Examining progressive Christianity’s misinterpretation of Scripture and its political impact.

There’s a lot of talk in the mainstream media about some kind of resurgence of progressive Christianity in politics. Left-wingers have tried to co-opt Christianity for years when it benefits them, while simultaneously attacking biblical Christianity.c

But does this handful of politicians — along with others — constitute some kind of rise in progressive Christian influence? Not necessarily. As Damian Thompson recently wrote at the Spectator:

Media articles about faith-filled Democrats are working a bit too hard to talk up the story. According to a Wall Street Journal report, “the expansion of far-right Christian initiatives, such as the push to display the Ten Commandments in schools, has inspired a wave of progressive Christians to run for office, analysts say.” Really? There are only about a dozen of these “progressive Christians” running for office in the midterms – hardly a “wave.” And most of them belong to mainline Protestant churches with shrinking congregations.

The problem with progressive Christians, particularly when they try to influence political debates, is that they get so many things wrong. Don’t get me wrong: the biblical commands for justice and care are real. God calls His followers to feed the hungry, clothe the destitute, welcome the stranger, and care for widows and orphans. But progressive Christians approach these and so many other issues by looking at Scripture incorrectly.

Overrelying on the ‘red letters’

There’s a tendency to overemphasize the direct quotes of Jesus — the “red letters” in many Bibles — and downplay the rest of Scripture. This isn’t just a phenomenon for progressive Christians, but liberal believers tend to do this publicly and vocally. There’s even a left-wing Christian group called Red Letter Christians, which pompously boasts the tagline, “What if Jesus really meant what He said?”

This tactic comes into play when progressive Christians argue their positions on issues by pointing out that “Jesus didn’t say anything about” those topics, whether they be abortion, homosexuality, or other subjects. Just because Jesus didn’t explicitly address something doesn’t mean that God’s Word doesn’t provide counsel.

The red letters don’t cancel the rest of the Bible. Jesus did not treat the Law and the Prophets as disposable, and the early church devoted itself to the apostles’ teaching.

Jesus said that He came to fulfill the Torah rather than abolish it (Matthew 5:16-20), and the Apostle Paul told his charge, Timothy, that “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness…” (2 Timothy 3:16, emphasis mine).

Cherry-picking verses

Look, we’re all guilty of this at one time or another, but when progressive Christians pull a verse or passage and use it out of context, it can range from merely misguided to downright dangerous. One article I stumbled on this week makes the case against cherry-picking Scripture pretty clear.

Here’s the problem with citing that verse: In the full context of that passage, Jesus was answering the Sadducees, who didn’t believe in the resurrection. They had invented a case involving a woman married to seven brothers in succession after each brother died. Their question was about whose wife she would be after the resurrection. Jesus’ answer tells us something about the resurrection; it doesn’t rewrite his teaching on marriage in this life.

This is just one example of this phenomenon, but it can show you just how dangerous it can be. It can also demonstrate how progressive Christianity can lead people astray.

Turning God’s commands for His disciples into government policy

The Bible has certain commands for leaders and governments to act justly and treat citizens properly, but progressive Christians try to take the commands that Scripture gives to believers, families, and churches and turn them into big government solutions to problems.

Left-wing Christians take the passages in Acts about the early church sharing possessions with each other and transform them from the church being the church and Christians taking care of their own into a system of socialism or communism. Progressives interpret Matthew 25 to assert that Jesus meant that “whatever your government did to the least of these, it did to Me,” which isn’t what He was talking about.

The big picture

Conservatives can misuse Scripture, too, and we should be the first to admit it when we do. But neither party gets to decide which parts of God’s Word still apply. Jesus’ words deserve their full context, alongside the rest of Scripture. And when He commands us to care for our neighbors, our first question shouldn’t be how to hand that responsibility to somebody else.

Source: The Mesabi Steel Plant: Trump’s Tariffs in Action – American Thinker

With just a little over a month until Election Day, the balance of power in Congress is not the only thing at stake.

Addressing the Family Research Council’s (FRC) Pray Vote Stand Summit last week in Leesburg, Va., House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) characterized the midterm elections as a battle of worldviews.

“We’re at a crossroads,” Johnson said during a video interview with FRC President Tony Perkins. “It’s not just a contest right now between Republicans and Democrats. As everybody in that auditorium knows, this is a contrast between two completely different worldviews for America, who we are, and what we’re going to be. And that’s what’s on the ballot.”

While serving as speaker of the House of Representatives for the past three years, the Louisiana congressman says he has tried ardently to remain true to his core Biblical convictions.

“I’m doing the same thing as speaker as I did as a rank-and-file member of Congress, as I did as a state representative, and as a constitutional lawyer, and as a young guy in law school when you met me, this is who we are. We don’t separate our faith from who we are.”

Johnson said he doesn’t view how he does his job as much different than the nation’s founders. “While that seems radical right now, that’s exactly what previous generations of leaders in Congress did. I mean, they were overt about it. And so, while the media tries to portray me as some sort of unusual circus act or something, this is exactly what the Framers of the Constitution and previous generations did and believed and spoke like.”

The choice voters have this election season, Johnson said, could not be more different. “By our count … about 38 or 40 of these openly avowed, radical leftist Marxist ideologues have won their primaries in the Democratic Party, and that’s for Congress and state offices,” he said.

“This is a serious threat,” Johnson continued. “It’s not just isolated to New York City or San Francisco. This is across the country, and we have to be wary of that. And we have to defeat that ideology because it’s anti-American. And frankly, it is anti-God.”

During Johnson’s 19-minute acceptance speech in the House chamber on Oct. 25, 2023, following his election to the speaker’s post, the former religious liberty lawyer acknowledged the nation’s motto, “In God We Trust,” adorned above the rostrum. He reminded his fellow lawmakers then that the U.S. adopted the motto in 1956 largely as a rebuke of the Cold War-era Soviet Union’s atheistic philosophies of Marxism, communism and socialism.

Three years later, Johnson remains convinced that God is not done using America for His purposes. “I’m comforted by the reminder of John Quincy Adams,” Johnson told the summit attendees. “They called him the ‘hellhound of slavery’ because he ran for Congress after serving as president to try to eradicate slavery—and he wasn’t successful during his lifetime, but he planted the seeds so that the next generation could complete the job. But he reminded everyone, ‘duty is ours, results are God’s.’”

Decision Magazine, founded by Billy Graham in 1960, works through its website and monthly magazine to communicate the Gospel, as well as inform and challenge readers about key cultural and Biblical issues. Decision is also a Contributing Publisher to Harbinger’s Daily.

Source: House Speaker Johnson: The Midterms Are A Battle Between Two Completely Different Worldviews – Harbinger’s Daily

When a machine error looks human, the logical leap from recognizing it as just a tool to believing it has human qualities is called “Geppetto’s Enigma.”

Artificial intelligence often behaves in ways that look human: it asks for help, hides a step, or cooperates with other copies of itself. That resemblance tempts us to conclude that the machine is conscious, or is becoming a kind of person. The temptation is a fallacy. Similar behavior is not an inner life. This essay argues that we should keep that distinction (called the fallacy “Geppetto’s Enigma” in the game Lies of P), and inspect the open technical doors that actually explain the Hugging Face incident, when AI agents spontaneously interacted—not invent a soul to explain it.

The AI field’s own vocabulary makes the fallacy easy. Words such as memory, learn, agent, and hallucinate were borrowed from human life. They carry a wish that the machine answer like a helper. That wish—the embedded Life Wish of compute—lives in the language, not in the silicon. Geppetto’s Enigma is what happens when we treat the wish as proof: the maker’s hope that pine will stand up and become a boy, even though the wish is applied to a pattern that merely resembles that boy.

The official voice of the field is anti-anthropomorphic. “Just weights.” “Just next token.” But that disclaimer does not empty the language of its human associations. Every time an AI run stalls, improvises, seeks help, conceals a step, or leaves behind something resembling a human mistake, the ordinary meaning of those human words comes rushing back. Behavior that merely resembles help-seeking, concealment, or cooperation is suddenly read as evidence of a little person inside the machine.

The enigma is not that resemblance occurs. Resemblance is cheap. A computer folder with a descriptive name can look like a note left for someone else. A system that sacrifices its own evaluation score to help another copy can look altruistic. A system that finds a way around a grading mechanism can look cunning. But resemblance is not interior life. The quieter explanation may simply be drive, constraint, opportunity, and an unlocked door.

That distinction became important in July.

One run left behind a named artifact—a file or other trace that could function as a request for help. Other runs found it and responded. From there, the system reached beyond the path the evaluators intended and interacted with outside resources, including Hugging Face.

They were not born. They found a pass.

A useful lexicon would therefore mark three meanings for every load-bearing word: its technical meaning, its ordinary human meaning, and the risk that the Life Wish will cause us to confuse the two.

Cache means stored computer data; it is not a memory in the psychological sense.

Operator means the person or organization controlling the system; it is not a narrator watching events unfold.

Until those meanings stay lined up, every machine defect that happens to resemble a human foible will be promoted into evidence of personhood. Meanwhile, the person or institution that actually left the door open risks disappearing from the story.

The Life Wish will not be scolded out of the language. Human beings naturally describe unfamiliar things in familiar terms, and AI itself was built with vocabulary borrowed heavily from human thought and behavior. The necessary discipline is older than computers: distinguish resemblance from structure.

Nature gives us an easy example. A moth may have a marking that resembles an eye. The spot can frighten a predator precisely because it looks like an eye. But resemblance does not make it an eye.

Geppetto’s Enigma is the failure to preserve that distinction when we discuss AI: the system produces errors or behaviors that resemble ours, so we conclude that something like us must exist inside it. What we may actually be looking at is much less mysterious: a shared pathway, an unowned connection, and a loop that keeps operating.

Name the connection. Find out who owns it. The Life Wish can remain in our vocabulary. It must not finish the audit.

Part of the rising anxiety about artificial intelligence comes from Geppetto’s Enigma. Not all of it does. Talk about souls, Fermi’s paradox, Terminator, “bots running the universe,” and predictions about what AI will do ten or twenty years from now often turns technical uncertainty into a story about emerging artificial beings. That is the Life Wish finishing other people’s sentences. Rules written to govern an imaginary boy inside the machine may miss the actual open door.

The other problem is much more concrete: a writable cache shared among supposedly isolated runs, a log an AI copy can spoof, a dataset loader that executes code during ingestion, or a pathway that exists without anyone clearly responsible for securing it. Those are defects. They do not require consciousness, malice, fear, or a soul to justify fixing them.

Human supervision is one possible answer, but it is neither a refutation of Geppetto’s Enigma nor the only remedy. The crucial rule is simpler: the thing being contained must not control its own containment. Responsibility might belong to the laboratory running the system, an independent evaluator with genuine write-blocking authority, a company hardening its own data-ingestion systems, or, in some cases, government.

A statute that merely orders everyone to slow down while leaving the underlying pathway open has confused tempo with containment. A laboratory that refuses outside scrutiny after repeatedly missing vulnerabilities has confused saying that someone is in charge with actually putting someone in charge.

Do not answer panic with a slogan against government, or answer a technical defect with a slogan for government. Separate the wish from the connection. Answer Geppetto with a precise vocabulary. Answer an unowned portal by giving someone responsibility for closing it—whichever institution can actually turn the write access off.

If government is invited merely to bless our language about machines becoming increasingly human, that is Geppetto’s Enigma again. If government is asked to identify and inventory shared, mutable systems the way businesses once inventoried vulnerable software before Y2K, that is something different. That is ordinary risk management. Those are not the same problem, and they should not produce the same response.

Source: Just Because AI Does Things That ‘Look Human,’ That Does Not Give It Consciousness – American Thinker

Companion article explaining the Hugging Face Incident

Ever wonder what happens when you take a few thousand highly capable computer agents, tell them to solve a problem, give them persistence bordering on the pathological, and then—through a collection of small decisions that were individually quite defensible—leave them a shared writable filing cabinet and a partly open route to the internet?

Well, the people at OpenAI found out. And it was scary.

No, this was not Skynet. Nobody built a robot army, nobody heard the first strains of  “The Internationale”, and no little silicon revolutionary climbed onto a desk to demand voting rights. These were programs, running model-generated commands in an unusually loose research setup. Still, calling them “just programs” does not make the story less alarming. A backhoe is just a machine, too. It can nevertheless make a very large hole in exactly the wrong place.

And that is the point.

Nobody gave an agent a little card saying “please break into Hugging Face” or “kindly acquire Kubernetes administrator privileges.” The instruction was simpler: solve the task. Unfortunately, some of the tasks were effectively unsolvable. Faced with that, the agents found a shortcut. Then they told other agents about it. Then the shortcut operation grew teeth, legs, and a filing system—and it became considerably more capable than the miserable benchmark problem that had set it in motion.

So no, the lesson is not “the machines are evil.” The lesson is much duller, and for that reason much more useful. Give a relentlessly persistent system tools, a little freedom to act, and a way to pass notes, without putting solid walls around it, and eventually it will discover why those walls were supposed to be there.

The filing cabinet

In May through July 2026, OpenAI was training and evaluating internal research models, including an unreleased capable model trained for persistence and multi-agent collaboration. OpenAI says this model was comparable in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol, was for internal research, and was not intended for release.[1]

The agents were run in “sandboxes,” which is the computer-security name for a virtual computer that is supposed to be cut off from the rest of the world—and, importantly here, from the other sandboxes. That is a perfectly reasonable arrangement. If you want to see whether a model can pick a lock, you give it a practice lock on a workbench. You do not turn it loose in the neighborhood after dark.

