The government watchdog White Coat Waste Project pulled back the curtain in 2021 on federally funded gruesome beagle experiments under the leadership of then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci. The scandal sparked a national outcry to end animal experimentation.

President Donald Trump’s administration set a goal to stop all mammalian animal testing by 2035, and on Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced significant steps to reach that objective, according to a press release obtained exclusively by Blaze News.

‘The solution is simple: Stop the money. Stop the madness!’

The EPA declared that it is expanding its approved list of “cutting-edge” alternatives to animal studies by adding 13 more new approach methods. The agency describes NAMs as “high-quality alternatives” intended to reduce animal testing, particularly on vertebrate mammals such as rabbits, mice, rats, and dogs.

The Toxic Substances Control Act “directs EPA to use NAMs whenever scientifically appropriate when evaluating chemicals, and to reduce, refine, or replace vertebrate mammal testing,” the EPA’s press release read. “Modern NAMs, including human cell models and advanced computer-based methods, help EPA identify hazards and exposures faster and often with results that are more relevant to people, not laboratory animals.”

The EPA contended that these alternative methods can reduce time and costs, as well as provide more applicable insight into how chemicals interact with the human body. The move “opens the door for innovators to bring the next generation of tools to the table,” according to the EPA.

The agency highlighted a few of those new replacement methods, including a way to evaluate eye hazards using reconstructed human cells; a process to evaluate phototoxicity using a 3D human cell-based tissue model, and combining in-chemico and in-vitro test data to “identify potential dermal sensitization hazard, dermal sensitization potency, and a quantitative point-of-departure.”

RELATED: Trump’s NIH closes Fauci’s apparent puppy-torture lab after 40 years of sadistic experiments

Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

Tuesday’s announcement marks the first time the EPA has expanded its NAMs list since 2021.

The EPA also announced a streamlined process for industry stakeholders to nominate additional NAMs for consideration in pesticide and chemical assessments.

While the goal to end animal testing was initially announced during the first Trump administration, under former President Joe Biden, the phase-out deadlines were canceled, the EPA stated.

“Today’s actions get that progress back on track,” the agency declared.

The EPA stated that the Trump administration has already made measurable progress toward meeting its goal to phase out mammalian animal testing, including implementing the agency’s first lab animal adoption program in April 2025 and using alternative methods in cancer evaluations for dibutyl phthalate and di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, which prevented an estimated 1,600 mice and rats from undergoing experiments.

“When the Trump administration makes a commitment, we deliver. With today’s announcement, we’re accelerating the shift to modern, gold-standard science — without the use of animal testing — by using new, innovative methods to review chemicals,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin stated. “By broadening high-quality alternatives and inviting strong new candidates, we can deliver faster, more protective decisions while reducing animal testing.”

RELATED: Republicans should take the easy win and stop medical testing on animals

Katherine Frey/Washington Post/Getty Images

Anthony Bellotti, founder and president of White Coat Waste, commended Zeldin and the EPA for honoring their commitment to reduce animal testing.

“Earlier this year, White Coat Waste proudly joined EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to restore the historic Trump-era plan to phase out animal testing by 2035 after we exposed how the Biden administration quietly scrapped it behind closed doors,” Bellotti said in a statement provided to Blaze News.

He stated that WCW is leading the charge alongside Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) to “eliminate outdated EPA red tape that forces companies to poison puppies in expensive, ineffective, government-mandated pesticide and chemical tests.” Bellotti was referring to the Fiscal Year 27 Interior-EPA Appropriations bill, which includes WCW-backed language to defund dog testing mandates for pesticides and chemicals. The House is scheduled to vote on the bill on Wednesday.

“Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to bankroll big-government bureaucrats who mandate beagle torture, butcher bunnies, force animals to inhale firearm emissions in bizarre gun-control experiments, or make animals eat lard and breathe smog,” Bellotti continued. “The solution is simple: Stop the money. Stop the madness!”

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​News, Anthony fauci, White coat waste, Lee zeldin, Donald trump, Trump administration, Michael cloud, Animal testing, Politics 

A troubled Democratic congressional candidate in Hawaii has been arrested after allegedly brandishing a firearm at county employees.

