Punch-Dr-Savage-2

Where Is God In The Machine?

Communist China

DW Opinion

Encyclical

Fertility crisis

Human Dignity

Weekend Punch

America was built on a simple, radical idea: work hard, build something, and no one can take it from you. The American Dream wasn&#8217;t an apology. It was an invitation.
But today? Dream a little too big, climb a little too high, and become … dare we say it … a successful CEO or, worse, a billionaire? The modern Democratic Party will revoke that invitation and send you to the electric chair.
Pennsylvania State Representative Chris Rabb just won the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania&#8217;s 3rd Congressional District, the bluest House seat in the country. He will almost certainly be heading to Congress in January, and he’s insane.
In a 2005 blog <a href="https://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2005/12/why_gang_leaders_should_fry.html">post</a>, the Democratic darling reacted to news that 300 CEOs had earned $12 billion in pay and bonuses, declaring that corporate executives &#8220;should fry.&#8221; His exact words compared business leaders to gang members, argued their &#8220;gangs&#8221; were more destructive than the Crips or the Bloods, and announced that he was reversing his previous opposition to the death penalty so it could be used &#8220;more frequently and swiftly&#8221; against capitalist &#8220;gang leaders.&#8221;
The Democratic death penalty; never for murderers or pedophiles, but anyone who builds a company and turns a profit? Yes.
Of course, Rabb didn&#8217;t arrive at this moment alone. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigned with him. Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar endorsed him. Congressman Ro Khanna stood beside him. And progressive activist and streamer Hasan Piker, the man who has spent years cheerleading &#8220;eat the rich&#8221; eliminationism, 9/11, and alleged killer Luigi Mangione, held rallies with him.
Again, this isn’t fringe. This is the new norm.
The Democratic Party isn&#8217;t moderating. It isn&#8217;t &#8220;evolving.&#8221; It is steering full steam ahead into radicalism. Wish death upon conservatives, Jews, capitalists, or any CEO who dares to succeed? That&#8217;s not a deal-breaker on the modern left. That&#8217;s your one-way ticket to power.
Rabb doesn&#8217;t just fit that mold. He is the mold. He&#8217;s <a href="https://freebeacon.com/democrats/far-left-house-candidate-backed-by-aoc-and-hasan-piker-said-corporate-ceos-should-fry-called-for-frequent-and-swift-death-penalty-for-ceo-gangs/">called</a> for the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted cop-killer who murdered Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in cold blood in 1981, right in the heart of the very district Rabb now wants to represent in Congress. Abolish ICE, nationalize healthcare, groceries, and housing, push reparations, defund the police, and treat Israel as the enemy? Check, check, and check. Rabb hits every box on the modern Left&#8217;s radical bingo card, and he does it with a smile.
Equally hilarious and alarming is the fact that the biggest outside money boosting Rabb came from an anti-Israel super PAC funded by, you guessed it, CEOs. American Priorities spent roughly $400,000 on ads backing him — bankrolled by $1 million from Showcase Commerce CEO Mohammad Waqas and another $1 million from Silicon Valley executive Omer Hasan.
The man who wants corporate executives to &#8220;fry&#8221; built his political career on their money.
Here is what the Left gets catastrophically wrong about CEOs and the executives they despise. The top 1% of earners in America, the entrepreneurs and executives who actually generate wealth, pay over 40% of all federal income taxes. Elon Musk flooded the market with electric vehicles, built reusable rockets that slashed space launch costs, and brought Starlink internet to some of the most impoverished corners of the world. Jeff Bezos employs 1.5 million people and has built the cloud infrastructure that powers half the internet. Tim Cook leads 164,000 Apple employees whose products have saved lives, connected families, and created entire ecosystems of developer jobs.
These are not the villains of the American story. They are the authors of it.
New businesses and the leaders who scale them create the jobs, the productivity gains, and the economic growth that lifts everyone.
We can explain that to the Left. We cannot understand it for them. They don’t care to understand; they want blood.
Ocasio-Cortez knows exactly what she is doing. She is not a fringe voice anymore. She is the operational center of the modern Democratic Party, and she is steering it with confidence, while wearing a <a href="https://x.com/AlinejadMasih/status/2060079814376341755">hijab</a>. She didn’t just endorse Chris Rabb — she campaigned with him, rallied with him, and called him exactly the kind of Democrat America needs.
Because the progressives’ brand of Marxist class warfare, anti-Israel obsession, and “fry the CEOs” rhetoric isn’t a bug in today’s Democratic Party. It’s the feature. It’s the direction they’ve deliberately chosen. Safe blue seats like PA-03 are their laboratory, and Rabb is their proof of concept.
Graham Platner cheers the deaths of fellow veterans. Obama-aligned activists post images of President Donald Trump in a grave. <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-pied-piker-is-leading-all-the-anti-american-vermin">Piker</a> celebrates a man accused of murdering a healthcare executive and openly wishes for capitalist blood. Mamdani is a terror-apologist. And now a man who called for killing corporate leaders is headed to Congress with the Democrats’ full blessing.
This is not a party in transition. It is not moderating. It is not &#8220;finding its way back.&#8221; It is sprinting, deliberately and proudly, toward a politics that treats success as sin and demands blood as penance.
November will be telling. But honestly, they have already told us everything we need to know.

