BlazeTV host and Lakepointe Church Pastor Josh Howerton recently discussed with the eponymous host of the “Shawn Ryan Show” the ongoing war against Christianity and what set the stage for America’s present “prodigal son” moment.

While he recognized that Christ’s church is now, as ever, assailed on all sides, Howerton emphasized that many have awoken in recent years to the reality that there are dark spiritual forces at work in the world and also that there are also prevailing forces of light whose victory was secured at Calvary two millennia ago.

‘That light has a name.’

Early in their conversation, Howerton told Ryan — who recently announced that he has resumed going to church — that the war on Christianity is primeval; that after the Fall, Satan declared “war on the offspring that God’s going to use to redeem the world. So that’s the storyline of the entire Bible. It’s Word versus world.”

“The Bible says the whole world lies under the power of the evil one. The Bible actually calls Satan the little-g god of this world,” said the pastor, who noted also that when tempted in the desert, Jesus Christ did not correct Satan when the dark one claimed dominion over the kingdoms of the world.

Howerton noted that there is “this tacit assumption throughout the entire Bible that Satan is really over all of the world’s systems — and that’s why everything in the world aligns against one thing in particular, and it’s Christianity — Christ and Christians. That’s baseline.”

Expounding on an observation shared with him by Middle East expert Raymond Ibrahim that this satanic contempt makes sense of otherwise nonsensical political alliances — such as those formed in recent years between LGBT activists, feminists, and Islamists — Howerton noted, “The unifying principle is the enemy of my enemy is my friend: anything but Christianity, and anyone but Christ.”

Howerton also detailed the commonalities between the Antichrist referred to in the Bible and Mahdi, the messianic figure in Islamic eschatology who is supposed to defeat Muslims’ enemies in the end times, and strongly suggests that the purported angel who spoke to Muhammad was the same demonic entity Saint Paul warned of in 2 Corinthians 11:14.

Ryan had expressed interest in whether Christianity was actually growing, citing statistics highlighting the years-long trend of widespread apostasization in America, which recent polling indicates has actually slowed down.

Although Howerton reassured Ryan that Christianity is “globally growing,” he noted that “in my lifetime, Christianity in America has generally been declining. I’m 43; 1983. Feels like the tide’s turning.”

RELATED: America’s fastest-growing Christian voice is joining Blaze Media

Screenshot – Courtesy of “Shawn Ryan Show,” YouTube

Ryan observed that widespread disenchantment with and distrust for government and various institutions has prompted people to seek something concrete and true, and this has driven them to Christ.

He also agreed with Howerton’s suggestion that the increasing immorality and vile actions exhibited in the West have awakened people to the twofold reality “that there was a non-ignorable dark force in the world” and that “if there’s a darkness, there must be a light, and that light has a name, and His name is Jesus Christ.”

The pastor likened this particular moment of apparent religious renewal and spiritual awakening to the biblical story of the prodigal son’s return.

“He spends all his money on parties and strippers and alcohol and, you know, whatever. And then if you read that, there’s this little verse, and everybody skips the verse that I think is most important, where he gets to the spot where he spends all the money and … everything that he thought was gonna make him happy, and it just didn’t,” said Howerton.

“It says, ‘and then he came to his senses,’ and he started running back to his father.”

Howerton added, “We got a bit of a prodigal nation.”

Like the prodigal son, the pastor suggested that it has finally dawned on America, “Everything else didn’t work, but I know I can go home to Dad.”

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​Josh howerton, Shawn ryan, Christianity, Religion, Satan, Islam, Faith 

For nearly 20 years, the same sentence has greeted me every morning.

It first appeared on a yellow Post-it note stuck to the door of my office in Nashville. When my wife and I moved to Montana, the note came with us. Eventually, the paper curled and the ink faded, so my wife had the words beautifully rendered in calligraphy and framed.

A culture that ceases to ponder the character of God will eventually begin reinventing the character of man.

Today, they hang on the wall in my office, where I see them before I begin each day’s work.

