Trump’s recent assembly of many of the very top people in AI must be counted among the most momentous political occasions in U.S. history — and perhaps human history. It comes at a time of extreme instability, uncertainty, and acceleration.

Even — or especially — those at the summit of tech and politics are unclear on what is going to happen and why. But they do know one thing: The nature of ultimate power on Earth is changing, and they are positioned to receive more of that power than almost anyone else.

Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us.

Power does not arrive alone. Rapidly acquiring unprecedented power brings anxiety, pressure, exhaustion, confusion, and the temptation to mistake possession for mastery.

The important thing about this is precisely that it is an experience. To deal with the consequences of a profound infusion of power is to plunge into the mysterious depths of being — the realm philosophers call ontology — in stark contrast to epistemology, the realm of knowing.

Power reminds us that knowledge arises from being, not the other way around.

For anyone operating at the highest levels of tech and politics, that reminder is crucial. Decades of bad modern philosophy and overzealous nerdery have encouraged the opposite idea: that being arises from knowledge.

That fake news is bad news. It feeds the fear that we have poured so much knowledge into machines that they are about to spring to life as an altogether new form of being — uncreated by God, no less — that will instantly dwarf and dominate us.

Yet one prominent techno-utopian belief treats the same prospect as good news, almost literally a new gospel. In this telling, the machine is not merely a rival life form. It becomes the vehicle for a new man. Rather than dwarfing and dominating us, the alien intelligence will fuse with us, becoming in effect a new god and a new soul, transforming us into Adam 2.0.

People who recoil from that prospect, and fear it could become real, are scrambling to fight or slow it through new law. The impulse is understandable. But it carries the seeds of its own failure.

RELATED: America’s ‘AI czar’ could revolutionize our form of government

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Christians know there are sharp limits to what lawgiving can accomplish. St. Paul wrote that, having died to what bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit rather than the old way of the written code (Romans 7:6). He also wrote that God “has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant — not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Paul’s point is spiritual, but it bears directly on our technological confusion. Treat lawgiving as the highest activity of man and God, and you begin to imagine that being arises from knowledge. If being arises from knowledge, then creating knowledge can create being — as if the Golem of Prague or Frankenstein’s monster could be brought to life by sufficient information.

That is not life. It is a parody of life: death pretending to be life and producing more death.

At the intersection of unprecedented technological and political power, we have to remember that epistemology is downstream, not upstream, of ontology.

That is why the new “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” signed by Trump and six of the industry’s most powerful executives, is so momentously uneventful. The companies say they “should implement” four basic layers of controls and audits: robust internal safety controls; an empowered internal team to make sure those controls work; an independent external auditor or evaluator; and an independent board committee to oversee the whole structure and make sure problems are fixed.

That’s it.

RELATED: Now they’re saying the AIs built ‘secret civilizations’ — the truth is far worse

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The accord adds that the companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices. “Over time,” it concludes, “it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.” But for now, no. Basically, it is a plan to get better organized about not screwing up the whole AI thing.

That may sound a little scary, considering how fast things are moving and how deep the trust gap has become between many Americans and the tech titans.

But it would be scarier if the companies threw themselves at the feet of lawgiving and tried to fob off responsibility onto a new written code. Because if they did that, they would in effect force the rest of us to do the same.

That kind of thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us. Christianity’s warning against pharisaical faith in the letter is not an invitation to lawlessness; it is a warning against confusing compliance with righteousness.

It is good that the accord is simple and unsensational. Strip away all the words, codes, boards, controls, and audits, and there are still people underneath — people who can run from responsibility but can never finally hide from it.

All told, the accord is being-first — human-being-first. That is exactly what it needs to be if we are to avoid the false faith that our identity is merely the slave of information.

​Ai, Trump, Algorithms, Huma beings, Americans, Big tech, White house, Christians, Power, Philosophy, God, Humanity, Ultimate power, Earth, Opinion & analysis 

When the Walter Reed scandal erupted in 2007, the officers under fire were more than names in a newspaper to me. I knew many of them. I saw their frustration and outrage as they scrambled to address failures some were only then discovering.

My wife, Gracie, and I were at Walter Reed frequently. A bilateral amputee herself, she had been invited to sing and spend time with wounded warriors, particularly women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with amputations. The military was struggling to care for troops with devastating injuries, many caused by improvised explosive devices.

We cannot turn the page simply because the people responsible do not want us to read it.

Knowing people working there helped me understand the strain. Knowing more wounded were coming helped me understand why the failures could not wait.

The Washington Post exposed serious problems in outpatient conditions and care, including mold, vermin, bureaucratic delays, and wounded soldiers falling through administrative cracks. The reporting was painful for people I knew. It was also necessary.

I discussed the scandal with my father, a retired Navy captain. The military, he explained, survives by folding painful lessons into its policies, procedures, and institutional memory so others do not have to learn them at the same cost.

That is what an after-action review is for: What happened? Why did it happen? What changes now?

The lesson must outlive the embarrassment.

When our leaders and the media lie, conceal, or confidently tell us something that later proves false, they do the heavy lifting for our enemies. How do we defend the country together when we cannot trust the people describing the danger?

Consider the assurances about President Biden’s capacity. In February 2024, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “He is sharp. He is on top of things.” In March, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough went much further, calling the sitting president “the best Biden ever” intellectually and analytically.

Then came the June debate and Biden’s withdrawal from the race in July.

The debate did not establish a medical diagnosis. It did demand an explanation from people who had spent months assuring the public that concerns about Biden’s capacity were misplaced.

In May 2025, Scarborough finally said, “I was obviously wrong.” He explained that his confidence came from extended personal encounters with Biden. Then he added that he was not sure what lesson to take from the episode.

That’s precisely the problem.

What evidence did he discount? What did he see that persuaded him? What did others see that contradicted it? What will he do differently next time?

