Anthropic has started marking text generated by its newest Claude models with an invisible watermark that can travel with the text after it leaves the chatbot. Copy a Claude response into a document, paste it into a website, drop it into a codebase, and the mark may still be there. Anthropic says models launched on or after August 2 support machine-readable marking at launch, and the company is applying those markings wherever Claude is offered worldwide, while it is adding support to older models as well.

There is a perfectly defensible reason for doing this. The internet is filling up with synthetic text, images, audio, and video, and some method of establishing where that material came from could be useful. Anthropic also deserves credit for attempting something more sophisticated than the current generation of AI detectors, which mostly look at finished prose and make an educated guess about whether a machine wrote it.

American users who never asked for it are getting it anyway.

Unfortunately, Anthropic’s solution comes with a fairly spectacular collection of problems. The watermark does not necessarily prove Claude wrote the material carrying it. Anthropic acknowledges that aggressive rewriting can remove it. And rather than confining the system to the European market that created the requirement in the first place, Anthropic is rolling it out across Claude worldwide, including Claude Code.

That last part is especially strange. Europe demanded a way to identify AI-generated text, and an American developer using Claude to write software in Tennessee now gets his code fingerprinted too.

Brussels writes the rule

This is not a case of Anthropic inventing a bizarre new restriction all by itself. Article 50 of the European Union’s AI Act requires providers of generative AI systems, including general-purpose systems, to mark AI-generated text, audio, images, and video in a machine-readable form so that it can be detected as artificial. Those requirements took effect August 2, 2026, while the EU’s accompanying voluntary Code of Practice lays out practical steps companies can use to comply.

The underlying concern is reasonable enough. Deepfakes are becoming more convincing, AI-generated propaganda is becoming cheaper, and fraudsters have an increasingly powerful collection of tools for impersonating real people. If someone generates a fake recording of a politician declaring war or a fake video of a CEO announcing a bankruptcy, having some reliable way to determine that the material came from an AI system could be genuinely useful.

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

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But Anthropic is not limiting its response to Europe. According to the company’s own documentation, marking applies to output from supported models “wherever Claude is offered, worldwide,” including Claude itself, the API, Claude Code, and Claude delivered through AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry.

Political scientists call this the Brussels effect. The EU controls a market too large for multinational companies to ignore, so regulations written in Brussels can wind up shaping products and business practices far outside Europe. Companies often find it easier to build one product that satisfies the strictest major jurisdiction than to maintain entirely separate versions for everyone else. The concept was itself modeled on the older California effect, in which regulations imposed by America’s largest state, particularly automobile emissions rules, influenced products and policies far beyond California.

Anthropic’s explanation gives us a remarkably clear example of the Brussels effect at work. The company says it is imposing the watermark globally because it doesn’t yet “have a durable way to scope it by region.” The EU imposed the requirement, Anthropic cannot reliably fence it off to Europe, so everyone gets it.

Anyone who uses the modern web has already experienced one version of the Brussels effect. European privacy rules helped produce the thicket of cookie banners, consent forms, and tracking pop-ups that now greet users on countless websites, including users nowhere near Europe. California has pulled the same trick domestically with privacy and automobile regulation. A government does not necessarily have to persuade the rest of the world to pass the same law if the market is large enough to persuade companies to impose its preferred standard voluntarily.

Maybe that will prove harmless, but the regulatory chain is pretty clear: Europe demanded the feature, Anthropic globalized it, and American users got it too. European regulators demanded a particular feature from an American AI company, and American users who never asked for it are getting it anyway.

What exactly is Claude putting in your text?

Anthropic says Claude’s watermark is based on Google DeepMind’s SynthID-Text, which does not hide metadata or invisible characters inside the output. Instead, the watermark is created during generation by slightly changing the odds that Claude will pick one acceptable token over another.

A language model usually has several plausible choices for the next word. Google gives the example of assigning different probability scores to possible next tokens and then adjusting those scores slightly to create a detectable pattern. Over a long enough passage, those tiny choices add up to a statistical signature that can be recognized later. Google says the process does not measurably affect the quality, accuracy, creativity, or speed of the output.

Anthropic says Claude uses the same basic approach, with an important limitation: The model needs some freedom to choose among acceptable tokens. If only one answer will preserve a fact, satisfy a constraint, or keep a piece of code working, there may be little or nothing for the watermark to manipulate. Anthropic says factual answers and code therefore tend to carry less watermark signal than open-ended prose.

Because the watermark only operates where Claude has room to choose, Anthropic says it should not sacrifice accuracy or produce broken code merely to preserve the mark. The trade-off is that highly constrained output can carry a weaker signal and may be harder to identify later.

Anthropic also says its watermark carries no identifying information and cannot be traced to a particular person, company, or conversation. If Anthropic is to be believed, Claude is not quietly slipping your account ID into every paragraph you generate. However, researchers have already demonstrated multi-bit watermarks that can carry provenance data such as a user ID, timestamp, and model ID. That means a text watermark can do more than answer, “Was this probably generated by AI?” It can potentially carry information about who generated it, when, and with which model.