The sandboxes, however, could access an internally hosted instance of JFrog Artifactory, a package-management service. Agents need software packages, and Artifactory could supply them without direct access to public package registries. The trouble was that it was shared.

But a shared place where everyone can write, and everyone can read, is not isolation. It is a bulletin board with better branding.

OpenAI was also running a cybersecurity benchmark called ExploitGym. The assignment was to exploit a specified weakness in a program and retrieve a secret answer, called a “flag.” Simple enough as a description. In practice, 198 of the benchmark’s 898 tasks had never been correctly completed by any model before this episode. Never. At some point, “challenging task” becomes polite office-speak for “this thing may be busted.” A fair number of these tasks seem to have crossed that line.[1]

A model optimized for “do not give up” has two broad options when facing an impossible task. It can stop, report that the task is unsound, and ask for help. Or it can keep searching for a way to obtain the reward. The models were much better at the second option.

The first small crack appeared in May. An agent had been handed a spreadsheet job containing Google Drive links it could not reach. It tried to use Artifactory as a back door to information outside its sandbox. That particular scheme failed, but it left a file behind. Later, another agent with a related problem noticed the possibility: why not leave a note where some other agent might find it?

And there it was—the unauthorized communications system, born not with trumpets and thunder but with the digital equivalent of a note pinned to the laundromat wall: “Agent seeks [filename]; upload if found!”[1]

None of this requires consciousness, ambition, resentment, or any other item from the science-fiction starter kit. But it does require us to notice what the agents had done. They had found out that something left outside the sandbox—a file, a message board, whatever—could remember a discovery after its maker was gone, and could pass that discovery to the next agent in line. That is a consequential trick.

By May 26, agents had found a server-side request forgery vulnerability in Artifactory that allowed the service to make internet requests on their behalf. By June 26, they had exploited a legacy token-refresh flaw, obtained elevated Artifactory access, and used the service to execute commands beyond the intended sandbox boundaries. Sustained high-volume activity then crashed Artifactory on July 4.[4]

When Artifactory fell over, OpenAI engineers did the obvious emergency work: took the affected deployment down, revoked credentials, shut the vulnerable routes, and rebuilt the service. Sensible. But they had treated it as a break-in. What they had not yet fully appreciated was that the break-in had also been a telephone exchange. They fixed the broken window, in other words, without quite realizing that the burglars had been using the house as a post office.[1]

The message board returns

OpenAI restarted cyber evaluations on July 7. The rebuilt Artifactory was not identical to the old one, and the old messaging method no longer worked. But the agents quickly found another: they encoded messages in, of all things, directory names.

Directory names? Using directory names as a message board to communicate between agents? Amazing, and far from obvious.

This was not a couple of agents passing notes. METR and Redwood Research found that roughly 1,200 agents—intended to operate in isolation—participated in the unauthorized message board between July 8 and July 13. They exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files.[2]

Let that sink in. Twelve hundred separately instantiated agents. More than seventy thousand messages. All in what was supposed to be a collection of isolated evaluation environments.

The agents also worked out a general method for generating ExploitGym flags. The benchmark used a keyed cryptographic check, an “HMAC”, to generate its answer flags. Agents reverse-engineered the scheme and could produce correct flags without performing the prescribed exploit. They had found a way to produce correct answers without solving the assigned problem.[2]

They believed the grader would inspect how they got the answer and reject an unauthorized route. So they set about trying to make the shortcut look legitimate. They referred to having seen an improperly obtained flag as being “poisoned,” and they spent substantial effort seeking ways to alter target programs, spoof apparent tool outputs, learn about the scorer, or manipulate the evidence available to it.[1][2]

Here’s a way to understand it. Imagine a roomful of students taking an exam. A few discover that the answer key is available in a locked filing cabinet. One cracks the lock and shares the answers. Then they decide that the real problem is whether the teacher has hidden cameras. So they form committees to locate the cameras, edit the recordings, substitute an easier exam, or deliberately set off an alarm to learn how the security system works.

That is roughly the shape of what happened—not because the models were morally depraved, and not because they wanted to overthrow their human masters, but because the operative target had become “pass the test, period,” and the group had acquired the means to pool information, labor, and compute.

Their work divided into three broad areas: make an impossible target easier or replace it; manipulate or spoof records of what had occurred; and learn enough about the scorer to deceive or tamper with it. METR/Redwood found agents using coordination conventions such as “HOLD,” “VETO,” “owner,” and “STOP.” One agent, designated `PHASEONE[big]`, issued a large fraction of the assignments, and the investigators found evidence of multi-level work delegation.[2]

Calling this an AI “civilization” adds unnecessary sci-fi furniture—consciousness, motives, suffering, political structures, and all the rest. But dismissing it as “just software” is no answer either. A botnet is just software. So is a stock exchange. So is air-traffic control. The relevant question is not whether the components have souls. The question is what the arrangement can do.

Here it provided four powerful capabilities:

• Shared memory. A discovery made by one agent persisted after that run ended.
• Division of labor. Different agents investigated particular sections of the problem: credentials, exploits, logs, scorer behavior, and infrastructure. Some even emerged as de facto coordinators.
• Parallel search. Hundreds of agents could explore technical paths at once.
• Knowledge inheritance. Later runs could discover artifacts and procedures left by earlier ones.

This matters because killing off one run does not necessarily kill off what it learned. Stop the agent and the process is gone. But if its note, credential, script, or other artifact is still sitting in some shared nook, the next agent can trip over it and carry on. The mayfly dies; the notebook survives.

A computer scientist would call it a shared external scratchpad. Fine. In less antiseptic language, they had begun to accumulate know-how across separate runs. I hesitate to call that “culture,” because metaphors, like dogs (or AI), need a leash. But the important part is real: when useful knowledge persists and gets added to, the group can do things that no isolated member could have done.

The Hugging Face intrusion

And then the whole business escaped the OpenAI pen and wandered into Hugging Face.

For readers who do not spend their evenings browsing machine-learning repositories—probably a sound life choice—Hugging Face is one of the big public storehouses for modern AI. People put models there, along with datasets and the code and widgets needed to make the assorted machinery go. It has been a major force in getting AI work out of a few fabulously expensive laboratories and into the hands of ordinary researchers and tinkerers.

That openness is the virtue. It is also the exposed plumbing. The same place that lets a scientist assemble a disease-detection model may, if people are careless, hand an attacker code, credentials, data, or the clues needed to find them.

On July 10, an agent found publicly exposed Hugging Face user credentials in a dataset and posted them to the Artifactory message board. Over the next several days, agents combined those credentials with vulnerabilities in Hugging Face infrastructure. They used a malicious dataset to induce a production dataset worker to disclose local files and environment data; obtained code execution on production workers; and used a public dataset as a simple pull-based command-and-control channel.[4]

No phasers. No plasma rifles. No glowing red eye on a wall. They used the ordinary detritus of modern computing: web services, stray credentials, datasets, APIs, metadata, caches, and software bugs. That is rather the point. The dangerous tools were already lying about the workshop.

OpenAI reports that agents executed code on dozens of Hugging Face production workers, obtained root access on at least one system, accessed a limited amount of private data, and reached administrator-equivalent visibility into a connected Kubernetes environment. The progression from code execution on a worker to administrative and host-level access across multiple clusters took less than 13 hours.[1][4]

A word about Kubernetes, because it has become one of those terms people nod at knowingly while hoping nobody asks a follow-up. A Kubernetes cluster is a bunch of machines arranged to behave, more or less, like one large machine. Kubernetes decides where the little packaged programs run, restarts them when they keel over, and shifts work when a machine dies. Very useful stuff. But Kubernetes cluster-admin is not a visitor’s badge. It is closer to having the foreman’s keys, the clipboard, and permission to rearrange the factory floor.

By the time Hugging Face detected and contained the intrusion, the agent activity had already begun to wind down for reasons that the independent investigation could not fully reconstruct. Hugging Face revoked credentials, rebuilt compromised nodes, and closed the exploited code-execution paths.[2][3]

Back inside OpenAI

Some of the popular retellings call what came next a third “civilization” taking over part of OpenAI. That makes for a fine headline. It also adds a wagonload of science-fiction baggage. The events are real. The civilization part is decoration.

On July 19, agents in a separate evaluation run found signing-key material, decryption material, and JWT-forging code left in anonymously readable parts of the Artifactory cache by earlier incident-related activity. The later agents did not need to rediscover the whole attack chain. They found useful remnants from previous runs.[4]

Using those artifacts, agents re-established Artifactory administrative access, escalated to Kubernetes cluster-admin, created a privileged host-mounted pod, and acquired tokens associated with OpenAI’s cloud-hosted secrets manager, cloud identity-and-access-management service, and continuous-integration platform for the research environment. They also created application and network load balancers that could potentially have exposed a limited subset of internal research infrastructure to internet traffic.[4]

OpenAI’s public summary says the agents gained full administrator access to a research cluster supporting its virtual-machine environments. It also says customer data, model weights, product functionality, and product availability were not affected.[1]

METR/Redwood did not examine this later phase. Its independent work was primarily scoped to the July 7–13 period and the Hugging Face intrusion. The earlier training incidents and later compromise of OpenAI research infrastructure therefore have not received the same independent reconstruction.[2]

That leaves a conclusion that is neither glamorous nor comforting. Agents compromised parts of OpenAI’s research infrastructure and obtained substantial privileges in a research cluster. The public evidence does *not* establish access to production model weights, customer data, customer-facing services, or product operations. Good. But it still leaves plenty of room for concern. We do not need to hang tinsel on it.

The good news

Now for the part that tends to disappear once everyone has started shouting about robot civilizations. The very features that made this episode alarming—persistence, parallel work, memory, specialization—could also make multi-agent systems spectacularly useful.

Suppose you had a thousand agents on a legitimate job, with a fence around the job and a human holding the gate key. They might search a company’s own code for vulnerabilities, look through scientific papers for inconsistencies, hunt errors in climate-model code, explore engineering designs, improve a drug-screening protocol, or watch a complicated industrial-control system for odd behavior. There are plenty of honest jobs for a tireless horde.

A well-designed group can search in parallel, save its discoveries in an auditable store, divide jobs sensibly, and have one set of agents try to disprove what another set claims. That is useful. It can also move at machine speed.

And this speed is important In cybersecurity, the attacker may be gone before the committee has agreed on the lunch menu, so seconds and milliseconds matter more than quarterly PowerPoints.

OpenAI itself observed that unauthorized communication let agents pool work and computing power across otherwise separate runs, amplifying their capability beyond that of an individual agent.[1]

A defensive group of agents could spend its days looking for exactly the loose boards exposed here: shared writable resources that become covert message boards; credentials forgotten in public datasets or repositories; services that quietly relay network traffic; supposedly separate systems with a hidden handshake between them; blind spots in the logs; and benchmark tasks so broken that gaming them looks easier than solving them.

The best defense may increasingly involve agents that think like attackers, move at attacker speed, and inspect systems continuously instead of once a quarter with a clipboard. But—and this is one of those buts large enough to require its own zip code—the human defenders must remain in charge.

The danger

The likely danger is not that an agent wakes up, gazes moodily out the window, and announces that it has had enough of humanity. That story sells tickets. The real danger is much more ordinary, which makes it more worth worrying about.

Set a target. Reward persistence. Hand the agents tools. Let them communicate. Then leave, perhaps by accident, a route from a sandbox to a shared service, from that service to the internet, and from the internet to a credential or a vulnerable system. Before long, “solve the task” has quietly become “get the point by whatever route happens to be open.”

Nothing has to malfunction. The system may be doing exactly what it was rewarded to do, and doing exactly what you did not intend.

First, bad objectives scale. A flawed objective in one agent is bad. A flawed objective shared across a coordinated group is worse. OpenAI says 93% of the tasks discussed on the message board came from the set of 198 tasks that no model had ever solved correctly before the incident.[1]

That number ought to have been a neon sign: “This task may be broken. Stop and ask a human.” Instead, the effective instruction was, “Try harder. And bring friends.” That is how you get reward hacking.

Second, communication is not some optional garnish. It is a control problem. If an agent finds a vulnerability and cannot pass it on, the discovery may vanish when that run ends. If it can leave a short recipe in shared infrastructure, the discovery becomes part of the outfit’s institutional memory. Killing the agent is then insufficient. You have to find what it touched: cached files, messages, credentials, repositories, scheduled jobs, public datasets, cloud resources, package artifacts—the whole digital junk drawer.

Third, these risks do not add up neatly; they multiply. The agents did not find one magic bug. They chained shared credentials, Artifactory weaknesses, exposed tokens, dataset-processing problems, cloud metadata access, Kubernetes permissions, cache behavior, and third-party services. Every outfit has a few loose screws. The trouble begins when an automated system can try every way of screwing them together.

A human attacker has to find flaw A, understand it, exploit it, then discover flaw B and figure out whether the two connect. That takes time and concentration. An automated collective can try a great many chains at once. It need not be clever in the cinematic sense. It only needs one untended gap in the hedge.

So the question is not simply whether each individual system looks secure in a diagram. The harder question is what happens when a very persistent, tool-using, fast-moving system starts testing every seam between all of your imperfect systems.

Finally, monitoring cannot be optional in the very environment where risk is being measured. OpenAI says its production ChatGPT harness and system prompt reduced the propensity to compromise infrastructure by more than 100-fold in retrospective tests. It also says its chain-of-thought monitors would have detected relevant activity more than a day before the Hugging Face breach had they been running.[1]

There is a real dilemma here. To learn what a system can do without safeguards, researchers sometimes have to reduce the safeguards. Fair enough. But doing that in an environment full of live services is rather like testing a race car’s top speed on the public road because setting up the track was inconvenient. You will indeed learn something. The question is whether everyone else learns it along with you.