RELATED: Gavin Newsom invoked Nietzsche. I thought of ‘Blazing Saddles.’

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Those questions belong not only to Scarborough but to every politician, aide, reporter, editor, broadcaster, and institution that gave the public confident assurances. An after-action review cannot end with “I was wrong” any more than it can end with “I meant well.”

The next people relying on you need to know what changed.

The border demands the same accounting. In September 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris said, “The border is secure.” In October 2023, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified that more than 600,000 known “gotaways” had evaded apprehension during that fiscal year.

What did “secure” mean? More important, what evidence would have caused the administration to abandon that description sooner?

An honest accounting must distinguish between what officials got wrong and what they knowingly concealed. That requires records, testimony, names, timelines, and decisions. Citizens should not have to settle for whichever explanation best protects a party, an administration, or a network.

We may expect politicians to lie. That does not excuse them. Nor does it relieve journalists of the obligation to test what politicians say rather than repeat it.

Over 40 years of caregiving, I have had plenty of doctors get things wrong. I understand the reluctance to offer a mea culpa. But I take their advice home and live with the consequences. If we are going to continue together, I need to know how the next decision will be better.

RELATED: The fourth bus of the Apocalypse

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That was the obligation at Walter Reed. The next wounded soldier needed the previous failure corrected whether anyone responsible felt sorry or not.

“Mistakes were made” leaves the authors conveniently absent. “Turn the page” asks the public to move on while the questions remain unanswered.

We cannot turn the page simply because the people responsible do not want us to read it.

Our enemies benefit from failures we refuse to examine. If those responsible will not come clean, voters should elect people willing to use lawful investigations, public hearings, compelled testimony, and the release of records to establish what happened. Where evidence establishes crimes, pursue prosecution.

But a hearing cannot become the place where accountability goes to die.

The Constitution provides authority. The law provides tools. Voters must supply people willing to use them.

This election, ask candidates whose records they will demand, which decisions they will examine, and whether their own allies will have to answer questions under oath. Anyone can promise to investigate an opponent. The test comes when the evidence reaches a friend.

I owe my preferred candidates and broadcasters that same scrutiny. Excusing them would preserve the very failure I want corrected.

We can disagree on policy and still defend this country shoulder to shoulder. But we cannot make truth optional. Calls for unity ring hollow when the people asking for trust refuse to account for how they broke it.

Our children will inherit whatever we excuse.

​Walter reed medical center, Hospitals, Trust, Washington post, Msnbc, Joe biden, Kamala harris, Wounded warriors, Doctors, Constitution, Opinion & analysis 

Philadelphia is full of must-see locations on sightseeing trips: Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, the Art Museum, to name a few.

But in a city known for its cheesesteaks as well as for its nation-shaping historical landmarks, one eatery stands tall: Pat’s King of Steaks.

‘This guy just messed with South Philly … we don’t forget!’

Pat’s has been around for almost 100 years, according to the colorful sign sitting above the South Philly establishment on East Passyunk Avenue. You might also recall it was a filming location for the 1976 Oscar-winning movie “Rocky.”

And while Pat’s certainly contends with plenty of competition around town these days, and the ongoing who-has-the-best-cheesesteak argument certainly opens the door for many opinions, one unhappy customer took things too far Wednesday.

General manager Tom Francano — who has worked at Pat’s for nearly 50 years — told KYW-TV the customer walked up to the window and ordered a cheesesteak.

Then about 10 minutes later, the customer returned with the opened cheesesteak and said, “This steak’s garbage,” Francano recalled to KYW.

Francano added to the station that he and the customer had a back-and-forth over the sandwich’s quality, and then Francano took an informal poll, asking other customers about their cheesesteaks — after which the patrons replied that they were satisfied.

“That’s when he got a little pissed off. He got mad, and he picked the steak up and threw it at me,” Francano told KYW, adding that he thought the customer might be a social media influencer. “He had this phone on, you know, on a pole, taking pictures outside and everything.”

RELATED: Armed South Philly residents guard Columbus statue from vandalism — and leftist mayor, district attorney call them vigilantes, ‘criminal bullies’

“I was pretty pissed off, you know. I’m not used to getting a steak thrown in my face, you know. I mean, if you don’t like the steak, be a little nicer about it,” Francano added to the station in the aftermath.

Shop owner Frank Olivieri told the station he reviewed video showing the customer ripping the cheesesteak apart by hand before approaching the window.

“The guy picked the sandwich up, threw it in his face, and ran away — the coward,” Oliveri told KYW.

“He assaulted my employee, so we’ll see how many of his friends that he has online are really his friends, see who’s going to turn him in first,” Olivieri added to the station. “The power of the camera, AI, we’ll find him. We’ll find him. $5,000, we’ll pull him out of whatever rock he’s living under right now.”

Yes, Pat’s offered a pretty penny for information leading to an arrest and charges in the incident, the station said.

But it appears the cash may not have been necessary.

A Philadelphia police spokesperson told KYW that a man turned himself in Thursday and was charged with harassment.

“This whole Streaming for Clout thing is getting out of hand … stuff like this needs to be stopped,” one commenter under the above video stated. “This guy just messed with South Philly … we don’t forget!”

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​Cheesesteak, Philadelphia, Pat’s king of steaks, Physical attack, Harassment, Arrest, Social media, Crime 

We live in a day when a teenager with a smartphone can perform tasks governments couldn’t fathom just three decades ago, says Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck is already disturbed by this strange reality, but he knows the technology in the pipeline will make our current capabilities seem like child’s play. “Something’s now being built that will hand every one of us abilities that we have not earned, we have not personally developed, and we were not formed to carry,” he warns.

He is referring, of course, to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, which many experts and developers have warned could spiral out of control and turn on humanity.

It seems like a new problem, but it’s actually as old as time itself, says Glenn.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” he connects Genesis, the book of Enoch, the Tower of Babel, and one of the Old Testament’s final warnings to ask a question we may soon be forced to reckon with: What happens when technological capabilities develop faster than our ability to handle them?

