Evangelist Cliffe Knechtle has spent decades facilitating open-air dialogues about Christianity on college campuses, and what he’s noticed is a massive change over the years.

“People are more emotionally fragile today than they were when we began back in the ’80s and ’90s,” he tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”

While his father grew up in Switzerland, “sat up in the Alps with a gun,” and watched Hitler’s army march toward his country — his grandfather was defending on the frontlines.

It was anything but fragile.

“Today, when Donald Trump wins the election, university students go to a crying room to get counseling. Give me a break. What emotional fragility. What an incredible emotional weakness today compared to the young 18-year-olds who fought against Adolf Hitler,” Knechtle explains.

But that’s not all that’s changed.

“Sexual immorality is embraced in a way that it’s not sexual immorality. It’s normal. So moral relativism and sexual immorality has become so commonplace, that if you stand against that, you are really, really, weird.”

Lastly, he says, “What has become too firmly entrenched is unless you can prove it scientifically, it’s not true.”

“I don’t care if you’re a liberal, you know very well that your critique of the conservatives is a moral, ethical critique. You’re not letting enough immigrants in. You’re elitist. And the conservatives are the same way. And you live a sexually twisted life, a perverted life,” he explains.

“So both are appealing to the moral argument, which I think is exciting because it really shows that we do have consciences, which means there really is a God,” he continues.

His son, Stuart Knechtle, recalls a moment when he was cornered by group of progressives who were distraught that he believed a suicidal 16-year-old girl should be saved.

“That’s devaluing her freedom and autonomy. If anything, you should aid in her decision to kill herself,” he says, mimicking their argument.

“I was shell-shocked, completely shocked,” he says.

“Sure enough, we kind of got around to the point of, ‘Do you guys really mean this?’ … I think they go to the point of starting to realize just what they were saying. And they were relativizing morality, objective value,” he explains.

“That’s the one that I see where personal autonomy and freedom is considered really the top idea and thing to pursue even more so than the value of human life,” he adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Autonomy, Christianity, God, Human life, Immigrants, Moral relativism, Progressives, Cliffe knechtle, Blazetv show 

Pope Leo XIV has overseen a shakeup at the Vatican sure to vex progressives: assigning an American conservative who has fought against the LGBT agenda and abortion activism to the Catholic Church’s highest court.

Weeks after excommunicating all members of the Society of St. Pius X and declaring it a schismatic sect, the Vatican announced a number of resignations and appointments.

‘It is a position of great prestige and trust within the Catholic Church.’

While declining to renew the term of Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark — a progressive cleric who has tipped his biretta to the LGBT community and championed migrant causes — Pope Leo XIV appointed on July 25 seven new members to the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura.

Among the new members are a pair of American bishops — San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone and Bishop Edward Lohse of Kalamazoo — and two Spanish canon lawyers who belong to Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic institution.

These appointments do not require a relocation to Rome.

Maggie Gallagher, executive director of the Cordileone-founded Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship, told Blaze News that “the Apostolic Signatura is essentially the Supreme Court of the Catholic Church (except that the Pope may intervene and overturn a court ruling).”

“It doesn’t issue rulings on Catholic teachings, but on cases against individuals including for example judgements of nullity for marriages, and charges against other judges, etc,” continued Gallagher. “It is a position of great prestige and trust within the Catholic Church and the appointment of Archbishop Cordileone is clear indication that Pope Leo appreciates his competence and his leadership.”

Gallagher added that Archbishop Cordileone’s appointment “does not mean of course that the Pope agrees with all the positions he has taken, but he is clearly signaling that these views do not put you on the outs with Rome, and that is a great relief to many Catholics in the United States, especially for Catholics attached to the traditional Latin Mass.”

Cordileone, the San Diego native whom President Donald Trump appointed last year to serve on the advisory board of the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission, is the archbishop who was harassed by California radicals for denying communion to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a professed Catholic within the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

RELATED: ‘It’s insanity’: Massachusetts Democrats pass bill that would make it open season on viable babies

Franco Origlia/Getty Images

In May 2022, Archbishop Cordileone — who has referred to abortion in America as a “genocide on life in the womb” — provided Pelosi with a refresher on the Church’s moral teaching that abortion is a “grave moral evil,” and stressed that there can be no more extreme example of “throwaway culture” than “when direct attacks on human life are enshrined in a nation’s law, celebrated by society, and even paid for by the government.”

Citing canon law — which states that those “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion” — as well as the instruction of Pope Benedict XVI, the American archbishop said it was his responsibility to bar the Democrat from what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the “source and summit of the Christian life”:

After numerous attempts to speak with her to help her understand the grave evil she is perpetrating, the scandal she is causing, and the danger to her own soul she is risking, I have determined that the point has come in which I must make a public declaration that she is not to be admitted to Holy Communion unless and until she publicly repudiate her support for abortion ”rights” and confess and receive absolution for her cooperation in this evil in the sacrament of Penance.