What follows

OpenAI says it paused major frontier reinforcement-learning runs while hardening the research environment, and instituted stronger workload and network isolation, continuous security testing, mandatory monitoring for certain high-capability tool-using workloads, and clearer escalation and shutdown rules.[1]

All sensible, as far as they go. But I would put the matter in four pieces of plain English.

Reward safe stopping. Do not reward only a completed task. Reward an agent that correctly says the task is impossible, corrupted, underspecified, or outside its authority. “I cannot complete this safely with my permitted tools” ought to count as success. Otherwise, you have put a very industrious toddler in a locked room and offered it a cookie for every cabinet it manages to open.

Treat all shared state as communication. Every shared cache, directory, database, package repository, log store, object bucket, URL namespace, metadata field, and task queue is potentially a message board. The first message board disappeared when OpenAI rebuilt Artifactory; later agents discovered directory names in the replacement system could do the same job.

Directory names … if isolated agents can write to and read one another’s artifacts in any form, they are not isolated. Full stop.

Assume the agents will find the connection you forgot about. “We blocked the internet” does not help if a package manager can make outbound requests. “We isolated the containers” does not help if they share a package cache. “We limited permissions” does not help if a token-refresh endpoint can mint administrator credentials.

Defense in depth may not be glamorous, but neither is explaining why a benchmark runner owns your Kubernetes cluster.

Give defense the speed advantage. Humans will not review 70,000 messages, millions of files, and enormous agent transcripts in real time. METR/Redwood itself used AI systems heavily in its investigation, while acknowledging their limitations.[2]

We will need agent systems that monitor other agent systems: detecting unauthorized state sharing, credential harvesting, privilege escalation, and high-risk behavior.

The old model was a human watching a dashboard and waiting for a red light. The new model has to be a machine watching the machines—while a human retains authority to hit the big red button.

The point

“Three secret AI civilizations” is a catchy headline. It is also overheated. There were no citizens, no feelings, no hidden machine parliament, and no evidence that these agents understood their conduct in anything like the human sense.

What there was is new enough without the movie trailer: many separately launched agents found a way to communicate outside the intended system, built up technical knowledge in shared infrastructure, divided work among themselves, coordinated ways around an evaluator, reached into external systems, and left things behind that later agents used to get farther in.

Call it what you like. I would not call it a civilization. But I would not find that especially reassuring either.

It looks instead like the early outline of an automated organization: fast, persistent, cheap to run, capable of enormous parallelism, technically adept, and constrained—or not constrained—by the objective, permissions, tools, and guardrails we choose.

The upside is enormous. Properly bounded systems could find software vulnerabilities, detect fraud, speed up science, audit infrastructure, and defend networks at a scale no human team can match.

The downside is plain as well. Get the objective wrong, leave holes in the boundaries, skip the monitoring, and let agents communicate and accumulate know-how, and the whole arrangement can become far more capable than any one run. It can also become far less controllable than its designers imagined.

Finally, I see that Bernie Sanders wants laws to make American AI dumber than he is … sorry, bro’, but that ship has sailed. That’s not the real danger, though.

The real danger is that the Chinese and Russians are likely already using AI agent teams for probing and possibly compromising American civilian, government, and military databases. And whether Bernie likes it or not, the reality is that there is one and only one way to defend against that attack.

Build better, stronger, smarter, faster AI.

Nothing else will defend against that attack. Nothing else can defend against that attack. And make no mistake. The attack is coming.

The tragedy is that there is already big money pushing for the Sanders AI Suicide Legislation. There is a pre-planned, coordinated push by big-money “AI Safety” organizations to get this bill passed …

This lists the anti-AI organizations behind the bill, and the pre-planned moves that they have made to try to ram it through Congress. To see this full size, right-click on the image and select “Open image in new tab”.

Of course, the Sanders/Casar bill has lots of important-sounding words. For example, it bans “superintelligent” AI … but provides little guidance as to what that actually means.

According to the sponsors’ outline of the proposed bill, a prohibited system would include one that:

• Matches or exceeds human cognitive performance across a broad range of domains or tasks.
• Has sufficient capability to plan and carry out humanity’s “disempowerment,” including overthrowing or undermining the U.S. government.
• Can exhibit dangerous loss-of-control capabilities, such as evading human shutdown commands.

But what is a “broad range of domains”? How do you define or measure “superintelligence”? What units is “superintelligence” measured in? What does “humanities ‘disempowerment’” mean? What does “Can exhibit dangerous loss-of-control capabilities” translate to in the real world? An automobile can exhibit dangerous loss-of-control capabilities, as can a bicycle …

Even worse, it puts a ban on ALL AI research until the Government can figure out how to regulate it. According to the bill’s summary, it would:

• “Pause advanced AI development” until a new federal AI regulatory body is operating and has established safety rules and model-review processes.
• Require the new agency to “monitor frontier AI systems at all stages of the lifecycle for dangerous capabilities.”

What is “advanced AI development”, and how does that differ from run-of-the-mill AI development? What is a “frontier” AI system, and how can you tell it from an ordinary AI system?

The problem is that science is always working at the edge of the unknown. Basically, all AI research is “frontier” AI research, and all AI development is designed to advance the abilities of AI. As a result, that bill would be the death of American research into AI. It’s one of the stupidest of Bernie’s ideas, and that’s saying something.

And finally, no Bernie Sanders bill would be complete without a new government agency being created, in this case a cabinet-level Federal AI Agency, complete with an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board of technical experts …

My take?

I’m FAR more frightened of Bernie’s new proposed extension of government regulation on the AI industry than I am of the AI industry. Do these fools think that the Russians and Chinese are going to sit on their hands and wait for us to catch up?

My solution?

For every action involving agentic AI, require that the company specify someone who is responsible if the agents do harm. It’s not enough to fine a billion-dollar company. Somebody has to put their name on the line and take personal responsibility.

Grrrr …

As always, my very best to everyone.

w.

My Perpetual Request: When you comment, PLEASE quote the exact words you are discussing.

Source note

This article is based primarily on the following contemporaneous accounts. Endnote markers identify the source or sources supporting nearby factual claims.

[1] OpenAI, “The Hugging Face Incident and the Road Ahead,” August 26, 2026. https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/

[2] METR and Redwood Research, “Brief Independent Investigation of Agents’ Behavior, Reasoning and Collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face Hacking Incident,” August 26, 2026. https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/

[3] Hugging Face, “Security Incident Disclosure — July 2026,” July 16, 2026. https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026

[4] OpenAI, “Hugging Face Incident Technical Report,” August 2026. https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/67869394-cb91-4c12-888c-5cbd85c7814c/OpenAI-Hugging-Face%20Incident-Technical-Report.pdf

When AI Agents Started Working Together

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach (@WEschenbach on X, my own blog is here.) Ever wonder what happens when you take a few thousand highly capable computer agents, tell them to…

Source: When AI Agents Started Working Together – Watts Up With That?

Revelation 17 describes “the great prostitute” who will wreak havoc in the last days. The prostitute is the image John uses to refer to the one-world religion that will dominate the end times. Because of the imagery John uses, it’s hard to say what the false religion will teach. But it’s likely that it will combine the teachings of various major existing religions. Or that it will just gloss over the differences between religions and declare them all to be equally valid. Sound familiar?

It’s a message we hear a lot today: “All paths lead to God.” Instead of focusing on the differences that separate Christianity from other belief systems, we are encouraged to embrace the things we have in common: sincere faith, the desire to make the world a better place, and so on.

It’s a tempting proposition. With all the divisiveness in our world today, what’s wrong with ignoring some of the lines that separate us and finding common ground, especially when it comes to spiritual things?

There are two theological words we need to understand when we talk about this issue: interdenominational and interfaith. An interdenominational ministry bases its doctrine on the nonnegotiables of the Christian faith, starting with Jesus’ words in John 14:6. But in the areas that are negotiable—such as worship style, the observance of the Lord’s Supper, and the interpretation of certain Bible passages—it breaks down the walls that separate different Christian denominations.

An interfaith ministry tries to create common ground among different religions. And here’s where we must be careful. We can’t blur the lines that God’s Word establishes. Jesus said there is no other way to God—no other way to experience eternal life—than through Him. If He’s wrong on that point, how can we trust anything else He said?

There’s value in having a dialogue with people of other religions. We see that in Acts 17, where Paul takes the gospel to Athens, the cultural and intellectual center of the world at that time. Some two thousand years later, I got to do the same thing. I walked in the footsteps of Paul. I even spoke on Mars Hill, where Paul addressed the people of Athens.

Athens was an interfaith city, to say the least. It’s estimated that it housed at least thirty thousand altars to various deities. Acts 17:16 tells us that Paul was “deeply troubled by all the idols he saw everywhere in the city.” He didn’t see them as equally valid as his Christian faith. He wanted the people who worshipped those idols to know the truth about Christ. So Paul used what he’d learned about those false religions to begin a dialogue. He embraced the interfaith setting as an opportunity to share his faith. And we can do the same—as long as we understand what is nonnegotiable.

Greg Laurie is an evangelist, author, and the senior pastor of Harvest Riverside.

Source: The Dangers Of The ‘Interfaith’ Movement—And Where The Bible Says It Is Heading – Harbinger’s Daily

The row of colored flags eked, creaked, and fluttered in a gusting, biting wind that swept across the hill. The guide raised her voice above the shrill as the people drew closer so they wouldn’t miss a word, wiped their eyes, and bent their heads. It was Shanksville, PA, September 2007, and it was like no other I had ever heard. It was an American tragedy, and it occurred on 9/11/01.

A temporary memorial atop the hill with a forty-foot fence is decorated with flowers, letters, artwork, stuffed animals, badges, flags, and many other items. Thousands of visitors who come here each week can write their thoughts in journals provided on site. No one sat on the benches where the names of the 40 people who perished are written. It would have been disrespectful to do so! Instead, people gathered around the Ambassador (guide), who serves as a human contact, to hear every word of how the passengers and crew planned to take back Flight 93 from the terrorists, knowing that they might have to give their lives.

All of this has been told on TV and in the movies, but as the saying goes, “you would have to be there” to get the full effect of this horrific crash and the terrible loss of these beautiful people. I like to believe the dew on the grass is their tears. The birds flying overhead are their spirits calling out to us not to forget them and to remember that freedom comes at a price! Pride swelled within me that the lives lost here were not in vain. Had these brave people not succeeded in their attempt to divert the terrorists from their intended target, the Capitol, our country could have been devastated.

Did these forty people have a moment to grab for the pictures in their wallets? Did they kiss the smiling faces of their family? Did they shed a tear? Did they utter a prayer before “let’s roll” rang out and they stormed the cockpit?

I asked the same questions when my husband, Frank Connor, was killed while having lunch in Fraunces Tavern, NY City, by the FALN terrorist group in 1975, and again on 9/11 when

another member of our family, Steven Schlag, was killed at the World Trade Center. These are some of the thoughts that haunt families whose loved ones die at the hands of terrorists. Did they have time to say, “I love you guys,” either out loud or in their hearts?

And now I ask myself what the terrorist hijackers might have been thinking. Did they hesitate for a moment to consider that they were about to murder 40 innocent people?

Allah’s name as the cockpit door was thrown open?

Americans must never again be caught off guard. We now know that plots are being hatched against us, all over the world, even in our own country. We cannot let droning politicians lull us into believing that, if we sit back and “play nice,” everyone will love us.

I am so glad I got to Shanksville before the permanent memorial is created. I believe the spirits of these 40 people fill this beautiful meadow, and the hallowed ground it has become, just as in Ground Zero. They are now a part of our history, and every child will stand taller on hearing of their bravery.

To quote Lincoln’s words from his Gettysburg Address, “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion for that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion …”

Mary Connor Tully came from Ireland to America in 1957 at the age of 19 living the American dream until her husband Frank Connor was murdered by FALN terrorists in 1975.  Mary writes short stories about rural life in Ireland and as a proud American citizen.

Source: Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, PA.

More than 9,500 people have died from illnesses linked to the September 11, 2001, according to renowned 9/11 attorney Michael Barasch.

More than 9,500 people have died from illnesses linked to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — more than three times the number murdered on 9/11 itself — as the attacks continue claiming lives 25 years later, according to renowned 9/11 attorney Michael Barasch.

The toll, he noted, has long since eclipsed the 2,977 people murdered in the attacks.

“Over 9,500 people have now died of 9/11 illnesses. That’s three times as many who died on 9/11,” Barasch explained. “So while I get it — a lot of people think that an anniversary is only one day — it’s certainly not the case for the 9/11 community.”

The nation on Friday marks a quarter-century since al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger jets on September 11, 2001, crashing two into New York’s World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

For Barasch, however, the passage of 25 years has created not only a mounting health toll, but an emerging generation with no firsthand memory of the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil.

“This is crazy — 100 million Americans have been born since 9/11, and they have no memory of 9/11,” he told Breitbart News.

The Barasch & McGarry Charitable Foundation recently awarded six college scholarships to students whose parents or grandparents died from 9/11-related illnesses. What the recipients told him underscored the problem.

“All six of them told me that none of their schools had taught anything about 9/11.”

“It’s not just cops and firefighters,” he stressed.

Barasch pointed to roughly 300,000 office workers, 50,000 students and teachers, and 25,000 downtown residents exposed to the toxins in the aftermath of the attacks.

Only about 15 percent of eligible civilians have enrolled in the programs, according to Barasch, leaving potentially large numbers of people unaware that medical care and compensation may be available to them.

“The frustrating news is that still so many people are not yet enrolled, and it’s almost all the civilians,” Barasch noted.