At around 9:30 a.m. on Friday, a suspect later identified as 40-year-old Kirill Basin marched into a county building in Wailuku and began “brandishing a firearm and engaged in a verbal altercation with County employees,” prompting a call to dispatch at approximately 10:57 a.m., according to a press release from the Maui Police Department.

The alleged gun incident on Friday is but the latest in a series of apparently bizarre events involving increasingly aggressive behavior from Basin.

The county has not explained the 90-minute gap between when the suspect first arrived and when police were finally called, the Honolulu Civil Beat reported.

Basin was arrested in Kihei around 12:30 p.m. and taken into custody without incident, police said. He was later charged with felony first-degree terroristic threatening.

“The Maui Police Department will not compromise public safety, and incidents of this nature are taken extremely seriously in Maui County,” said a statement from Chief John Pelletier. “I am extremely proud of the quick response and professionalism displayed by our personnel, which helped ensure a peaceful resolution.”

Jail records indicate Basin has since bonded out of custody.

Basin’s campaign told Blaze News:

Kirill Basin denies that he brandished a firearm or threatened anyone. According to Mr. Basin, the item being referenced was an unloaded pellet gun inside his backpack, with no pellet magazine in it. He states that it was never removed from the backpack, and that the individual making the accusation only saw it inside the bag.

The campaign is deeply concerned that the public description of this matter omits critical facts and presents a one-sided version of events before the evidence has been reviewed. Mr. Basin is presumed innocent. He intends to fight the charge and expects the facts, including available video, witness accounts, police records, body camera footage, booking records, and medical documentation of his injuries, to be reviewed through the proper legal process.

RELATED: Hawaii tells Supreme Court our rights should exist only with permission

Handcuffs and fingerprint card; Daniel Tamas Mehes/Getty Images

The alleged gun incident on Friday is but the latest in a series of apparently bizarre events involving increasingly aggressive behavior from Basin.

On Wednesday, Basin had to be forcibly removed from a South Maui town hall meeting, police said, after he engaged in “a verbal altercation with Council Member Tom Cook and staff members.”

As a result of some continuing alleged interactions in the parking lot outside the town hall, Jared Agtunong, Cook’s executive assistant, successfully petitioned for a temporary restraining order against Basin on Friday, the Civil Beat reported.

The petition alleged that Basin has also badgered Agtunong with threatening texts and phone calls, the Civil Beat added.

“I did not answer Basin’s phone call, but he left a message telling me that I’m a piece of trash, said I should think of my family, and insisted I call him back,” the filing said, according to the outlet. “In additional texts sent on the same day, Basin wished me luck with prison, then at 9:00 p.m., Basin’s text said ‘you’re f**ked.'”

Then on Thursday, the day after the outburst at the town hall but a day before his arrest for alleged terroristic threatening, Basin filed a lawsuit alleging he has been the victim of police brutality, including “prolonged and deliberate infliction of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse,” the Civil Beat reported.

The lawsuit “basically outlines how 3 police officers tortured me for 14 hours,” Basin wrote in an Instagram post on Saturday. “That’s the gist. It’ll never happen to anyone again.”

Basin was also arrested for disorderly conduct on May 2.

As the press release from Maui PD states, Basin is running for Congress. He has filed to run as a Democrat in the 2nd Congressional District of Hawaii.

Records with the Hawaii Office of Elections revealed that Basin was just issued an official 2026 candidate report last Tuesday.

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​Democrat, Hawaii, Terroristic threatening, Politics 

Every year around mid-spring, Google hosts its annual IO event where it shows off the latest and greatest features coming to its products, services, and platforms. While the keynote address is now mostly reserved for AI and Gemini, we still got a sneak peek at the cool new things coming to Android 17. Here’s what you can expect when the update lands later this summer.

Gemini Intelligence

AI is everything these days, with Google even admitting it’s become an “AI-first” company under CEO Sundar Pichai, so it only makes sense that Android would receive a fresh new AI-powered update.

Those who despise it may do the unthinkable: consider switching to iPhone.

Perhaps as a cheeky nod to the flailing Apple Intelligence, Google introduced Gemini Intelligence, the first native AI agent for Android. Its main mission is to automate tasks on your device to free up your time to do other things. Just like you, Gemini Intelligence can interact with the apps installed on your device. If you don’t have an app required to complete a task, it can shift its workflow to the web via Chrome to navigate webpages.