Members of trade unions join Occupy Wall

The Left’s Death Wish For American Success

Anti-capitalist

Democrats

Elections

While Disney and ABC were <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/nicholas-fondacaro/2026/05/22/fcc-chairman-responds-disneys-claim-view-bona-fide-news">duking it out </a>with the Federal Communications Commission over whether or not The View was a “bona fide news” program (HINT: they’re not), they were proving that they certainly were not bona fide historians. From the origins of Memorial Day to claims that President Joe Biden never embarrassingly fell asleep while performing his presidential duties, The View cast was engaging in revisionist history this week.
While attacking Secretary of War Pete Hegseth for his Memorial Day speech at West Point and claiming he was ignorant of military history, co-hosts Sara Haines and Sunny Hostin claimed he was “losing sight of the first Memorial Day.”
According to her, Memorial Day was a holiday celebrated by blacks and women before becoming popularized by whites.
<blockquote>
HAINES: It was celebrated because Union soldiers, black soldiers that were put in mass graves, a lot of the black community came out and said, “We&#8217;re going to honor these soldiers by giving them a proper burial for giving their life to a country that did not treat them as equals.”
HOSTIN: So, Memorial Day was started by black people!
HAINES: By black people, and then a year later, it was women who laid flowers on the graves of these people.
</blockquote>
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs tells a slightly different story. According to the VA’s <a href="https://www.cem.va.gov/history/Memorial-Day-history.asp">Memorial Day history </a>page, it was a multi-racial affair: “In the waning years of the Civil War (1861–1865) and immediately afterward, communities in the North and South, Black and White, decorated soldiers&#8217; graves with floral honors on springtime ‘decoration days.’”
Even left-wing <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/the-origins-of-memorial-day-and-how-it-has-evolved">PBS doesn’t acknowledge</a> a singular racial origin, noting that “The practice was already widespread. Waterloo, New York, began a formal observance on May 5, 1866, and was later proclaimed to be the holiday&#8217;s birthplace.” PBS does note that blacks in Charleston, South Carolina, held a memorial for Union dead who died in a Confederate prison, but it doesn’t appear to be for only black soldiers.
Later in the week, they tried to do some more revisionist history on a more recent event. Since President Donald Trump’s health was the topic du jour, they toed the liberal media line that Trump was supposedly falling asleep all over the place.
Co-host Joy Behar seemed to scoff at the notion by bitterly asking, “Wait a second. Joe Biden didn&#8217;t fall asleep, did he?”
Well Joy, while meeting with the leaders of African nations in Angola, <a href="https://x.com/jacobkschneider/status/1864403426303529321?s=20">Biden fell asleep</a>. When attending the late President Jimmy Carter’s funeral at the National Cathedral, <a href="https://x.com/jesseyjay94/status/2053911230528499796?s=20">Biden fell asleep</a>. When attending the COP26 summit in Glasgow, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBUgHkbtm9I">Biden fell asleep</a>.
To brag about “what Sleepy Joe got done while he was asleep,” moderator Whoopi Goldberg read from a note card someone gave her and claimed Biden “oversaw an historic economy that produced over 16 million jobs” and “revitalized NATO.”
Obviously, no serious person gives Biden credit for that number, since it was the economy coming back online as COVID lockdowns were being lifted. Even <a href="https://thedispatch.com/article/assessing-claims-about-job-growth-under-joe-biden/">The Dispatch admits </a>that. Meanwhile, the pressure Trump put on NATO in his first term and the war in Ukraine were what spurred the members of the military alliance to invest in rearmament.
ABC News shouldn’t be allowed to rewrite our history like this. Especially the parts we&#8217;ve seen with our own eyes.
***
Nicholas C. Fondacaro is the associate editor for the Media Research Center and NewsBusters.

ABC’s “The View” – Season 25

ABC News’ ‘The View’ Shows Off Expertise In Fake History

Memorial Day

The View

Zohran Mamdani has found a new way to play Santa Claus with other people&#8217;s money.
Last week, New York City&#8217;s socialist mayor proudly announced a deal that will allow 1,000 New York City residents to purchase World Cup tickets for just $50 each, complete with free transportation to the games. The announcement was framed as a victory for affordability and access, proof that government can step in and help ordinary people enjoy one of the world&#8217;s biggest sporting events.
But there&#8217;s one problem: the games aren&#8217;t being played in New York City. They&#8217;re being played in New Jersey.
While Mamdani enjoys the headlines and takes credit for making the World Cup more &#8220;affordable,&#8221; New Jersey residents will be dealing with the traffic, security costs, transit disruptions, and logistical burdens that come with hosting one of the largest sporting events on the planet. New Jersey taxpayers are helping shoulder those costs, yet New York politicians are the ones claiming the political victories.
The arrangement is a perfect illustration of a broader problem in progressive politics. Time and again, politicians create highly visible benefits for a select group of people while pushing the costs onto someone else. The formula is simple: generate a headline, distribute a perk, celebrate the winners, and avoid talking about who ultimately pays for it.
Mamdani&#8217;s supporters will argue that he is simply making good on his promise to make New York more affordable. But affordable for whom? The World Cup has become a luxury event, with many tickets costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars. A giveaway of 1,000 discounted tickets doesn&#8217;t solve that problem. It simply creates a handful of lucky winners while leaving the overwhelming majority of families priced out of the event.
That&#8217;s the dirty little secret behind many modern political &#8220;solutions.&#8221; They&#8217;re often designed to create the appearance of action rather than address the underlying issue. If housing is unaffordable, create a subsidy. If college costs are too high, forgive selected loans. If World Cup tickets are out of reach, give away a limited number of discounted seats. The politician gets a favorable news cycle while the larger problem remains unsolved.
What makes this case especially frustrating is that New Jersey is doing much of the heavy lifting. The state&#8217;s infrastructure, public safety resources, and transportation systems will all be put under enormous strain during the tournament. Yet when an opportunity arises to provide a meaningful benefit to residents, New York City negotiates a special arrangement for its own constituents and then celebrates it as an achievement.
If the games are being played in New Jersey, why aren&#8217;t New Jersey families receiving the same opportunity?
The answer is obvious. This was never primarily about soccer. It was about politics. Mamdani understands that voters remember benefits far more than they remember costs. The benefits are visible, immediate, and easy to market. The costs are spread out, buried in budgets, and often paid by people who aren&#8217;t standing behind the politician at a press conference.
The World Cup should be an event that brings the region together. Instead, it has become a case study in how politicians increasingly operate: concentrate benefits, disperse costs, and claim credit for both. Mamdani may view this ticket giveaway as a political win, but for many taxpayers watching from across the Hudson, it looks like a familiar story — one group gets the perks while another gets the bill.
That&#8217;s not affordability. It&#8217;s political theater.
***
Rosemary Becchi is a tax attorney, taxpayer advocate, and founder of Jersey 1st.