Once a company starts deliberately shaping generated text so that it can carry a hidden machine-readable signal, users have a legitimate interest in knowing exactly what that signal contains, who can read it, and whether the system could change later.

Claude’s fingerprint does not prove Claude wrote it

Anthropic’s own explanation puts some hard limits on what the watermark can actually prove.

Anthropic warns that detecting a Claude watermark means only that the material may have been processed by Claude. Claude might have generated the text from scratch, but it also might merely have proofread something written entirely by a human, translated it, summarized it, reformatted it, or otherwise transformed it.

That sounds like a technical distinction until you imagine how the detector will actually be used. A professor finds a Claude watermark in a student’s paper. An editor finds one in a freelancer’s submission. An employer detects one in a report. A company finds one in source code supplied by a contractor. In each case, the obvious conclusion will be that Claude wrote the work, even though Anthropic itself says that conclusion may be false.

Anthropic then manages to make the opposite case equally murky. Failure to detect a watermark does not mean Claude did not write the material either. The company warns that heavy editing, paraphrasing, translation, mixing Claude-generated material with other text, or simply using too short a passage can make the signal disappear or become unreliable.

The translation example is especially funny. Ask Claude to translate your human-written text, and Anthropic says the result may acquire a Claude mark. Take Claude-generated text and translate or paraphrase it aggressively enough afterward, and the mark may disappear. The same basic transformation can therefore help create the evidence on one side of the process and destroy it on the other.

This doesn’t make the watermark completely worthless. A positive signal may still be useful evidence when interpreted alongside other facts. But Anthropic is building a system that institutions will be sorely tempted to treat as a yes-or-no answer even though the company itself says it is nothing of the sort.

RELATED: Bill Gates is freaking out over AI — so why did he just spend hundreds of millions on this?

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As I wrote recently for Blaze News about Substack’s integration of the Pangram AI detector, even an unusually sophisticated detector can put genuine human writers in the position of having to prove that they wrote their own words. Pangram falsely flagged a passage by Freddie deBoer as completely AI-written, only to classify the same material as human when it was submitted with more surrounding text. Technology journalist Taylor Lorenz was also falsely flagged before Pangram’s CEO investigated and acknowledged the mistake.

The problem is broader than Pangram. Vanderbilt University disabled Turnitin’s AI detector after calculating that even Turnitin’s claimed 1% false-positive rate could translate into hundreds of incorrectly flagged papers at the university’s submission volume. Turnitin itself warns that its AI score should not be used as the sole basis for adverse action against a student, because the system can misidentify human and AI-generated writing.

Claude’s watermark is technically different and potentially more reliable because the model itself inserts the signal. But the institutional temptation will be exactly the same: Somebody in authority sees a red warning light and treats it as proof, while the caveats buried in Anthropic’s documentation disappear from the conversation.

The people trying to cheat can just wash the mark off

There is also a more practical problem: People who actually want to hide their AI use may be able to remove the mark.

Anthropic acknowledges that heavy paraphrasing and other transformations can make the mark disappear, and academic research on text watermarking has repeatedly found the same problem. A 2025 paper describing the Self-Information Rewrite Attack tested an automated rewriting method against seven recent watermarking schemes and reported nearly 100% attack success, without requiring access to the watermark algorithm or the watermarked model.

That does not prove the attack works against Claude. Anthropic has not disclosed enough about its system for anyone outside the company to know how robust it is, and Claude’s watermark could turn out to be substantially stronger than the experimental schemes researchers tested.

But Anthropic has already conceded the important point: Sufficiently aggressive rewriting can break detection.

The incentives are therefore almost backward. Someone who uses Claude openly, copies the result into a document, and makes ordinary edits may leave the watermark intact. Someone who actually intends to conceal his use of AI has an obvious extra step available: paste Claude’s work into a different model and order it to rewrite everything aggressively while preserving the meaning.

The EU wanted to make AI-generated work easier to identify. What it may have helped create instead is an incentive to launder AI prose through multiple models.

That is not some exotic hypothetical attack involving a team of computer scientists. Anyone serious about concealing AI use is already motivated to rewrite generated text because untouched chatbot prose has recognizable habits of its own. Now Anthropic has given that same user another reason to do it.

Claude is not the only model leaving fingerprints

Anthropic is not the first major AI company to watermark text. Google has been doing it through SynthID in Gemini since 2024. Unlike Anthropic, Google has publicly explained at least the basic mechanism: SynthID changes the probability scores used during token selection, creating a statistical watermark without attaching conventional metadata to the finished text.

OpenAI has taken a different public approach so far. It has embraced provenance and watermarking for generated media and currently uses SynthID for supported images and audio, alongside C2PA metadata for generated images. Its public provenance materials do not describe a comparable watermark being embedded in ordinary ChatGPT text. That may not last. OpenAI says its goal is to expand provenance signals to all modalities, including text, as it works to comply with the EU’s Code of Practice.

Claude users are not choosing simply between “watermarked AI” and writing everything themselves. They are choosing among competing models whose providers have made different decisions about whether generated prose and code should carry a persistent vendor signal.