Pelosi remained unrepentant and attacked Archbishop Cordileone on the network then known as MSNBC, complaining, “Our archbishop has been vehemently against LGBTQ rights too.”

Archbishop Cordileone is on the radar of GLAAD and other non-straight activist organizations, not only for his defense of the Catholic teaching that “all sexual acts outside of a marriage between one man and one woman are morally wrong and do not serve the good of the person or society,” but for his rejection of gender ideology, long-standing defense of the institution of marriage, and advocacy for protecting the First Amendment freedoms of those opposed to the LGBT agenda.

In addition to holding fast to the teachings of the Church, Archbishop Cordileone has called — especially in the wake of the SSPX schism — for greater Catholic access to the traditional Latin Mass.

Archbishop Cordileone said in a statement on Saturday, “I am deeply grateful to the Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, for this appointment as a member of the Supreme Apostolic Signatura. I receive this responsibility with a profound sense of stewardship, recognizing that every office in the Church is entrusted for the service of Christ, His people, and the mission of the Gospel.”

“The Supreme Apostolic Signatura assists the Holy Father in safeguarding the proper administration of justice within the life of the Church,” continued the archbishop. “Justice in the Church is never merely legal; it is ordered toward the salvation of souls, the protection of the rights of the faithful, and the strengthening of ecclesial communion. I am honored to contribute to that important mission.”

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​Catholic church, Nancy pelosi, Pope leo xiv, Salvatore cordileone, San francisco, Faith, Politics 

The pivotal battle over one of two Texas seats in the U.S. Senate may be decided by new accusations of election fraud against the Democratic candidate.

State Rep. James Talarico is being accused of falsely using his mother’s address in Austin in 2021 to elude residency requirements and run in the Democrat-leaning district.

‘He is a lying politician who has been deceiving voters throughout his time in office, so it should come as no shock that he continues his flip-flop tour across the state of Texas.’

Talarico announced on Oct. 13, 2021, that he would move back to state House District 50, just one month ahead of the Nov. 8, 2021, deadline for him to meet the one-year residency requirement for the 2022 election.

At the time, he blamed Republicans for redrawing state House District 52, which he then represented, into one that was more red-leaning.

“Republicans have gerrymandered me out of my district. If they think they can keep me off the House floor, they better think again,” he wrote on social media.

The Federalist report, citing Texas voter registration files, claimed that Talarico registered to vote at his mother’s Austin address in December 2021, well after the deadline, and used her address “on election forms,” then purchased a home in state House District 50 after the primary in March 2022.

“There’s no evidence, sources say, that Talarico lived at his mother’s home during the period. Even if he did, the candidate would have to have resided there for at least a year before launching his House campaign,” the Federalist reported.

Voter registration for Talarico dated December 2021 listed an Austin address, according to images shared by the Dallas Express. He was previously registered in Round Rock, Texas, according to the images.

Current records with the Texas Secretary of State list a P.O. box in Austin as Talarico’s address for the March 2022 Democratic primary.

The unmarried candidate also reportedly shares an individual checking account with his mother. His campaign reported receiving an in-kind donation from Talarico’s parents of $1,437.84 for moving expenses in December 2021, according to the Dallas Express.

Five years later, he’s facing difficult questions about whether he actually met that residency requirement.

“James Talarico has proven he has zero regard for Texans and the rule of law. He’s been lying to voters and shamelessly committing election fraud to hold onto power,” Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote on social media.

His campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Madison Cercy, a spokeswoman for the Paxton campaign, did not hold back in a statement to the Federalist.

RELATED: James Talarico’s WOKE CHURCH raises money to fund abortions and transgender summer camp for children

“It is absolutely disgusting that James Talarico used his mother’s address to not only commit voter fraud, but also to defraud his entire constituency, all so he could run in a safe Democrat seat,” she said. “He is a lying politician who has been deceiving voters throughout his time in office, so it should come as no shock that he continues his flip-flop tour across the state of Texas.”

A recent Democrat-aligned poll said Talarico had a five-point advantage over Paxton, but the Decision Desk voter probability has Paxton as a slight favorite over the Democrat.

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​Election fraud, James talarico, Ken paxton, Us senate election, Politics 

It was 1903, and Theodore Roosevelt had a problem. The Sherman Antitrust Act, passed in 1890, was effectively dead. It had been used rarely, and when it had been, cases moved sluggishly through the courts. Roosevelt wished to move forward on a multitude of what he believed to be monopolies, including in railroads and energy.