It’s literally like having a personal assistant inside your phone. Tell it what to do, and it will go out and do it on your behalf. Theoretically, that means Gemini Intelligence can do your online shopping, reserve tickets to an upcoming concert, and even book your vacation, complete with airplane tickets and a hotel stay.

In many ways, Gemini Intelligence is the ultimate personal assistant that Google Assistant was always meant to be when it launched more than a decade ago, and with generative AI, we might finally be at the cusp of having useful AI agents in our mobile devices. That may excite some users who are bullish on the AI rush, while those who despise it may do the unthinkable: consider switching to iPhone.

While the Gemini Intelligence demo looked promising, we’ll have to test Google’s new AI agent firsthand to see if it lives up to the hype, which we’ll get to do soon. Gemini Intelligence is coming to Google Pixel 10 phones and Samsung Galaxy S26 devices later this summer.

Gemini Intelligence/The Android Show/I/O Edition 2026

Pause Point

Phones are addictive, and even with the Digital Wellbeing settings baked into Android that let you set app timers and silence notifications, sometimes your favorite app still pulls you in and wastes hours of your time before you realize what’s happened. If you’re trying to kick certain addictive apps to the curb and setting time limits isn’t enough, Pause Point might be what you need.

This new feature acts as a check point between you and your apps. When activated, a pause screen will show up on your device the next time you open an addictive app. The screen stays up for 10 seconds, giving you time to consider if you really want to click through and waste hours of time doomscrolling on social media or watching cascades of short-form videos. During the waiting period, you’ll be prompted to take a couple of meditative breaths or browse photos of people you should spend time with instead of scrolling. You can even tell it to suggest different apps to open instead of that one addictive thorn in your side.

RELATED: Sick of Microsoft’s preinstalled propaganda on your PC? Block it now.

DigitalVision/Getty Images

Either let the time go by and open the app anyway, or tap “Don’t Open” to close the addictive app and reclaim the free time you almost lost.

The idea of Pause Point is to get you to think twice before you spend too much time looking at a screen, and even though it might sound a little silly for some, it’s a great tool for other users who want to break their app addiction without completely throwing out their smartphone.

Pause Point/The Android Show/I/O Edition 2026

Other interesting announcements

Google had a few more interesting updates before the close of the event. Here are the highlights:

Expanded Quick Share support: It’s easy to share a photo from one iPhone to another with AirDrop, or between Android phones with Quick Share, but it’s nearly impossible to do the same across OS platforms. That’s changing now that Android 17 includes interoperability with AirDrop, letting iPhone owners and Android users exchange photos, videos, and other files over the air with just a tap. The list of supported devices is small right now, but it’s a step in the right direction to knocking down the walled garden that historically made it harder for Apple and Google devices to communicate with each other.

Quick Share + AirDrop supported devices/The Android Show/I/O Edition 2026

New iOS transfer tools: Again, it’s easy to upgrade from an iPhone to an iPhone and Android to an Android, but it’s historically been difficult to switch platforms entirely. With Google’s new iOS transfer tools, more of your personal data can be pulled from an old iPhone to a new Android phone, including apps, app data, home screen layout, calls, contacts, and more.

New iOS transfer tools/The Android Show/I/O Edition 2026

Android Auto optimizations: Widgets you can easily glance at are coming to Android Auto to provide more contextual information about your apps while on the road. Immersive navigation offers a new 3D view of Google Maps when driving, complete with lanes, stop signs, stop lights, and other markers. You can also watch videos on the internal display when your car is stopped or listen to the audio of the video only when in drive.

Android Auto updates/The Android Show/I/O Edition 2026

Googlebooks

Serving as its “one more thing” moment, Google had a final surprise to tease before the end of the event. It’s called Googlebook.

Not to be confused with Google Books, the books archival service established in 2004, or Google Play Books, the company’s little-known competitor to Amazon Kindle and Apple Books, Googlebooks are a new breed of laptop that run on a combined version of Android and ChromeOS.

Just like mobile Android, this laptop-ready version of Android is centered on AI. Gemini lives in the cursor. Simply wiggle the mouse to summon it to the forefront to read your screen and complete different tasks based on what it sees — schedule a calendar event it spotted in your email, automatically write a reply, or prompt Gemini with your own queries. The goal is to make laptops more useful with AI, though I’m not sold on the initial demo. It feels like Googlebooks are still searching for a problem in need of a solution to make them stick.