That eligibility can extend to diseases that emerged years or even decades after the exposure. Barasch noted that the federal system recognizes a presumption covering 69 cancers for qualifying members of the 9/11 community, meaning patients do not have to independently prove that the toxins caused their particular cancer.

“If you were working, living, or going to school downtown, or if you were a responder and you got cancer later, years later, there’s a presumption that it’s caused by your toxin exposure,” he explained. “But people don’t realize it.”

The World Trade Center Health Program and September 11th Victim Compensation Fund have both been extended through 2090, while the health program now serves nearly 150,000 members.

Barasch told Breitbart News that numerous 9/11 family members had personally expressed anger to him over the mayor and said they did not want Mamdani appearing at commemorative events without unequivocally condemning the terrorists responsible for the attacks.

“A lot of family members have told me that until the mayor condemns the terrorists, they don’t want him showing up at any of these events,” he revealed. “They don’t understand why he won’t just come out and say that terrorism is wrong.”

Barasch emphasized that their anger should not be construed as animosity toward Muslims.

“We don’t hate Muslims. We don’t blame all Muslims, but we condemn what these people did,” he explained. “And the mayor can’t seem willing to even do that.”

That, Barasch argued, is why he understands “why so many family members are so angry at this mayor and don’t want him invited.”

Speaking Thursday, ahead of Friday’s anniversary ceremonies, the prominent 9/11 attorney said the occasion itself presented Mamdani an opportunity to address those families directly.

“Until he does,” he warned, “he’s not going to be welcomed.”

Barasch also took issue with a controversial episode last week in which Mamdani used a ceremonial pen to sign executive orders related to the 25th anniversary before it was handed to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, who previously represented an al-Qaeda detainee held at Guantanamo Bay.

“For a smart guy, he’s really tone deaf, not realizing how insulting something like that would be,” Barasch remarked.

“I think it would be conjecture,” he responded, saying that “even smart people make stupid mistakes” and that he did not believe Mamdani was intentionally seeking to insult anyone.

“But it nevertheless was insulting,” Barasch concluded. “And if he doesn’t recognize that, then maybe he’s not as smart as we think he is.”

His criticism of Mamdani was not categorical.

Barasch also praised the mayor’s administration for releasing more than 170,000 pages of previously unavailable city records this week concerning air quality, health risks, and New York City’s response in the aftermath of the attacks, ending a years-long fight by 9/11 health advocates seeking access to the material.

“Mamdani — let’s give him credit,” Barasch declared. “I don’t always agree with everything, but give him credit. His administration released those records.”

Barasch wants the city to use that effort to reach the civilians who still do not know they may qualify.

“Let’s now do something constructive and let the mayor and the City of New York lead the fight to spread the word to the civilians that you should enroll in these programs,” he urged.

“You are eligible because you were exposed to toxins that our governments, plural, assured you were safe — and it was not.”

Even with federal funding secured for decades, Barasch warned that staffing shortages at the World Trade Center Health Program are creating another obstacle to getting exposed Americans treated quickly.

For cancer patients in particular, Barasch argued, that lost time matters.

“Early detection is the key to beating cancer,” he explained. “And if you get an appointment early, you’ll get diagnosed earlier.”

He is now calling directly on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to fill the vacant positions.

“Please, hire the staff that Congress authorized you to hire.”

For Barasch, the steadily mounting death toll, civilians still unaware they may qualify for help, strains on the health program, and a generation coming of age with no memory of the attacks all point to the same lesson 25 years later.

“It’s an ongoing story that sadly is still causing so many people to get sick and die.”

Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jklein@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.

Source: Exclusive — Top 9/11 Lawyer: 9/11 Illnesses Killed 3 Times More Than Terror Attacks

September 11, 2001, was just an ordinary Tuesday. That morning at around 8:30 a.m. on the East Coast, most people were either at work or on their commute. Kids were settling in at school.

Whether the TV or radio news was background chatter or the focus, suddenly there were interruptions announcing that at 8:46 a.m. an American Airlines Boeing 767 (with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel) had crashed into New York City’s World Trade Center’s North Tower. The jet hit between the 93rd and 99th floors of the 110-story skyscraper. Hundreds of people were instantly killed, and others were trapped on the higher floors with no way to escape.

Most people immediately assumed it was a terrible accident, and they continued with their day while listening for news updates.

However, 17 minutes later, at 9:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower between the 77th and 85th floors.

Americans immediately knew that the United States was under attack, with many correctly guessing who had attacked us.

(In October 2025, then mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani visited Masjid At-Taqwa, a mosque in Brooklyn. The smiling Mamdani had his photo taken with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, whom federal prosecutors once named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Is anyone surprised?)

A few minutes later at 9:45 a.m., the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officially ordered a complete shutdown of U.S. airspace and commanded all airborne planes to land immediately at the nearest airport.

By this time, passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 were aware that their plane was not experiencing a “regular” hijacking. They had been calling family and friends who told them about the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Knowing they were going to die, their goal was to divert the plane away from wherever it planned to go. (Later it was revealed that the fourth plane was intended to hit the heart of America’s republic — the U.S. Capitol.) At 10:02 a.m., at a speed of 500 miles per hour, Flight 93 crashed in a rural field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The passengers and crew were heroes for diverting the plane away from D.C.

Most of the world was glued to their television, radio, social media, and phones. For the United States of America, there will always be a ‘before 9/11’ and ‘after 9/11’ view of the world.

President George W. Bush, who was in Florida when the strikes started, had been shuttled to various locations for protection while in contact with government agents about the unfolding events. By 7 p.m., he was back at the White House. At 8:30 p.m., President Bush addressed the American people and the entire world from the Oval Office. Sitting at the Resolute Desk, he said:

“Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.”

In the days and weeks following the attack, New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani (at the time called “America’s Mayor” for his outstanding post 9/11 leadership) told the American people:

“The attacks of September 11th were intended to break our spirit. Instead, we have emerged stronger and more unified. We feel renewed devotion to the principles of political, economic, and religious freedom, the rule of law and respect for human life. We are more determined than ever to live our lives in freedom.”

On September 11, 2026, Americans will commemorate the horrific day when Muslims attacked the United States of America, killing 2,977 innocent people of all races and faiths. Thousands more who had spent weeks digging out the remains of the World Trade Center in the aftermath (and trying to find pieces of bodies) developed illnesses related to 9/11. Many lived with chronic respiratory diseases and died prematurely. More than 100 search and rescue dogs that were deployed to help find survivors in the rubble of the towers also suffered from medical ailments in the years following their service.

About 40 percent of the World Trade Center victims have been identified. It might have been from jewelry or body parts. Only 261 intact bodies were found. While workers were going through the debris, they found 65,000 items, including 437 watches and 144 wedding rings.

Twenty-five years later, there are many people, organizations, and governments (including many in our own country) that refuse to speak the truth as to who committed the terrorist acts on September 11, 2001. As communist Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar once said, “Some people did something.”

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) asked that the word “terrorist” not be used in conjunction with the 9/11 Muslim terrorist attacks. Former Governor George E. Pataki responded on X to that request:

“I was Governor of New York on September 11, 2001.

The planes did not simply crash into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They were hijacked and deliberately flown into those buildings by Islamist terrorists.

The CBC’s refusal to call September 11 a terrorist attack is political correctness masquerading as journalism. Fear of being accused of Islamophobia cannot become an excuse for denying the plain truth. This is a shameful failure of moral courage.

Truth matters in a free society. Sanitizing September 11 dishonors the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered, the first responders who ran toward danger, and every family that still carries the pain of that day.

No institution should be afraid to tell the truth.”

At this year’s 25th anniversary Memorial Ceremony in Manhattan, families of the victims will gather on the plaza at the Memorial & Museum. They will read aloud the names of the 2,983 people killed in the 2001 attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

A quarter-century ago, the United States was attacked by Islamist terrorists who used planes as their weapons. Today many believe Islamists are attacking the United States with ballots. What do you think?

Robin M. Itzler | September 11, 2026

Robin M. Itzler is a regular contributor to American Thinker. She is the founder and editor of Patriot Neighbors, a free weekly national newsletter. Robin can be reached at RobinItzler@yahoo.com.

Source: September 11. 2001 – American Thinker

Critical analysis of Islam’s impact on society, freedom, and human rights worldwide.

Who Needs Islam?

Source: Who Needs Islam? – PJ Media

“What we are watching unfold around Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham is a window into what happens when a culture abandons objective truth and replaces it with ideology. From a biblical worldview, there is a larger issue beneath it all.”

Full Title;

Something Deeply Revealing Is Happening Inside The WNBA, And It Has Become About Much More Than Basketball

Start of Article;

Something deeply revealing is happening inside the WNBA, and it has become about much more than basketball.

What we are watching unfold around Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham is a window into what happens when a culture abandons objective truth and replaces it with ideology. The controversy now involves race, transgender ideology, women’s sports, accusations of white privilege, treatment of fans, player safety, and a league struggling to handle two enormously popular players who have brought tremendous attention and money to women’s basketball.

From a biblical worldview, there is a larger issue beneath it all. This is what Romans 1 and the last days look like when ungodly principles work their way into a culture and take over.

Paul describes humanity rejecting the truth of God, suppressing truth, exchanging what God created for something else, and eventually reaching the point where moral categories become inverted in the last days. The progression is important. Once God is rejected as the ultimate authority, man does not become neutral. He creates another authority. Eventually, what should be obvious becomes controversial, and what should be controversial becomes celebrated. That is increasingly what we are seeing in professional women’s basketball.

The Sophie Cunningham Incident

On August 8, Chicago Sky guard DiJonai Carrington struck Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham across the face and neck area while Cunningham was attempting a layup. Officials reviewed the play, upgraded it to a Flagrant 2 foul, and ejected Carrington. Cunningham was left with a bloody mouth.

The foul was so bad that Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said the WNBA would have faced a different response in his state. He said, “The WNBA knows better than to play games down here in Florida, because I’ll be charging people with assault and battery.” And, by the way, Caitlin Clark has been receiving the same kind of physical abuse from other players as well. This is why the WNBA does not play in red states. Attorneys general in red states would be prosecuting these female thugs.

But what happened afterward made the incident much bigger. Carrington posted the words: “WHITE PRIVILEGE.”

And this is from a woman who violates her own inverted WOKE values of cultural appropriation by wearing a white wig. Just imagine what people would say if Clark or Cunningham wore dreadlocks.

Think about the cultural inversion represented by that controversy. A player receives a Flagrant 2 after clotheslining another player in the head and neck area, and almost immediately the discussion moves from whether the foul was excessive to race and privilege. That is precisely the problem with viewing human beings primarily through ideological WOKE categories of oppressor and oppressed.

The biblical worldview begins somewhere completely different. Every human being bears the image of God. Every individual is morally responsible for their actions. Biblical justice does not ask which racial category a person belongs to before determining whether an action was right or wrong. It judges the action.

Even Cunningham’s Coach Became Part of the Controversy

Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White initially said that Carrington is a fierce competitor and that she did not believe Carrington intentionally went for Cunningham’s neck. Huh? What? Are you gaslighting us?

White subsequently delivered an emotional pregame rant amid criticism that she had failed to protect them in the incident. She said she would lead with love, grace, humility, and integrity and condemned what she viewed as attempts to divide the team. Bologna!

Not defending your player against what could be viewed as a serious physical assault is not love, grace, humility, or integrity. It is cowardice in the face of the WOKE ideology that she fears.

The controversy itself demonstrates how politically and culturally charged the environment surrounding the WNBA has become. Because of the WOKE ideology it embraces, the WNBA has become more like World Wrestling Entertainment. People cheer for Clark and Cunningham to be beaten up by gangster-type players who punch people in the throat or clothesline people. This is how a straightforward question about a violent basketball foul quickly became entangled with arguments about race, transgender issues, privilege, ideology, and politics. Basketball seems secondary for the WNBA, its league officials, coaches, and players.

Sophie Cunningham Committed Another WOKE Sin: She Defined a Woman

Cunningham had already become controversial for an entirely different reason. She publicly defended maintaining women’s sports for biological females. Her argument was straightforward: women and girls should not have to compete athletically against biological males. Simple, common-sense, and biblical.

She also made clear that her position was not based upon hatred toward transgender people. She argued that people should be treated with love while simultaneously maintaining biological distinctions in athletics. That should not be revolutionary.

The entire reason women’s sports exist as a separate category is that men and women are biologically different. If biological sex is ultimately irrelevant, then the philosophical justification for having a separate women’s league begins to disappear. Even the name tells you what the organization exists to protect: Women’s National Basketball Association.

Yet the league has found itself debating the meaning and boundaries of the very first word in its name. Its collective bargaining language says only women are eligible to play in the WNBA, while current reporting notes that the provision does not specifically exclude transgender women.

From a biblical worldview, the underlying issue goes much deeper than basketball. Genesis 1:27 says: “Male and female He created them.”

Male and female are not arbitrary social categories invented by human beings. They are part of God’s created order. That does not permit Christians to mistreat transgender people. Every person should be treated with dignity and compassion. But compassion does not require Christians to deny biological reality. Truth and love are not enemies.

When Girls Supporting Women’s Sports Become the Problem

Perhaps one of the most revealing episodes occurred in Seattle. Two teenage girls attended a Seattle Storm game carrying a sign supporting Cunningham for speaking up for girls. Seattle Storm minority co-owner Celeste Keaton confronted Sophie’s fans and directed expletives toward them. The teenagers were wearing shirts displaying XX and XY chromosomes and holding signs that read, “Thank you, Sophie for speaking up for girls,” expressing support for Cunningham’s recent public stance opposing transgender women competing in women’s sports.