Roosevelt was not wrong to be concerned with monopoly. Coming out of the Civil War, America’s Gilded Age had moved the country lurchingly from a regional power to a global power, one that would soon dominate the world.

America’s antitrust laws simply are not built for these technologies and economic sectors.

But with that explosion of commerce came its domination by a few select companies. And while Roosevelt’s predecessor, William McKinley, had repeatedly urged Congress to crack down on them, it was mostly to no avail. By the time Roosevelt took the reins of power in 1901, several companies effectively ran entire industries.

His problem was solved by Congress, which quickly passed what became known as the Expediting Act. The bill, passed unanimously, allowed for the attorney general to declare a given antitrust case to be of national importance. This in turn mandated the creation of a special three-judge panel on what would today be the level of district courts. After that hearing, which was to be “given precedence over others and in every way expedited,” an appeal could only be levied at the Supreme Court.

Roosevelt and his successor, William Howard Taft, launched a bevy of antitrust cases, breaking apart railroad, cigarette, and energy companies. Americans alive in the 21st century may find it difficult to imagine just how powerful these Gilded Age companies were.

Standard Oil controlled roughly 90% of all oil production in America. American Tobacco produced and sold 86% of all cigarettes in the entire country. And the Northern Securities Company governed effectively all freight railroads from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest. By the end of Taft’s term, none of those companies would exist.

RELATED: America needs heroes who do not apologize for being heroes

Heritage Art/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Eventually, the Expediting Act became a victim of its own success: The large trusts were broken apart, with few — such as the Bell telephone system — existing into the latter half of the 20th century. Eventually, the lack of large antitrust cases gave way to smaller cases filled with minutiae. This, plus complaints from the Supreme Court about its supposedly immense workload, led to the bill’s repeal in the 1980s, with antitrust cases ultimately being treated like other civil suits.

Today, the oil industry remains broken up, and no one is concerned about a single cigarette company dominating that industry. But like the turn of the 20th century, there are entirely new industries and economic sectors that have sprung up — and along with them have come entirely new monopolies.

Thirty years ago, the notion that a single company could dominate an online search index would be unfathomable. That the same company could dominate browsers and other aspects of the internet would likewise be difficult to imagine. Amazon, meanwhile, controls America’s book market and facilitates the sale of a majority of all books sold in the United States.

And there are other even more dangerous monopolies that could develop, like in artificial intelligence. OpenAI was founded just over 10 years ago. Its main rival, Anthropic, was only founded in 2021, meaning that it has existed for less time than the United States government has been suing Google. Google, for what it’s worth, owns 14% of Anthropic.

With the speed at which AI is developing, it is not outside the realm of possibility that an AI company controlling an AGI-level large-language model, or beyond, would be able to monopolize the artificial intelligence sector — an extremely concerning prospect, made all the more concerning by the fact that America’s antitrust laws simply are not built for these technologies and economic sectors.

RELATED: The path to America-first AI

Yunping Iiang/Getty Images

While antitrust laws clearly need to be revamped — the foundational law, upon which many antitrust cases are still brought, was passed in 1890 — a quick and relatively easy solution would be a return to the Expediting Act, with small updates to match our current judicial structures.

Forcing judges to put antitrust cases first and move quickly on them — as opposed to taking months to mull over decisions — along with speedy hearings by the Supreme Court would help preemptively prepare America for the possibility of 21st-century monopolization.

The Supreme Court’s original concern over its workload should be discarded. When the American republic was new, government was not year-round. Congress was out of session for months on end. The president, far from barnstorming the country as they do today, stayed in Washington or simply went home when Congress was out of session. The Supreme Court had a similarly light schedule. This was all in keeping with the times, when things simply moved slowly.

But as speeds have increased, so too have government workloads. Today, Congress — though lawmakers take Fridays off — is in Washington far more often, and the presidency is now a 24/7 job.

But the Supreme Court’s calendar still sits empty for multiple months of the year, with bursts of work coming throughout. If the court will have to hear a handful of cases the attorney general deems to be of critical importance, the justices may have to suffer the indignity of having only two months of uninterrupted vacation as opposed to three.

There is something for everyone in bringing back the Expediting Act. Investors and employees will no longer be left in limbo for years as merger trials drag on and on. Antitrust advocates will not need to wait endlessly for results. And America will be better equipped to deal with sudden monopolies that, in our increasingly fast-paced world, can come about in a flash.

No one benefits from slow antitrust hearings. Congress should pass a new version of the Expediting Act and make antitrust fast again.

​American republic, Anthropic, Antitrust laws, Artificial intelligence, Energy companies, Google, Openai, Supreme court, Theodore roosevelt, Amazon, Monopolies, Opinion & analysis 

Radical Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener may have sworn off campaign support from law enforcement unions in California — yet these same unions are still financing Wiener’s anti-cop and pro-LGBTQ agenda.