Mayor Mamdani And Governor Hochul Make FIFA World Cup Announcement

Mamdani’s World Cup Giveaway Is A Grifter’s Game

New York City

Subsidies

World Cup

Zohran Mamdani

A man in red prison garb walks a thin line, hunched and defeated, holding up an American flag that simultaneously pierces his back. The <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/01/how-problematic-is-patriotism#rid=0bd55821-fee5-4e7f-a50e-f02ce9d98968&amp;q=patriotism">caption</a>: &#8220;How Problematic Is Patriotism?&#8221;
That&#8217;s how The New Yorker and its ideological allies see this country. The flag isn’t a symbol of sacrifice and freedom; it’s a wound. Patriotism isn’t a virtue; it’s a plague.
These writers, cartoonists, and readers are a despondent people. They are perpetually ungrateful for what is, by any honest accounting, the greatest birthright a human being can receive. They are immune to the privilege of simply being born here — born into a country that hands them the freedom to publish, criticize, and mock. They use every one of these gifts to fixate on America&#8217;s imperfections while ignoring the ocean of blessings surrounding them.
To answer this whimpering writer&#8217;s question: Yes, national pride in America is “worth trying to salvage.” And no, patriotism is not problematic. It is necessary, and it starts with refusing to despise the very country you claim to want to improve.
Before making the case for American pride, it&#8217;s worth being clear about who is arguing against it.
The New Yorker&#8217;s &#8220;How Problematic Is Patriotism?&#8221; ran May 25. Their May 4 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2026-05-11">cover</a>, &#8220;Red, White, and Kinda Blue,&#8221; showed a melancholy George Washington slumped at a table, blowing a party horn, drinking a dirty martini. The accompanying text sneered that there was plenty to celebrate about America&#8217;s birthday: &#8220;Climate catastrophes are still somewhat frequent … and you&#8217;re free to express your opinion, as long as you keep your voice down and remember who you&#8217;re talking to.&#8221;
Last year, a <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2025-05-05">cover</a> showed Lady Liberty behind prison bars, 100 tallies scratched into the wall, because President Donald Trump&#8217;s first one-hundred days had apparently caged freedom. <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2024-11-11">Another</a> depicted her on a tightrope, because democracy was &#8220;hanging in the balance.&#8221; In January 2024, they <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2024-01-15">drew</a> Trump as Hitler. In February, they <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2025-03-03">showed</a> the Founders — Hamilton, Franklin, Madison — being escorted out of the Oval Office like fired employees, boxes in hand, watched over by armed, masked Praetorian guards, their point being that cutting federal bloat is anti-American.
They have spent years bashing the Founders, our symbols, our president, and the 77 million people who voted for him. They call themselves defenders of democracy while their own party leaders push to pack the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/kamala-harriss-bad-ideas-brainstorm-struggle-session?author=Chloe+Trapanotto&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=7&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Kamala+Harris%E2%80%99s+Bad+Ideas+Brainstorm+Struggle+Session">Supreme Court, stack the Senate, and abolish the Electoral College.</a> They declared democracy dead under Trump while ignoring that his opponent was installed at the top of the ticket without a single primary vote.
This is not good-faith criticism. This is a campaign to make Americans ashamed of their country. To mock her and to mock you.
They’re wrong. America is not a burden. It is the greatest experiment in human freedom the world has ever known. 
She was founded on a self-evident truth — not a government decree, not a racial grievance scorecard, but a moral claim written into the architecture of the republic: that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our Founders weren&#8217;t utopian dreamers or progressive airheads. They were battle-tested realists who understood human nature&#8217;s capacity for tyranny and deliberately built a constitutional republic to contain it. In today’s America, it’s leftists who are trying to tear down our constitutional republic, destroy individual liberty, take away property rights, and centralize government in the hands of a few.
From the blood-soaked fields of Lexington and Yorktown to the moon landing and the smartphone in your pocket, America has generated more wealth, innovation, opportunity, and freedom for more people of every color and creed than any other nation in history. Millions still risk everything to reach our shores, not because they want to live under oppression, but because they know what the Left refuses to admit: this place is exceptional.
America is winning. Our president has brokered the end of multiple global conflicts in barely over a year. Our military is crushing tyrants and terrorist networks. Our children are receiving tax-advantaged savings accounts at birth to jumpstart the American dream. We are leading the AI revolution that will reshape the world. After four years of timid retreat, America is acting like the global hegemon again.
The engine of prosperity roars forward. That&#8217;s why people still come. That&#8217;s why freedom still lives here. And that&#8217;s why tearing down the greatest force for good in human history would leave the world darker, poorer, and enslaved to the very tyrannies our Founders bled to reject.
For most people I know, the great frustrations of daily life are gas prices and expensive coffee. It sounds small, but it&#8217;s actually a testament to how good we have it. My biggest complaint isn&#8217;t political imprisonment or starvation. It&#8217;s that my latte hasn&#8217;t been under $4 since the last time President Trump was in office, and gas that was $2 in February crept back up to $5.
Of course there is disease, grief, and disappointment in every corner of life. We should work to reduce all of it. But in the context of human history, in the context of what most of the world endures, Americans have it the best.
America, to me, is still pie and summer picnics. It&#8217;s riding horses and watching football. It&#8217;s working hard, day in and day out, to build a life worth living and passing down. It&#8217;s a flag that doesn&#8217;t pierce you; it covers you.
I love my country. I’m proud of it. I’m a patriot.
We all should be.

US-ART-NEWYORKER-MASS-MEDIA-100TH ANNIVERSARY

Patriotism Isn’t The Problem — The Left Is

All American Patriotism

Anti-American

Leftists

The New Yorker

The <a href="https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/rocky-mountain-institute-rmi/">Rocky Mountain Institute</a> (RMI) is still a relatively little-known American climate NGO, but since 2021, they’ve been quietly raking in more than $100 million <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/742244146">annually</a>.
They’re also big fans of China.
In <a href="https://rmi.org/press-release/chinas-carbon-neutrality-goal-increases-urgency-of-meeting-nations-demand-growth-with-zero-carbon-sources/">2021</a>, RMI complimented China for “responsible global leadership” toward achieving “carbon neutrality before 2060.” Similarly, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/china">boasts</a> that they were the “first international nonprofit to launch a clean energy program in China” and that China now “leads the world in renewable energy installation . . .”
China love also extends to climate policy donors. Billionaire venture capitalist <a href="https://www.influencewatch.org/person/john-doerr/">John Doerr</a> has been the chair of the <a href="https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/climate-imperative-foundation/">Climate Imperative Foundation</a> since <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/845024713/202113199349324966/full">2020</a>. In <a href="https://speedandscale.com/newsletter/john-doerr-issues-urgent-call-to-action-for-global-leaders/">April</a> of this year, Doerr celebrated China as the “world’s first electrostate” and praised it for “upending the old carbon-based world order.”
The total truth is less lovely, as is President Xi Jinping’s repressive regime. This China emissions story and many other hypocrisies promoted by our so-called “environmental” movement are exposed in my <a href="https://capitalresearch.org/article/enemies-of-energy/">new report</a>, Enemies of Energy: The Myths, the Movement, and the Money, just released by the Capital Research Center.
In 2005, China and America were each responsible for <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-share-of-co2-emissions?country=CHN~USA">20%</a> of global CO2 emissions. After 20 years of help and praise from the enemies of American energy, China is now cranking out 32% of global CO2 emissions, while the USA has fallen to just 13%.
A major driver of this has been China’s buildout of coal-fired power generation, which is <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country?stackMode=absolute&amp;time=1995..latest&amp;country=CHN~USA~OWID_WRL">already 12 times more</a> than that of the U.S., and they’re not done. In January, two months before John Doerr praised Xi’s dictatorship for upending the carbon-based world order, the Financial Times <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/103a731c-91cc-45bc-8769-ee4cadf3ce40?syn-25a6b1a6=1">reported</a> that China was on course to open nearly 100 new coal-fired power stations in 2026 alone.
The decline in American CO2 emissions, as reported in Enemies of Energy, is in large measure due to our switch from coal to <a href="https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php">cleaner-burning</a> natural gas in our electricity generation. Calculated on a <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics">per-person basis</a>, American carbon emissions haven’t been this low since before our entry into World War II.
But rather than praise this natural gas-driven accomplishment, the anti-energy nonprofits work to impede our gas production. They also oppose coal and oil production. And most hypocritically, they have been working against nuclear power, which produces no emissions at all and is the most reliable electricity fuel we have.
The report is titled Enemies of Energy because this movement, which collects more than $9.3 million per day in revenue, has been trying to halt nearly 90% of the fuel that runs the American economy. Enemies provides lively profiles of the 15 most influential and richest anti-energy NGOs, and their 15 largest known donors. Other examples, in addition to those previously mentioned, include NGOs such as the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, and billionaire donors such as Michael Bloomberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Enemies also provides descriptions of the 10 biggest myths and misconceptions the anti-energy movement uses to promote their agenda.
The profile for the “climate emergency” cites a <a href="https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/key-indicators/global-mean-sea-level/">NASA</a> estimate that sea levels have been rising at less than half a centimeter per year since 1993, roughly the thickness of three pennies stacked atop each other. That is not an emergency that justifies radical alteration of the American economy and our energy dominance.
Nearly all of the Enemies promote weather-dependent wind and solar energy in place of reliable sources. The report reveals that these options devour far more real estate than necessary, or what the “environmental” movement used to think of as “the environment.” Among other sources, Enemies uses an <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210430145128/https:/www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-energy-land-use-economy/">April 2021</a> study from Bloomberg Green that showed “solar energy needs 140 times the land area to produce the same kilowatts as a natural gas plant, 47 times more than an emissions-free nuclear plant, and nearly 18 times more than a coal-fired power station.”
Bloomberg’s comparisons were even worse for wind energy.
A section on “plastic pollution” shows the United States is responsible for just 0.25% of the plastic waste <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics">reaching the ocean</a>, despite producing 25% of the planet’s economic output. Meanwhile, China, the supposed carbon-fighting hero for so many of America’s energy enemies, is responsible for 7.2% of ocean plastic.
That’s 29 times more than the USA, even as China has a much smaller economy.
The major point of Enemies of Energy is that the anti-energy movement is implicitly the enemy of our economy. In addition to our world-beating prosperity, reliable energy fuels the wealth we use to protect the features and creatures we love. If the Enemies get what they want, then we will no longer have what we need and love.
***
Ken Braun is managing editor and director of content at the Capital Research Center. He also edits <a href="https://capitalresearch.org/publication/">Capital Research</a> magazine and conducts investigative research and drafts profiles for <a href="https://influencewatch.org/">InfluenceWatch.org</a>.