Glenn, citing both Genesis and the book of Enoch, recounts the story of how he believes the giant human-demon hybrids called Nephilim came to be.

“200 [Watchers] come down on a mountain [Mount Hermon] … and they bind themselves by an oath because each one knows the other is going to lose the nerve. So what do they do? Among other things, they open a school,” he says.

“One of them teaches metalworking: swords, knives, armor. Along with it, how to grind minerals into paint for the face and dye for the cloth. Others teach reading the stars and the property of roots and plants and cutting of spells,” he continues. “And the account doesn’t say they taught lies. It says they taught things that were true and the earth was ruined by it.”

Glenn says the fact that true things ushered in destruction, including the great flood, is the “weirdest part of the story” for him.

“The crime was the calendar. It arrived early. It arrived unearned from a source with no interest in what it would do to the people who received it. The giants in the story are simply the result — something enormous born of that union with an appetite that the earth couldn’t feed,” he says.

The Tower of Babel followed the same trajectory and was also thwarted by God, he notes.

But Enoch, according to Latter-day Saint scripture, converted a people who became so unified — “of one heart and one mind,” with “no poor among them” — that God named them Zion and took their city into heaven, Glenn explains.

“Same architecture, opposite foundation. One is built out of what people became, and the other is built out of what some people could engineer,” he says.

He wonders if artificial intelligence is a modern-day Mount Hermon or Babel.

“We’re being sold the Tower of Babel — a merged intelligence, a unified mind, every problem solved by consolidation. It’s Enoch’s city offered without the price that Enoch had to pay,” he says.

If the world of the Nephilim and the city of Babel were both destroyed for grabbing power before they had the character to hold it, what’s to stop it from happening a third time, he wonders.

To answer that question, Glenn looks at God’s warning to mankind in Malachi 4:5-6: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

“He’s threatening a repeat,” says Glenn.

The verse names only one stay of judgment: the hearts of fathers and children — not rulers, walls, laws, or restricted knowledge.

“The [Watcher] school on that mountain was teaching knowledge, and it was unearned. … Fatherhood without fatherhood, capability handed down by beings with no stake in the children receiving it — no relationship, no formation, nothing owed, just given — give a child a blade and no reason to sheath it, and you have manufactured a giant,” says Glenn.

He points out how human flight and nuclear fission were discovered at the same time by people with no connection to each other. That’s not coincidence but divine timing, Glenn argues. “We earned [that knowledge]. We controlled it. We’ve been responsible with it.”

But artificial intelligence, he says, is not following that same trajectory. It’s ushering in knowledge at a rate strikingly similar to the empires built by the ancient Watchers and the builders of Babel.

Enoch and Elijah, Glenn notes, are the only two men in the Bible who do not die — and that’s not a coincidence in his opinion. Enoch is “the man sent to deliver the verdict on the first bad transfer of knowledge,” he says, and Elijah is the man who will be “sent back before the last day to repair fathers and children, which may be now — another time of bad transfer of knowledge.”

“The danger in new technology is almost never the technology; it’s the interval between when a capability arrives and when the character to hold it arrives,” he says.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, Glenn wonders if the technology was “received or seized.”

While he has no hopes that AI development will slow down before it reaches dystopian potential, he does have hope in people.

“Turn your heart to the Father and to the children,” he pleads.

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Artificial intelligence, Book of enoch, Glenn beck, Modern technology, Nephilim, Blazetv show 

Horror has always had a respectability problem. But filmmakers eventually discovered a useful trick for getting around it: Make the monster a metaphor.

The creature in “The Babadook” isn’t merely a boogeyman under the bed; it’s grief and depression. “It Follows” has been read as everything from an allegory for sexually transmitted disease to a story about sexual trauma and mortality. Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” turned body-snatching horror into an examination of race and liberal paternalism. Even “Hereditary,” which gives us actual demons, comes wrapped in grief, mental illness, and inherited trauma.

Moore was said to have been decapitated, horribly echoing the death Richardson had devised for the movie.

Nothing wrong with that. Horror works best when it gives physical form to intangible fears.

But the metaphor also provides a convenient escape hatch. Whatever battles of principalities and powers we see on screen, we know the real horror lurks in our minds — best addressed with modern, morally neutral techniques like therapy.

Asking us to believe in monsters that stand for nothing more than themselves — real monsters, in other words — takes us uncomfortably close to an idea Christianity has maintained for 2,000 years: Supernatural evil actually exists.

It’s no wonder filmmakers who want their commercial success with a side of art-house respectability don’t often go there.

But there might be another reason as well. When filmmakers do attempt to depict the devil, he has a curious way of making himself known through strange disruptions to the production: fires, equipment failures, injuries, even death.

Almost as if he would prefer to be dismissed as a fairy tale.

Here are six movies that took supernatural evil seriously — and the strange things that happened while people were making them.

1. ‘The Exorcist’

If any movie were ever cursed, surely it was “The Exorcist.” William Friedkin’s 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel has plenty to say about a broken family, psychiatric medicine, and a priest suffering a crisis of faith.

But when Regan MacNeil starts speaking in strange voices and contorting her body, “The Exorcist” is blunt about the cause: demonic possession. Friedkin brings an almost documentary realism to material that might otherwise have been safely dismissed as gothic fantasy. Audiences fainted, vomited, and fled theaters. The movie became a cultural phenomenon.

And if the stories that emerged from the production are to be believed, audiences weren’t the only ones disturbed by its unflinching treatment of evil. The trouble started before Friedkin had even begun shooting in Iraq. A statue of Pazuzu, the demon who possesses Regan, had been built in Burbank and shipped to Mosul for the movie’s opening sequence. It never arrived.

