn how to think, yet many perceive controversial subjects as effectively off-limits, while their confidence that administrators will defend free speech has substantially deteriorated.

This points to a deeper problem than free speech.

We have forgotten what a university is for.

Socrates did not walk around Athens distributing approved answers. He asked questions. Irritating questions, as the Athenians eventually discovered.

He questioned politicians, poets, and craftsmen who believed themselves wise and discovered that possessing expertise in one subject has a curious tendency to persuade people that they possess expertise in everything.

Twenty-five centuries later, we have perfected the type.

The university is supposed to cultivate intellectual maturity by forcing students to distinguish what they know from what they merely assume. That requires disagreement. It requires professors willing to have their own beliefs questioned. And it requires students who can make an argument without first consulting the ideological weather report.

When I was recently interviewed by KJZZ in Phoenix about my Arizona Supreme Court case, leftists — including ASU professors — took to the Facebook comments to dish out personal attacks because I dared to question the university’s DEI curriculum. My case concerns a training program I argue violated Arizona law; ASU has disputed my claims, and the Arizona Supreme Court is now being asked to decide whether I may proceed with the suit.

Such professors teach students the one skill required for university success: identifying the professor’s approved conclusion.

This is not education. Not even close. It’s training students to lie for approval and to accept censorship.

The problem becomes particularly obvious when universities congratulate themselves on “critical thinking.”

Critical thinking is one of those phrases that appears in university mission statements with approximately the frequency of “excellence,” “inclusion,” and “innovation.” Everyone favors it because nobody bothers to define it.

But critical thinking cannot mean criticizing only the ideas your professors have already designated as problematic.

If students are encouraged to “interrogate” Christianity but not transgender ideology, colonialism but not Marxism, capitalism but not DEI, they have not been taught critical thinking.

They have been given a list of suspects.

Real critical thinking is considerably more dangerous because it applies the same standards to everyone.

Can you define your terms?

What is your evidence?

Does your conclusion follow from your premises?

Are your premises true?

What would prove you wrong?

Those questions are wonderfully indifferent to race, sex, political party, academic rank, ideology, or preferred pronouns.

RELATED: Equal treatment makes a comeback

Kevin Carter/Getty Images

Logic has always suffered from an embarrassing lack of sensitivity.

This is why free speech is not merely one university value among many. It is inseparable from the purpose of the institution. And it is a God-given right, not a gift to be handed out and taken back by radical professors or university administrators.

A university exists because human beings are not born knowing the truth. We must learn.

Learning requires discovering that some things we believe are false. Discovering that requires allowing someone to tell us we are wrong.

Remove that possibility and the university ceases to be a university in anything but name.

There is at least one encouraging finding in the new national data. Student tolerance for shouting down speakers, blocking access to events, and using violence against speakers declined slightly from last year’s record highs. Maybe students are beginning to rediscover something their institutions forgot: Hearing an argument does not constitute an injury.

That’s progress.

But universities should not congratulate themselves because students have become slightly less enthusiastic about silencing one another. The standard is considerably higher.

The university should be the place in American life where the unpopular question is most welcome.

Where the student can challenge the professor.

Where the professor can challenge the administration.

Where Christians, atheists, conservatives, progressives, Marxists, and their increasingly rare opponents can all be asked the same unforgiving question: How do you know?

Until universities recover that purpose, Americans will need to be honest about their value.

And we will cultivate our God-given freedom to think elsewhere.

​Arizona supreme court, Education, Free speech, Lgbtq ideology, First amendment, Fire, Asu, Dei, Christianity, Conservatives, Opinion & analysis 

Sixty-four years ago, John F. Kennedy stood on a football field at Rice University and declared space the new, permanent frontier of human ambition.

Fast-forward to today, and President Donald Trump has signed an executive order establishing a tuition-free U.S. Space Academy. This lays the groundwork for a dedicated institution to train the next generation of American space talent.

The enemy plays by total-war rules.

Critics immediately started whining about overreach, arguing that civilian science and military operations must remain strictly separated. Those pessimists are living in a long-dead era. Their thinking sounds less like 2026 and more like the 1960s, when the biggest concern was whether America would beat the Soviets to the Moon. Those days are gone. Space is now a strategic battleground. And pretending otherwise is national-security malpractice and a guaranteed recipe for disaster.

America’s chief global adversaries view space as one big battlefield. Chinese military planners at the People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force don’t care about Western academic debates over civilian-military separation. They view lunar orbits, communication satellites, and near-Earth reconnaissance networks as a unified target grid. Russian state operators routinely maneuver anti-satellite weapons alongside commercial broadband satellites. The enemy plays by total-war rules, understanding that crippling an opponent’s space systems could decide a war before the first shot is fired on the ground. America falls behind the moment it assumes its own satellites enjoy permanent immunity.