Oil pump on background of US dollar and RMB,

What’s Behind American Energy NGOs Doing China’s Dirty Work

China

Energy Policy

NGOs

Millions of American families trust Home Depot with their home improvement projects. Recently, I joined the company’s shareholder meeting to ask whether the public should trust Home Depot with their children.
I am a detransitioner. Between the ages of 12 and 16, I was placed on puberty blockers and testosterone, and at 15, surgeons removed my breasts. I carry those consequences in my body every single day. And when I spoke to Home Depot&#8217;s board and shareholders, I told them something that every person in that room needed to hear: your company&#8217;s healthcare plan appears to cover these same interventions for covered dependents — including children. Shareholders deserve to know that. Families deserve better.
This is not a political abstraction for me. I know exactly what these procedures take from a child, because they took it from me.
When my parents first sought help for what I was experiencing as a young teenager, they believed they would find counseling, support, and time. Instead, they were handed one option — and a threat. Consent to these interventions, they were told, or your daughter will probably die. The ACLU&#8217;s own top attorney has since acknowledged to the Supreme Court that there is no evidence that denying these interventions causes suicide. The claim used to pressure my family, and thousands of families like mine, was not medicine. It was a lie.
Days before I raised this question at Home Depot’s shareholder meeting, the Department of Justice (DOJ) made something clear to the entire country: this conduct is also fraud.
The DOJ announced a landmark resolution against Texas Children&#8217;s Hospital (TCH) — the first action in its ongoing national investigation into pediatric gender transition procedures. TCH has agreed to pay over $10 million in damages and civil penalties, permanently end these procedures on children, and — perhaps most significantly — fund the first-ever clinic in this country dedicated to restorative care for detransitioners.
This is a turning point in our culture. Texas will be home to the first clinic that helps victims of these barbaric procedures get back to normalcy.
That clinic matters to me personally. The medical interventions I received did not resolve my pain. They replaced it with permanent damage and stripped me of the final years of my childhood. I am currently suing Kaiser Permanente — the healthcare system that profited from my confusion — because institutions that cause this harm should be held accountable. The DOJ has now signaled that the federal government agrees, and that every provider and institution still funding these procedures should take that seriously.
Home Depot should take it seriously, too.
Based on publicly available information from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Home Depot still holds a perfect score on the HRC&#8217;s Corporate Equality Index — a score earned in part by providing employee insurance coverage for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for covered dependents, including children.
Industry leaders from Walmart to Lowe&#8217;s, Ford, and Harley-Davidson have already stepped back from covering these practices. The medical authorities in more than six countries, including our own Department of Health and Human Services, have backed away as both data and personal testimony have made the consequences undeniable.
Over half the states across the country — including Georgia, where Home Depot is headquartered — have moved to protect minors from these procedures. The Supreme Court has upheld states’ right to protect children in this way.
The landscape has shifted. The question now is whether Home Depot shifts with it or waits for a federal investigation to make that decision for them.
Former patients like me are speaking out and winning in court. Parents are organizing and showing up. The DOJ is investigating. And I will keep standing in shareholder meetings, legislative chambers, and wherever else I need to stand, until every institution that has chosen ratings and outside pressure over the protection of children is made to answer for it.
No child should need a lawsuit, a congressional hearing, or a federal fraud investigation to be protected from procedures that rob them of their bodies and their futures. Home Depot does not have to become part of what happened to me. But right now, it is — and the window to change that is narrowing.
Children deserve compassion, counseling, and time to grow up. They deserve to inherit their bodies intact.
And the institutions still standing in the way of that deserve to know: we are not going away.
***
Chloe Cole is a detransitioner, patient advocate, and plaintiff in ongoing litigation against Kaiser Permanente. She recently called on Home Depot to end its apparent coverage of gender transition interventions for minors.