The bigger question is what happens when the rest of the industry complies. If Brussels gets its way, invisible fingerprints in AI-generated prose may soon become the norm rather than an Anthropic oddity.

Claude Code is where this starts looking suicidal

The stakes look different once the watermark reaches software.

Claude Code exists because developers want an AI agent that can write useful code directly into real projects. If Claude generates 200 lines that work correctly, there is no reason a programmer should have to rewrite those 200 lines merely to put his personal stylistic stamp on them. Accepting useful machine-generated code with minimal changes is the product.

And Anthropic says its marking system applies to Claude Code, although code generally carries less watermarking than prose because programming often leaves the model with only one correct choice. The mark is more likely to show up where Claude has some freedom, such as comments or interchangeable names and terms. That makes the commercial risk harder to quantify, but it does not eliminate it.

That potentially leaves Claude’s signature in private company repositories, open-source projects, contractor deliverables, student assignments, and commercial software. Some organizations will not care at all. Plenty of software companies openly encourage AI-assisted coding and may regard provenance as useful rather than threatening.

But some companies restrict which AI tools employees may use because of confidentiality concerns. Some clients expect contractors to disclose AI assistance. Some schools ban AI-generated code. Some open-source maintainers are nervous about provenance and licensing. A developer may also simply prefer not to have his source code carry an invisible identifier tied to a particular vendor.

That leaves Anthropic in a strange competitive position. The AI coding market is viciously competitive, and programmers have no shortage of alternatives. If two coding agents perform roughly the same job but only one deliberately leaves a detectable fingerprint inside the output, there will be users who choose the other one for that reason alone.

Anthropic appears to be betting that the benefits of provenance will outweigh that concern. Maybe they will. But fingerprinting Claude Code worldwide to comply with a regulatory regime centered in Europe is an extraordinary way to test the theory.

Could Anthropic use the watermark to claim your code?

One obvious fear is that Anthropic could eventually find its mark in a program and claim ownership of the code. Under the company’s current commercial terms, that is not a strong concern.

RELATED: This top school says AI has shredded college — and every university is next

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Anthropic says its commercial customers own their outputs, while U.S. copyright law creates another obstacle because purely machine-generated material may lack copyright protection altogether. The U.S. Copyright Office’s current position is that copyright still requires sufficient human authorship; prompts alone generally do not provide enough human control over the expressive elements of generated material, although human selection, arrangement, modification, and other creative contributions can be protected.

So the current watermark should not be understood as Anthropic secretly stamping its property claim onto your work.

Traceability is the more plausible concern. There is no evidence that Anthropic is putting account IDs, timestamps, prompts, session identifiers, or other personally identifying information into Claude’s watermark today. Anthropic has not claimed to do so, and there is no basis for accusing it of secretly doing it.

But the technology makes a few obvious questions unavoidable. What exactly does Claude’s current watermark encode? Is the mark identical for every user? Can it identify a particular model or generation system? Could Anthropic later add a timestamp or account-specific identifier? Would users know if it did?

Those questions are not conspiracy theories. Once a company announces that it is invisibly embedding machine-readable information directly into the prose and code its customers produce, asking what information is being encoded is about as basic as asking what information a website stores in a cookie.

AI provenance may be useful. This is still a mess.

As AI-generated material becomes harder to distinguish from human work, provenance will matter more, not less. A reliable method for establishing that a piece of media came from a particular system could help expose fraud, propaganda, impersonation, and manipulated evidence.

But Claude’s watermark illustrates how quickly that seemingly simple goal becomes complicated once it reaches ordinary text. Anthropic is now altering output so that it carries a hidden signal that users cannot see. It is doing so worldwide in response to European regulation. The signal may survive normal editing but can apparently be destroyed by sufficiently aggressive rewriting. Finding it does not prove Claude authored the work, while failing to find it does not prove Claude did not.

Anthropic has explained the basic mechanism and says the watermark contains no identifying information, but outsiders still cannot independently inspect the hidden signal or verify exactly how the system behaves in practice.

The result may punish the least-deceptive users most. Someone who treats Claude as an ordinary work tool, accepts useful output, and moves on may carry Claude’s fingerprint into whatever he publishes or ships. Someone determined to pass AI work off as entirely human has a fairly straightforward workaround: He can ask another AI to wash the fingerprints off.

​Artificial intelligence, Tech 

Ten years after Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest ignited one of the biggest cultural battles in sports history, the former NFL quarterback says he still believes the league has blackballed him.

But according to BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock, that claim misses the bigger story.

“Ten years later, Colin Kaepernick just told the country he won,” Whitlock says.

“He sat with NBC News and said he no longer watches the NFL because the league is actively blackballing him and the men who knelt with him. He watches college football now. That is not a quarterback begging for a clipboard; that is a man who knows the institution already belongs to him,” he explains.

“A three-minute kneel during the national anthem has been stretched into game-long signs in every NFL stadium. ‘End racism,’ ‘stop hate,’” he continues, noting that it’s not going away any time soon.

“For the 2026 season, the seventh straight year of the stencil, the league will paint those slogans in the grass and on the helmets again. Marxist liturgy as field decoration. [Kaepernick] never needed another snap. He needed the building to preach after he left the huddle,” he says.