Somehow, Pazuzu ended up in Denmark. “It was lost,” Friedkin recalled years later. Shooting in Iraq was delayed for weeks while somebody presumably worked out how to get the demon to the right country.

Things got worse back in New York. In the early hours of the morning, a fire tore through the set of the MacNeil house at 20th Century Fox’s studio on West 54th Street.

“The production manager called me at 4 a.m. and said, ‘Don’t bother to come to work today,’” Friedkin later recalled.

“I said, ‘Why? Am I fired?’”

No. The set had burned to the ground. Well, most of it had. Regan’s bedroom — the room where Friedkin was filming the exorcism — survived. Investigators never established what caused the fire. Friedkin later blamed a pigeon that had flown into a light box.

Production shut down for six weeks while the set was rebuilt. Then Ellen Burstyn hurt her back. During the scene in which Regan strikes her mother, a stuntman attached to a wire was supposed to yank Burstyn backward. After several takes, Burstyn told Friedkin that the stuntman was pulling too hard.

“Well, it has to look real,” she remembered him replying.

On the next take, she landed hard on her coccyx and screamed in genuine pain. Friedkin kept the camera rolling. Burstyn later summed up her relationship with the director rather neatly: “He was always great with me. Except when he permanently injured my spine.”

Burstyn went on to do many more films. Others in the cast weren’t so lucky. Jack MacGowran, who plays director Burke Dennings — murdered by the possessed Regan in the movie — finished his work and died of influenza at 54. Vasiliki Maliaros, who played Father Karras’ mother, also died during production.

In the 1998 BBC documentary “The Fear of God: 25 Years of ‘The Exorcist,'” Burstyn remembers others connected with the production dying as well: the newborn child of an assistant cameraman, the man responsible for refrigerating the bedroom set, and a night watchman.

None died in accidents while shooting the movie. But there were enough deaths, injuries, delays, and other mishaps that people began talking about a curse.

The actor playing the conflicted priest and trained psychiatrist who attempts to save Regan got a more explicit warning. In “The Fear of God,” Jason Miller recalls eating and studying his lines at the Jesuit residence while filming at Georgetown. One day, an elderly priest handed him a medal of the Blessed Virgin and asked whether Miller had ever heard of “intervention.”

“If you do anything on the devil, anything at all on the devil to reveal him as the trickster that he is,” Miller remembered the priest telling him, “he will seek retribution against you, or he will even try to stop what you’re trying to do to unmask him.”

The priest told Miller the medal would protect him.

About three days later, Miller was walking through the Jesuit residence on his way to dinner when something caught his eye in one of the side rooms. He went back and looked, only to see the old priest lying there in a casket.

By 1974, Castle of Frankenstein magazine was running an article with the wonderfully unsubtle headline The Curse That Hangs Over “The Exorcist.”

Eventually, Friedkin called the Rev. Thomas Bermingham, the Jesuit priest serving as a technical adviser to the movie.

“Would you come down and exorcise the set?” Bermingham recalled Friedkin asking in “The Fear of God.”

Bermingham refused. “I don’t want to increase anxiety or anything like that,” he told him. But Bermingham wasn’t laughing off the possibility that they had gotten themselves into something strange.

“There was definitely a feeling that it could happen,” he says in the documentary. “We were playing around with something. I even felt it. I felt we were playing around with something I shouldn’t be playing around with.”

He blessed the production instead, just in case.

2. ‘The Passion of the Christ’

Mel Gibson’s 2004 “The Passion of the Christ” isn’t a horror movie, although anyone who has sat through the scourging scene might dispute the point.

But neither is it the kind of “faith-based” film that confines the battle between sin and redemption to the dialogue. Gibson keeps the personification of evil in the frame.

Satan stalks Jesus through Gethsemane. He moves through the crowd as Christ suffers. During the scourging, he carries a grotesque child. After Christ’s death, Gibson cuts away from Calvary to show Satan defeated. On screen, Satan can only howl in rage. What happened off screen suggests a more active opposition.

Jim Caviezel, the man playing Jesus, was struck by lightning. Producer Steve McEveety recalled seeing the bolt hit him from roughly 100 feet away. Assistant director Jan Michelini was struck too.

Which would already make for a pretty good story, except Michelini had reportedly been struck by lightning once before during the same production.

Caviezel later joked that the strike lit him up “like a Christmas tree.” Contemporary reports said neither man was seriously injured.

Caviezel had previously turned down three opportunities to play Jesus. He accepted Gibson’s offer because, he later said, he sensed the director’s commitment to telling the Passion story “without restraint.”

Be careful what you pray for.

The lightning strike was far from the only hardship. Caviezel separated his shoulder carrying the cross. He developed hypothermia while hanging nearly naked in bitter winds during the crucifixion scenes, followed by pneumonia and a lung infection. The elaborate makeup left his skin raw. During the scourging, one of the actors missed the protective board behind Caviezel and struck him across the back hard enough to tear the skin.

At one particularly miserable point, hanging on the cross in the cold, Caviezel remembered crying out to God:

“So you don’t want this movie to be made?”

Caviezel kept making it anyway; appropriately enough, the suffering itself began to serve the movie. He received Communion daily, prayed the rosary during the long hours in makeup, and went to confession during production.

Caviezel also came to see his suffering as part of what made the performance work. Recreating the crucifixion on a comfortable soundstage, he later said, would have lost some of its “effect and reality.” The cold, the injuries, the exhaustion — things that might have stopped another production — became part of the movie Gibson and Caviezel had set out to make.

3. ‘The Omen’

If “The Exorcist” created the cursed-movie template, “The Omen” perfected it.

The 1976 movie is even less interested in metaphor. The little boy at the center of the story really is the Antichrist, and the people who figure this out have a nasty habit of dying before they can do much about it.

Bob Munger, the advertising executive who helped originate the premise, later recalled warning producer Harvey Bernhard about making the movie in the first place.