The sentence comes from Catherine Winkworth’s 19th-century translation of Joachim Neander’s 17th-century hymn, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty”: “Ponder anew what the Almighty can do, if with His love He befriend thee.”

The word ponder is surprisingly rare in our hymnody. Yet Neander was hardly the first to call God’s people to this discipline. More than a thousand years earlier, an ancient text from the Liturgy of St. James, rooted in the worship of the early church, gave us the hymn we know as “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand; ponder nothing earthly minded …”

Silence and pondering belong together. Silence quiets the noise. Pondering fixes the mind on what is true.

Our culture has become proficient at neither.

Relentless conflict eventually exhausts everyone. We were not created merely to react to the world around us. We were created to contemplate the God who rules over it.

Ask friends, family, or neighbors how they are doing, and many will answer with the same word: “Tired.”

Fatigue has become shorthand for nearly every kind of cultural exhaustion: political, racial, social, even digital. The causes differ, but the word keeps returning. We have become exhausted by the demand to react to every controversy, and in the process we have nearly forgotten how to ponder.

RELATED: The unbearable burden may still be worth bearing

Serggn/Getty Images

That discipline has quietly eroded. We accumulate information without assembling it. We have access to more knowledge than any generation in history, yet seem to spend less time fitting those pieces together into wisdom. We react to isolated events without considering the larger story. We spend more time contemplating the latest controversy than contemplating the unchanging character of Almighty God.

Joachim Neander built his life around a different discipline.

He frequently retreated into a valley outside Düsseldorf to pray and contemplate the majesty of God revealed in creation. That contemplation eventually found its way into his hymns.

The valley where he so often prayed and wrote came to bear his name: Neander’s Tal, or Neander’s Valley.

Nearly two centuries after his death, laborers uncovered ancient human remains there. Scientists named the discovery for the place where it was found: Neanderthal.

Today, the word has become a pejorative. We use it to describe someone as backward, primitive, or unenlightened.

The irony is striking.

Long before the world associated that name with fossils, it belonged to a man who saw with remarkable clarity. While others would one day search that valley to understand where man came from, Joachim Neander walked those same hills contemplating the One from whom man came.

That irony reaches beyond Neander’s name. The habits that shape a people’s souls eventually shape their civilization.

America’s founders inherited centuries of reflection on the character of God, the nature of man, the meaning of liberty, the demands of justice, and the proper limits of civil government. Their constitutional order reflected two convictions especially important to the American experiment: Rights do not originate with government, and human beings possess great dignity while remaining profoundly capable of abusing power.

Those convictions help explain both the founders’ insistence on individual liberty and their determination to restrain political authority.

At its best, America bore the fruit of generations that had pondered questions larger than politics itself.

RELATED: You didn’t build that, Mr. Obama

Pablo Martinez Monsivais – Pool/Getty Images

A civilization eventually follows the direction of its gaze.

A culture that ceases to ponder the character of God will eventually begin reinventing the character of man. Gratitude gives way to grievance. Stewardship gives way to entitlement. And politics begins carrying burdens it was never built to bear.

Which brings me back to the sentence hanging on my office wall. Tomorrow morning, I’ll walk into my office, glance at those familiar words, and begin another day: “Ponder anew what the Almighty can do, if with His love He befriend thee.”

The noise of the moment loses some of its authority. Headlines surrender some of their urgency. The fatigue begins to dissipate. And before long, pondering gives way to praise.

Perhaps that is why Neander ended the hymn where such pondering inevitably leads: “Let the Amen sound from His people again; gladly forever adore Him.”

​Hymns, Doomscrolling, Lyrics, Joachim neander, Pondering, Irony, God, Creation, Dusseldorf, Praise to the lord the almighty, Amen, Opinion & analysis 

The chatter surrounding the Lindsay Clancy murder trial continues to grow more convoluted and contentious by the day.

Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, strangled her three children — ages 5, 3, and 8 months — with exercise bands in January 2023 before attempting suicide by jumping from a second-story window, leaving her paralyzed. She has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming postpartum psychosis.