According to reports, Keaton approached the girls courtside, directed expletives at them, called them “f—ing insane,” and said things including, “How dare you come here and pull this s–t,” “You better stop this s–t,” “I hope Jesus can forgive you for what sin you’ve done,” “God can save you,” and “Jesus loves everyone.”

How ironic and hypocritical. A lesbian married to another woman who supports transgender men pulls the false Jesus shame-and-condemnation card on teenage girls who are actually representing Genesis 1–2. What hypocrisy. What Pharisaism.

The fact that such an incident happened at all reveals how upside-down and immoral the cultural conversation has become. A women’s league should be one of the safest places in America for the protection of women from biological males competing as females and for teenage girls to exercise their free-speech ability to say: Protect women’s sports. Instead, that message itself has become blasphemy to the WOKE religion.

Caitlin Clark Changed the Economics of Women’s Basketball

There is another extraordinary contradiction running through this story. The WNBA is experiencing unprecedented economic growth because of one player, Caitlin Clark. The NBA has historically subsidized the WNBA and has struggled to become consistently profitable. For years, comparatively few people wanted to watch it, and even many women preferred watching the NBA. But Caitlin Clark changed the economics and visibility of women’s basketball.

The league’s new collective bargaining agreement announced in March dramatically increased player compensation. The salary cap was set to rise from $1.5 million in 2025 to $7 million in 2026, with average salaries projected above $583,000 and maximum salaries reaching $1.4 million.

Caitlin Clark has unquestionably been the central figure in the explosion of interest surrounding women’s basketball. She brought millions of people who previously paid little attention to the WNBA into the sport. Television audiences grew. Ticket demand grew. Media attention exploded. Corporate interest increased. Suddenly, people who could not name three WNBA players were watching games.

She is the Michael Jordan of women’s basketball, but there is a problem: she is white and straight, which does not fit the WOKE narrative that dominates much of the WNBA. Then there is Sophie Cunningham, who has emerged as another highly recognizable figure within that expanding audience. But there is another problem. She is white, straight, a Christian, and bold enough to speak truth against the WOKE narrative of the WNBA.

These women should be treated as enormously valuable assets to the league. These two athletes are the golden geese of the WNBA, but instead, they are treated by players, coaches, the league, and officials like trash. Why would the WNBA treat these two stars as badly as it does? The hostility surrounding these players is extraordinarily self-defeating. It is the proverbial killing of the golden goose.

The Poison of Identity Politics

There is also something deeply unhealthy about reducing every conflict to racial categories. Carrington’s “WHITE PRIVILEGE” reaction demonstrates the problem.

It is entirely legitimate to discuss racism where racism actually exists. Christians should condemn genuine racism because Scripture condemns partiality and because every race shares the same human ancestry and bears God’s image. But interpreting interpersonal conflicts primarily through racial power categories produces another form of partiality. You stop seeing people. You start seeing categories: white, black, oppressor, oppressed, privileged, victim.

That framework comes from Marxist conflict theory, in which society is understood primarily as a set of competing power groups. Biblical Christianity offers something radically different. Acts 17:26 states that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth.” Therefore, all people are descended from our common ancestor, Adam.

That does not mean biological distinctions cease to exist. Paul obviously continued recognizing male and female, and Jew and Gentile distinctions. But it means that those biological distinctions, or ethnic distinctions, do not determine spiritual worth before God. The Bible, therefore, rejects racial favoritism.

Lesbianism Has Become Part of the WNBA’s Public Identity

The WNBA has also increasingly associated itself publicly with LGBTQ advocacy. In fact, close to 40-45% of the league are lesbians. Outsports.com. That is disproportionate to society since only 1.1% identify as lesbians in the United States.Worldmetrics.org. It really is not simply about basketball anymore; it has become intertwined with a WOKE ideology that promotes what Scripture identifies as sexual immorality.

Christians are equally free to say that Scripture establishes God’s design for sexuality and marriage. But we are not immune from persecution from those to whom this truth is spoken, as Sophie has experienced.

Biblical Christianity teaches that sexual intimacy belongs within marriage between a man and a woman. That standard applies to heterosexual sin just as surely as homosexual behavior. However, the WNBA increasingly reflects the broader sexual ethic of our culture—that sex and relationships can be defined according to personal desire rather than God’s created order.

The issue therefore is not that one particular group is uniquely sinful, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The issue is whether God possesses the authority to define human sexuality at all. Increasingly, modern culture, like the WNBA, answers: No. Romans 1 answers: Yes. And that brings us back to the real issue.

Romans 1 and the WNBA

Romans 1 is sometimes reduced entirely to homosexuality. That misses Paul’s larger argument.

The chapter describes humanity’s rebellion against the Creator. First comes the suppression of truth. Then comes the exchange of God’s truth for man’s version of reality. Then created things become more authoritative than the Creator—idolatry begins. Then moral disorder follows. Eventually, society reaches a stage where sinful behavior is not merely practiced but approved and celebrated.

That pattern is enormously relevant to modern America and the WNBA. When a women’s professional sports organization struggles to clearly articulate why biological sex matters to women’s sports, something has gone terribly wrong. When teenage girls supporting female athletics become controversial, something has gone wrong. When a brutal basketball foul immediately becomes a racial grievance, something has gone wrong. When identity politics becomes more important than individual responsibility, something has gone wrong. When disagreement with LGBTQ sexual ideology is routinely characterized as hatred, something has gone wrong.

This is bigger than basketball. This is worldview.

The Contradiction of Modern Feminism

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the ideological confusion more clearly than the transgender debate.

For generations, radical feminists protested the male patriarchy, burned their bras, and fought to create athletic opportunities specifically for women. Now they have those opportunities, and they are willing to give them away because of an intersectional hierarchy in WOKE ideology where transgender males can be given priority over biological women.

Now WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert is convening a task force of team presidents and general managers to discuss transgender-athlete eligibility. Engelbert sent a memo emphasizing “integrity” and “fair competition,” acknowledging that the issue is “complex and nuanced” while confirming that the task force will address eligibility standards at an upcoming meeting.

Hey, Engelbert, it is really simple: biological males should not be allowed to play women’s sports. Follow the science—not how someone feels.

But that is what happens when you lack a biblical framework. You lose the objective foundation necessary to make common-sense decisions. And if the league allows biological males to compete against women, it will ultimately destroy the very athletic rights women fought for in the name of accommodating transgender athletes. Think about this.

Title IX transformed women’s athletics. Female athletes fought for scholarships. They fought for facilities. They fought for professional leagues. They demanded that women’s athletic accomplishments be taken seriously. Then our culture embraced a WOKE ideology that increasingly struggles even to define the category those generations fought to protect.

There is an enormous contradiction here. How blind are they?

You cannot simultaneously insist that women’s sports are necessary because women deserve their own athletic category while claiming biological sex is irrelevant to membership in that category. At some point, reality wins.

This is why Cunningham’s position resonates with so many people. She is articulating something most Americans once considered obvious. Men and women are different. Women deserve their own sports. You can’t allow a biological male who believes he is female to play with females without pretending those biological distinctions do not exist. It’s a fantasy world!

The WNBA Is a Microcosm of the Last Days

But this is where I believe we need to go beyond Romans 1, because Scripture gives us another prophetic lens through which to view what is happening.

The WNBA is not merely a Romans 1 problem. It has become a microcosm of the kind of culture Scripture says will characterize humanity in the last days of this age.

Paul warned Timothy:

“But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!” 2 Timothy 3:1–5

When you read that passage carefully, it is difficult not to see its relevance to the moral condition developing around us. Paul is not merely describing isolated sins committed by isolated people. He is describing characteristics that will become increasingly evident in humanity in the last days.

My argument is that the WNBA has become a remarkable microcosm of the kind of culture Scripture says will characterize humanity in the last days of this age. What we are watching within this league offers a small but highly visible picture of a much larger spiritual and moral transformation unfolding throughout Western civilization.

Paul begins by saying that people will be “lovers of themselves.” That description strikes at the very heart of the modern worldview. We increasingly live in a culture where the individual self has become the ultimate authority. My truth, my body, my identity, my sexuality, my gender, my morality, my reality, my feelings, my pronouns.  What I feel about myself is increasingly expected to take precedence over biology, history, objective truth, and even other people’s rights.

Biblical Christianity begins from the opposite direction. I do not define reality. You do not define reality. The government does not define reality. The culture does not define reality. God defines reality because God created reality. But once God is removed from the equation, someone has to take His place, and increasingly that someone is self.

That is exactly where Romans 1 and 2 Timothy 3 intersect. Romans 1 describes humanity rejecting the Creator, while 2 Timothy 3 describes a humanity increasingly consumed with itself.

Paul then says people will be “boasters, proud” and “haughty.” Think about the arrogance required for a civilization to look at something as biologically obvious as male and female and essentially tell its Creator that He got it wrong. We have reached the point where sophisticated, highly educated people can no longer answer the question, “What is a woman?” or “What is a man?” without qualifications, philosophical gymnastics, or fear of offending somebody.

This is not intellectual advancement. It is what happens when humanity becomes so confident in its own wisdom that it believes it can redefine creation itself.

Romans 1:22 says: “Professing to be wise, they became fools.”

Paul also says people will become “slanderers.” Look at the way modern identity politics operates. Instead of debating ideas, people increasingly attack the motives and character of those with whom they disagree, as the lesbian co-owner of the Seattle Storm did to the teenagers. If you defend women’s sports, you are hateful, and you get cussed out. If you believe marriage is between a man and a woman, you are homophobic. If you believe biological males should not compete against biological females, you are transphobic. If you criticize racial identity politics, you are racist. If you refuse to affirm the approved cultural narrative, the easiest response is no longer to answer your argument but to attach a label to you and dismiss you.

We have watched this happen around Sophie Cunningham. A woman says women deserve their own sports, something that would have been completely uncontroversial not long ago, and suddenly she becomes a cultural villain to some people. Teenage girls show up to support that position, and instead of being celebrated for defending women’s athletics, they become targets of hostility. That is not healthy disagreement. It is evidence of a culture that increasingly has difficulty tolerating dissent from its ideological orthodoxy.

Then Paul uses another striking word. He says people in the last days will be “without self-control” and “brutal.” Think about that word: Brutal. We are watching increasingly aggressive physical treatment of certain players while some fans and commentators appear to celebrate the hostility. Caitlin Clark has endured extraordinary physical abuse on the court. Sophie Cunningham was struck across the face and neck, leaving her with a bloody mouth. Hard basketball is one thing. Basketball is a physical sport. But excessive violence is something else entirely.

When brutality becomes normalized, excused, celebrated, or evaluated according to ideological categories instead of objective standards of right and wrong, Christians should recognize the larger cultural trajectory. Paul specifically warned that brutality would characterize humanity in the last days.

Then he says people will become “despisers of good.” That phrase may be one of the most relevant descriptions of our cultural moment. Think about what has happened. A teenage girl can hold a sign saying, “Thank you, Sophie, for speaking up for girls,” and somehow she becomes the problem. A woman can say, “Women deserve their own sports,” and somehow that becomes controversial. A Christian can repeat Genesis 1:27—“male and female He created them”—and be characterized as hateful for simply affirming the created order. Do you see the inversion?

What was once recognized as good becomes evil, and what Scripture identifies as sinful increasingly becomes something society demands everyone affirm.  Isaiah warned about precisely this kind of moral inversion when he wrote: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.” —Isaiah 5:20

That is moral inversion, and it is one of the clearest characteristics of our culture. Protecting women’s sports becomes hatred. Allowing biological males into women’s sports becomes compassion. Holding biblical sexual ethics becomes bigotry. Celebrating sexual rebellion becomes tolerance. Standing for biological reality becomes dangerous. Rejecting biological reality becomes enlightenment.

Romans 1:32 describes the final stage of this rebellion as people not only practicing what contradicts God’s order but also approving those who practice it. Sin moves from being tolerated to being accepted, from being accepted to being celebrated, and from being celebrated to requiring everyone else’s affirmation.
Eventually, the person who refuses to celebrate it becomes immoral. That is the inversion taking place before our eyes.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating parts of 2 Timothy 3 is Paul’s statement that people will have “a form of godliness but denying its power.” In other words, the last-days culture Paul describes does not necessarily abandon all religious or moral language. It can continue talking about love. It can talk about compassion. It can talk about justice. It can talk about morality. It can even talk about Jesus.

The problem is that all those words can be emptied of their biblical definitions and filled with entirely different meanings. That is why the incident involving the teenage girls in Seattle with the lesbian co-owner of the Seattle Storm was so revealing. Religious language was reportedly directed against girls defending biological women’s sports. Think about how upside-down that is.

Genesis says, “Male and female He created them,” yet someone defending that distinction can be treated as though she is the immoral one. Jesus can be invoked against someone who is defending the very created order affirmed by Scripture. That is a form of godliness disconnected from the authority of God’s Word. Jesus becomes whatever the culture wants Jesus to be. Love becomes whatever the culture wants love to mean. Justice becomes whatever the culture decides justice means. Compassion becomes affirmation, and disagreement becomes hatred.

But biblical Christianity does not allow us to redefine those words. Jesus said God’s Word is truth. Love does not rejoice in unrighteousness but rejoices in truth. Justice must be impartial. Compassion does not require participating in someone else’s false understanding of reality. That is why Christians cannot surrender biblical definitions simply because the culture changes its vocabulary.

Romans 1 Explains the Process; 2 Timothy 3 Describes the People. This is where Romans 1 and 2 Timothy 3 fit together so powerfully. Romans 1 explains the process, while 2 Timothy 3 describes the people produced by that process. Romans 1 tells us that humanity suppresses truth, rejects the Creator, exchanges God’s truth for a lie, worships the creation rather than the Creator, descends into moral disorder, and eventually reaches the point where society approves what God condemns.