One giant leap

Winning this high-stakes struggle requires an interconnected defense strategy. Today’s commercial logistics networks, NASA scientific payloads, and Space Force tactical communications share the exact same orbital pathways. A modern GPS constellation guides precision artillery, syncs local bank transactions, and routes commercial cargo ships at the same time. Protecting that shared highway demands an integrated command structure. Trump’s proposal for a dedicated Space Academy aims to create a specialized officer corps in which military tacticians, space engineers, and commercial operators train together, day in and day out. You don’t have to love everything the president does to recognize a good idea when you see one.

The immediate necessity of this institution becomes obvious when you look at how China and Russia prepare for future conflict. Beijing- and Kremlin-backed cybercriminals already hack American digital infrastructure for fun, routinely stealing industrial trade secrets, military blueprints, and sensitive corporate data. Moving those exact same malicious operations into orbit gives hostile states total control over the ultimate high ground. A state with the upper hand in low-Earth orbit gains an enormous advantage in global navigation. It enjoys greater control over maritime trade and real-time military intelligence. Surrendering that control turns every terrestrial aircraft carrier, fighter jet, and armored division into a blind target in open waters.

RELATED: California dismissed them as backward. Now they’re building America’s future.

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A Chinese or Russian monopoly on critical space infrastructure would rewrite daily life across the Western world. Hostile operators could sever global financial links with a single orbital jammer. They could plunge domestic air traffic control systems into immediate chaos and disable military command networks in seconds. Foreign state operators would effectively hold a permanent off-switch over the modern digital economy. America simply can’t afford to let autocratic regimes dictate who gets to broadcast data, launch commercial rockets, or operate lunar infrastructure. Dominance in space is nonnegotiable; it is the absolute foundation of national survival.

If an adversary manages to take over a network of satellites, it doesn’t need to launch a missile to cause serious damage. It could turn solar panels away from the sun, push satellites out of their proper orbits, or interfere with emergency communications across huge areas. A dedicated Space Academy could train the specialists needed to protect these systems and keep America’s satellites secure from relentless foreign attacks. America needs elite specialists who can defend against new and evolving threats.

But where should these specialists learn their trade?

Two cultures, one decision

Washington bureaucrats may instinctively want to put the campus near Silicon Valley or inside the government beltway around Maryland. That would be a mistake. The Gulf South is the obvious choice. Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida already have much of the infrastructure America needs to build, test, and launch rockets. The academy should be close to the people and facilities already advancing America’s space industry. Placing cadet training near active launchpads ensures that future space commanders grow up surrounded by real rocket fire, rather than philosophizing from the comfort of a Bay Area beanbag chair.

The choice is clear. Train the next generation of elite patriotic space warriors, or watch the enemy turn the skies into a deadly weapon aimed directly at us. Kennedy gave America the ambition to reach the stars. Modern dangers demand that America develop the strength to dominate space and defend that achievement.

​Tech, Space academy, Donald trump, John f. kennedy, Space race 

After a week like this one, many Americans arrive at Sunday carrying more than they can easily name.

This past week marked one year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking to students at Utah Valley University. The following day, our nation observed the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, when 2,977 people were murdered in New York, at the Pentagon, and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

May we draw as near as circumstances allow, sit with them in their sorrow, speak the names of those they love, and remind them that grief does not have to be carried alone.

Though different in scale and circumstance, both remind us that evil never remains theoretical. Eventually, it enters a crowd, a cockpit, an office, a home, leaving behind blood, unanswered questions, and an empty chair.

Public trauma always becomes private sorrow, one household at a time.

We understandably respond with investigations, arguments, and demands for accountability. We should seek truth and justice. Evil should be named without apology. But grief should not have to pass an ideological examination before we treat it as grief.

In 1903, a Presbyterian minister named Cleland McAfee faced a brutal week of grief when his brother lost two young daughters to diphtheria within 24 hours. Because the disease was highly contagious, the family’s home was quarantined.

McAfee was a preacher, theologian, musician, and choir director. He stayed up late, considering what he could possibly say or sing the following Sunday.

From his own sorrow, he wrote the words and music to a hymn:

There is a place of quiet rest,
Near to the heart of God,
A place where sin cannot molest,
Near to the heart of God.

The modern ear catches on the word “molest.” Today, it almost always refers to sexual abuse. McAfee used the word in its older and broader sense: to harass, disturb, persecute, or injure with hostile intent.

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It is a jarring word, but it is the right one.