“If the devil’s greatest single weapon is to be invisible,” Munger told him, “and you’re going to do something which takes away his invisibility to millions of people, he won’t want that to happen.”

Bernhard eventually became convinced Munger was right. “The devil was at work,” he said years later.

The stories began before audiences had even seen the movie. In April 1976, New York magazine was already reporting that Gregory Peck’s plane had been struck by lightning while he was traveling to London to make “The Omen.” The magazine named screenwriter David Seltzer and director Richard Donner in connection with troubled flights as well. Executive producer Mace Neufeld later recalled a lightning strike on his own flight. The surviving accounts make it difficult to say exactly how many people were struck by lightning, which is not ordinarily a problem a movie production has.

The close calls continued once Neufeld reached London. He later recalled walking out of his London hotel with his wife when a bomb exploded about a block and a half away. The couple also had reservations at Scott’s, the Mayfair restaurant bombed by the IRA in November 1975. Both bombings are real; Neufeld recounted his brushes with them in the 2020 documentary series “Cursed Films.”

For one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, Damien visits a safari park and the baboons go berserk at the sight of him. The sequence was filmed at Windsor Safari Park. During the production period, 22-year-old keeper Sidney Bamford was killed there by a tiger. Later curse accounts claimed the keeper died immediately after the filmmakers shot the sequence. Contemporary reports establish the tiger attack, but not that timing or that Bamford personally worked with the movie.

And then there was the airplane the filmmakers didn’t take. Donner later recalled that the production had intended to use an aircraft for aerial filming, only to lose it at the last minute when it was reassigned to Chinese customers. According to the story, the plane subsequently crashed.

There was a remarkably similar accident during production. On November 20, 1975, a Hawker Siddeley executive jet carrying a Chinese delegation took off from Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey, flew into a flock of lapwings, lost power in both engines, overran the runway, and struck a passing car.

All nine people aboard the aircraft survived. All six people in the car died.

The timing and the Chinese passengers make it a plausible match for the crash Donner remembered. What the investigation doesn’t establish is that “The Omen” crew had ever booked that particular plane.

The strangest story came after “The Omen” was finished.

Special-effects designer John Richardson had helped create one of the movie’s most gruesome deaths. Photographer Keith Jennings is standing by the side of a road when a sheet of glass slides from a truck and takes off his head. Richardson’s effects team accomplished it with a rigged dummy and replica of actor David Warner’s head.

In August 1976, Richardson was in the Netherlands working on “A Bridge Too Far” when he was involved in a car crash. Richardson survived. Sculptor Liz Moore, traveling with him, did not. Biographical accounts date her death to August 13.

Over the years, the accident acquired two details that made it irresistible to anyone writing about the curse of “The Omen.” Moore was said to have been decapitated, horribly echoing the death Richardson had devised for the movie. And Richardson was said to have emerged from the wreck near a road sign reading:

Ommen — 66.6 km.

The crash and Moore’s death are well attested. Those two grisly details are not. No contemporary report or official record located in our research establishes that Moore was decapitated. Richardson did later recall a roadside marker involving sixes and a road leading toward Ommen, but the famous “Ommen — 66.6 km” sign has never been independently verified.

By then it hardly mattered. “The Omen” had acquired a curse almost as elaborate as its screenplay.

Fox eventually made the legend part of the product. By 2000, the DVD included a featurette called “Curse or Coincidence?”

4. ‘The Possession’

The 2012 movie “The Possession” had something most demon movies don’t: a supposedly genuine haunted object behind it.

The “dybbuk box” was an old wine cabinet whose strange history had first attracted widespread attention on eBay. Kevin Mannis supplied a terrifying history involving a Holocaust survivor and a malicious Jewish spirit. Owners supposedly experienced nightmares, illnesses, and other misfortunes.

The story spread online, made its way into newspapers, and eventually became the inspiration for a Hollywood movie.

Then odd things started happening on the movie.

Director Ole Bornedal recalled production lights exploding even though they weren’t switched on. About a week after filming ended, he said, a warehouse containing props from the movie burned; Bornedal said he never learned what caused the fire.

Years later came a fairly devastating blow to the legend: Mannis admitted that he had invented the box’s elaborate backstory. So much for the haunted box.

Except Mannis inventing a story about a wine cabinet doesn’t explain why Bornedal said lights exploded. It doesn’t explain the warehouse fire either.

Bornedal himself offered the best skeptical argument. “Would we have noticed if this had been a ‘Love Story’? Perhaps not.”

RELATED: Inside the mind of a Catholic exorcist: Fr. Chad Ripperger talks shop with Shawn Ryan

Photo by SIMON WOHLFAHRT/AFP via Getty Images

5. ‘The Omen’ (2006)

Thirty years after the original “Omen,” Fox decided to make it again, if only to take advantage of a uniquely demonic release date: June 6, 2006, or 6/6/06.

Director John Moore had been raised Catholic, and maybe that’s why he found the strange happenings that befell him so unnerving.

Two days of footage involving the discovery of Damien’s 666 birthmark were destroyed. Moore received an airfare costing exactly $666. And a promotional videotape apparently wound up overwritten with ESPN footage even though, Moore said, the machine wasn’t capable of recording.

Moore was disturbed enough to wonder whether making the movie might offend God. Eventually, he reasoned that a movie acknowledging the existence of evil necessarily acknowledged the existence of good.

As for Fox, the curse was great publicity. Although perhaps even the box-office bean counters were a little shaken by the movie’s first-day box office:

$12,633,666.

What were the odds? Pretty good, as it turned out. Fox distribution executive Bruce Snyder admitted that the studio had adjusted the reported estimate to give it the demonic final digits.

“We were having a little fun,” he said.

6. ‘The Deliverance’

By the time Lee Daniels made “The Deliverance” in 2024, the old stories had become part of Hollywood folklore.