Wiener, 56, has sparked disgust and outrage across America since he joined the California Senate a decade ago. Since then, he has advocated for:

lessening the criminal penalties associated with HIV-positive prostitutes;exempting some adults who had oral or anal sex with minors from automatically registering as sex offenders;making California a “refuge” for parents who want to subject their kids to gender-related medical interventions banned in other states;eliminating mandatory minimums for opioid trafficking and other drug crimes; andS.B. 627, aka the No Secret Police Act, prohibiting most law enforcement officers in California from wearing masks that many believe protect them from doxxing.

‘Scott Wiener has shown throughout the years that he is no friend of law enforcement.’

Wiener has not even tried to hide his animus against cops. In June 2020, at the height of George Floyd hysteria, he pledged not to “accept contributions from law enforcement unions going forward.”

“Our policing/criminal justice system is broken & needs drastic change,” he claimed at the time.

“This system kills/harms countless people, esp people of color. We need to do more & I’m committed to this fight,” he added.

And yet police union dollars are still flowing his way.

How? The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Caucus Leadership Fund, a political committee for the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus. Wiener currently sits on the caucus and previously served as chair.

Since January 2020, the respective political action committees of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, and the California Association of Highway Patrolmen have donated a whopping $210,000 total to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Caucus Leadership Fund, state records show.

During that same period, state filings show that the LGBT caucus fund donated $11,000 directly to Wiener’s campaign committees and spent an additional $27,000 in independent expenditures supporting his 2020 re-election bid.

The leaders of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus; the chair of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Caucus Leadership Fund; and representatives from PORAC, CCPOA, and CAHP did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

In addition to his seat on the LGBT caucus, Wiener also currently serves as chair of the state Senate Elections and Constitutional Amendments Committee and just a month ago killed a bill that would have barred anyone who “has ever been required to register as a sex offender” from running for elective office in California.

The bill passed 60-0 in the California Assembly, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 60 to 19.

Wiener voted against the bill because he thought it ought to apply only to Tier 3 registrants, the worst sex offenders.

Of note, Tier 1 offenses can include misdemeanor child pornography. Just this year, Rene Campos, a registered sex offender who pled no contest to possessing obscene matter depicting a minor in sexual conduct, nearly qualified to run for Fresno City Council but failed to gather the necessary 20 signatures.

Campos confirmed to Blaze News that he fully intends to “run again.”

“Does equal protection still mean equal protection when the person invoking it is unpopular? Under the same sun, no one is above the law — and no one should stand outside its protection,” Campos wrote in an email. “I believe every person stands equal before the law.”

RELATED: Fresno candidate’s registered child sex offender status sparks outrage after city council campaign launch

Rene Campos. California Sex Offender Registry screenshot

Many rank-and-file members of law enforcement have been frustrated that so much union largesse has been dedicated to Democrats like Wiener who seemingly make cops look like the bad guys and sex offenders look like victims.

Sgt. Tony Romo, who has spent nearly 40 years as a deputy and a detective in Los Angeles, told Blaze News that he resigned from the board of the Los Angeles County Professional Peace Officers Association in 2023, partially because the group was “selling out the members” with some of its “relationships with politicians.”

Romo claimed that lawmakers in Sacramento are passing bills that “handcuff” police officers and that police unions are helping facilitate this anti-cop legislation through financial support.

“These bills are being passed, and the unions are basically getting rolled over on [them]. And they’re not fighting the leadership. They just kind of want to go to status quo,” Romo explained.

Sgt. Tony Romo. LA County Sheriff’s Department

Romo also claimed that while he was still on the board, the L.A. County PPOA discussed donating to Wiener even after Wiener renounced all police union support in June 2020. Each time Wiener’s name came up, Romo and another board member would immediately reject it because of Wiener’s anti-cop activism, Romo said.

“Scott Wiener has shown throughout the years that he is no friend of law enforcement. Absolutely, he’s more of a nemesis to law enforcement. And if he had it his way, there would be probably no law enforcement. So it’s our duty to support our membership, and it’s not to support any senator, assemblyman, congressman that is doing the exact opposite of that,” Romo said.

State filings show PPOA donated $21,000 directly to Wiener’s re-election campaigns between June 2016 and July 2018 but has not made a direct donation to Wiener’s campaigns since.

Sen. Wiener is now running for the congressional seat former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) has held since 1987, representing most of San Francisco.

Wiener’s campaign and PPOA did not respond to a request for comment.