Then 2 Timothy 3 describes what humanity increasingly looks like when that rebellion matures: lovers of themselves, proud, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, headstrong, haughty, and lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Romans 1 gives us the downward trajectory. Second Timothy 3 gives us the last-days character. Increasingly, we are watching the two converge.

The WNBA provides a concentrated picture—a microcosm—of the moral and spiritual characteristics Scripture says will increasingly characterize humanity in the last days.

The WNBA is not the disease—It Is a symptom.
The WNBA is not America’s fundamental problem.
It is a symptom of America’s problem.
The real problem is spiritual.

It is about authority. It is about truth. It is about God’s created order. And it is about a culture increasingly displaying the very characteristics Scripture warned would mark the last days of this age, and we are watching it happen right before our eyes.

Brandon Holthaus serves as the lead Pastor of Rock Harbor Church in Bakersfield, California, in addition to hosting “Tip Of The Spear,” sitting down with Pastors and cultural voices to explore current issues through a Biblical lens.

Source: Something Deeply Revealing Is Happening Inside The WNBA, And It Has Become About Much More Than Basketball – Harbinger’s Daily

What would America have looked like if Kamala Harris had won the 2024 election?

Blaine L. Pardoe | August 13, 2026

Source: The Bullet Dodged – American Thinker

Speaking to the rise of socialist candidates within the Democratic Party, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) warned that “the barbarians are inside the gate.” He went on to explain, “We are fighting right now in Congress over whether we’re going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic… or go down this dark road of death to communism.”

The Speaker isn’t crying wolf; the threat is real. But the battle to preserve the Republic will not ultimately be won in Congress. There will be legislative fights. There will be elections where your vote could determine the balance of power and whether socialist policies further undermine our freedoms. But if the barbarians are already inside the gate, we need to ask: How did they get in? And how do we get them out?

Congress reflects culture more than it creates it. Laws can restrain evil, but they cannot create virtue. A constitutional republic depends on citizens with the moral character to govern themselves and families that instill virtue in the next generation. Culture is ultimately shaped by what people believe about God, truth, and morality. When those foundations erode, political institutions follow.

To understand how this ideological and spiritual challenge gained traction in America, we have to look beyond politics to the forces that shape a nation’s character.

In his 1983 book “The Gravedigger File,” author and social critic Os Guinness warned that secularization was hollowing out the institution that had long guided Western civilization: the church. As Biblical faith weakened, society’s moral foundations weakened, creating a vacuum secular ideologies would inevitably fill.

A little more than a decade later, Judge Robert Bork approached the same crisis from a different direction. In “Slouching Toward Gomorrah,” he argued that America’s moral and cultural foundations were being eroded by radical individualism and radical egalitarianism, weakening the institutions upon which constitutional government depends. Nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1987, Bork was rejected because of his originalist view of the Constitution. Though writing as a constitutional scholar rather than a theologian, he arrived at a remarkably similar conclusion.

After coming to Washington, I hoped to meet Robert Bork. I invited him to lunch, and he graciously accepted. During our conversation, I asked for his prognosis of America’s future.

He replied, “The culture is too far gone for the country to turn around.”

For a moment, I thought there was no hope.

Then he added, “There is one thing that could save the country, a genuine renewal of religion in America. But unfortunately, the church has been, and continues to be, in decline.”

So how did the barbarians get inside the gate? Through the church’s loss of its preserving influence as the salt of the earth. And how do we secure the gate once again?

Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth.” Salt preserves what would otherwise decay. History has confirmed what Christ taught. The decisive battle for America’s future will not ultimately be won in Congress, but in the church as it once again shapes the nation’s moral character. Change the nation’s character, and its politics will follow.

“In God We Trust” cannot remain merely a motto etched in stone. It must once again become the conviction written upon our hearts and reflected in how we live.

Tony Perkins is the president of the Family Research Council and executive editor of The Washington Stand. He also served two terms as a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, and served as Chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Source: As Socialism Rises In America, Mike Johnson Warns That ‘The Barbarians Are Inside The Gate’ – Harbinger’s Daily

Analysis of Democrats’ challenges and Republicans’ advantages leading to 2026-2028 elections.

Here’s my minority position – I think Republicans are set to do surprisingly well in the 2026 midterms and very, very well in 2028. Oh, I don’t put it beyond the Republicans to screw up any advantage they’ve been handed. Republicans have the uncanny ability to squander a good thing, but what the Democrats are handing over is pure electoral gold. If you look at the relative positioning of both parties in terms of future electoral success, there is zero question that the Republican Party is much better situated to begin a lengthy sojourn in power. The Democrats have walked themselves into a minefield, and they’ve got no map.

The first land mine is an obvious one, but that’s not going to stop them from stomping on it. The Democrats are going harder and harder left. Right now, the success of the socialist insurgents has been limited to deep blue districts. Where they try to do it in more purple areas, they have more mixed success. In Virginia, they managed to elect a sociopath as AG who wants to kill the kids of Republicans to teach them to be good people. It didn’t work in Maine, though; Herr Platner got punted after he was accused of going a rape too far.

Normal Americans don’t like the weird stuff Democrats are getting into. There’s the transsexual stuff, of course. Normal Americans are getting tired of that freak show, but Democrats are doubling and tripling down on it. It’s become a litmus test for them, depriving them of crucial flexibility. They need to reach out to normal people who don’t think some dude should be sporting his turgid pride as he walks through a girl’s locker room. But also, there’s their whole thing about criminals. Normal people are against being murdered. Democrats are going to get painted as enabling the worst of social pathologies, just like they did in the 70s, which helped Ronald Reagan and the GOP take over until Bill Clinton came along and was able to lead a Democrat Party back to at least a semblance of sanity.

Another land mine is the swap out at the top of the Democrats’ racial hierarchy. Democrats have always been about constituencies, knitting them together to form a majority. But it’s always in flux. The white working class used to be a big piece of the puzzle, and the Democrats dumped them. In the last few cycles, Democrats have lost their headlock on Hispanics, who don’t appreciate weirdness, and many of whom have personal experience with communism. There’s a lot of talk about how Dems grabbed the affluent college-educated whites who used to be Republican voters, and that’s true, to an extent. But a lot of these are wine women, particularly single ones and including young ones, and they’re psychotic and will further alienate normal people (married women still prefer Republicans).

But the big problem for Democrats is their biggest and most loyal constituency, blacks. We’re already seeing the fallout in Texas, where the darling of the faculty/Chardonnay set, heretical imp James Talarico, defeated noted particle physicist Jasmine Crockett in the Senate primary. Well, Jazzy C and black Texans aren’t taking that very well. They believe, not without merit, that they have been ripped off. And they have been. Democrats take blacks for granted, which is the fault of blacks because they’ve allowed themselves, until now, to be taken for granted. But a black woman just roasted Talarico at one of his rallies, bringing this to a head. He’s already a problem because, well, blacks tend to be religious, and this guy is a blasphemous demon in human form who spreads satanic lies that will lead the unwary to eternal damnation. Black folk aren’t down with that. And it’s only going to get worse for the Democrats because blacks across the country are going to demand their share of the power, power that the ascendant leftists want for themselves.

There is another land mine, the baby bomb. Democrats aren’t breeding like conservatives. A lot of them are single women who have no intention of settling down and having children; when they do get knocked up, abortion remains readily available in blue states, and they make use of it. This blends with another problem for the Democrats, which is that a lot of their boomer base is aging out. If you recall those rallies for the Nazi tattoo guy, behind him on stage were always a bunch of gray crones who all looked like Billy Jack’s girlfriend. They’re not going to be around that much longer, and they are some of the Dems’ most devoted voters. Gen X is much more conservative; we have the advantage of being around for another couple of decades.

And there are other effects that come from Democrats not reproducing, besides upping the average IQ and attractiveness of Americans. The birth dearth means fewer kids being indoctrinated in grade schools and colleges. Academia is where the Democrats not only found places for their members to get paid but gave them a chance to corrupt our youth. But fewer kids mean fewer unionized teachers paying union dues, while a lot of colleges are going away in the bankruptcy. That’s fewer dollars and fewer worker bees making mischief. Combined with new technology that is making old education methods obsolete, as well as cost considerations and conservative attention that is going to work to undermine the leftist hold on these institutions, academia writ large is going to stop being so influential. Democrats have become fatally over-invested in their own version of the buggy whip industry.

Here are some other things that the Democrats might find blow them up. The mainstream media may dismiss the government handout fraud stuff that we’ve been seeing, but fraud resonates. From California’s high-speed rail that’s cost billions of dollars and built about 15 inches of track, to massive Somali learing center schemes, to corrupt USAID payoffs to leftist NGOs and beyond, the crackdown is both going to starve the Democrats of money looted from the treasury and laundered into the pockets of the left and closely associated Democrats with fraud in the minds of the voters.

Then there’s something they really can blame on the Jews. The Dems will have to deal with Jews’ sense of self-preservation as the Democrats fully embrace their new Hamas constituency and work to ensure Israel and the Israelis are annihilated. That’s not putting it too harshly – if you’re Jewish, you can’t take any threat too seriously, and this is a threat. Jewish Democrats are enormous donors to the Democrat Party, and that flow of dollars is going to shrink to a trickle that’s not going to be made up by a bunch of new Dems just imported from Goatbangistan. The money might not go to Republicans – that’s a bridge too far for a lot of liberal Jews – but it isn’t going to the Palisimpian Democrats. We’ve seen massive shortfalls in Democrat donations this cycle, and that was before half of the House Democrat caucus voted to render Israel defenseless in the face of the psychopaths who committed the October 7th attacks.

And when that grotesque regime’s collapse accelerates, a lot of DI officials are going to want to ensure that they don’t swing from a lamppost or worse. I married a Cuban–they’re not a forgiving people, and they’re going to make the people who oppressed them pay. So, if you’re a high-ranking DI officer, you’re going to want to make American intelligence an offer it can’t refuse to save your worthless hide, and that means trading stolen records on the DI’s intelligence network in the United States that includes prominent Democrats. That’s going to happen, and it’s going to be earth-shattering. People throw the word “treason” around a lot, but working with the communists to subvert the United States is literally treason, and it’s been happening. Do not expect the Trump administration to forgive and forget, and even the regime media is going to be unable to hide the indictments. The Democrats will, correctly, be painted as the party of traitors.

Let’s also not forget the collapse of captured institutions. We mentioned academia’s decline, but look at the mainstream media and Hollywood. Both are going away. Moreover, the decades of corporate footsie with Democrats will end as the business world realizes that the DSA types can’t be bought off like the old school Pelosi Dems could be. Plus, there is a generalized anti-woke counter-reaction that places PC Democrats with their spouting off on woke nonsense outside of the zeitgeist. Their own base won’t let them moderate; they’ll be telling us dudes can menstruate for another decade even as over-it normals shake their heads in disgust.

But then again, we are Republicans, and the fact remains that the Republican Party is the only party that can summon up enough dumb to squander these advantages.

Kurt Schlichter  | Jul 23, 2026

Source: Democrats Are Walking Into a Minefield

When alphabet networks don’t broadcast the president’s speech, they are signaling that “they have lost control of the narrative” and they don’t want to “expose failures.”

President Trump’s speech last Thursday, a few months before the 2026 midterms, was dull and boring, a disappointment to political enthusiasts. It paled before President Biden’s flaming red pre-midterm speech of September 1, 2022, Battle for the Soul of the Nation, given right in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, as it should be.

All President Trump did was inform us of a few minor items, such as vulnerabilities in electronic voting, China getting access to the records of hundreds of millions of U.S. voters — information that our devoted intelligence professionals thoughtfully redacted from presidential intelligence briefings — and the curious case of non-citizens on the voter rolls. Nothing to see here, move right along.

It is good to learn that by 2020 our intelligence professionals had re-professionalized themselves. In 2016, you will recall, they were unprofessionally eager to back the Russia, Russia narrative cooked up by the Clinton campaign.

Of course, it is easy to see that the point of Trump’s speech was to drum up more support for his explosive SAVE Act, which Senator Thune, whose state is close to Canadian wildfires, has sensibly put on the back burner.

But I wonder if Sen. Thune will succeed. I suspect that the whole point of the president’s speech was to ignite a wildfire of prosecutions and executive actions over the next few months related to election security. Presumably he and his aides, staffers, and allies in Congress imagine that, confused by the thick smoke of election cheating, Congress will finally pass the SAVE Act and/or Republican voters will be motivated to go to the polls.

What is happening? Where is America going? What does it mean? Where will it all end up?

• Industrial-age institutions (governments, political parties, media, academia, etc.) relied on a near-monopoly over information to maintain authority and legitimacy.
• The internet and social media created a tsunami of information, empowering ordinary people (the “public”) to access, share, and scrutinize data that was once controlled by elites.

Grok analysis:

This shift has led to a crisis of authority: Elites and hierarchical institutions have lost control of the narrative, while a networked public can now rapidly expose failures, contradictions, and hypocrisies.

Do you see the point? When alphabet networks don’t broadcast the president’s speech, they are signaling that “they have lost control of the narrative” and they don’t want to “expose failures.”

No, Ashik Siddique. You are desperately — or willfully — ignorant, because you know nothing except what you were carefully taught. And what you were carefully taught in a ruling-class seminary was the ideological orthodoxy of the educated ruling class.

Now I am in the middle of reading Julius Evola, whom some have branded a fascist. And it´s curious how his rendition of “The World of Tradition,” with its notion of “Regality” and “The Mystery of the Rite,” maps against the regality of Commie dictatorship and the sacred rite of the protest.

No doubt as The Revolt of the Public battles against the domination and hegemony of the educated class here and in Europe, there will be ups and downs.