Sin does indeed molest. It does not knock politely before entering. It intrudes, violates, and corrupts. It turns passenger planes into weapons and political disagreement into bloodshed. Then it continues its work by tempting us to mock the dead, exploit the bereaved, turn suffering into content, and answer hatred with still more hatred.

McAfee did not write his hymn because sorrow had passed his family by. He wrote it because sorrow had come through the door. His nieces were dead, his brother’s home was darkened, and the family remained isolated by disease.

He did not attempt to explain why the children died. Instead, he pointed his brother toward the only refuge death could not breach:

O Jesus, blest Redeemer,
Sent from the heart of God,
Hold us who wait before Thee,
Near to the heart of God.

The choir learned the hymn at its Saturday evening rehearsal. Because the home remained quarantined, they could not go inside to embrace the family or sit beside them.

So they came as close as they could.

Standing on the lawn beneath the night sky, the choir sang through the walls. They did not repair the loss or answer the family’s questions. They simply placed themselves as near to the grieving family as the quarantine allowed, and they sang.

That image has stayed with me for years: a grieving family inside, the church outside, darkness surrounding them, and a hymn passing through the walls.

Twenty-five years after September 11, families still gather to read the names of those who died. One year after Charlie Kirk’s murder, his wife, children, friends, and colleagues continue living with the chair he no longer fills.

Their persistent grief is not weakness. It is the continuing cost of love.

McAfee’s hymn does not promise that sin cannot reach our bodies, families, or country. The circumstances that produced it would disprove such a claim. The place near to the heart of God is not where Christians become immune to suffering. It is where we find refuge when suffering comes and assurance that evil does not possess ultimate authority.

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Christ stepped into this broken world and took its worst. The cross shows us what sin does; the empty tomb shows us that sin does not get the last word.

Most of us will never address a grieving country, but nearly all of us know someone living inside a darkened house.

The lawn may be literal, or it may be a kitchen table, a church pew, a telephone call, or a quiet visit where very little is said.

After such a solemn week, and as battles rage within and beyond our borders, may we enter the coming days looking for the brokenhearted. May we draw as near as circumstances allow, sit with them in their sorrow, speak the names of those they love, and remind them that grief does not have to be carried alone.

And when words fail, perhaps we too can stand on the lawn and sing.

​Charlie kirk, Cleland mcafee, Grief and sorrow, Christians, Church, Sin, Opinion & analysis, 911 

As the LGBTQ+ movement that seeks to deconstruct gender and normalize all sexualities continues to collide with orthodox Christian teaching, many believers find themselves in a painful tension: how to love others while still honoring God’s commands about sexuality and gender.

Nobody is better at navigating these challenging situations, says Allie Beth Stuckey, than former lesbian turned Christian apologist Rosaria Butterfield.

On this episode of “Relatable,” Allie and Butterfield address voicemails from listeners asking for advice on personal predicaments that many Christians will find all too familiar.

In the first voicemail, a “Relatable” listener shared a predicament now common in many Christian families: a loved one leaves the faith after embracing an LGBTQ+ identity.

She explained that her nephew, who was raised in a Christian home, distanced himself from the family and the faith after coming out as gay and “marrying” his partner.

“How would you handle … loving him but also bringing him back to the Lord?” she asked.

“The first thing you always do, always do, is affirm your love for your prodigal, and you do that in every way you can,” says Butterfield.

The second order of business, she says, is to commit to “consistently praying for your prodigal.”

“One of the things you’re praying for, and especially if your nephew doesn’t live close … [is] that the Lord’s going to put many Christians in his life,” says Butterfield.

“There is no such thing as a gay marriage, and so what you’re going to do is pray that the Lord would destroy that — in fact, that the Lord would remove all unholy, ungodly influences from your nephew’s life,” she adds.

In these scenarios, a believer, says Butterfield, can also petition God for “insight” into the prodigal’s life.

“You might want to also be praying that the Lord would give you insight and wisdom to know more about how your nephew is living and see if he’d be willing to let you do some reconnaissance work with him,” she says.

“You know, find out does he have a craving to fit in, to belong? … Does he need to feel important? Are there other comorbidities and medications that might be making it really hard for him to get unstuck from harmful patterns? Or to what degree is activism involved?” she continues. “All of these things will help you know how to speak a word in season.”

But the most important thing one can do in these heartbreaking situations, says Butterfield, is to “not lose heart.”

“Because there really is no such thing as someone who has ‘left the faith’ who is in the faith,” she says.

“The concept of a faith deconstructor is a misnomer. You can’t construct your faith, so you can’t deconstruct it. Now he’s a wanderer; he’s a prodigal — and we want him back.”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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​Lgbtq movement, Christian apologist, Allie beth stuckey, Blazetv show