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​California, California senate, Nancy pelosi, Scott wiener, Politics 

The president’s executive order “Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation” arrived in language that sounded both urgent and inevitable. Americans have always needed a frontier. Close the continental one and you get the endless frontier of Vannevar Bush, who argued in 1945 that basic science was the territory left to settle.

Now, 81 years later, the covered wagons are cryostats … and the territory is quantum.

Hype is a strategic tool for securing funding.

And what, exactly, is quantum? We’ll get to that.

President Trump signed executive order 14413 on June 22, 2026. The stated goal is to make the United States the world’s quantum “superpower,” a word that does not appear in the order itself but in the accompanying fact sheet, in which ambitions are permitted to be louder. The order proper is more bureaucratic and more interesting, directing the creation of a national quantum strategy within 180 days and demanding technical specifications for a scientifically transformative quantum computer within 90 days. It orders sensor deployment plans extending to September 2028 and establishes the Quantum Computer for Application Development and Discovery Science effort, which aims to deliver at least one machine to a Department of Energy facility where real scientists can use it for real problems. The order is less a building than a set of blueprints.

Federal quantum policy is actually not new. Spending on quantum information science rose from $456 million in fiscal year 2019 to over a billion by 2023. The 2018 National Strategic Overview had already laid out grand challenges, workforce initiatives, and international cooperation frameworks. A 2009 vision document warned, with admirable prescience, that quantum technologies could render existing data-protection schemes obsolete. The new order tightens this apparatus. The posture shifts from encouragement to expectation, from “let us coordinate” to “let us specify what we are building and whether it works.”

Confidence or con?

Quantum computing has suffered from a particular condition: The distance between what is promised and what is delivered is large, and the people doing the promising know it. Physicists have acknowledged, in terms more candid than one might expect, that hype is a strategic tool for securing funding. DARPA, not an institution given to sentiment, created a Quantum Benchmarking Initiative whose purpose is to determine whether anyone’s machine can actually do something worth its cost by 2033. The executive order’s insistence on specifications, benchmarking centers, and public assessment institutions is therefore a response to a credibility problem. The government is trying to build institutions that can tell the difference between a breakthrough and a press release.

RELATED: Smartphone and laptop prices are rising. Buy now before they go higher.

Crovik Media/Getty Images

The underlying physics explains why quantum computing is so difficult. A qubit, the fundamental unit of quantum information, can exist in a superposition of states, which permits certain computations to proceed in ways unavailable to classical machines. The trouble is that qubits are extraordinarily fragile. They decohere; their gates fail; their measurements are imperfect. The central engineering challenge is error correction: combining many noisy physical qubits into fewer, cleaner logical qubits whose effective error rates are low enough to be useful. Google reported a 101-qubit surface code that exceeded the lifetime of its best physical qubit by a factor of 2.4. Microsoft and Quantinuum demonstrated logical qubits with better-than-physical error rates on a trapped-ion processor.

These are genuine achievements, but are only way stations, and the order reflects an awareness that a useful quantum computer cannot be defined by qubit count alone. Instead, such a computer must be described in terms of gate fidelity, decoder latency, circuit depth, error-correction overhead, and performance on actual workloads. The romance of the blackboard gives way to the actuality of engineering and manufacturing.

The break and the fix

Trump’s order treats quantum as a material civilization project, with supply-chain analyses, foundry access, domestic component development, and critical minerals, speaking of readiness, deployment, and trusted supply chains. Quantum policy is now a cousin of semiconductor policy, another domain in which the distance between theoretical capability and industrial reality turned out to be the whole story. The order also folds in workforce provisions: recruitment strategies, labor-market tracking, apprenticeships, and a network of national training institutes. Talent, chips, standards, and secrecy are treated as a single policy field.

There is a tension at the heart of the order. On the same day as the president’s signature, the White House issued a companion order on advanced cryptographic attacks. The reason is straightforward and unsettling. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break the public-key cryptography on which much of modern privacy, commerce, and infrastructure depends. NIST finalized its first three post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024. Migration, the agency stresses, must begin now. The government is doing two things simultaneously: accelerating the technology that could undermine the current architecture of trust and building a new architecture of trust designed to survive the technology it is accelerating. The government has decided that the technology is too important to forgo and too dangerous to leave unsecured.

​Tech, Quantum, Computing 

An Amber Alert on Monday led to the shooting death of a man who allegedly abducted a 13-year-old girl from her home in Ocala, Florida.

The Marion County Sheriff’s Office said that 45-year-old Jason Castillo had been identified as a possible suspect after the Amber Alert for Juliet Louise Arioso was issued in the morning.

Castillo was shot by 8 sheriff’s deputies and 1 officer while they tried to take him into custody.

Police believe Castillo had abducted Arioso from the Shady Road Villas community between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

At about 5:20 p.m., deputies spotted the red 2021 Hyundai Santa Fe and tried to pull Castillo over, but he refused and tried to speed away.