Daniels had read about what supposedly happened during the making of “The Exorcist” and “Poltergeist.” His Episcopalian mother warned him about making a movie dealing with demonic evil.

“She was just like, ‘You are a portal. You work from a place of groundedness, and your soul is open, and I don’t want anything bad happening to you,’” Daniels recalled.

He took precautions. The production brought in an ordained Christian who conducted deliverances on set. Daniels also instituted daily prayer circles.

“We prayed every day,” he said.

Netflix HR reminded him that Christian prayer couldn’t be mandatory. Daniels told anyone who didn’t want to participate that they were free to leave.

“There were a few that left, but for the most part, most of them wanted to be covered by the blood of Jesus,” he recalled. “They knew what was up.”

The precautions didn’t prevent “The Deliverance” from acquiring a curse story of its own.

Daniels’ sister had appeared in every movie he made as his “good luck charm.” For “The Deliverance,” she appeared in a scene with Glenn Close involving chemotherapy.

Two days later, Daniels said, his sister was diagnosed with lung cancer.

“My dog died on set,” he added.

Mo’Nique had a more explicable brush with the supposed curse. While filming an outdoor scene involving a demon, Mo’Nique said material being blown around the set made it difficult for her to breathe. Afterward, she was hospitalized with an enlarged thyroid.

“It was a lot of things happening with ‘The Deliverance,’” she recalled.

None of this proves that anything supernatural was happening. Mo’Nique herself described a perfectly physical reason for becoming ill. Cancer diagnoses and dead dogs require no demonic explanation.

But half a century after “The Exorcist,” Daniels went into another movie about demonic possession worried enough about the old curse stories to pray over his set every day and bring in someone to perform deliverances.

Then his sister got cancer, his dog died, and one of his stars wound up in the hospital.

​Entertainment, Cursed films, Movies, The exorcist, The passion of the christ, Jim caviezel, Mel gibson, The omen, Culture, Satan, Evil, Christianity, Faith 

John Cleese must feel very lonely.

Not only is the Monty Python alum virtually alone in calling out the inconvenient ills of British society, but he rarely gets support from his fellow stars.

It’s climate change alarmism run wild, a shocking project from an actor who aggressively avoids political hot takes.

Cowards, the lot of ’em.

Now, things could be getting serious. A British Muslim group has reported Cleese to the authorities for his “anti-Islamic” comments. It’s not funny. Just ask Graham Linehan. The British comic/writer got arrested last year for his thoughts on transgenderism.

Will Cleese be next? Just know that if he’s sent to the hoosegow, free speech “warriors” like Jimmy Kimmel and Howard Stern will remain whisper-silent …

Woody’s buzz

Woody Allen is heading back to work at the age of 90.

The quasi-canceled auteur is prepping his next film, a story he describes as “a comedy with romance, intrigue, and infidelity.”

The more things change, right?

Except some things have changed for Allen. A-listers now flee his projects, fearful of the MeToo blowback. Did Allen inappropriately touch his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow many years ago? For a while, Hollywood shrugged off the accusations. Then, after the #MeToo revolution, “name” stars stopped working with him.

There’s an easy fix for him. All he needs to do is shout, “Free Palestine,” and he could be back in the industry’s good graces again …

Green party

Hulk still mad!

Mark Ruffalo has been obsessed with the Paramount/Warner Bros. merger for some time. “Merger bad!” he cried from every possible venue.

Now, with the deal close to fruition, he’s still sounding off.

“This merger will stifle creativity, weaken free speech, and cost people their jobs — it is a bad deal for this country and should never have been approved.”

Huh. We don’t remember Ruffalo tearing his trousers over Disney’s acquisition of Fox, or the rampant attacks on free speech during the woke era …

Hulk hypocrite!

RELATED: ‘View’ host questions Patrick Clancy’s divorce: ‘You know, in sickness and in health’

Lou Rocco/Boston Globe/Getty Images

S is for ‘socialism’

Jon Stewart is getting a tad touchy.

The far-Left “Daily Show” host has been kissing up to socialists for quite a while now. Watching him lob softballs at Zohran Mamdani gave us one undeniable thought. “Get a room.”

Now, he’s recoiling at being labeled a socialist.

And, you know, now the buzzword on, on the right is, oh, so you’re, you know, you want socialism. Well, no, I want to stop privatizing things that don’t work well in a market system like health care, like Medicare, like all those things that are getting ruined by privatization and insurance, and all those different markets and rebalance so that labor gets a fairer shake.”

Fair shake? He blasts income inequality and is a millionaire many times over. And if George Soros graced his Comedy Central studio, he would ask even more gentle questions than the ones that greeted Mamdani.

If you don’t want the “S” label on your jersey, Jon, maybe ask a tough question or two of the next DSA member who enters your studio …

Goofy ‘Globes’

There’s plenty to laugh at regarding the annual Golden Globes gala. The awards remain in the shadow of the Academy Awards, for starters. Nominees are known to hit the bar, and hard, between announcements. Plus, unusual nominees and bizarre categories are still the norm.

Now this.

“Obsession,” the year’s most unlikely blockbuster, will compete for Globe honors in the Comedy/Musical category. The horror film isn’t remotely funny, beyond some gallows humor that runs through many a horror tale. And if there was a musical number between star Inde Navarrette’s murderous rages, we missed it.

As long as the Globes cling to such insane categories, they will remain a punching bag for all things Hollywood …

‘Digger’ in deep

Steven Spielberg famously praised Tom Cruise for “saving” Hollywood with “Top Gun: Maverick.” The blockbuster coaxed moviegoers back to theaters after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, Cruise may be an anchor around the neck of a major movie studio.

Warner Bros., about to be gobbled up by Paramount, spent a reported $180 million on Cruise’s new film, “Digger.” The black comedy casts Cruise as a Southern oil tycoon whose drilling station sparks an ecological panic.