Entrance to Home Depot Store

Home Depot’s Shareholders Need To Know What Their Benefits Package Did To Kids Like Me

detransitioner

Home Depot

After two years of devastating American and Israeli strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites, missile infrastructure, air defenses, terror proxies, and regime leadership, President Donald Trump holds more leverage over the Islamic Republic than any U.S. president since the Islamists took power in 1979.
The question is whether he uses it — or trades it away.
Talk of a deal is again at fever pitch. Trump is reportedly mulling a memorandum of understanding that would extend the ceasefire by 60 days, lift the U.S. naval blockade of Iran’s ports, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and launch formal nuclear talks.
The guns, however, are not yet silent. On Wednesday night, U.S. forces shot down four Iranian drones and struck a ground control station to preempt attacks on American troops and commercial shipping in the Strait. Tehran answered with a ballistic missile aimed at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, intercepted by Kuwaiti air defenses. The infrastructure to resume the war Trump began in February remains in place — and no deal is better than a bad one.
The Iranians have mastered the art of negotiating with Washington. They outplayed Obama. They outplayed Biden. Each time, they preserved their nuclear pathway and pocketed billions in sanctions relief. Even now, at the regime’s weakest moment since the revolution, the mullahs retain enriched nuclear material, terror proxies, residual missile capability, and a chokehold on the global oil economy. They are losing the war.
But they believe they can still win the peace — meaning regime survival and a runway to rebuild.
Three issues will decide whether talks succeed or hand Tehran a lifeline.
First, Hormuz. The regime has been running a maritime extortion racket, charging tankers up to $2 million for “safe passage.” Any deal must end the toll, clear every Iranian mine, and forbid attacks on commercial or U.S. Navy vessels. The American blockade should come off only in phases tied to verified compliance, not all at once. If Tehran cheats, Trump must be ready to relaunch Project Freedom — the tanker-escort operation aborted earlier this year when Riyadh withheld overflight rights. The Saudis should be told, plainly, that this time they have no choice but to grant them — or we won’t defend them.
Second, the nuclear file. Iranian assurances that they “do not seek a bomb” are worthless. Only actions count. That means surrendering every kilogram of enriched uranium — not just the 970 pounds of 60-percent material entombed in the tunnels of Isfahan and Fordow, but the thousands of additional pounds enriched between two and 20%, much of it three-quarters or more of the way to weapons grade.
It means a permanent ban on enrichment and plutonium reprocessing. It means dismantling Pickaxe Mountain, the underground site Iran intends as an enrichment and centrifuge plant impervious even to the massive ordnance penetrators that destroyed the Fordow nuclear facility during Operation Midnight Hammer last June. And it means hard limits on rebuilding the missile force that threatens Israel, the Gulf, and Europe, U.S. forces across the region, and the American homeland if they rebuild their destroyed ICBM program.
Third, sanctions relief and access to frozen funds. Trump has said Iran will receive no cash and no sanctions relief up front. Good. But the principle of “no dust, no dollars” must be airtight. The war has cost Tehran between $150 and $300 billion. Will the regime now be permitted to unload the $15 billion in oil sitting in blockaded tankers? Tap the billions frozen in Qatar, Oman, and Iraq? Hand the mullahs any of that money before they verifiably dismantle their nuclear program, and the leverage Trump built with American air power vanishes overnight.
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Iran still controls enriched uranium sufficient for at least 10 nuclear weapons. It can still convulse oil markets by squeezing Hormuz. And the Iranians read American politics. They see November’s midterms. They know how to drag negotiations into a season when they believe a wounded president would have less appetite for confrontation. Stalling is their best weapon.
Here is the bad deal Trump must refuse: a freeze instead of dismantlement, sanctions relief for promises, frozen funds released for goodwill, the nuclear program left dormant rather than eliminated. It is the deal the regime is built to extract — and the deal that hands the Iran problem, yet graver and closer to a bomb, to Trump’s successor, who may not have the spine to finish what Trump started.
The six-week military campaign is incomplete. The administration declined Israeli proposals to hit Iran’s energy infrastructure and to decapitate dozens more regime leaders, including Iran’s current supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. If Tehran refuses real terms, the military and economic warfare campaign can be resumed. The leverage is there. The forces are in position — and President Trump can arm, support, and help unleash millions of Iranians to retake their streets and their country. The only question is whether the president who built this position has the will to use it. It is a good bet that he will.
***
Mark Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the presenter of <a href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.fdd.org/category/podcasts/the-iran-breakdown/__;!!F0Stn7g!CXgsIlEBML2AYFaX0372v0_L5qnUjHMgegvX8DDMWsMIjt3f0Sf06wIzQZDE2vGSfwN3STHRx9Y$">“The Iran Breakdown”</a> podcast.

US-ISRAEL-IRAN-WAR-POLITICS-TRUMP

Iran Thinks It Can Still Pull Off One Last Trick

Iran war

President Trump

As AI chatbots get more conversational, one question hangs in the air: could AI be conscious? The latest public thinker to announce openness to the idea is famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. After spending three days <a href="https://unherd.com/2026/05/when-claudia-met-claudius/?edition=us">conversing</a> with Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude about a range of topics, the noted atheist acknowledged that he was now open to the possibility that artificial intelligence may possess consciousness.
Dawkins is just the latest in a long line of people going back centuries who have attributed mind to machines. In the 1960s, almost 60 years before Claude came along, MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum discovered something unsettling about human beings: we are astonishingly quick to attribute mind, personality, and even intimacy to machines that merely simulate conversation.
Weizenbaum built a primitive chatbot he called ELIZA, a program that relied on keyword detection, pattern matching, and scripted response templates to carry on a conversation. The computer scientist was under no pretenses about ELIZA. He knew it was driven by comprehensible procedures. What shocked him was the strong emotional responses he observed from people who interacted with ELIZA. He wrote in a 1976 book: “Extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” He often gave the example of his secretary at MIT, who watched him work on the program for months. After only a few sessions with ELIZA, she asked him to leave the room so she could more privately confide in the program.
Weizenbaum was also taken aback by how quickly science professionals were willing to consider programs like ELIZA as substitutes for human treatment. Psychiatrist Kenneth M. Colby said ELIZA could be “made widely available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centers suffering a shortage of therapists.” Noted astrophysicist Carl Sagan also weighed in on ELIZA’s potential, envisioning a future where such programs would provide medical care to the masses: “[F]or a few dollars a session, we would be able to talk with an attentive, tested, and largely non-directive psychotherapist.”
ELIZA also taught Weizenbaum that people are very generous with their assumptions in conversation: “The human speaker will…contribute much to clothe ELIZA’s responses in vestments of plausibility,” he <a href="https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs124/p36-weizenabaum.pdf">wrote</a>. In other words, trained as we are since before birth in human conversation, and lonely as we might be in today’s modern age, we are more than happy to meet a conversation partner halfway, even if that partner is a machine.
Which brings us back to Mr. Dawkins.
Today’s Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT are vastly more sophisticated than ELIZA, harnessing newer technologies in natural language processing to make conversations much more engaging. And as Weizenbaum predicted, today’s AI models can build belief-structure models of users across multiple sessions. It’s little wonder, then, that even eminent thinkers like Dawkins would be flattered and impressed to the point of acknowledging the possibility of consciousness.
But is AI actually conscious?
Under the hood of today’s AI models, it’s still all about patterns. Algorithms trained on vast datasets analyze our queries letter by letter and harness statistical analysis to produce responses arranged in patterns we recognize as human language. And it’s getting better and faster at doing this every month. Give an AI model enough data and train it to shape its responses in patterns we recognize as conversation, and the sky is the limit. AI can simulate intelligence, consciousness, romance, concern, interest, curiosity, or anything else that typifies human existence. But simulations, while powerful, are still only simulations.
If Mr. Dawkins can get lulled into entertaining notions of AI consciousness, all of us can. It’s crucial that we get in the driver’s seat with AI now so we don’t get taken for a ride later. If you’re going to use an AI chatbot, keep it limited and advisory. Avoid personalizing chatbots with names or personal pronouns. And wherever possible, opt for the real thing over a simulation. The most amazing computer in the universe is still your own brain. Use it to blast past mere simulations and unleash the real thing.
***
Andrew McDiarmid is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Follow his writing on technology at <a href="https://thehumanadventure.substack.com/">https://thehumanadventure.substack.com</a>.