Hundreds of women recently gathered in pink outside her ongoing murder trial courthouse (and online via the “Same, Lindsay” trend) to defend her, arguing the medical system failed her and that many mothers share similar postpartum mental-health struggles. Another viral theory perpetuated largely by female Clancy supporters speculates that it was actually her now ex-husband, Patrick, who killed their children and framed her for the murders.

BlazeTV host John Doyle sees beyond the disturbing Clancy support to what he believes is fueling the apologetics surrounding her: the true crime obsession that has gripped so many American women.

True crime, Doyle explains, has become so popular that it’s the subject of many podcasts, television series, and books. There’s even entire true crime conventions that attract thousands of fans.

But it’s predominately women who make up the true crime audience.

Doyle believes there’s a connection between this data and Clancy’s significant base of female supporters. He argues that many of the women who get sucked into the twisted tales of serial killers will find ways to reject the “settled science” when it’s a woman who’s the perpetrator.

To illustrate this point, he reads a tweet from friend of the show Sean Fitzgerald who attended CrimeCon:

This tendency of these true crime fans to support female defendants regardless of the evidence brought against them is what’s fueling the support for Clancy, Doyle argues.

Women, he says, have been conditioned by modern culture to be “extremely paranoid of men” — even in situations when it’s a woman who’s facing conviction.

“The true crime thing, part of what they like about it is the mystery. … It’s like who did what to whom? What’s going on? Oh my gosh, what if this person was framed and it was actually the man?” says Doyle.

What these “junior psychologists” fail to realize, however, is that “most everybody who is actually at the point of going to criminal trial is guilty,” he adds. “They’re in that room for a reason.”

But in addition to their general distrust of men, Doyle continues, there’s the “drama” that pulls them in. A woman being framed by a man is a far more interesting scenario than a cut-and-dry case.

“These people are only interested in drama, in entertainment, in narrative. There’s no part of them that considers the merits of individual claims. This is not about truth for them,” he says.

“If you put something in front of them that contradicts what they are telling you, they will reflexively deny it basically on credit. They’ll say, ‘No, this isn’t true. I just have to go find why,’ and then they go digging to find some piece of information to rationalize their having reflexively denied it,” he continues.

But if pushback continues, the doubling down only intensifies.

“They will even … amplify the drama to themselves by asserting without any evidence at all that you, by not feeding into their fantasy, are actually a part of it — but on the side that’s trying to hide the truth,” says Doyle. “Ultimately though, they’re going to get mad at you for basically pouring water on their fantasy.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from John Doyle?

To enjoy more of the truth about America and join the fight to restore a country that has been betrayed by its own leaders, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​John doyle, Lindsay clancy, Murder trial, True crime, Blazetv show 

Does Israel still have a biblical claim on the Middle East?

That’s the title of a recent article in which a prominent Christian theologian disqualifies himself from his own argument by putting forth a pack of half-truths, innuendo, and outright lies as the foundation informing his biblical interpretation of Israel’s claim to its land.

I’ve also attended services at an evangelical church in Jerusalem, and neither going in nor coming out were we ‘spit on’ or accosted in any way.

Christian theologians definitely disagree on Israel’s role in the end-time and its relevance to us today.

That’s OK. We don’t have to agree on everything.

What’s not OK is undergirding your “biblical interpretation” with ignorant lies.

Michael Horton is a theology professor at California’s Westminster Seminary, and he believes the answer to the question is no; Israel has no biblical claim in the Middle East.

Honestly, I’m not going to address his biblical interpretation (see: above, “We don’t have to agree on everything”).

However, this article slyly uses almost every Jew-hating talking point to build a foundation for Horton’s point.

I’m going to talk to Mr. Horton here.

‘Terrorists’

The only time you use the word “terrorist,” Mr. Horton, you’re referring to Israeli settlers, who can be unpleasant but have yet to dip into pastimes such as raping women or slaughtering children in the most hideous ways imaginable (see: October 7).

Why can’t you bring yourself to apply the word where it absolutely fits — the ongoing campaign of terrorism the Palestinians have inflicted on Israeli citizens?