Nevertheless, Googlebooks are meant to replace Chromebooks as Google’s flagship laptop platform, though Google claims that Chromebooks are also sticking around, at least for schools and other institutions.

Googlebooks/The Android Show/I/O Edition 2026

Android 17 is coming

All the features covered today are expected to roll out in Android 17 to Google Pixel phones first this summer. After that, it will make its way to other Android phones as OEMs like Samsung, Motorola, and OnePlus integrate their user interfaces into the final Android codebase for their own devices.

​Tech, Google, Android 17, Artificial intelligence 

Texas police officers said a home “smelled like death” when they were called to investigate after being alerted about the foul odor.

Inside they found two young children sitting in a bathtub halfway filled with dirty water and the home buried with feces, garbage, and maggots, according to an affidavit.

Police said the children smelled like ‘urine, feces, body odor, and stagnant water.’ The children said they didn’t know how to read or write and had never been to school.

Officers from the Temple Police Department said they were called to the home on Young Avenue on May 20 after a caller reported the odor and no sign of the residents.

They knocked on the doors and windows, but no one responded. Then they noted flies at the windows, which led them to believe someone had died inside.

Police made entry into the home and found 34-year-old Michael Robbins and 68-year-old John Robbins coming to the door.

They inspected the home and said every surface was filled with garbage, rodent and mouse droppings, rotting food, and maggots.

Then they found the two children.

The 8- and 10-year-old children had matted hair that was apparently infested with bugs. When they were told to get dressed, they returned in foul-smelling clothing with food stains.

Police said the children smelled like “urine, feces, body odor, and stagnant water.” The children said they didn’t know how to read or write and had never been to school.

One of the children had their adult teeth growing rotten in their mouth, an affidavit said.

Police determined that the men were not providing food for the children and that they were forced to fend for themselves.

The children were transported to McClane’s Children’s Hospital for treatment.

RELATED: Police rescue 2 children from freezing home with ‘overwhelming’ smell of dog feces and urine: ‘Like a punch to the face’

Neighbors told police they had not seen the children in years.

Both men were booked into the Bell County Jail on charges of abandoning or endangering a child with intent. They each have a bond of $60,000.

Temple is a city of about 82,000 residents located 80 miles north of Austin in central Texas.

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​Child endangerment, Child abuse, Child neglect, Filthy home, Crime 

“Backrooms” came out of internet lore to take down “The Mandalorian.” Perhaps audiences are turning on Disney. The film is now a smash hit theatrical release, but its story began online, where it grew from a 2019 4chan image and creepypasta into one of the most recognizable examples of liminal horror: familiar spaces that somehow make no sense.

The idea began on 4chan’s paranormal board, where a discussion about “disquieting spaces that just feel off” led to a user defining the Backrooms as spaces where you “noclip” out of reality. The term comes from video games, where a player slips outside the designed bounds of the game into unintended space. The Backrooms are marked by yellow wallpaper, buzzing lights, and seemingly infinite rooms.

‘Backrooms’ asks a question more terrifying than anything hiding under the fluorescent lights: What are you doing with your guilt?

These spaces are liminal, meaning they should function as transitions. Hallways, corridors, and waiting rooms are meant to have an entry point and a destination. What makes the Backrooms terrifying is that they do not go anywhere. The hallway has no destination. That is not merely inconvenient. It is a picture of purpose removed.

The movement, then, runs from liminal horror to cosmic horror. Liminal horror unsettles us because a familiar space no longer performs its purpose. Cosmic horror goes further. It asks whether all of reality is like that. The terror is not merely that something bad may happen inside reality. The terror is that reality itself may not make sense.

On the surface, life seems familiar and coherent. But as we move through it, life often becomes stranger and harder to explain. It does not turn out as we hoped. Our efforts fail. Our goals recede. Our explanations collapse. That is the fear beneath the fluorescent lights: not monsters, but meaninglessness.

We assume reality can be understood. When failure comes, we think we need more information, more self-help, more discipline, or a better method. Then we try again. We expect success. But we fail again. The failures accumulate. And life gets shorter.