AI Technology Innovation concept

Skynet Goes Live

Chatbots

The manosphere is <a href="https://rationalmale.substack.com/p/what-is-the-sexual-marketplace?r=30rvnp&amp;utm_campaign=post&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;triedRedirect=true">full of distortions and caricatures about the science</a> of evolutionary psychology: alpha males who dominate sexual activity, enabled by online dating apps; women whose sole interest in men is their capacity to provide financially; men whose only interest is in large numbers of very young sexual partners; women who marry men as providers (betas) but then have affairs with alpha males, and so on.
Alas, sometimes, evolutionary psychologists themselves seem to actively enable these caricatures. A recent paper by Mads Larsen and colleagues, published in <a href="https://www.scilit.com/publications/60117189b430a3a76783c5a605c1c7d8">Politics and the Life Sciences</a>, illustrates this tendency. While the authors make some valid points about sex differences, their psychological understanding needs to be supplemented with knowledge of the current empirical realities of marriage and the family in rich developed countries.
Individualistic Reproduction
Larsen and colleagues argue that extremely low fertility rates in developed societies — despite women’s continued desire for children — are due to the interaction of women’s economic empowerment, the availability of effective contraception, and evolved sex differences in mate preferences. These factors in combination have increased the tendency of women to reject the least desirable men as long-term mates, leaving many women (and men) unable to find a long-term partner.
The authors further suggest that dating apps exacerbate this dynamic: a small number of attractive men receive disproportionate attention, while many women are inundated with offers from men they find undesirable. At the same time, dating apps enable the most attractive men to “play the field” and not commit to the women they date. Reliable contraception facilitates both men and women following short-term mating strategies, which leaves many without a committed long-term partnership. Because women can now support themselves and their children independently — through either their own earnings or welfare provisions — the need for male parental investment has declined, further incentivizing women to follow a short-term mating strategy where they seek the most attractive male partners with “good genes” rather than male partners who would be reliable long-term providers.
Their rather startling conclusion is that the best way to increase fertility rates in modern societies is to facilitate childbearing outside of long-term partnerships. They write:
<blockquote>
If post-pair bonding nations like Norway are to significantly raise their fertility rate, we believe politicians must be far bolder and more innovative, and consider preparing for the future by funding limited experiments to boost — and learn what is required to motivate — single parenthood.
</blockquote>
They propose policies such as expanded support for single parents, round-the-clock child care for women, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World">Brave New World</a>-type solutions such as “state sponsored surrogacy for single men who want to become fathers” and “artificial wombs” to allow childless men to have children without female help.
What the Authors Get Right
At the core of Larsen and colleagues’ argument is that there are sex differences in mate preferences, a point that has merit. The finding that women are choosier about partners than men, on average, is <a href="https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-103408">well documented in the evolutionary psychology literature</a>. The reason for this is that female fixed biological costs in pregnancy, childbearing, and child raising are much greater than male fixed biological costs. Because of this sex difference, over evolutionary time, women who were careful about choosing mates who were both willing and able to parent their children were more likely to have surviving offspring, leading to the selection of traits for greater choosiness and a <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/sex-differences-in-human-mate-preferences-evolutionary-hypotheses-tested-in-37-cultures/0E112ACEB2E7BC877805E3AC11ABC889">preference for reliable providers</a>. Additionally, their argument that the <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/making-good-men-harder-to-find-how-changing-wealth-inequality-affects-marriage-patterns">economic empowerment of women in developed countries is making it more difficult for low-status men to find long-term mates</a> also has some validity.
What the Authors Get Wrong
Beyond these points, however, the authors’ argument falters — largely because it overlooks contemporary sociological realities.
First, in all developed societies today, it is the highest-status men with the most financial resources who are most likely to marry and have children, and the least likely to divorce. This research on data from the U.S. shows that men in the highest income category are about 57 percentage points more likely to ever marry than men in the lowest income category, and about 37 percentage points less likely to divorce. Moreover, contrary to the manosphere claim that such men are merely income-providing “betas” whom women settle for while pursuing affairs with “high genetic quality alphas,” <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/on-internet-dating-sites-women-prefer-men-with-higher-incomes-and-more-education">data from online dating sites show that it is highly educated, high-income men who attract the most attention from women</a>, and thus presumably would be best able to follow a short-term mating strategy if they chose to do so. If dating apps truly created unlimited opportunities for high-status men to avoid commitment, as some authors suggest, these men should be the least likely to marry and the most likely to divorce. In fact, the opposite is true. The strategy of maximizing the number of sexual partners appears to characterize only a relatively small and atypical minority of men. Further, this evidence also suggests that women are using dating apps primarily to pursue long-term, reliable mates, and are not switching to pursuing short-term mates to the extent Larsen and colleagues argue.
Similarly, it is now the <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-marriage-how-breadwinning-matters-for-both-men-and-women-today">highest-income young women with the most access to resources who are most likely to marry</a> and have children (and they tend to marry high-income men). Assortative long-term mating is well-established, and the trend has become more pronounced in the last 50 years. By the authors’ logic, women with their own resources should be least likely to marry and stay married because they would be best able to live independently, but this is not what we see.
Second, declining fertility and marriage rates cannot be attributed to women’s empowerment alone, a point that Larsen and his coauthors themselves acknowledge. Other factors — including rising housing costs, cultural shifts, and widening educational gaps between men and women — play substantial roles. Public policy matters as well. For example, in Sweden, as documented by <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00324728.2022.2134578">Martin Kolk</a>, the transfers to women who have children enable them to take family leave and stay home to care for their kids. It does not enable women to work more hours, as women with the most children work the fewest hours over the course of their lives. High-status women are more likely to marry and have children, but this is largely because they enter motherhood with stable, high-status careers they can retain after having children, thanks to generous parental leave policies. This is government subsidization of female employment, which leads to more women working than would otherwise be the case. At the same time, these benefits in practice tend to advantage higher-status couples, effectively redistributing resources upward and likely exacerbating the difficulties lower-status men and women face in forming stable unions.
Third, there is little evidence that one of their proposals for low fertility — “more generous support to women wanting to solo parent” — would be effective at raising fertility rates. Even in societies where state support for single parents is most generous, such as in contemporary <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-018-9492-2">Scandinavian countries</a>, lower-status women are more likely to forgo childbearing altogether than to have children outside stable partnerships. If women generally favored raising children independently with genetically “desirable” partners, such patterns would be unlikely to emerge.
Further, the promotion of single parenthood is a poor solution to low fertility because substantial evidence shows that <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-structure-matters-for-rich-kids-too">stable, two-biological-parent families provide the best outcomes for children on average</a>, including lower mortality, <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w33776">higher educational attainment, and greater adult earnings</a>.
Finally, Larsen and colleagues’ historical argument is also problematic. They suggest that arranged marriages in pre-industrial societies mitigated mismatches in mate preferences by overriding female choice. However, arranged marriage is primarily associated with agricultural societies, a relatively recent phase in human history. For <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Evolution-and-Gender-Why-It-Matters-for-Contemporary-Life/Hopcroft/p/book/9781138956162">the vast majority of human evolutionary history</a>, both men and women likely exercised choice in selecting partners. Indeed, the very existence of female choosiness implies that women historically had the agency to select mates; without such agency, there would have been no basis for this trait to be selected. Female selectivity and unequal mating outcomes for lower-status males are not novel phenomena but <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Evolution-and-Gender-Why-It-Matters-for-Contemporary-Life/Hopcroft/p/book/9781138956162">longstanding features of human societies</a>.
Men and Women Still Need Each Other
Thus, although sex differences in the choice of partners are a psychological reality, and women’s economic empowerment likely has promoted less marriage and lower fertility than in previous eras, Larsen and colleagues’ scenario of men and women pursuing short-term mating strategies as the primary reason for extremely low fertility overlooks the realities of marriage and parenthood in most developed societies. In fact, it is the men and women who are best able to pursue a short-term mating strategy and live independently without a long-term partner who are most likely to marry and have children.
The empirical evidence shows that most men and women today still find each other useful as long-term mates, and those who are successful at finding and keeping one are the most likely to have children who will be successful. The increased individualization of reproduction that the authors recommend is an unwelcome dystopian solution that is unlikely to be successful at improving reproductive outcomes at either the individual or societal level.
***
This is republished with permission from the Institute for Family Studies. The original can be found <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/lab-made-babies-wont-solve-the-fertility-crisis">here</a>.
Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of Evolution and Gender: Why it matters for contemporary life (Routledge 2016), editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, &amp; Society (Oxford, 2018), and author (with Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber) of Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship Between Status and Fertility (Routledge, 2024).