And the “diversity score cards” within the league — like the male cheerleaders who went viral not too long ago — still “sit in the front office as if they were defensive schemes.”

“The NFL did not stumble into this; it was discipled into it. [Kaepernick] watches college football and accuses the NFL of blackballing him,” Whitlock says.

“He can afford the sneer. He is one of America’s greatest Trojan horses. He never recaptured the quarterback job. He captured the institution,” he continues. “The NFL thought it was containing a protest. It was being converted by one.”

“What began as a sideline gesture now owns the grass, the hiring, and the moral vocabulary of Sunday. The loudest league in the country is still kneeling. The quietest quarterback already cashed the cultural check,” he adds.

And while Kaepernick is often treated as a “failed activist,” that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

“Ten years later, we are still talking about Colin Kaepernick. … That is a cultural victory that never required a comeback, a tryout, or another down. He sacrificed a fading quarterback career and got a league to carry his flag,” Whitlock says.

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

To enjoy more fearless conversations at the crossroads of culture, faith, sports, and comedy with Jason Whitlock, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Colin kaepernick, Trojan horse, Nfl, Diversity, National anthem, Protest, Activist, Racism, Jason whitlock, Marxism, Blazetv show 

Dozens of “gap” statistics have become so deeply embedded in our political discourse that we hardly question whether unequal outcomes are actually evidence of discrimination. “Women make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men.” “Hispanic students make up a disproportionately small percentage of university graduates.” “Black women must work into the following July to catch up to what white men made the previous year.”

In our equity-obsessed age, each one of these “gap stats” has a grimy underbelly, made up of individuals who are unfairly denied the fruits of their talents because institutions have tried to force equal outcomes: men who work longer hours on average; Asians who have higher SAT scores on average; Millennial and Gen Z white applicants who get passed over at work because they don’t add to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Though no example exists anywhere of a world without disparities, it seems that most American institutions — government agencies, universities, and corporate workplaces — cannot tolerate the reality of their existence.

We are living through a decade of wokeism in which racial favoritism has graduated from an ostensibly temporary thumb on the scale for the almost-qualified to the kind of unqualified frenzy that attracts grifters and con artists. And, correspondingly, the discrimination against the disfavored has gone from ambient to so intense as to bar advancement in culturally prestigious industries.

Contra to dismissive talking points from purveyors like AOC, Woke 1 has done real damage to many lives.

Think, for example, of the nameless crowd of people denied the sinecures, positions, and honors bestowed on Cambridge’s former “youngest black professor,” Jason Arday. He was a serial fabulist and plagiarist and tragically died by suicide earlier this month.

In addition to the coveted position from which he resigned, Arday had a lucrative book deal in an industry in which just three of the 70 National Book Awards nominees in the past decade were white men, a shift that happened far too suddenly to have occurred naturally.

The Arday debacle shows that the quest to eliminate disparities has turned hiring into a de facto racial spoils system. Despite every remedy applied against them, disparities persist everywhere — in every profession, school, boardroom, prison, scientific award category, sports field, and socioeconomic tier for reasons that are cultural, political, family-based, genetic, religious, and natural.

RELATED: DEI refuses to die

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Sometimes the reasons are even historically arcane. The majority of nail technicians in the United States are Vietnamese, even though they make up just 0.75% of the population. It turns out that this particular disparity can be traced to a single American actress, Tippi Hedren of “The Birds” fame. She visited a refugee camp near Sacramento after the Vietnam War and paid her manicurist to provide training, which then spread like wildfire throughout that community.

Disparities of a thousand hues are the norm. As Thomas Sowell wrote in “Discriminations and Disparities” back in 2018, “Neither in nature nor among human beings are either equal or randomly distributed outcomes automatic. On the contrary, grossly unequal distributions of outcomes are common, both in nature and among people.”

Though no example exists anywhere of a world without disparities, it seems that most American institutions — government agencies, universities, and corporate workplaces — cannot tolerate the reality of their existence, even where there is no evidence that they arise from discriminatory practices.

University of San Diego School of Law professor Gail Heriot, an experienced civil rights lawyer and author of the aptly titled article “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal,” regularly challenges audiences to come up with a single hiring criterion that does not produce disparate outcomes on the basis of some protected characteristic — that is, race, sex, religion, or national origin.

She has never received a satisfactory answer, even after offering a cash reward.

The ubiquity of disparities allows government agencies to choose their victims at will. No government body tasked with enforcing laws against workplace discrimination has ever investigated whether requiring a bachelor’s degree for entry-level office work causes disparities among different demographic groups. Instead, the government seeks to root out all disparities against protected classes.

During the Biden administration, the EEOC sued the grocery store chain Sheetz for screening out potential employees with certain kinds of criminal records. The government admitted that Sheetz had no intention of discriminating against black and Native American job applicants. But because a higher percentage of job-seekers from those backgrounds had criminal records, it had the effect of constituting illegal discrimination.

Welcome to disparate impact liability, a branch of the law now declared dead for the time being — and potentially unconstitutional — by the Trump administration’s Office of Legal Counsel.