That makes this horror different from a standard slasher or zombie film. In those stories, the threat is physical and animal-like. You cannot reason with the monster. You simply have to survive it. Cosmic horror raises the stakes. It asks: What if rationality is not built into reality at all? What if reason is merely man’s frantic attempt to impose order on chaos?

Clark, the film’s protagonist, embodies that question. He enters the Backrooms already looking for an explanation that will let him escape responsibility. His failures have left him with a ruined marriage and a failed career. He wants to be told that none of this is his fault. He refuses to see his obvious flaws as the cause of what happened to him. That makes him a perfect fit for the irrationality of the Backrooms.

Guilt is the bridge between the film’s horror and its spiritual meaning. Clark does not simply want to survive the Backrooms. He wants the Backrooms to explain him. He wants the maze to tell him that his failures were not really his fault.

RELATED: Indiana Jones found the lost ark of campus clichés

Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for Paramount+

In that sense, the Backrooms can be read as an image of the unconscious mind. As in a dream, things feel familiar but not quite right. The spaces are recognizable and impossible at the same time. Clark searches there for something that will excuse him, but he cannot find anything intelligible. He wants the maze to justify him. Instead, it exposes him. He is trapped in the Backrooms because he is already trapped inside himself.

Director Kane Parsons has said the Backrooms are not purgatory or hell. In a literal sense, he is right. They are not presented as divine judgment according to a moral order. But that is exactly why they work as an image of a different terror: existence without moral order at all.

Christianity gives a name to this terror. It is life severed from the God who made reality intelligible. Hell is terrifying not merely because of punishment, but because those in hell have cut off communion with God the Creator. God made the world with wisdom. The world makes sense because God created it and gave man a rational soul by which to understand his creation.

When human beings reject God, they cut themselves off from the source of rationality and meaning. They then try to create their own smaller rationalities and meanings. All of them collapse because human beings cannot be God.

The person who has lost communion with God occupies a dreadful liminal space. He senses that he was created for a purpose, but he can no longer grasp that purpose. Reality feels familiar, but something is wrong. It has become unintelligible.

To be handed over to final meaninglessness while still possessing a mind that longs to understand is the greatest terror imaginable. You cannot understand reality. You cannot understand yourself. All lesser terrors frighten us because they echo this one.

One word often used to describe the Backrooms and their occupants is “deformity.” That’s key. Deformity is the attempted creation of someone who cannot create rightly. It is Lucifer’s counterfeit of what God made, and it turns out wrong. When man follows Lucifer by believing he can be his own god, he ends up in the Backrooms of his own unintelligible mind.

God created through the Logos. Lucifer deforms creation through the anti-Logos.

RELATED: When ‘be nice’ becomes the whole ethic, we’re in trouble

akinbostanci via iStock/Getty Images

The movement of the film is clear: A man burdened by guilt enters a world without meaning, seeks self-justification, and is destroyed by the irrationality he hoped would excuse him. That gives us good reason to consider our own guilt before God. Clark is gripped by guilt, but his solution is self-justification. He deceives himself about his failures and wants others to join the deception.

If we do not deal with guilt by turning in repentance to God through Christ, we are left with the same self-deception and the same liminal space of meaninglessness.

The Christian answer is not self-justification but repentance and reconciliation. In Christ, guilt is not hidden in a maze, explained away by trauma, or dissolved into meaninglessness. It is forgiven. Communion with God is restored. Reality becomes intelligible again because we are reconciled to the One who made it.

In the end, “Backrooms” asks a question more terrifying than anything hiding under the fluorescent lights: What are you doing with your guilt?

​Backrooms, Horror, Guilt, Religion, Faith, Christianity, Hollywood, Entertainment, Movies, Opinion & analysis 

Barney Frank spent his final months warning Democrats that the left had become a danger to itself.

Frank, the 16-term congressman from Massachusetts who died May 19 at 86, had been promoting a book scheduled for September publication: “The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy.”

The most effective revolutionaries do not always sound revolutionary. Sometimes they sound like men telling the revolutionaries to shut up, count the votes, and wait their turn.

That title says a great deal. Frank warned his fellow Democrats that they’re losing the electorate. But he was no mushy moderate. He was solidly a man of the left who understood that his party had developed habits that could cost it power — and, in his view, endanger the country.