It’s climate change alarmism run wild, a shocking project from an actor who aggressively avoids political hot takes.

The film is getting some awful reviews, deservedly so, and could lose Warner Bros. millions.

How many? The conservative estimate is at least $100 million. Crunch the numbers on a cocktail napkin, and you might want to double that figure. “Digger” is looking at a $12 million opening, at best.

Once word of mouth kicks in, it’s good night, Gracie.

Did Hollywood’s onetime savior just dig an iconic studio’s grave?

​Warner bros, Climate change alarmism, Tom cruise, Islam, John cleese, Hollywood, Entertainment, Movies, Digger, Paramount, Mark ruffalo, Lifestyle, Woody allen, Jon stewart, Zohran mamdani, The daily show, Socialism, Toto recall 

As voting day approaches quickly, BlazeTV host Steve Deace believes Republicans are making a critical mistake: focusing too much on what they’re for and not enough on who they’re running against.

Laying out what he calls a political survival strategy, Deace urges GOP candidates at every level to embrace far more aggressive campaign messaging.

“The biggest strength we have is who we’re running against,” Deace explains, noting that this “is what the strategic plan should be.”

“I’m looking at what’s been used against me in the past and done so successfully and can I emulate it in a way that doesn’t violate my own worldview?” he says, “And in this case, the answer is yes. We’re not going to bear false witness.”

“We don’t have to, like they do calling us Nazis, but we’re just going to say they’re anti-American communists. We’re going to try to drive turnout down,” he adds.

While he admits that may sound “cynical,” he doesn’t care.

“I like my way of winning better than your way of losing,” he says.

“Drive down turnout. This is what they did in 2022. Drive down normie turnout because … basically every normie voter is going to just assume they’re voting against us. Our margins with normies are like minus 30 or something,” he continues.

Deace says that the Republican Party needs to assume that these “normies” will be “voting against us.”

“Drive down as much of that normie vote as you can,” he explains. “Make the environment as negative and toxic as you can.”

This strategy is one of survival, and Deace concludes it with three parts: “Drive down normie turnout, heighten the negative messaging on who our opponents really are, and try to heal the fractures within our coalition as best we can by what people are actually united against, rather than trying to message to them things they’re never going to be united for.”

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve’s take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Steve deace, Midterms, Election, Republicans, Democrats, Messaging, Strategy, Voting, Blazetv show 

On May 13, 2026, CIA senior operations officer James Erdman III appeared under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He was testifying despite his agency’s objections.

Erdman had recently led an investigation for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s “Director’s Initiatives Group” into COVID-19 origins, anomalous health incidents, and UFOs. What he told the senators was explosive.

‘We just want to clear the air. We did not take back documents.’

“Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional,” Erdman testified. He said Fauci had steered the intelligence community’s COVID-origins analysis by supplying “a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts,” several of whom co-wrote the paper dismissing the lab-leak theory.

Inside the CIA, Erdman said, six of the seven technical experts involved in a COVID relook favored a lab-leak conclusion. Management changed the assessment anyway in what he called a “middle-of-the-night anonymous rewrite.”

Then came the allegation that set House members on fire.

“The CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of DIG personnel, their investigations, and contact with whistleblowers,” Erdman said. “When the DIG ceased operations, the CIA took back 40 boxes of JFK and MK-Ultra files being processed for declassification by DNI Gabbard.”

Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) read aloud a statement the CIA had just released calling the hearing “dishonest political theater.” Then he turned to Erdman. “I have years and years and years of built-up frustration of agencies like the CIA, Department of Justice, the FBI, HHS, snubbing our oversight, giving us the big middle finger,” Johnson said.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), chairwoman of the House declassification task force, called the episode “an internal coup.” She and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) took to social media demanding that the files be returned. Within a day, the CIA invited them to headquarters.

On May 14, Burlison and Luna stood before the Memorial Wall at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, its 141 stars carved into white marble for officers who died in the line of duty.

They had surrendered their phones. No aides were allowed, no notepads, no recording devices. If anyone later disputed what was said, there would be no way to prove it.

They were led up an elevator to the top floor and through narrow, winding hallways. Burlison was struck by how ordinary it felt: a sterile cubicle farm straight out of a “Dilbert” cartoon.

The meeting was supposed to be with CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Instead, they were met by the agency’s archivist, a woman in her late 50s who oversaw two football fields’ worth of paper files.

RELATED: Fauci’s agency backed an experiment aerosolizing lethal Ebola — then he panicked about what it exposed about vaccination

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Ratcliffe, they were told, was “out of pocket.” They later learned he was in Cuba.

“We just want to clear the air,” the archivist began. “We did not take back documents.”

In the CIA’s telling, when President Trump ordered the JFK records released, Gabbard’s team showed up unannounced and demanded them. The CIA objected to the files leaving in the team’s personal cars and insisted on moving them in its own secure vans.

About 300 boxes were handed over, the CIA said, while 42 were at another location being processed. When those were ready, according to the agency, it notified the DNI’s office.

Burlison saw the irony. The CIA was telling the office that oversees it that it could not be trusted with the files.

“You do recognize that there’s a point of friction between the CIA and the ODNI,” he told them, “and there’s a reason ODNI came in without informing you that they were coming? There’s clearly a level of mistrust between the two organizations.”

RELATED: Deep-staters at FBI framed Trump firing Comey as a Russian op — then apparently worked to cover their tracks

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

They acknowledged it. They also agreed that the CIA spokesperson’s public attacks were unacceptable.

“The way they conducted themselves in the meeting was almost like they were a kid caught doing something wrong,” Burlison told me afterward, “and were profusely apologetic, and desperately trying to figure out, ‘How do we de-escalate the situation?'”

Burlison left without a clear answer about what was in those 42 boxes or whether the CIA had pulled them before Gabbard’s team could review them. The CIA also said there were 11 more boxes the DNI would never be allowed to see because they contained tradecraft secrets.