Instead, you share a whopper like this:

“Since 1948, Israel has fought for its own existence, while Palestinians have also defended their homes. The only way forward was a two-state solution, which was very close in the 1970s and ’80s, but is being brought to a forever-impossible point with the current Israeli government.”

Whew, that’s a lot to unpack.

So what the Palestinians have been doing since 1948 is simply “defending their homes”? How do we explain the existence then of security checkpoints and walls near freeways and all manner of other anti-terrorist setups in Israel? Were those crazy Jews just imagining the suicide bombings and knife attacks and rocks being pelted at cars? Surely you’ve heard of terrorist attacks on Israeli soil, sir?

Nor do you mention that when a two-state solution has been close, it has always and forever been nixed by the Palestinians. All they have to do is agree to stop killing Jews and live in peace. And that, Mr. Horton, has always been unacceptable to them.

And you turn this on its head, by blaming the “current Israeli government” and, later in your piece, “Christian dispensationalists.” It’s never the Palestinians’ fault. They’re the victims, and not once in this piece do you even hint at their own responsibility for so much bloodshed and hatred.

RELATED: ‘Anti-ICE’ Christians mistake moral confusion for empathy

Ryan Murphy/Getty Images

‘Horrible atrocities’

The internet is full of outlandish tales of Christians supposedly being persecuted in Israel, so the Candace Owens/Tucker Carlson fans are afraid to travel there for fear of being “spit on” at best and tortured in a dungeon at worst. You play into this nonsense by claiming you’ve talked to pastors in the Middle East (you notably don’t say where in the Middle East) who tell of “horrible atrocities” by the Israeli soldiers and the Israel Defense Forces.

Surely you are not unaware of the people who have it IN THEIR CHARTER to wipe out the Jews? The people who train their children to hate Jews? The people who pulled off October 7? Is there no place in your seemingly measured discourse to condemn actual “horrible atrocities”?

I know many Christians in Israel, and I have visited there, including non-tourist places. I’ve also attended worship services at an evangelical church in Jerusalem, and neither going in nor coming out were we “spit on” or accosted in any way, because the vast majority of Jews could not care less. The church live streams its services for Pete’s sake. It’s not an underground or persecuted church. Not to mention that the number of Christians in Israel is growing unlike any other Middle Eastern country.

‘Genocide’

Of course you had to use the g-word, even though Israel has never, ever called for genocide. It is, however, precisely what the Palestinians explicitly call for (regularly, and in Hamas governing documents). But you said it is Israel’s far-right Kahanist party that is “demanding genocide wherever Palestinians now live.”

That is simply not an accurate description of Kahanism. Meir Kahane and his Kach Party advocated the forced expulsion — or “transfer” — of Arabs from Israel and the territories under its control. Whatever you want to call that policy, it is not in any way “genocide.”

Words mean something, Mr. Horton.

I also grow weary of the demonization and complete mischaracterization of “dispensationalist” churches. You again:

“In the dispensationalist churches of my youth, the whole Bible centered not on Christ but on the nation of Israel, especially its reconstitution in 1948.”

Yeah. I grew up in dispensationalist churches, too. And at no time, in no way, did the nation of Israel displace Christ as the center of the Bible or anything else. I have heard this nonsense so many times lately, that Christian Zionists or dispensationalists “worship Israel.” It’s not true, outside of some weird sects that may exist, and it is frankly sinful to besmirch fellow believers in this way.

The soft-pedaling of the Palestinian/Islamic worldview that is in fact genocidal toward Jews (and the West in general) is galling. You describe what you call “horrific acts of ultra-orthodox violence” and then sympathetically offer this: “As is too often true in families and national histories, those subject to extreme violence seek revenge through a similar dehumanization of the other.”

So it’s the Israeli settlers who are extremely violent? Poor Hamas has no choice but to burn families alive in their homes? After October 7, I simply cannot see how a professed Christian can twist truth this way.

Whopper after whopper

Let’s finish with one more of your whoppers:

“Christianity in the West Bank, including Bethlehem, is being erased by ultra-orthodox settlers under the protective umbrella of the Israel Defense Forces.”