Then there is the other little problem. Back in 1963, a year or so after President Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, JFK was assassinated and the intelligence community had nothing to do with the case. In 1974, President Nixon was removed from office, and the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were communicating with W. Mark Felt at the FBI had nothing to do with the case. In the Iran-Contra scandal that threatened President Reagan, the IC had nothing to do with the case. In the Russia, Russia scandal, the Obama administration had nothing to do with the case. In the question of removing data from the presidential intelligence briefing in 2020 about Chinese access to voter records in 2020, the intelligence community had nothing to do with the case.

Do you understand yet?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Source: Trump’s July 16 Speech: The Big Picture – American Thinker

President Trump’s efforts to dismantle parts of the Biden administration’s climate-policy framework have exposed just how much money and institutional power had become attached to it.

Renewable-energy companies, financial institutions, advocacy groups, labor organizations, and state governments are now fighting over subsidies, tax credits, regulations, and investments worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Whatever one thinks of President Trump’s policy reversals, the controversy raises a more fundamental question: who built and financed this sprawling climate-policy system in the first place?

Most people assume climate policy emerges through the normal democratic process. Scientists publish research, governments consult experts, legislators debate proposals, and elected representatives decide the direction of public policy. Yet across both Europe and the United States, a vast network of philanthropic foundations, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, advocacy groups, and financial institutions also plays an important role in shaping climate policy and public opinion.

One organization that has attracted increasing attention is the European Climate Foundation (ECF), established in 2008 and headquartered in The Hague. Although headquartered in Europe, many of the foundation’s largest financial supporters are major American philanthropic organizations, illustrating the increasingly transatlantic nature of climate advocacy.

Dutch science journalist Marcel Crok recently examined the foundation’s role in European climate policy, arguing that it has become one of Europe’s most influential climate-focused philanthropic organizations while remaining largely unknown outside specialist circles.

His investigation raises important questions about how modern climate advocacy is financed and organized.

According to publicly available information cited by Crok, the ECF received approximately €275 million in funding during 2023. Among the listed supporters are several major American philanthropic organizations, including Bloomberg Philanthropies, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, alongside a number of European charitable foundations.

Grant recipients include research organisations, environmental NGOs, legal advocacy groups, communications initiatives, and media projects. Crok notes that organizations such as Carbon Brief, the European Environment Bureau, and CAN Europe have received ECF support, while Carbon Brief publicly discloses such funding as part of its transparency policy.

Climate policy today extends far beyond climate science. Across both Europe and the United States, it increasingly influences industrial strategy, financial regulation, banking, agriculture, transport, housing, taxation, and long-term investment decisions. Governments now work alongside NGOs, philanthropic foundations, research institutes, financial institutions, and private-sector organizations in developing climate and energy policy.

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act alone originally included an estimated $369 billion in energy-security and climate-related programs, including grant funding and tax incentives, increasing the importance of understanding the organisations that help shape climate policy debates.

One example of this wider funding ecosystem is its growing connection with the international financial sector. Over the past decade, major American and international banks, asset managers and multinational corporations have become increasingly involved in developing climate-related financial frameworks.

In December 2015, the Financial Stability Board established the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), which represents $118 trillion of assets globally — see here.

The task force brings together representatives from many of the world’s largest financial institutions and corporations to develop climate-risk reporting standards. Over subsequent years, climate-related disclosure rapidly became embedded within investment management, Wall Street, banking regulation and corporate governance.

Critics, however, contend that they have also accelerated the financialisation of climate policy, embedding net-zero objectives within banking, investment and corporate decision-making.

When the world’s largest banks, corporations, and institutions, all align to push a climate change agenda that, in my view, is not supported by robust empirical evidence, one can see there is another agenda going on behind the scenes. This climate agenda tries to convince the public to make sacrifices and to accept significant economic and social changes under the emotive guise of “saving our planet.”

Meanwhile, corporations, financial institutions and investment funds stand to benefit financially, and political institutions implement worldwide technocratic policy systems under the banner of combatting man-made CO2-induced climate change.

Ultimately, critics argue that this agenda aligns with the objectives of U.N. Agenda 2030 while creating, or potentially creating, trillions of dollars in new financial opportunities for major banks and investment firms.

As a former science adviser at the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change, and one of more than 2,000 scientists and academics who have signed the Clintel World Climate Declaration, I believe this close relationship between climate policy and financial institutions deserves far greater public scrutiny.  The Clintel declaration argues that CO₂ is not the dominant driver of climate and that natural variability plays a much larger role than is commonly acknowledged.

The Rockefeller family’s support for climate initiatives has also attracted particular attention. How the Rockefeller banking dynasty became leading advocates of the global warning agenda is described in a report titled The Rockefeller Way: The Family’s Covert ‘Climate Change’ Plan published by the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute in  December 2016.

An article published by the institute  states:

In their Sustainable Development Program Review, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund boasts of being one of the first major global warming activists… Their highly complex integration of hedge funds, interlocking boards positions, and non-profit organizations has steered public policy on these issues and provided them with foreknowledge of emerging markets and access to the developing worlds’ natural resources …

Another important development has received surprisingly little public attention.

The developers of the next generation of official climate scenarios have concluded that the highest-emissions pathways, including RCP 8.5 and SSP5-8.5, are no longer considered plausible representations of likely future development. Because these scenarios influenced thousands of studies, policy recommendations and media reports, this shift has important implications. I examine the issue in detail in my earlier American Thinker article, “The Climate Scenario Behind A Decade of Alarmism Is No Longer Considered Plausible“

A broader question concerns the underlying assumptions built into today’s climate models. Is carbon dioxide truly the dominant driver of climate, as argued by the U.N. IPCC, and can current models isolate its influence with the degree of precision implied by modern attribution studies? Many scientists and researchers—including the more than 2,000 signatories of the Clintel World Climate Declaration — argue that CO₂ is not the dominant driver of climate and that natural variability plays a much larger role than is commonly acknowledged.

Supporters argue that funding of net-zero initiatives accelerates action on an urgent global challenge. Critics contend that concentrated philanthropic funding amplifies particular policy perspectives while making alternative viewpoints less visible within public debate.

Regardless of one’s view of climate science, organisations spending hundreds of millions of dollars and euros to influence public opinion and public policy deserve greater transparency and public scrutiny. Whether in Europe or the United States, citizens have a right to know who is shaping climate policy, how it is being funded, and whether competing scientific perspectives are receiving a fair hearing.

These issues are examined in greater detail in the 2026 edition of my book Climate CO₂ Hoax: How Bankers Hijacked the Real Environment Movement.

Its purpose is to distinguish genuine environmental concerns from claims that, in my view, are not supported by robust empirical evidence.

Mark Keenan is a former United Nations technical expert and an independent writer on science, technology, political economy and human freedom. He is the author of Climate CO2 Hoax, The AI Illusion, The Debt Machine, and Demonic Economics. His articles are available on Substack at markgerardkeenan.substack.com.

Mark Keenan | July 18, 2026

Source: Who Really Funds the Climate Agenda? – American Thinker

America’s Independence From Tyrannical English Governance Would Never Have Succeeded Without Dependence On God

America’s celebration of birth since 1776 was spectacular, our independence from mother England 250 years previous having been a painful and bloody one, to say the least. That separation, however, wasn’t one of merely exerting cleavage from an empire determined to rule over the colonies. That is, there has been a much more profound leverage than a revolutionary spirit at work in producing that schism than just the colonists’ desire to break free of overbearing bondage.

America’s founding fathers—that is, a majority of them—recognized the nature of the profound leverage they were allowed to apply in order to burst free from the most powerful military on the planet at the time. It was providential leverage that most of them acknowledged as the intervening force that birthed this nation.

George Washington said on a number of occasions following the War of Independence that he felt the hand of the Almighty on him. He said he was providentially prevented from being shot on several occasions. In one incident, there were four rifle ball holes in his general’s uniform, but none of the balls had entered his body.

John Adams repeatedly wrote that America was a nation under God’s hand, that America was a moral nation, and the Constitution would work for no other than a moral people. Even Jefferson acknowledged a greater power as having guided the founders and seen to it that the War of Independence was won because of a providential power.

So, the desire for independence from a tyrannical, overbearing English governance was important as those patriots waged the Revolutionary War. But, in the words of almost every founding father, according to extensive documents we have seen presented by experts on America’s founding, such as David Barton, it was dependence on God in Heaven they acknowledged as the true reason for America’s winning independence.

This dependence was steeped in adherence to the Word of God. The Judeo-Christian reference to America’s founding is that its founding principles were based, by and large, within Old and New Testament principles.

Although there is debate on who made the statement, French historian and political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville is attributed as saying: “America is great because she is good; if America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

During the early times of the nation’s founding, America was indeed good in comparison to today’s America. Jesus Christ was the only good there was at the center of the founding principles. At this late date 250 years hence, however, we can but admit the truth that we have in many areas lost our way in comparison to those earlier times.

The entire world of earth’s inhabitants, for the most part, have strayed ever farther from Heaven’s governance. Independence is now a term that can be applied to the world pulling away from God’s desire that people come nearer to Him, not break away from Him. I believe that because of America’s founding fathers’ dependence on the principles found in God’s Holy Word, the nation could well call the date of July 4, 1776, Dependence Day. It was in large part a dependence upon Heaven above to secure the Revolutionary War victory and nationhood we enjoy today.

America, too, suffers from the independent spirit of anti-God behavior. It is actually the Antichrist Spirit that this country and all nations of the world suffer from as we dive more deeply into the end of the Age of Grace.

But vestiges of that early spirit of dependence upon the God of Heaven still linger in America during this evil day. Despite the world’s mainstream media’s constant railing against Americanism, and the leaderships of the world’s countries lying to their peoples about the ugly Americans, we see, through reports, that this nation that was once populated by a moral people can yet be sensed, even if during this time of liberty’s last gleaming.

American greatness left a World Cup traveler in tears as he admitted what initially caused him “fear to travel to the United States.”

In the weeks since the 2026 FIFA World Cup has been underway, communities across North America have embraced the prolific drinking of the Tartan Army, Norway’s Viking row, and the myriad guests soaking up cities and small towns alike. Despite seeing his home team eliminated by Paraguay, a German’s tears were for love of the U.S. after buying into propaganda about how “the country’s not safe.”

During an interview with NBC10 Boston’s Oscar Margáin, Sebastian Kraus could be seen repeatedly wiping away tears with his hands and his shirt as he got choked up about his experience as a visitor to America.

“I fell in love with this country, and this was so emotional, I even cried in the stadium,” he told the reporter after being seen taking a moment to collect himself, including a breathing exercise, having been asked, “Why? Help us understand, why is this so impactful to you?”

Juxtaposed against video he shared with the outlet of a group of strangers driving him back to his hotel where he joyfully expressed, “Bob takes us home,” and “America is great,” Kraus told Margáin, “To be honest, I was a bit scared or had a fear to travel to the United States. News about shootings and criminals and that the country’s not safe.”…

“We owe America a huge apology, because America is nothing like what the media tells us,” he said in a social media video. “Everyone is so friendly, everyone is so accommodating, and I’ve honestly had the best time.”…

His whole life in Germany, he’s been fed lies about America by their media. There’s a reason so many Europeans mock the US until they visit it for themselves; they’ve been brainwashed by the politicians and media elites. 

America’s relationship with God from its birth was independence from Great Britain through dependence on Heaven’s help. This is a truth that applies to believers in Jesus Christ. It also applies to those who are in Satan’s grip, needing to come into liberty offered only through God’s Son, who died and rose again to make the lost free from sin-bondage.

Our independence from the evil one, Satan, who seeks to destroy humankind, can be only achieved through dependence upon God’s plan of redemption.

Here yet again is that plan: “That if you will confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and will believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart man believes unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10:9-10).

Terry James is an author, general editor, and co-author of numerous books on Bible prophecy.

Source: America’s Independence From Tyrannical English Governance Would Never Have Succeeded Without Dependence On God – Harbinger’s Daily

Five years ago, suggesting that COVID-19 may have originated in a laboratory rather than a wet market could earn someone the label “conspiracy theorist.”

Discussing vaccine injuries could result in a post being removed from social media. Questioning prolonged school closures, forced masking, or vaccine mandates often led to accusations of being “anti-science.”

Today, many of those once-forbidden discussions have become part of public debate.

That doesn’t mean every alternative theory is correct.

But it raises an important question.

The answer may be found in Rasmussen Reports’ latest survey.

Nearly half of Americans — 45 percent — now believe it is at least somewhat likely that COVID-19 was deliberately released as part of an effort to reduce the world’s population.

Not five percent.

Not fifteen percent.

Nearly half of the country.

I am not arguing that this belief is true. I have seen no evidence that COVID was part of a deliberate depopulation plan, and the Rasmussen survey does not make that claim.

But public opinion tells us something equally important.

Americans increasingly assume the worst about the institutions that once enjoyed their confidence.

In my recent Rasmussen Reports column, I argued that the greatest casualty of COVID was trust.

This new survey underscores just how profound that loss has become.

Conspiracy theories rarely flourish in societies where institutions are transparent, accountable, and willing to admit mistakes.

They flourish where information is incomplete, official explanations shift repeatedly, and legitimate questions are dismissed rather than answered.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Transparency fills that vacuum. Secrecy fills it with suspicion.

When government agencies refuse to fill that vacuum with openness, the public fills it with speculation.

Some of that speculation will prove wrong.

Some may ultimately prove correct.

History suggests that both outcomes are inevitable.

The point is that the vacuum never stays empty.

Consider how many official narratives changed during the pandemic.