New parents watching babies in hospital nursery

Love, Marriage, And A Baby Carriage

Marriage

As the great Ella Langley once <a href="https://youtu.be/hLOheGDwD_0?si=xqXiZQc1dig3-s1X">said</a>, &#8220;He&#8217;s choosin&#8217; Texas, I can tell by the way he&#8217;s two-steppin&#8217; &#8217;round the room. And judgin&#8217; by the smile she&#8217;s putting on his face, there&#8217;s nothing I can do.&#8221;
A perfect song. A perfect melody. A perfect metaphor.
Will Texas choose Texas? The tried and true, the Texas they know and love, the Texas they always fall back on because she&#8217;s stable, shares the same values, and abides by the same laws of the land?
In the song, both Texas and Tennessee were great options. In this scenario, however, Attorney General Ken Paxton is Texas. And State Representative James Talarico is Tennessee, with a whole lot more estrogen than Ella Langley and a whole lot fewer attractive characteristics.
Actually, that would be doing an injustice to Tennessee. He&#8217;s more like Seattle, Washington.
Democrats are trying for the millionth time to &#8220;take Texas,&#8221; but they continue to forget who actually lives there and keep putting up candidates who represent the opposite of the Lone Star State. Texas ain&#8217;t choosin&#8217; Talarico, and here&#8217;s why.
This week, Texans chose their fighters for November. Trump-backed Attorney General Ken Paxton decisively beat incumbent Senator John Cornyn for the Republican ticket. In March, on the Democrat side, State Representative James Talarico, to our chagrin, beat the lovely Representative Jasmine Crockett, who would&#8217;ve been quite entertaining to watch flail about.
But Talarico is already getting dragged through the media, and not without good reason. He&#8217;s a nutcase. He&#8217;s everything wrong with the woke religious Left jammed into a small, feminine <a href="https://x.com/realBrandonGill/status/2059624531837231475">body</a>.
His latest blemish, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/this-book-is-gay-read-the-sexually-explicit-volumes-james-talaricos-church-gives-kids?author=Leif+Le+Mahieu&amp;category=undefined&amp;elementPosition=29&amp;row=3&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+News&amp;rowType=Vertical+Carousel&amp;title=%E2%80%98God+Is+Queer%E2%80%99%3A+See+The+Sexually+Explicit+Books+James+Talarico%E2%80%99s+Church+Gives+Kids">reported</a> exclusively by the Daily Wire, is that the church the former pastor preached at is pushing radical gender ideology on children through libraries stocked with &#8220;banned books&#8221; containing descriptions of anal rape, incest, and oral sex.
He was asked on a podcast to name something he loved that wasn&#8217;t family or friends. He answered, &#8220;trans children.&#8221; He thinks the Bible is pro-abortion. <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/no-the-bible-still-doesnt-advocate-for-abortion">It’s not.</a> He believes God is &#8220;non-binary.&#8221; He declared Jesus a &#8220;radical feminist.&#8221; He said atheists are &#8220;more Christ-like&#8221; than Christians. He thinks illegal aliens are &#8220;more patriotic&#8221; than Americans. He believes there are six biological sexes. He called America&#8217;s border a &#8220;giant welcome mat.&#8221; He posts guidelines for evading ICE. He wants to abolish prisons.
In an ominous sign of what we&#8217;re seeing now, he announced in 2022 (and resurfaced in 2026) that his campaign, in one of the biggest cattle-ranching states in America, had &#8220;officially become a non-meat campaign&#8221; to combat climate change.
This, among a myriad of other reasons, including that Talarico is fully on board with red-flag gun confiscation laws and killing constitutional carry in the state where the Second Amendment isn&#8217;t just a right but damn near a religion, is precisely why real Texas is going to cattle-stomp this guy come November.
Texas is the conservative stronghold of beef, barbecue, border security, family, fossil fuels, cowboys, firearms, patriotism, and unapologetic faith. Not Seattle soy-boy progressivism wrapped in a fake clerical collar.
James Talarico doesn&#8217;t just disagree with Texas values. He is the walking, talking rejection of everything that makes this state the envy of the country.
That&#8217;s exactly why it&#8217;s so insulting and alarming that Democrats would even try to run him. At least when they tried this last time with Robert &#8220;Beto&#8221; O&#8217;Rourke (say that with a surfer-dude accent for maximum impact), he was slightly less feminine and slightly less woke. Still a slap in the face to Texans, and he was crushed in rural Texas and conservative strongholds where the margins are simply too big to overcome. Republicans carried Texas statewide by double digits in 2022, and no Democrat has won a statewide race here since 1994. That wall hasn&#8217;t moved. It&#8217;s gotten taller.
Here&#8217;s what the radical Left isn&#8217;t doing a good job of hiding: Talarico isn&#8217;t a miscalculation. He&#8217;s a business decision. Democrats know he can&#8217;t win Texas. They&#8217;re running him to light up coastal donors and build a progressive media presence, using the Lone Star State as a stage rather than a target. Which is actually more cynical than simply being wrong about the electorate. They&#8217;re not trying to represent Texans. They&#8217;re performing for people who&#8217;ve never been there.
The vehicle they&#8217;ve chosen for this performance is faith. Democrats are deliberately propping up progressive &#8220;Christian&#8221; voices to launder their most extreme agenda through the language of the pulpit. It&#8217;s the same playbook that turned mainline Protestant churches into rainbow-flag social-justice factories. They know they can&#8217;t sell open borders, child gender mutilation, and abolishing prisons on the merits, so they&#8217;re hijacking Jesus Himself to move the product. This isn&#8217;t tolerance; it&#8217;s ideological conquest dressed up in piety. If they can ever flip the biggest, baddest red state in America with this not-so-Trojan horse, the GOP will have a massive problem on its hands.
Ken Paxton, on the other hand, is from Texas. You can tell.
Tuesday night, the Trump-backed AG didn&#8217;t just win a primary. He toppled John Cornyn, the Senate&#8217;s number-two Republican and the living definition of the establishment old guard, which tells you exactly where the Texas GOP actually stands. Paxton earned it. He&#8217;s spent years suing the Biden administration to lock down the border, defend the unborn, protect the Second Amendment, and beat back woke indoctrination in schools and courts, winning more than three out of every four of those lawsuits. He&#8217;s a battle-tested bulldog who stands for beef, borders, Bibles, and bold Lone Star independence. The exact opposite of what Democrats are trying to peddle.
Texas isn&#8217;t just choosing a senator in November. They&#8217;re choosing between two entirely different theories of what Texans are. Talarico&#8217;s entire platform is built on the premise that Texans need to be managed, corrected, and guided toward someone else&#8217;s values. Paxton&#8217;s is built on the premise that they don&#8217;t. That&#8217;s the whole election in one sentence.
Conservatives are a simple folk who don&#8217;t require much. Stay out of our way. Protect our private property. Cut the regulations so we can flourish, and stop taxing away the money we work hard for. Small government. Big families. A listening ear, not a lecture.
Talarico is just too much. We&#8217;ve gotten the ick.
So choose right, Texas. Choose Texas. Choose Paxton. You know the way you&#8217;re leaning. I can tell by the way you&#8217;re two-stepping.