There is a kernel of truth here. There have been documented incidents of extremist Israeli settlers harassing and attacking Palestinian Christians, vandalizing Christian property, and encroaching on Christian-owned land.

But you take those incidents and spin them into something much larger: a story in which Jews are “erasing” Christianity from the West Bank under the “protective umbrella” of the Israeli military.

Where is the evidence for that sweeping claim?

And just as striking is what you leave out. Palestinian Christians have also faced documented harassment, intimidation, violence, and property disputes involving Muslim Palestinians, including incidents in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Christian communities have been shrinking across the Middle East for decades, including in places where there are no Israeli settlers and no IDF.

That Horton blames Jews for “erasing” Christianity in the West Bank, when said erasure precisely patterns the erasures in every Muslim country — well, it’s just the same old libel: anti-Semitic libel.

Perhaps you didn’t mean to lie. I hope so. I also hope you consider that you approached this all wrong, and you need to try again.

​Bible, Christianity, Dispensationalism, Genocide, Hamas, Israel, Israeli settlers, Jews, Middle east, Muslims, Palestine, Theology, Two-state solution, Faith, October 7 

Students head back to classrooms this month. Many will arrive already convinced their future is hopeless.

In a Lancet Planetary Health study of 10,000 young people across 10 countries, 75% said the future is frightening and 56% said they believe humanity is doomed.

We are graduating energy-illiterate students at precisely the moment the country has to build.

A 2025 PNAS study found one in five Americans ages 16 to 24 is afraid to have children because of the climate. That gloom has deepened over time. In Yale’s long-running survey, the share of Americans 18 to 34 who say global warming is already harming this country rose from 40% in 2012 to 64% in 2022.

What’s causing such a dramatic shift? It could be what’s missing in the classroom.

Teenagers name teachers as their leading source on climate and energy. Seventy-one percent say they learned “a lot” or “some” from a teacher, ahead of parents at 67% and social media at 63%. Yet the median high school science teacher spends one or two hours a year on the subject, and three-quarters of teachers say they have never been trained to teach it.

The teaching gap shows. Nearly three-quarters of teens believe ocean plastic is a major contributor to climate change. Energy illiteracy is even worse: Fewer than a third of high schoolers can name the three sources that generate most American electricity. Energy literacy scores among high school seniors fell between 2017 and 2022.

What fills the gap is the phone. Researchers at the University at Buffalo, writing last fall in Climatic Change, found that heavier social media use correlates with what they call “climate doom,” the belief that warming will collapse social and economic order. When other researchers examined 100 climate videos on TikTok, only eight cited a reputable source.

A video feed full of ignorance and despair doesn’t make a good curriculum.

The consequences are economic as well as emotional. After 15 flat years, American electricity demand is climbing again, roughly 2% annually since 2020. Data centers are on pace to double their share of peak demand inside two years. We are graduating energy-illiterate students at precisely the moment the country has to build.

For a teenager trying to figure out what to do with his life, that ignorance could be costly. We hear a lot these days about how artificial intelligence is closing the on-ramps into white-collar work.

The head of one leading AI lab has warned that the technology could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, concentrated in the fields that used to hire new graduates.

RELATED: China is building power. America is still debating it.

Yuan Hongyan/VCG/Getty Images

But that’s not the whole story. Electricians are growing at three times the rate of the average occupation, with roughly 73,500 openings a year. Nuclear technicians earn a median above $104,000, often without a four-year degree. Applied trades have added 2.5 million jobs since 2019, and the average utility worker is past 50 and nearing retirement.

Students need to know the full picture. That goes for job prospects as well as the climate. Natural gas displacing coal drove the largest share of the decline in American power-sector emissions, according to the Energy Information Administration. Technology companies have committed more than $50 billion to nuclear power, more than in any previous decade. Three Mile Island restarts next year. Most new reactors arrive in the 2030s.

For a 16-year-old who wants to work in the nuclear industry, that timeline sounds like job security.

Kids deserve to know that their futures are far from hopeless. A little bit of energy education could work like an SSRI for doomsday depression.