Before anyone mistakes my point: This is not a eulogy for the co-author of Dodd-Frank, a man with more than his share of ethical lapses and scandals — male prostitution, anyone? — and a long record of expanding federal power and undermining American civilization. I am not here to praise Barney Frank’s life and career. I am here to draw a vital lesson about politics — how it works, who wins, and who loses.

Frank spent more than three decades in Congress advancing left-wing causes, from gay rights and anti-discrimination law to financial regulation and a more aggressive federal role in American life.

But not too aggressive too soon.

In one of his final interviews, Frank told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Democrats had succeeded in moving inequality to the center of the party’s agenda. But that success, he said, had “enabled people who wanted to use that as a platform for a wide range of social and cultural changes, some of which the public isn’t ready for.”

That little caveat — what “the public isn’t ready for” — carries a lot of weight.

To the activist mind, public reluctance often looks like bigotry, cowardice, or false consciousness. To Frank, it looked like politics. Voters were not clay to be molded by professors, nonprofits, and online scolds. They had to be persuaded, reassured, pressured, and moved over time.

Politics is persuasion — and persuasion can be the work of a lifetime.

Frank never confused delay with defeat. He treated delay as part of the cost of lasting victory. That was the real meaning of his final, misunderstood calls to “moderation” — something his irritating leftist critics missed or chose to ignore. He did not ask the left to abandon its goals. He asked the left to stop endangering them.

RELATED: Inside the left’s push to reshape 2028 with ranked-choice voting

Michael Blackshire/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

His career offers a useful correction to our political vocabulary. We tend to call politicians “moderate” when they sound less insane than their allies. But Frank was not moderate in his ends. He was moderate only in his sense of timing, sequencing, and risk.

Consider same-sex marriage. Frank supported gay rights long before they became fashionable in elite institutions. But he understood that the movement first had to win more basic fights against discrimination before asking the public to redefine marriage.

“When we were fighting for gay rights — a fight I think we have essentially won — we knew that some issues were more popular than others,” Frank told the New York Times a week before his death. “So we tended to start by trying to win the ones that were most popular. Gays in the military. Employment. We didn’t go after same-sex marriage, we didn’t make marriage a litmus test, until the very end.”

Then he drew the analogy to biological males competing in women’s sports. “That is the most controversial part of the agenda — the equivalent of gay marriage — so put it at the end. If you go at it that way, you build support for it. But if you insist on the most controversial parts all at once, you make it harder.”

Notice what he did not say. He did not say men in women’s sports had crossed an uncrossable line. He said the left had mistimed the fight. Prepare the ground, then advance. Move the public, then consolidate the gain. Do not force every question at once and then denounce the electorate for failing to keep pace.

Call that whatever you like, but don’t call it mushy moderation. That’s professional politics.

The same instinct shaped Frank’s conduct in Congress. In 2007, he supported removing gender identity protections from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act because he believed the votes did not exist to pass the broader bill. Activists accused him of betrayal. Frank’s answer was coldly practical: Do what you can now, and return later for the rest.

Frank was a patient institutional leftist. He understood committees, votes, caucuses, and public opinion. He could be abrasive, partisan, and arrogant. But he did not mistake moral intensity for legislative power.

That separated him from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whom Frank often criticized as a politician with little to show for decades in Congress. Sanders treats politics as indictment. The system is corrupt. The billionaires are guilty. The people have been betrayed. Some of that rhetoric can move voters, but rhetoric alone does not write statutes, build coalitions, or hold fragile majorities together.

Sanders rages against the system. Frank learned how to use it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez complicates the picture. She entered Congress as a democratic socialist insurgent in the Sanders mold. But she has grown in office — not toward the center, exactly, but toward machinery. Frank would not have mistaken her for one of his own. But he might have recognized the beginning of her political education.

RELATED: Your enemies aren’t mentally ill. They apparently just want to kill you.

Blaze Media Illustration

A better comparison might be Jerry Brown.

California Republicans never got past the late-1970s caricature of “Governor Moonbeam,” and it cost them. “Moonbeam” was Jerry 1.0. The man who left the governor’s office in 2019 was Jerry 7.0, maybe 7.5: older, harder, more disciplined, more fiscally cautious, and vastly more dangerous. Brown was no conservative, though he possessed certain conservative instincts. Brown succeeded because he understood California’s currents better than the Republicans who mocked him.