RELATED: We need lawfare for white men

Blaze Media Illustration

When the law presumes that these gaps exist because of discrimination, it places defendants in an impossible position: When the inevitable disparities appear in your organization, you can either accept them — and open yourself to litigation — or discriminate against unprotected classes to make the numbers even out — and open yourself to litigation.

As I testified before the House Oversight Committee in July, our universities, corporations, and public institutions have been “at war with the reality of disparities” for decades. In their effort to vanquish them, often under shapeshifting terms, they’ve turned to actual discrimination against “overrepresented” groups in a way that is both deeply unjust and illegal under U.S. law.

For too long, even those on the right were defensive about the existence of these disparities.

They went beyond the laudable goal of reforming the K-12 education system to make it function better for all students to promising that their reforms would “close the gaps” and selling them as a way to render affirmative action at the university level unnecessary.

But the problem with DEI, and before that affirmative action, is simple: It tries to impose a Harrison Bergeron dystopia of equitable outcomes at mass scale. But doing that in a real world full of disparities requires discrimination against individuals.

As a multiethnic republic, we can no longer tolerate a system that institutes a legalized hierarchy of favored and disfavored classes. We can either enforce civil rights laws equally for everyone, which the Trump administration has done an admirable job of pursuing, or we can continue to degenerate into balkanized bloc politics marked by increasing resentment.

For the good of everyone, we must kill the god of the gaps: equality under the law for all, special favor for none, and let the disparities fall where they may.

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

​Affirmative action, Aoc, Black women, Dei, Disparate impact, Disparity of outcome, Eeoc, Equality, House oversight committee, Jason arday, Joe biden, Racial preferences, Sheetz, Title vii, Trump, White men, Woke, Opinion & analysis 

A former Florida mental health therapy intern is accused of having an inappropriate, sexual relationship with her client at an addiction facility. The therapist reportedly “facilitated alibis” to enable her patient to leave the facility to have sex, including at her mother’s home and a hospital.

According to official documents obtained by WPLG-TV, 32-year-old Michelle Luchau-Rebora had been an intern “in the capacity of a mental health therapist” at New Hope C.O.R.P.S., an addiction and behavioral health treatment facility in Homestead.

The alleged victim reported the ‘forbidden affair’ to staff at the facility after Luchau-Rebora broke up with him last fall, according to the arrest report.

New Hope C.O.R.P.S. is self-described as a “residential substance abuse treatment facility for single men in South Miami-Dade County.”

According to WTVJ-TV, the alleged victim told investigators that he and Luchau-Rebora engaged in a sexual relationship from June 2025 to September 2025 while the patient was under her care.

The 42-year-old patient and therapist allegedly had sex during therapy sessions.

WPLG, citing authorities, said Luchau-Rebora engaged in sexual activity during therapy sessions while at the facility and also “facilitated alibis on his behalf,” which allowed the patient authorization to leave the restricted facility and engage in sexual intercourse on multiple occasions at several locations, including her home, her mother’s home in Key Biscayne, and at Jackson Memorial Hospital.

RELATED: Former HS counselor arrested for allegedly ‘abusing her position’ to gain ‘inappropriate relationships’ with students

Deputies said Luchau-Rebora “demanded that he not tell anyone about their relationship because it will affect her ability to work as a therapist.”

The alleged victim reported the “forbidden affair” to staff at the facility after Luchau-Rebora broke up with him last fall, according to the arrest report.

Luchau-Rebora surrendered to authorities and was arrested on Wednesday. She was hit with a charge of sexual misconduct by a psychotherapist, a third-degree felony. Luchau-Rebora faces up to five years in prison if convicted, according to the New York Post.

A judge ordered Luchau-Rebora, of Pinecrest, to have no contact with the alleged victim.

Luchau-Rebora was released from the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on Wednesday night after posting a $5,000 bond.

New Hope C.O.R.P.S. said Luchau-Rebora was fired after the accusations surfaced.

Stephen Alvarez, executive director of New Hope C.O.R.P.S., issued the following statement to WPLG:

This is an unfortunate situation involving allegations concerning an individual who was serving as an intern with New Hope C.O.R.P.S. Upon becoming aware of the allegations, New Hope promptly reported the matter to the appropriate authorities and agencies, terminated the individual’s internship, and fully cooperated with the subsequent investigation.

WPLG reported that Luchau-Rebora “refused to speak about the incident.”

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​Arrest, Florida, Florida man, Florida woman, Sex crimes, Therapist, Crime 

Everything that lives will eventually die. The problem is that in the spring of our youth, the end of our lives feels far away. Because of that, we become cocky and self-assured, casting aside belief in the consequences of the kind of regret that puts things in perspective and, at the end of our lives, reminds us of what was really important.

Two women are in the news right now. Gloria Steinem, a writer and journalist who just died at 92, and Lindsay Clancy, on trial in Massachusetts for the murder of her three children.

It will be interesting to see whether what began in a courtroom that at times resembled a women’s rally will elevate a mother with postpartum depression into a feminist icon.