Some groups are trying to fill the energy education gap. Generation Atomic runs a nuclear science program for grades 6 through 12. The American Conservation Coalition organizes young people around nuclear power and permitting reform. And Blue Energy Nation’s BENERGY course launches nationally this fall. It features six modules built for homeschool families but is easily folded into any science, civics, or economics class.

Students shouldn’t be left to form a worldview based on TikTok videos. We should teach them where energy comes from, how it impacts their futures, and what it will need from them. Fear is a lousy career counselor. A generation convinced the future is already finished will not build the grid that future requires.

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

​Artificial intelligence, Energy, Natural gas, Social media, Students, Climate change, Technology, Opinion & analysis 

Jonathan Goodman’s mnemonic words were written down and stored in safes and safety-deposit boxes. The device that generated them had never touched the internet. The cable was never plugged in, the QR code never scanned by anything connected to the wider world. Every visible precaution was observed with great care. Then, on the evening of July 29, 2026, the Canadian investor watched 18.25 Bitcoin leave his wallet over seven minutes. The sum was worth roughly 1.6 million Canadian dollars. He thought he had done everything right, but the money was now gone.

Goodman, like others, had put his trust in Coldcard, a hardware wallet for cryptocurrency. The natural instinct, when confronted with a theft like the Coldcard hack that hit him and many others, is to look for the intrusion: the broken window, the intercepted message, the insider. The Coldcard incident offered no such satisfaction. The secret was never stolen in transit; it was simply never secret enough.

What remains is not the absence of trust but its redistribution.

A hardware wallet is a small device that generates and guards the cryptographic keys controlling a Bitcoin balance. The device does not hold the coins. The coins exist as entries on a distributed ledger maintained by thousands of computers. What the device holds is the authority to move them, encoded as a string of words derived from a number that is supposed to be random. The entire architecture of private ownership rests on the proposition that the number your device chose when you pressed the button could not have been predicted by anyone else on earth. However, the Coldcard’s number could be.

A tale of self-deception

In 2021, Coinkite, the Toronto company that manufactures the Coldcard, migrated its cryptographic library. The migration was routine, and the new library was reputable. However, during integration, a function call that was supposed to reach the device’s hardware random-number generator instead resolved to a software fallback, a deterministic pseudorandom-number generator built into MicroPython. A hardware generator harvests physical noise, the kind of irreducible unpredictability that makes a secret genuinely singular. A software fallback produces numbers that look disordered but are fully determined by their inputs. Feed it the same inputs and it will produce the same outputs, every time, on every machine. The function returned bytes of the correct length in the expected format. The mnemonic phrase looked random, but it was not.

On older Coldcard models, the effective search space collapsed to roughly 40 bits, meaning an attacker had to consider about a trillion candidates rather than the intended hundreds of trillions. On newer devices, secure-element entropy raised the figure, but independent analysis found that only 32 bits of genuinely secret material survived in a critical reseeding operation. A trillion sounds like a large number, but it is not when the adversary has rented a cluster of GPUs and the public blockchain serves as a free answer key against which every guess can be checked in milliseconds.

The thefts were automated. On July 30, roughly 1,083 Bitcoin moved from 1,196 addresses in 41 minutes. Subsequent waves targeted thousands more. By early August, estimates ranged from 1,596 to over 2,000 Bitcoin drained across thousands of addresses, a sum approaching $130 million. The attackers did not need to know who owned the wallets or where the devices were stored. They needed only to regenerate the small universe of secrets those devices could ever have produced, derive the corresponding addresses, compare them against the blockchain, and sign. The protocol saw valid signatures, which is the only authority it recognizes.

RELATED: A shocking storage exploit bankrupts Bitcoiners — with lessons for us all

Velishchuk/Getty Images

The Coldcard had occupied a particular niche in Bitcoin’s self-image. It was the serious person’s wallet, the one recommended on the forums and podcasts that prized operational security, air-gapped signing, open-source firmware, and a philosophy of radical self-reliance. Its marketing vocabulary was a compressed manifesto: sovereignty, verification, trust minimization. Two weeks before the mass thefts, Coinkite published an essay arguing that offline status alone was insufficient and that real security required architectural separation, trusted displays, secure elements, and reproducible builds. The essay ironically enumerated the locks on the doors in a house whose foundation was already fissured.