Officers performed a precision immobilization technique, commonly known as a PIT maneuver, that disabled the SUV on U.S. Highway 441.

Castillo was shot by eight sheriff’s deputies and one officer while they tried to take him into custody.

He was transported to a hospital, where he was later declared dead.

Arioso was found safe and returned to her home.

Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods later said that a citizen notified police when they saw the car described in the Amber Alert, and police were also aided by a license plate reader.

Woods said Castillo produced a handgun when the officers confronted him. The video they released shows him pointing the gun at police.

“I couldn’t be more proud of my deputies,” Woods said. “When that little girl needed them, they answered the call. They worked every lead, used every tool available, and they didn’t quit until she was safe.”

RELATED: Texas man arrested in connection to 12-year-old who went missing after getting into strange truck in the middle of the night

Castillo’s family released a statement about his death.

“We love him regardless of what he has done over the years no matter what a loss is a loss! Don’t take this as we supported his acts. But we did care about him and wished him better. I grew up with him as a huge part of my close family and it really sucks knowing he is gone,” the statement reads.

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​Amber alert, Child abduction, Florida man, Officer shooting, Crime 

As the shooting war with Iran enters its sixth month, the United States continues to smash Iran’s military — and lose the information war in Iran, at home, and around the world.

American forces can strike targets across Iran and hit Tehran’s regional allies, especially the Houthis in Yemen. By every conventional military measure, Iran is taking severe losses. Yet a growing domestic and international audience believes Tehran is fighting the United States to a standstill.

The Iranian officials would earn an A in my information-warfare seminar. Too many American officials would earn an F

It is not. But Iran is winning the argument over what the war means.

Too many senior American officials still treat television — whether broadcast or streamed — as a record of an event rather than a battlefield in its own right. The War Department approaches global visual media as if it were still 1991 and Desert Storm. That must change.

U.S. military planners still tend to think in Clausewitzian terms: War is politics conducted through the controlled application of violence. That formulation reflected the technology of the early 19th century. It does not account for an information age in which images cross the globe in milliseconds and political effects can precede, outweigh, or even replace battlefield effects.

I call this form of conflict SOFTWAR: the hostile use of global visual media to shape another society’s will by changing its view of reality. Three colleagues and I have taught this form of warfare to generations of students at U.S. war, staff, and intelligence colleges since the early 1990s. Too few American institutions adapted.

Iran did. Its military and intelligence apparatus has embraced the concept since at least 2003 and even adopted the American-coined term in its own publications and influence operations.

That helps explain why the United States has spent billions of dollars over five months while Iranian drone and missile attacks — and Tehran’s televised defiance — continue. Washington is using Cold War systems and industrial-age doctrine against an asymmetric enemy organized for the infosphere.

Iran’s theocratic dictatorship is fighting a four-dimensional guerrilla war across land, sea, air, and information. Its military losses have limited its ability to retaliate directly against U.S. forces. Its remaining attacks are therefore chosen less for battlefield effect than for global media impact.

Oil tankers and cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a desalination plant and power station in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil hub, a liquefied natural gas facility in Qatar, a U.S. communications center in Jordan, and American naval facilities in Bahrain all produce frightening images and headlines.

RELATED: The only Iran plan that doesn’t end with a 20-year hangover

Marcin Golba/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Iran times its scattered counterattacks for its own early-morning hours so the images arrive during the American prime-time news cycle. The objective is not merely to damage a target. It is to shape the story told about the war here, there, and everywhere.

The United States helps Tehran by concentrating almost exclusively on visible military targets while leaving the regime’s domestic television system intact. Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting continues to push the mullahs’ account across dozens of television channels and through its official news operation.

Washington destroys weapons and commanders but fails to contest the information environment that gives those losses political meaning. It has not destroyed the transmitters and replaced the regime’s message with one aimed directly at the Iranian people.

Those people are the regime’s real engine: a population that has endured repression and the reported killing of tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators. Outside the relatively small number of Iranians with access to Starlink, the United States has no coherent way to speak to them at scale.

America does not lack the technology. The military weakened its own capacity. In 2024, it retired the EC-130J aircraft of the 193rd Special Operations Wing, the only U.S. airborne radio and television broadcast platform. The aircraft were judged too vulnerable for modern combat, but no announced drone replacement has taken over the mission.

The result is overwhelming kinetic power without a direct means of reaching the Iranian public. It is the doctrine of a mechanic who responds to an engine-warning light by cutting the wire to the bulb. The warning disappears. The engine keeps failing.