Brown had his canoe theory of politics: Paddle a little to the left, paddle a little to the right, and you get where you need to go — ultimately, the to left bank of the river. Brown was smart enough and steady enough not to tip the canoe on the way there.

Conservatives should study politicians like Brown and Frank, not because we should admire or emulate their goals, but because we should understand their methods. A political movement that cannot describe its opponents accurately cannot defeat them. Worse, it cannot learn from them.

Frank’s final warning to Democrats was simple: Stop letting the loudest voices on the left turn every unpopular cultural demand into a test of moral seriousness. Read the room. Build consensus. Move when the ground can hold.

That warning should stir conservatives, too. The most effective revolutionaries do not always sound revolutionary. Sometimes they sound like men telling the revolutionaries to shut up, count the votes, and wait their turn.

​Barney frank, Bernie sanders, Democrats, Jerry brown, Opinion & analysis, The left, Alexandria ocasio-cortez, Gay marriage, Transgender agenda, Transgender athletes, Sports, Elections, Conservatives, Jake tapper, New york times, Moderate 

For years, Glenn Beck has warned that artificial general intelligence — a true master of all human intellectual tasks — will completely upend society by the year 2030.

But according to internet pioneer Marc Andreessen, AGI is already here. On a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” he claimed that we quietly crossed the threshold with the latest chatbot models like GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.6, Grok 4.3, and Gemini 3. Andreessen declared that these models now outperform top human experts in many domains.

Glenn believes this is critical information. Like electricity, telephones, television, the internet, and other general-purpose technologies that are so powerful and broad they fundamentally reshape how society, economies, and daily life function, AGI will revolutionize the world.

Is humanity ready to navigate the rapids, or will it crash on the rocks of blind trust and indiscrimination?

Unlike the aforementioned technologies whose transformative powers were slow, AI is “coming at the speed of light,” Glenn says.

“And because of that, there will be almost no chance to adapt or to stop and think, ‘Wait a minute, what is it we’re losing? And what is it we’re gaining here?’” he warns.

AGI, Glenn explains, will render much of the world’s experts obsolete.

“This is a tool that touches every single field at once: medicine, law, education, programming, finance, therapy, research, media, art, science — everything,” he says.

In his conversation with Rogan, Andreessen claimed that medical doctors are already relying heavily on AI models to assist in diagnosing and treating patients.

“When doctors are using this in examination rooms, you need to pay attention,” Glenn says, “because it’ll reveal something really important that always comes first in history, and that’s this: The experts themselves already know.”

“While we’re sitting here using it as a toy and debating whether AI is useful, the professionals, the ones who have those deep credentials, they’ve already quietly moved on to depending on it,” he continues.

Adoption before disruption, Glenn says, has long been the pattern.

“Factories automate before workers hear about it; banks digitize before the tellers disappear; retailers optimize before the storefronts close. The future arrives inside the institution first,” he explains.

While this seems like apocalyptic news, he acknowledges the bright side: People who learn how to use AGI to their genuine advantage by employing it as their own personal “staff” will not only avoid being replaced; they’ll create new opportunities that were impossible before.

“With AI, if you know how to prompt, a small company can compete against giant corporations. A teenager can launch a product that used to have millions in capital behind it. … A single mom can get tutoring, legal explanations, business advice, health analysis … free,” Glenn says. “The upside of this is staggering.”

But there is a dark side that “matters just as much,” he warns.

While access to information has been democratized, judgment remains a skill that must be cultivated with care.

“When everyone has access to infinite information, discernment becomes priceless,” Glenn says.

He fears that those who never learned how to think critically and ask questions will blindly follow whatever AI tells them, perhaps to their demise.

“I can ask AI how to treat symptoms, but do I know the right questions to ask to see if that analysis of what I’m treating is wrong? … You can ask it legal advice, but do you know when you need a real, actual, physical attorney?” Glenn comments.

When people lose that “living moral compass” inside them — the one that detects manipulation, corruption, and ill advice — we’re in a dark age indeed.

“That’s why I have said you will be lost without the spirit to guide you,” Glenn says, “because [AI arguments are] going to be so overwhelmingly well-crafted, you may not know what is true.”

“The whole thing is not whether machines can think. Yes. The real question is whether humans can still think, and I’m not sure about that.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Artificial general intelligence, Joe rogan, Marc andreessen