Hidden is not secure

Bitcoin was designed to eliminate the need to trust institutions. You do not need to trust a bank to honor its ledger because the ledger is maintained by mathematics and distributed consensus. However, the self-custodying individual must trust or personally verify the firmware on the device, the compiler that built the firmware, the library the compiler linked, the symbol the linker resolved, the entropy source the symbol reached, the chip that generated the noise, the build system that packaged the result, the reviewers who examined the code, and the update channel that delivered the fix. One is trusting an entire institutional apparatus compressed into a plastic rectangle the size of a playing card.

“Do not trust; verify” is the community’s canonical imperative, but verification requires a division of labor. The user verifies an address on a screen. An auditor inspects the firmware. A reproducible-build operator compares binaries. A laboratory assesses an entropy source. No single person does all of these things, and almost no one does more than the first. What remains is not the absence of trust but its redistribution, away from a chartered institution with a complaints department and toward a dispersed, informal, largely volunteer apparatus of maintainers, reviewers, and forum participants whose oversight, in this case, missed a five-year-old defect in the most consequential function the device performs.

Jonathan Goodman’s safe was not breached. His backup was not photographed. His mnemonic words were not intercepted. The words themselves were simply a member of a knowable set, a predictable output dressed in the costume of randomness. The distinction between concealment and unpredictability turned out to be critical. While the Coldcard was offline, the institution that made the key never was.

​Tech, Hacking, Savings, Security, Bitcoin 

The Muslim Brotherhood’s influence in America may be far more deeply embedded than most Americans realize according to former CIA targeter Sarah Adams.

Adams tells Christopher Rufo and Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman on “Rufo & Lomez” that the organization has spent decades building relationships and political power from the ground up, financially supporting candidates while embedding itself in universities, religious organizations, chambers of commerce, and local civic groups.

“They back a lot of the political candidates financially as we know. They pump a ton of money into our universities, but they also are very much like the Chinese, and nobody’s really honest about that,” Adams explains.

“They start at the local level,” she continues, “They get involved in community organizations and chambers of commerce, you know, religious organizations, volunteer organizations.”

“So they’re more integrated than I think most people realize,” she adds.

Lomez points out that there are even reports that Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is funded by the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Admittedly these are just headlines, that you know, he may be funded by Muslim Brotherhood,” he says. “This comes as a surprise to me, but it sounds like you’re saying, ‘No, this is something to be expected.’”

While expected, Adams notes that it is “complicated.”

“When it comes to the U.S., though, it’s so complicated because when we say ‘Muslim Brotherhood,’ you’re not going to drive down the street and have a building and it says ‘The Muslim Brotherhood.’ It’s going to be called something like, I don’t know, the Saudi American Friendship Society, right?” she explains.

“And so that’s where it’s complicated because people at the local level don’t even know that they’re interacting,” she says, noting that even local candidates and activists have no idea.

“That awareness does not exist at all in the United States,” she adds.

Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Christopher rufo, Cia targeter, Jonathan keeperman, Muslim brotherhood, Sarah adams, Blazetv show, Abdul el-sayed 

Bill Gates spent the 1990s acting like a corporate warlord, threatening any rival startup that dared to exist in the same ecosystem. Then, after nearly being torn apart by antitrust lawsuits, he hired a massive PR team to rebrand himself as the world’s kindly, sweater-wearing grandfather who just wants to eradicate disease.

It was a shameless makeover, and many on the left eagerly bought in to it. Then came the stories about cozy dinners with Jeffrey Epstein long after his conviction for sex offenses. When asked about it, Gates gave answers so limp and evasive that they barely qualified as English.

Gates is innocent until proven guilty, but the evidence raises serious questions.

Now we turn to his daughter, Phoebe Gates. When it comes to deceptive tactics, the apple doesn’t appear to fall far from the tree.