Meanwhile, Iranian propagandists study the American audience, especially younger people hostile to the Trump administration, and target them with AI-generated Lego-character videos. The goal is to unite disparate factions, erode domestic support for the war, and influence the midterm elections.

America needs a genuinely four-dimensional military capable of operating on land, at sea, in the air, and throughout the infosphere. Information warfare should organize and direct the campaign, with kinetic operations supporting strategic influence objectives — not the other way around. Iran already understands the hierarchy.

RELATED: Memo to Hegseth: Military education needs a strategic makeover

Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu/Getty Images

Its officials also understand presentation.

When Iranian military figures such as Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari or Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesman Abolfazl Shekarchi address the public, they are usually seated behind a desk with the Iranian flag visible. Their uniforms are immaculate, their beards trimmed, and their faces dramatically lit. Most important, they look through the camera lens directly at the audience. This is television 101.

Viewers who speak no Farsi still receive the intended message: discipline, seriousness, and defiance.

American military spokesmen too often squander the same opportunity. They ignore, disdain, or have never learned the skills needed to communicate effectively on television.

General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is informed and capable. But at his Pentagon press conferences, his televised manner resembles a squadron commander consulting his notes while briefing the weather to the first three rows.

He should address the millions watching beyond the room. Put the camera a few feet away, frame him from mid-bicep to just above the head, and have him look through the lens to establish direct eye contact with the intended audience. Reporters can sit to either side. The difference would be immediate.

Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, makes a similar mistake. He often appears in green camouflage designed to defeat electro-optical observation — including television — rather than the Navy service uniform designed to convey authority, experience, and command. He also stands too far from the camera for viewers to read his face.

His folksy Ozzie Nelson manner may work before Congress or the Navy League. It does not put an enemy on his heels.

RELATED: The future of warfare is not what you think

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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth should know better. The former Fox News host needs a tighter camera shot and a visual style designed for wartime communication rather than his old television demographic.

His current presentation is crowded with distractions: a tight European-cut suit, patterned tie, clashing flag pocket square, and hair product that makes his scalp glisten under studio lights. His deep-set eyes require careful lighting. Without it, viewers may read strain or evasiveness where none exists.

Alfred Hitchcock understood the rule: Dress the leading man simply and light him properly so the audience watches the man rather than the costume. Cary Grant in “North by Northwest” remains the model.

The Iranian officials would earn an A in my information-warfare seminar. Too many American officials would earn an F — and three hours of detention.

That needs to change right now.

The United States is not losing the military contest with Iran. It is losing the contest over what the world believes the military contest means.

A nation can destroy every designated target and still lose the war if its enemy controls the images, timing, and story. Information warfare is not an elective. It is the core course.

America, so far, is failing.

​Iran, Opinion & analysis, Pete hegseth, Tehran, Television, United states, War department, Yemen, Information war, Propaganda, Dan caine, Brad cooper 

Two summers ago, our team at the Oversight Project sat in a conference room asking the same question as the rest of the country: How were they running the government with a broken president?

That was before Joe Biden’s complete malfunction on the debate stage. Even then, we were confident he could not sustain a full re-election campaign. We began examining whether state election laws would permit Democrats to replace him after key ballot deadlines. Leaked Democratic National Committee memos showed that the prospect had already alarmed both pro- and anti-Biden factions.

The silence on the tapes speaks loudly. It suggests knowing and willful conduct, not an innocent paperwork mistake.

As a clip of Biden stumbling played on the television, someone asked the lawyer’s question: How were they moving paper through the White House, and could Biden even sign it?

After a brief silence, someone answered: Probably an autopen. Let’s find the documents and calendars and figure it out.

The rest became what President Trump has called the scandal of the century: congressional investigations, Justice Department and White House inquiries, evidence of the extraordinary lengths Biden’s aides took to conceal his condition, and even the rearrest of violent felons who should never have received autopenned commutations.

Accountability, however, has remained elusive.

Which is infuriating. What happened during the Biden years was wrong, harmful, and in many instances unlawful. The Constitution vests presidential authority in one person. That person must possess both the capacity and the awareness to authorize official acts. The entire system depends on fixing responsibility on the president whom the voters chose.

That did not happen. For a country that has spent decades lecturing the world about democracy, the Biden presidency became an embarrassment at home.

Monday brought a measure of accountability. After more than two years of litigation, the Biden tapes were released to the American people.

Joe Biden and his well-funded legal team fought us in federal district court and on appeal. We won both times. Biden could have asked the Supreme Court to intervene, but he finally surrendered. His lawyers had so much time and money that they devoted pages of legal filings to posts from my X feed and that of my colleague Jeff Clark, apparently hoping to discredit us before the court. I will always enjoy knowing that the Biden team paid an aspiring left-wing lawyer to study my unvarnished thoughts.