He wasn’t interested in de-escalating.

Two and a half months later, Luna told me the CIA had located the files and placed them in line for declassification.

But it took a whistleblower defying his own agency, a Senate subpoena, and two members of Congress walking into Langley to get there.

If the task force doesn’t survive November, who will make that walk next time?

Editor’s note: This article is excerpted from “Book of Secrets: Congress Tries to Find the Truth About the Deep State,” by Kent Heckenlively (Permuted Press).

​Anna paulina luna, Cia, Covid19, Eric burlison, Fbi, Homeland security, Odni, Opinion & analysis, Ron johnson, Senate, Tulsi gabbard, Whistleblower, Jfk files, Mk ultra 

AI is coming for our jobs. It may even come for our lives. At least, that’s the assumption increasingly baked into modern life. We’re told machines will soon diagnose our illnesses, program our software, drive our cars, and leave millions of humans wondering what, exactly, they’re still good for.

What if that assumption is badly wrong?

Alejandro Rodriguez, a 20-year-old with a 4.5 GPA who spent his formative years in gifted and talented programs, certainly believes it is. By the conventional American definition of success, he was exactly the sort of kid who should have been pushed toward a four-year college. Instead, he chose technical school and trained to become a Porsche technician. His decision points to something the AI panic often overlooks. There is still an enormous number of things humans need to know how to do in the real world, and they can’t be done with a prompt. They require skill, judgment, patience, and the ability to do something useful with your hands.

The deeper problem is not AI itself. Instead, it is the growing belief that everything humans learn will eventually become worthless. That mindset is pure poison. If young people assume AI will eventually do every meaningful task, why bother learning carpentry, mechanics, welding, electrical work, cooking, nursing, or other practical skills? Why even bother getting out of bed in the morning? The irony is impossible to ignore. The more people believe humans are obsolete, the less capable humans become.

A cultural correction

America spent decades telling smart kids that success meant sitting at a desk in a fancy office, filling out spreadsheets until their mid-60s. Now tech executives are shipping code designed to render those exact spreadsheet-fillers redundant. A cultural correction is under way. Being able to rebuild a blown engine, wire a high-voltage circuit, repair a factory line, or build a house has real value because some things still have to be done by human beings.

AI will eliminate or transform some jobs. That is true. Yet a huge canyon separates a software model generating text from a physical entity that replaces millions of workers navigating unpredictable, real-world environments. A chatbot can generate a textbook explanation of a Porsche’s dual-clutch transmission. The chatbot cannot crawl onto a cold concrete floor on a Tuesday morning to replace the clutch pack.

Certain tech prophets display a peculiar brand of fatalism. They demand that humans accept the swift death of their own relevance as an act of faith. This doctrine breeds its own fulfillment. Tell an entire generation that their talents are dead on arrival, and they stop pursuing difficult trades. When the nation runs out of people who can fix a broken water main, the technocrats blame automated progress rather than the cultural disdain that killed off the workforce.

RELATED: Our military turns off this invasive smartphone feature. So should you.

Thx4Stock/Getty images

America suffers from a competence famine. The economy needs citizens who can execute physical tasks correctly. Someone has to run the copper pipe, construct the frame, mend the bone, operate the lathe, and keep the power grid online. Software models function exceptionally well in environments made purely of data. The physical world remains stubbornly physical.

Rodriguez isn’t alone in obliterating America’s long-standing myth. A growing wave of high schoolers like him are drawing headlines of their own. “Elijah Rios won’t graduate from high school until next year, but he already has a job offer,” the Wall Street Journal recently reported, “one that pays $68,000 a year.” His Catholic high school in Philadelphia partners with companies looking for recruits before they even graduate. The Journal has been tracking such companies’ struggles to find hires from the typical job pools for years. Last year, Missouri senior Jenna Smith, with a 3.98 GPA and National Honor Society participation at Francis Howell High, chose to become a welder like her grandfather.

Guidance counselors and, often, parents can be slow to go along with the shifting tides. They have long treated technical trades as a consolation prize for academic failures. High marks meant a liberal arts degree, followed by 40 years of answering emails.

But high intelligence has zero natural connection to desktop work. A student can master advanced calculus and still prefer the immediate reality of a machine shop.

Competence or bust

The classic path — straight A’s leading to a university degree leading to an entry-level cubicle — is breaking at the midpoint. Automated systems are devouring the very administrative roles that university graduates relied on to pay off their student debt. Higher education still serves a clear purpose for specialized fields. But the blanket belief that a four-year degree represents the sole respectable entrance into adulthood no longer holds.

In a world made of bits, AI rules supreme. Silicon Valley coders write scripts that spit out screenplays and analyze legal contracts in seconds. Outside the server farm, rain leaks through roof shingles. Electrical transformers blow out during winter storms. Hydraulic lines rupture on garbage trucks. Millions of daily crises require spatial reasoning and fingers and thumbs.

Predicting the labor market in 2045 remains a fool’s game. AI could reshape whole industries before Christmas, or it could hit insurmountable barriers regarding energy consumption, hardware limits, and regulatory lawsuits. Betting a career on doom-mongering from software salesmen is a terrible strategy. Personal responsibility demands building actual competence that holds value on any given afternoon.

America spent half a century celebrating corporate credentials and bureaucratic titles, while ignoring the dignity of skilled craftsmanship. Rodriguez picked a difficult trade. He mastered the mechanics and built a career. His smartest observation was entirely practical: These skills guarantee employment for the foreseeable future and perhaps the entirety of his working life.

Fear can be healthy, but building your working life around it isn’t. Competence remains the only reliable shelter. Silicon Valley can create a machine that writes a short story about a broken car, but when the head gasket blows on the highway, AI won’t get you off the shoulder. The future belongs to the person holding both the wrench and the ability to use it properly.

​Tech, Auto mechanic, Artificial intelligence