The scandal at her shopping platform, Phia, is far from an isolated accident.

Phia is under scrutiny due to evidence suggesting that the platform allegedly utilized an illegal digital trick called cookie stuffing that sent top tech executives to federal prison over a decade ago. In a previous landmark federal fraud case involving deceptive tactics, eBay’s most lucrative marketing partners, Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning, were convicted of federal wire fraud and landed behind bars after stealing over $33 million by secretly dropping tracking cookies onto millions of unsuspecting web users. Hogan alone pocketed tens of millions before federal prosecutors and the FBI dismantled the operation.

Phoebe Gates may ultimately face the exact same fate if found guilty in a court of law.

If misdeeds are proven, they may stand as the latest high-profile iteration of a multibillion-dollar digital scam that has preyed upon internet commerce for decades. Cookie stuffing involves sneaky companies secretly planting hidden tracking codes on your web browser to claim undeserved cash. Instead of creating tools that genuinely help consumers save money, these immoral operators hijack web traffic, diverting sales commissions from honest creators and straight into their own corporate bank accounts.

Understanding why this practice is so damaging and diabolical requires going a little deeper.

Stepping on the little guy

Niche bloggers, independent reviewers, and digital workers spend countless hours testing products, writing detailed advice, and guiding consumers to reliable goods. Yes, some are downright deceptive, but my focus here is on the decent ones.

When a reader clicks a link on a small creator’s site and buys a product, that creator earns a modest commission. Digital tracking hijacking destroys that fair, free-market exchange. Software can secretly inject a tracking code into the customer’s browser at checkout, as Phia is alleged to have done, overwriting the original creator’s referral tag and snatching the payout. It functions as an invisible pickpocket standing at the store register, snatching commission payments right out of the hands of hardworking men and women.

The economic damage hits everyday consumers in their wallets. Major retail brands include affiliate commissions in their operating overhead costs. When millions of dollars are skimmed from the retail pipeline by parasitic browser extensions, store profit margins shrink. This forces companies to raise retail prices across the board to offset the losses. Think of a massive siphon system built to extract wealth from independent workers and concentrate it inside the portfolios of Silicon Valley’s privileged class.

That’s hardly a fair marketplace.

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Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc./Getty Images

When it comes to Phia, which did not respond to a request for comment, what renders the scenario even more disturbing is evidence that alleges to show there was early corporate awareness. According to a recent Bloomberg report, internal Slack messages seem to show that Phia’s leadership knew for months that its browser tool could claim commissions on sales it had not actually generated. This allowed Phia’s tracking code to attach itself to customer transactions after those shoppers had already been directed to merchant sites by outside sources.

The internal Slack records deal a blow to any hopes of a preemptive public defense strategy. They suggest this wasn’t a minor technical glitch discovered after launch, but a mechanism executives were discussing while aware of its effect on commission payouts.

Working the system

Unfortunately, the alleged strategy mirrors Gates’ formal academic training at Stanford University. While enrolled on campus, she gained entry into “So You Think You Can Rule the World?” an exclusive, invitation-only seminar. According to investigative reports by the Stanford Daily, a select group of students met behind closed doors each week to analyze power structures. They studied institutional influence and how to work the system, lessons Ms. Gates could have learned from her father for free. The course focused on teaching students how to “hack” bureaucracies and navigate them to their own advantage. And people say elite universities don’t teach anything useful.

The contrast between classroom theory and real-world execution would be amusing if the stakes weren’t so serious. On one side was an academic course focused on understanding how power moves through institutions and how to manipulate them to get ahead. On the other side sit corporate chat logs that seem to capture Phia operators exploiting digital retail systems to claim revenue for sales the software never earned. This sort of privilege, merged with absolute arrogance, creates a predatory threat to ordinary Americans. Federal prosecutors must apply the law without bias and ensure that tech royalty faces the exact same justice system as everyone else.

Gates is innocent until proven guilty, but the evidence described above raises serious questions that are difficult to dismiss. If prosecutors ultimately establish knowing participation, real prison time is a serious possibility.

​Technology, Tech