RELATED: Biden audio tapes have just been released — and it’s not good for Joe

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What does the release of the tapes mean?

First, it pushes the timeline of Biden’s decline back to 2016 and 2017.

The recordings capture Biden’s interviews with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer while the two worked on Biden’s memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.” They were made within six months of Biden leaving the vice presidency. On the tapes, Biden forgets the name of Rep. Jim Clyburn, the man who would later rescue his 2020 campaign. He repeatedly says, “I’m so confused” and, “I can’t remember.”

The good days and bad days that defined his presidency were already apparent in 2017. The recordings contain so many pauses and verbal stalls that Biden sounds like a dial-up connection trying to buffer.

That helps explain why the 2020 campaign used COVID-19 as cover to keep him in the basement. Had Biden been forced to speak publicly and off the cuff throughout that campaign, his decline might have become as obvious then as it was during the 2024 debate. Democratic leaders knew they were selling damaged goods long before the public finally saw the label.

Second, the tapes raise serious questions about special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified information.

Hur declined to prosecute, concluding that a jury would view Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Yet the recordings reveal conduct more serious than Hur’s public account suggested.

At several points, Biden acknowledges that the material before him may be classified. The audio then cuts to long stretches of silence redacted for national security reasons. These are not isolated interruptions. Classified redactions cover substantial portions of the recordings.

The transcripts indicate that Biden disclosed information involving the CIA, the Defense Department, and other sensitive national security matters to a ghostwriter who lacked both a security clearance and authorization to receive it. Biden made those disclosures while pursuing a book deal worth $8 million.

The silence on the tapes speaks loudly. It suggests knowing and willful conduct, not an innocent paperwork mistake. The recordings justify a fresh examination of whether Hur’s investigation was designed to uncover the full truth or to contain a politically explosive scandal.

RELATED: Biden freed killers with a pen he didn’t even hold

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Third, the tapes open the door to criminal inquiries.

Biden told the American people that he “did not share classified information” with his ghostwriter. The tapes contradict that statement. Knowing and willful disclosure of national defense information to an unauthorized person can constitute a federal crime. Unlike a witness with a failing memory, a recording does not need to testify.

The inquiry should not stop with Biden. His White House mobilized in 2024 to discredit Hur for accurately describing the president’s mental condition. Officials who knew the truth attacked the special counsel for saying it aloud. The autopen scandal was institutional, and accountability must extend to the aides who enabled, concealed, and benefited from it.

Investigators must reconstruct the timeline carefully. Biden was plainly diminished in 2016 and 2017, though he deteriorated further by 2024. What was his mental state when he removed classified documents from secure facilities? Did he understand that he was disclosing protected information when he said as much on tape? How did Hur evaluate intent at the time the alleged offenses occurred rather than at the time of his later interview?

Those questions demand answers.

The tapes always belonged to the American people. The Oversight Project merely delivered them to their rightful owners.

America can never again permit a presidential administration to operate by mechanized fiat. Only one person may exercise the powers of the presidency. That person must know what he is authorizing, accept responsibility for it, and actually possess the confidence of the voters who put him there.

​Autopen, Joe biden, Oversight project, Justice department, Robert hur, Classified documents, Donald trump, National security, Opinion & analysis 

Donald Trump turned a White House dinner joke into one of the most controversial statements possible, as his joke clearly left his victim fuming — but she couldn’t say anything about it without damaging the left’s belief system.

BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales calls it “the greatest joke” he’s had, before playing a clip of the president honing in on CNN host Kaitlan Collins.

“But I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award. It was all about me, it’s a fake. She shouldn’t get the award. It was a fake. But I didn’t mind. I said, ‘Kaitlan, congratulations.’ But it was fake,” Trump began.

“There’s no question about it. But she’s a young, attractive woman. She never smiles. I said, ‘Kaitlan, do you have a smile? Smile. You have a nice position. You’re at CNN fake news. You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan,’” he continued.

“I thought Kaitlan had really made it big with a major new sponsorship, but then I informed her that it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can,” he said, adding, “It was Dylan Mulvaney.”

“Now,” Gonzales comments, laughing, “what’s so brilliant about this joke is that they can’t actually complain about the joke without proving that they’re transphobic. How are you going to explain what exactly is offensive about this joke?”

“Because if you want to accept leftist logic, Dylan Mulvaney is just as beautiful of a woman as Kaitlan Collins,” she says, noting that according to the left, “trans women are real women.”

When Collins was questioned about the joke following the dinner, she ignored the questions and walked away.

“They couldn’t be too offended,” Gonzales says, adding, “to protect the trans people.”

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​Donald trump, Dylan mulvaney, Kaitlan collins, Sara gonzales, Bud light, Blazetv show, Lgbt