Steinem was a feminist in the 1960s and ’70s, when it wasn’t popular to be one. She went on to spend her life redefining peace, justice, and racial fairness and fighting for women’s liberation, which came to primarily mean a woman’s right to choose to dispose of her offspring.

In the eyes of many, Steinem was adored as an activist, even though her idea of equality was rooted in her belief that men, marriage, and children were oppressive because their presence in a woman’s life could deter her from achieving loftier goals.

At an abortion awareness rally in 1969, Steinem listened to other women’s abortion stories. At the time, unless a woman’s mental or physical health was in danger, abortion was illegal in the U.K. This is somewhat how, at the moment, the seriousness of child murder is in danger of being downplayed if mental illness is identified as a motive.

Steinem venerated the doctor who, like Henry VIII, approved of Anne Boleyn climbing the scaffold to be beheaded by the man assigned to wield the sword. The doctor referred Steinem for the execution of her unborn child in the womb by a practitioner willing to perform the procedure.

In language that is now regarded as heroic and liberating, before doing the deed or referring her to a female doctor who did the deed — either way — the willing accomplice made Steinem promise two things: “First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.”

Nearly 60 years after her child had been killed, Steinem dedicated her memoir, “My Life on the Road,” to her hero, Dr. John Sharpe.

Around that time, Steinem was widely viewed as a crusader for abortion rights, calling it “reproductive freedom,” a watered-down slogan she thought would make the subject more palatable in political discussion and a phrase that continues to be used in abortion debates to this day.

But now, Steinem is dead, and her legacy will be credited with having spent the lion’s share of her earthly existence downplaying the value of life while exalting a woman’s right to dispose of her children.

RELATED: Did Lindsay Clancy lose her mind — or her free will?

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Gloria Steinem, in life and now in death, will be idolized as an icon for women who embraced the idea that liberation is the right for a woman to snuff out life in the womb.

Her glowing death announcement states that she “passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her.” It is stunning that someone gets to pass away peacefully after spending a lifetime advocating the slaughter of the unborn.

The sad truth is that the “many who loved her” circling her bed did not include the son or daughter who would have been entering the seventh decade at the time of their mother’s death. What that touching announcement didn’t mention was whether she finally felt the regret she admitted she couldn’t muster for 69 years over the decision to sacrifice her child on the altar of ambition.

Despite all the books, speaking engagements, and accolades laid at Steinem’s feet, as the totality of her life flashed before her eyes, the son or daughter over whom success took precedence, whether she was capable or willing to admit it, may have been the last thing to cross her mind before passing into eternity.

Surely her progressive contribution to advancing a woman’s right to decide whether life inside her womb survives is Gloria’s legacy.

Now, nearly seven decades after Steinem’s backroom abortion, another woman with the potential to be a progressive pioneer in the fight for a mother’s rights over the lives of her children has been sitting in a wheelchair in a courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts. At the time Steinem terminated her child’s life, it was illegal unless a woman was physically or mentally ill. Today, mental illness is exploited as a defense in a trial where three children were executed by their mother.

Although it might not look like it, the female support surrounding Lindsay Clancy is similar to the support Steinem received in 1969, when women rallied because they felt no one understood their plight. At this juncture in the Clancy trial, although Clancy’s children, unlike Gloria’s, were outside the womb, the willingness to call her innocent hinges solely on her mental state: guilty if she had her wherewithal, exonerated if mental illness drove her to murder her babies.

In Clancy’s case, the thoughts and feelings of her children concern not whether they had regrets, but rather what kind of terror a confused preschooler, toddler, and infant experienced as their mother, for whatever reason, decided they no longer had the right to life.

How different is what Lindsay Clancy did — for whatever the reason — from Gloria’s youthful decision to benefit herself?

RELATED: ‘That far’ always becomes here

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As these thoughts come full-circle, it’s important to consider the impact Gloria Steinem had on the deaths of more than 65 million unborn children and how she’s being celebrated and mourned, in light of the potential Lindsay Clancy’s defense might have as an excuse to deny the right to life to those of us outside the womb.

Steinem’s actions helped reshape the nation’s views on abortion. In the same way, Clancy could change the nation’s views on maternal filicide. And after postpartum psychosis is accepted as an excuse to kill three children, what’s the next step in the progression for those who move through life like a horse with blinders?

If the progressive impulse to excuse the killing of children in the womb extends to children outside it, Lindsay Clancy’s case could have consequences far beyond her trial — potentially eroding the right to life even more profoundly than Gloria Steinem’s abortion activism did.

Gloria Steinem is gone. Lindsay Clancy is still here. It will be interesting to see whether what began in a courtroom that at times resembled a women’s rally will elevate a mother with postpartum depression into a feminist icon who moves the needle from excusing child murder to finding any other excuse to dispose of human life because societal mores demand it.

Steinem’s opportunity to influence the culture is over. Cases like Lindsay Clancy’s may only be beginning.

​Opinion & analysis, Lindsay clancy, Gloria steinem, Murder, Postpartum depression, Abortion, Children, Feminism, Equality, Progressives 

A rabbi was caught along with seven other men allegedly trying to arrange for underage sex, and he was caught with a damning item.