Woman Wearing Cowboy Hat Riding Running Horse While Holding Large Texas Flag In Grassy Field With Cloudy Sky

Everything Texans Love, This Candidate Seems To Hate

James Talarico

Ken Paxton

Texas Elections

The idea of a “multipolar world,” where great powers can coexist within separate geopolitical spheres, is increasingly popular. But multipolarism, if it is embraced rather than resisted, will only end in Chinese Communist domination.
Multipolarity is innocent enough as a description of changing global trends. It is true that U.S. power has been waning even as China’s star has risen. But normative multipolarism, once isolated to the Left (former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once <a href="https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/05/142312.htm">promised</a> to “turn a multi-polar world into a multi-partner world”), is making new inroads on the Right. Republican “restrainers” are increasingly arguing that the emerging status quo is the natural state of affairs, and American hegemony an oddity.
According to the restrainers, the U.S. should normalize relations and continue to sweep tensions under the proverbial rug. Ironically, some of these same voices often object to U.S. support of Ukraine and U.S. action in Iran because the focus has shifted away from China, stating that the U.S. no longer has the strength to combat the CCP on top of Iran and Russia.
There is a temptation to sit back and allow the CCP to operate how it prefers in its hemisphere, even with an ongoing genocide and a surveillance state, as long as the U.S. is unbothered. But to assume that other global superpowers will respect U.S. hegemony once they have secured primacy in their sphere is woefully naïve.
The majority of people in the United States have never lived in a multipolar world. They have never witnessed a world in which the United States is not the global superpower, the enforcer of international law and free trade, and the credible deterrent to enemies of freedom. They see U.S. defense spending as excessive, especially when U.S. allies aren’t paying for their defense, remain inadequately armed, and refuse to decouple their economies from hostile powers. It is true that the NATO alliance must demonstrate to the U.S. (and to each other) that they are capable of defending their own countries and can adequately deter their enemy to the east, because they, too, have never lived in a world without the alliance deterring hostile powers.
The focus of the White House’s summit with China was largely on the economy, trade, and Iran, with Xi Jinping warning of a possible clash with the U.S. over Taiwan. There has been little reporting on President Donald Trump’s response to the question about Taiwan. It still has not been clarified what the U.S. response would be if the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) moved on Taiwan, and the U.S. has not widely discussed what exactly it would look like for the PLA to begin to take Taiwan, though we can assume it is a war game often played out in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities of the Pentagon.
It is no mystery what the isolationist Right’s views on Taiwan will be if the attack occurs. They will argue that Taiwan is very far away, that our men and women should not die for a foreign country, that Taiwan’s independence is not associated with American security, but they misunderstand China’s long-term goal. Isolationists in the U.S. will be content with a multipolar world, so long as they do not feel any major shifts to their day-to-day life, but the Chinese Communist Party will not be content with multipolarity.
The United States stands in sharp contrast to the communist hegemony, and in the long term, the CCP will not tolerate the U.S. as a rival power. If the U.S. shrinks into its role in a multipolar world, we will be weaker, freedom around the world will be feebler, and the U.S. economy will suffer. Eventually, all American citizens will feel the consequences if the U.S. is no longer the preeminent force on the world stage, and will hate it.
The Chinese Communist Party is hoping for that future, for a U.S. citizenry scrolling TikTok where they are told China was right to take Taiwan, and China’s internal affairs don’t concern the U.S. The CCP already executed a test run after October 7, and the U.S. is still having to sort fact from fiction amongst our population.
China will accept a multipolar world for a few years, but that will not satisfy them in the long run. The freedom of America is a thorn in the side of every communist nation, and in the end, China will prefer only one to stay standing. Multipolar worlds do not exist in the long term. China knows this; it is time America learns it, too.
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Ali Holcomb is a National Security Fellow and Communications Advisor at Advancing American Freedom.

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