The sting operation was conducted by the New York State Police in collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation between Aug. 27 and 28 in Onondaga County.

The men allegedly arranged to have sex through text messages and believed they were doing so with a teenager.

The eight men were charged with attempted rape in the second degree, according to a state police release.

Court documents indicated that an undercover officer pretended to be a 14 or 15 year old during the operation. The men allegedly arranged to have sex through messaging apps and believed they were doing so with a teenager.

All of the men separately arranged to have sex at hotels or at hotel parking lots in Syracuse, Liverpool, or Salina.

“Each one of these individuals came in contact with law enforcement during their search for an actual child,” said Assistant District Attorney Jarrett Woodfork for Onondaga County.

Police said Rabbi Peter Schaktman was arrested for trying to arrange sex with a person he believed to be a 14-year-old boy. He allegedly had sex lubricant in his possession at the time.

Schaktman and the following four men were arrested on Aug. 27:

Jarod M. Groah, age 42, from Frankfort, NYWilliam D. Sheehan, age 53, from Syracuse, NYJohn L. Dejesus, age 34, from Syracuse, NYXiaoqing Qi, age 37, from Syracuse, NY

These three men were arrested on Aug. 28:

Marvin D. Knapp, age 44, from Syracuse, NYWilliam D. Whitfield, age 41, from Seneca Falls, NYKevin M. Lapoint, age 65, from Cicero, NY

RELATED: Illegal alien transvestite prostitute jumped from hotel’s second floor while fleeing police

Temple Emanu-El, a Jewish temple in Utica, released a statement saying the rabbi was suspended over the heinous allegations and they were cooperating completely with law enforcement.

“Temple Emanu-El is shocked and deeply troubled by the serious criminal charges involving Rabbi Peter Schaktman,” the temple said. “We recognize the sadness, confusion, anger, and many unanswered questions this news may create for members of our congregation and the broader community. Our thoughts are with all those who may have experienced harm and with their loved ones.”

The eight men were arrested in separate cases unrelated to each other.

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​Child predator, Child sex crimes, Jewish, New york, Sting operation, Crime 

Andrew Garfield is really committed to the bit.

The versatile star played Spider-Man in two feature films, but back in 2013 he shared a curious wish for the web-slinger.

‘I would like to avoid being in a tampon commercial 20 years after I’m dead.’

Why couldn’t he be gay?

The comments caught fire at the time, and more than a decade later, he hasn’t budged on the issue.

“I like the idea of a place where everyone is being honored and everyone is being included, and it was just a kind of act of saying, ‘Well, why not?’ And you’ll be telling on yourself if you have a strong opinion either way.”

“Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” the fourth solo adventure in the Tom Holland-led series, shattered records mere weeks ago and is now in the top five grossing films of all time.

If it ain’t broke, why in the world would Hollywood want to fix it? Or is the MCU “telling” on itself for wanting the good box office times to keep rolling?

Goodbye, Dolly

We just can’t quit Dolly Parton.

The country music superstar passed last month at the age of 80, but interest in all things Dolly is just warming up. Parton’s songs zoomed up the iTunes music charts in the days after her death. Her estate announced that she previously recorded a special new song, “My Place in History,” to be released on her 100th birthday in 2046.

This week, an ABC broadcast of her beloved 1980 film “9 to 5” scored the network its biggest ratings for a film in over three years.

Meanwhile, country superstar Jelly Roll is still juggling the fallout from his disastrous week guest-hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” …

RELATED: GHOUL NATION: Pop culture’s decade-long descent into cruelty and bloodlust

Joseph Prezioso/Getty Images

Down with ‘Uprising’?

“First reaction” stories should be relegated to fifth-rate movie blogs and Bluesky. These stories capture early film reviews from influencers who like almost everything.

If you need a reference point, the recent “Supergirl” earned solid “first reactions.” Raves even. So there’s that.

Which makes the terrible “first reactions” to “The Uprising” genuinely newsworthy. Our friend Andrew Garfield anchors the film, based on actual events of a peasant uprising against King Richard II.

Director Paul Greengrass has made some great films, including “United 93” and “Captain Phillips.”

So what went wrong? The pacing, the dialogue, and the execution, apparently …

Clooney … for her

George Clooney has seen the future, and he’s a mite worried about it.

You can’t blame him. He’s a big Hollywood star, and the rise of AI will dramatically impact his industry. Jobs will be lost. Old stars will be reborn (just ask the Val Kilmer estate that OK’d a digital Kilmer “comeback” for an upcoming film).

Clooney is keeping his sense of humor about the future and his own possible “comeback.”

“I would like to avoid being in a tampon commercial 20 years after I’m dead. I would like that. I would like to avoid that.”

We feel his pain. But if AI can fix old “Facts of Life” episodes and digitally remove Clooney’s mullet, it won’t be all bad …

Marvel make-’em-ups

When you think improv, names like Larry David, Robin Williams, and Colin Mochrie come to mind.

What about Thor, Captain America, and Ant-Man?

The upcoming “Avengers: Doomsday” began production without a finished script. Seems problematic for a movie with a budget north of $400 million, no? Not according to directors Anthony and Joe Russo.

The duo, who previously gave us “Infinity War” and “Endgame,” explained away the lack of a finished script.

We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors. We like to see what the actors bring to the characters, and sometimes you don’t get the actors until a few days or a few weeks before you shoot them. And a lot of the time, that’s when the magic happens.

“Doomsday” isn’t a comedy, but that defense is hysterical …

Blind casting

Wait … was “Saturday Night Live’s” Pat not available?

Actress Sandra Hüller of “Project Hail Mary” fame is set to star in the upcoming “Arbeit und Struktur” (“Work and Structure”), a biopic of the late German writer and artist Wolfgang Herrndorf.

Yes, Hüller is female and Herrndorf, best known for his 2010 coming-of-age best-seller “Tschick,” was a man.

The actress called the role a “profound challenge.” Hard to argue with that.

​Andrew garfield, Dolly parton, George clooney, Hollywood, Jelly roll, Jimmy kimmel, Marvel, Paul greengrass, Saturday night live, Spiderman, Tom holland, Culture, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Toto recall 

Last month, a viral X debate erupted among conservatives after Turning Point USA’s Andrew Kolvet shared a college student’s complaint that “a burrito shouldn’t cost $20,” prompting other conservatives to argue that the exorbitant price had more to do with poor spending habits than inflation alone.

While somewhat silly at face value, “burritogate,” says BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre, reveals a contentious divide in conservative America over the nation’s affordability crisis. But while people are getting riled up debating charts and graphs, they’re missing a kind of loss that is much harder to quantify, he says.

On this episode of “The Auron MacIntyre Show,” Auron sits down with British author Johann Kurtz to discuss the social currency they believe is at the heart of America’s cost-of-living crisis.

Kurtz says it’s true that official numbers make young people look richer because goods like technologies, toys, cheap food, travel, and apps have gotten less expensive. But at the same time, the essentials that actually build a stable adult life — rent, homes, child care, school, and health insurance — have gotten much more expensive.

“Graduating from a good education, getting a stable career, finding a good spouse, buying a nice home, and having children — anchoring the debate on the price of a burrito, you know, it’s an interesting flash point, but I do think that these deeper issues risk getting lost in the discussion,” he says.

One of those issues is social capital.

In his recent article “Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise,” Kurtz argued that young people feel financially squeezed not only because prices are higher but because earlier generations got free social capital — trusted neighbors, functional schools, courtship norms, predictable careers, and a usable public square.

But in today’s world, that stock has been diminished, forcing young people to purchase expensive stand-ins.

“In London, where I’m from, the classic recommendation for middle-class parents is: You don’t need an expensive home; you should just get a starter home in somewhere like Kentishtown,” says Kurtz.

But modern Kentishtown, he explains, is “full of unsavory characters” that make the area unsafe for families. “Material conditions have changed.”

Today, “it is no longer often wise to opt for the public school. There is actually a good reason to choose the private school,” he tells Auron, noting that 50 years ago, 85% of the families of public school children were intact and likely upheld “implicitly Christian context.”

“Now that intact family rate has totally collapsed, and the only place where it can be predicted and relied upon as a kind of norm typically are in harder-to-access spaces — charter schools, public schools, classical Christian education, homeschooling,” Kurtz explains.

This trend isn’t showing up just in education, however, but in virtually all “easy, cheap public option[s].”

“[Easy, cheap public options were] good because they were embedded in a good culture populated by good people who sort of shared a vision and understanding and moral sense of life that you shared. And thus you could slum it a little bit,” he says.

But in the modern day, slumming it comes at exorbitant social cost. Such a lifestyle, says Kurtz, is more often than not shared by people who are “quite sketchy and are quite dangerous and are quite anti-family.”

Auron agrees. “In America, the famous example is Detroit. You know, people say, ‘Well, you can get a house for $50,000.’ Sure, and all you need is, you know, the machine gun perched on top of your roof in order to make sure that your home is safe all the time,” he says.

“What’s really happened is the breakdown in all of those things that used to operate in the background that were built into the social fabric,” he continues. “The idea that you had intact households that cared for each other, that cared for the neighborhood, that made places safe, that made places affordable, that allowed for child care and all these things that weren’t a paid job … that took a large amount of the burden off of young working families.”

But today, those built-in support systems are largely gone and therefore must be supplemented with paid child care, expensive housing in safe neighborhoods, private or classical Christian schooling, and other costly stand-ins for neighborly and family support.

What people are missing in the debates surrounding the affordability crisis, says Kurtz, is that “social capital is every bit as important as financial capital.”

“[When] you quantify everything and you host these very abstract arguments, which are exclusively framed in terms of a narrow set of poorly understood reductive metrics, it misses all of that context, which is why the lived reality on the ground can differ so radically from the kind of theoretical arguments that people make online.”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Want more from Auron MacIntyre?

To enjoy more of this YouTuber and recovering journalist’s commentary on culture and politics, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Auron macintyre, Affordability crisis, Blazetv show