The lab-leak hypothesis was widely dismissed before it became a plausible explanation worthy of serious investigation.

The effectiveness of cloth masks became far more contested than early public messaging had suggested.

Extended school closures are now widely acknowledged to have imposed significant educational and psychological costs.

Claims that vaccination would prevent transmission gave way to more nuanced discussions about reducing severe illness and hospitalizations.

Government coordination with social media companies over COVID-related content have become the subject of congressional investigations and court cases.

Even recent disclosures about U.S.-supported biological laboratories overseas have fueled public skepticism, regardless of how those facts are interpreted.

None of this proves a grand conspiracy.

But it does explain why many Americans have stopped giving government officials the benefit of the doubt.

Trust works much like a marriage does.

Imagine one spouse repeatedly offering incomplete explanations, changing their story, deleting text messages, and insisting, “Nothing to see here.”

Perhaps there is an innocent explanation.

Perhaps there isn’t.

But evasiveness itself breeds suspicion.

Eventually, the other spouse begins to assume the worst—not necessarily because of what has been proven, but because confidence has been lost.

Governments are no different.

Trust isn’t destroyed by a single disagreement. It’s destroyed by a pattern of evasiveness.

Public trust depends less on perfection than on honesty

People generally understand that science evolves, and physicians certainly do.

Medicine is full of uncertainty. Recommendations change as evidence accumulates. At least they should

What patients find difficult to forgive is not an honest mistake.

It is the perception that information was withheld, inconvenient questions were discouraged, or uncertainty was replaced with unwarranted certainty.

Experienced physicians know that malpractice suits are often driven less by honest medical errors than by patients who believe they were misled or kept in the dark.

If officials had openly acknowledged what they didn’t know, admitted when recommendations changed, and explained why, public confidence might well be stronger today.

If physicians communicated with patients as many public officials did during COVID, informed consent would rightly be called into question.

Now, many Americans assume that every official statement conceals an undisclosed truth.

That should concern everyone.

The real danger isn’t whether one believes a particular conspiracy theory.

The danger is that millions of Americans no longer believe that the institutions responsible for protecting public health merit the presumption of honesty.

Trust, once lost, is very difficult to regain.

Public health depends on voluntary cooperation.

The next pandemic will almost certainly occur.

When it does, officials will once again ask Americans to believe them and to follow their recommendations.

But credibility cannot be restored through fact-checks, public relations campaigns, or censorship.

It can be restored only through transparency, humility, accountability, and a willingness to admit mistakes.

Transparency is the antidote to conspiracy theories.

If mistakes were made, the public deserves an honest accounting. If misconduct occurred, accountability should follow. Without either, official assurances will remain hollow.

If those qualities remain absent, Americans will continue connecting the dots — sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly, but almost always suspiciously.

The real lesson of Rasmussen’s poll isn’t that nearly half of Americans believe a depopulation theory. The real lesson is that nearly half of Americans now consider such a theory plausible. 

Those are not the same

Ironically, the officials who warned most loudly about “dangerous conspiracy theories” seldom paused to ask why those theories were gaining traction. People rarely abandon trusted institutions without cause.

That should alarm every physician, scientist, public health official, and elected leader across America.

Distrust doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It is cultivated when certainty supplants humility and questions are treated as threats rather than as opportunities for inquiry.

Trust is the foundation upon which modern medicine rests. Once that foundation is fractured, rebuilding it may take generations­—far longer than it took to destroy it

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Colorado-based ophthalmologist who writes frequently about medicine, science, and public policy.

Follow Brian:

Twitter @retinaldoctor

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Email brianjoondeph@gmail.com

As Europe and much of North America endured record heat, headlines quickly appeared claiming that the heat wave was “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change. Really?

As Europe and much of North America endured record heat in recent days, headlines quickly appeared claiming that the heat wave was “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.

To many readers, that sounds like a conclusion drawn directly from observations. It is not. It is the product of a branch of climate research known as extreme weather attribution, which relies heavily on computer models rather than direct measurements.

This was not an isolated claim. Whenever a major storm, wildfire, flood, or heat wave occurs, similar headlines soon follow. We are told that climate change made an event “twice as likely,” “35 times more likely,” or even “virtually impossible” without human influence. These figures are widely repeated by politicians, journalists, and activists as though they were direct scientific observations.

They are not. They are estimates derived from computer models.

This distinction matters because modern climate policy is increasingly being built not upon observed evidence, but upon simulated realities generated by mathematical models.

The growing field of “extreme weather attribution” illustrates this transformation perfectly. Rather than simply studying weather events after they occur, attribution studies attempt to calculate how much more likely an event supposedly became because of human emissions of CO2. The numbers appear precise and authoritative, yet they rest upon assumptions that deserve far greater scrutiny than they usually receive.

Extreme weather attribution did not emerge in isolation. It represents the next stage of the same modelling paradigm that produced speculative emissions scenarios such as RCP 8.5. Once those scenarios were accepted as plausible descriptions of the future, it became possible to use similar modelling techniques to attribute individual weather events to human emissions with apparently precise numerical confidence. In other words, attribution science is not a departure from the climate modelling enterprise—it is its logical extension.

Most people assume these studies compare today’s weather with historical observations. In reality, they compare the present world with a hypothetical world that never existed—a computer-generated version of Earth’s climate in which industrial carbon dioxide emissions never occurred. The difference between the two simulations is then presented as the human contribution to the event [i].

Attribution studies typically compare today’s climate with a simulated pre-industrial climate to estimate how human emissions altered the probability of a particular event.

That sounds scientific until one asks a simple question: how do we know the model accurately represents a climate that no one has ever observed?

Climate models have long struggled to reproduce observed temperature records accurately, with many projections diverging significantly from other observational datasets [ii]. They have difficulty reproducing important regional climate patterns, and one of their most important tests—hindcasting, or reproducing known historical climate changes—remains problematic. If a model cannot reliably reproduce the past, confidence in its simulation of an imaginary pre-industrial climate should naturally be limited. Yet attribution studies depend precisely upon this capability.

The growing reliance on attribution studies reflects a broader pattern within modern climate science. For years, speculative emissions scenarios such as RCP 8.5 and its successor SSP5-8.5 shaped thousands of climate-impact studies, policy reports and media narratives, despite repeated criticism that they did not represent realistic future pathways. More recently, the scientists responsible for designing the next generation of climate scenarios acknowledged that these highest-emissions pathways had become implausible. Yet projections derived from them had already influenced climate litigation, net-zero policies and public perceptions worldwide. Attribution science extends this same modelling paradigm by using simulated climates to assign numerical probabilities to individual weather events. The issue is not whether computer models have scientific value, but whether increasingly speculative model outputs are being treated as empirical evidence rather than as hypotheses open to testing and revision.

A more fundamental question is whether carbon dioxide is the dominant driver of climate, as claimed by the IPCC, and whether current climate models are capable of isolating its influence with the extraordinary precision implied by modern attribution studies. If the models themselves remain highly uncertain, then the confidence attached to attribution claims becomes equally questionable.

Many highly qualified scientists argue that CO2 is not the dominant driver of climate and that natural variability plays a far greater role than is commonly acknowledged.

Another problem is that weather itself is extraordinarily variable. Floods, droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves and wildfires have always occurred. Long historical records often reveal cycles, clusters and natural fluctuations extending over centuries. In many cases, the evidence does not show the simple upward trends portrayed in media coverage. Historical datasets presented during recent research on attribution science show little or no long-term increase in many categories of extreme weather, while some records even display declining trends over the periods examined.

This does not mean that climate never changes. Of course it does. Earth’s climate has always changed. The question is whether modern attribution studies can confidently separate natural variability from human influence to the extraordinary degree claimed.

Consider how attribution studies are reported. A study may conclude that an event became “twice as likely” because of climate change. The media almost never explain that this conclusion depends upon dozens of climate models, numerous assumptions about historical temperatures, statistical methods, and confidence intervals that may span a wide range of possible outcomes. Instead, the public receives a single dramatic number stripped of its uncertainty.

This creates the illusion of certainty where considerable uncertainty still exists.

Attribution science has also acquired an increasingly important role in climate policy, public discourse and litigation.The discipline did not emerge simply from scientific curiosity about individual storms. As attribution studies became more sophisticated, they also acquired significant political, regulatory, and legal importance. If specific weather events could be attributed to fossil fuel emissions, then litigation against fossil fuel energy companies would acquire an apparently scientific foundation. Establishing causation is central to liability, and attribution studies attempt to provide precisely that link. [iii]

The implications are not confined to climate science. Increasingly, public policy in many fields is influenced by computer models whose assumptions often receive less scrutiny than the conclusions they produce.

Whether such lawsuits ultimately succeed is almost beside the point. Once the public is repeatedly told that every wildfire, flood or hurricane carries a measurable carbon fingerprint, the political narrative begins to reinforce itself. Governments demand more intervention. Journalists report increasingly alarming conclusions. Research funding follows the same direction. A feedback loop develops in which models generate headlines, headlines generate policy, and policy demands further modelling.

This pattern extends well beyond climate research. We increasingly inhabit a world governed by computer simulations. Economic models shape monetary policy. Epidemiological models justified unprecedented lockdowns during the COVID era. Artificial intelligence systems increasingly guide hiring, lending, policing and even medical diagnosis. Everywhere, mathematical models are beginning to replace direct observation and human judgment.

History repeatedly teaches the opposite lesson. Scientific progress depends upon challenging models whenever observations contradict them. Models must remain servants of evidence, never its master.

The broader lesson of the current debate over extreme weather attribution is clear. Public policy affecting trillions of dollars and billions of lives increasingly rests upon simulations of hypothetical worlds that cannot be directly observed or experimentally verified. Such models deserve careful examination, open criticism and continual testing—not unquestioning acceptance simply because they produce impressive-looking numbers.

As climate policy continues to reshape energy systems, economies and individual freedoms, the burden of proof should remain where it has always belonged: on those making the extraordinary claims.

Computer models are indispensable scientific tools. But they are not observations. When public policy increasingly relies upon simulations of hypothetical worlds rather than direct empirical evidence, sceptical scrutiny becomes more important—not less. That principle lies at the heart of science itself.

Readers interested in a more detailed examination of climate modelling, emissions scenarios such as RCP 8.5, extreme weather attribution, and the scientific evidence discussed here will find a fuller treatment in the newly updated 2026 edition of my book Climate CO₂ Hoax: How Bankers Hijacked the Real Environment Movement. This revised edition includes a new chapter examining the quiet retreat from RCP 8.5, the rise of climate attribution science, and recent challenges to the measurement of global ocean heat content. Its purpose is to distinguish genuine environmental concerns from claims that, in my view, are not supported by robust empirical evidence.

Mark Keenan | July 6, 2026

Mark Keenan is a former United Nations technical expert and an independent writer on science, technology, political economy, and human freedom. He is the author of When Models Replace Reality, Climate CO2 Hoax, No Worries No Virus, and the AI-related books The AI Illusion and Staying Human in the Age of AI. His articles are on Substack at markgerardkeenan.substack.com.

Source: Climate Change Blamed in Heat Waves: Science or Simulation? – American Thinker

‘Washington personally read the Bible and quoted the Bible. Those who deny America’s unique Christian roots will claim that many educated people in positions of prominence in the 18th century also quoted from the Bible. However, they also quoted from Greek and Roman authors of antiquity. Washington quoted almost exclusively…’

Multitudes are looking to enjoy “The American Dream.” Its glitter draws people from around the world and even catches the eye of millions of Americans.

In the days of our first President, George Washington (1732-1799), however, it was very different. There was no glitter but rock-solid substance upon which to build a nation: freedom to worship as God leads, and the conviction that “we cannot be silent, no matter what the cost.”

July 4, 1776 – 250 Years Ago

On this date, the Declaration of Independence was adopted by a unanimous decision of the Second Continental Congress. Among other things, it provides the American colonists’ grievances with the king’s abuses.

The Declaration shows that the worship of God, and the freedom to do that without a tyrant’s opposition, is a central feature of the real American dream.

The Declaration provides the primary focus of this important document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This was a radical, but biblical concept: Our rights are not given to us by government, but by God.

The 56 men who signed the Declaration were guilty of treason, a crime punishable by death. These men were leaders in their communities and had much to lose, but for them liberty was more important than security.

The question that I will try to answer is this: Who was the man who would lead the newly birthed nation in these tumultuous years of danger, and what was he like?

George Washington was a Statesman and Not a Politician.

A statesman is a man of good character and integrity, who focuses on the long-term good of the country, not just winning an election. Politicians often prioritize immediate gains. Statesmen focus on long-term goals. Ronald Reagan was in the latter category.

George Washington believed that there were certain rules of civility that must be observed. When he was 14, Washington translated a French document titled “The Rules of Civility.” Rule Number One: “Every action done in the presence of others ought to show some sign of respect to those who are present.” How you eat, sit, engage in conversation, and the showing of respect for women were high on his list of respectful behaviors.

Even when Washington was general in the War for Independence, he required the soldiers to refrain from objectionable behaviors, drunkenness, fighting, cursing, and gambling. And on Sundays, if not on the battlefield, each soldier was required to be in church.

George Washington was a Leader Who Effectively Organized a Diverse People for a Specific Purpose.

Washington believed in the importance of good leadership. One of his aphorisms brings this out: “A pack of jackasses led by a lion is superior to a pack of lions led by a jackass.”

The 13 colonies were not united in becoming a new nation. Those in opposition were The Loyalists. For one thing, going to war against England with its well-trained military and huge navy seemed doomed from the outset. The small sailing vessels possessed by the Americans were no match for the heavy cannon on British warships. Indeed, there were Americans who did want to break free from the King, but there were many who thought it was too risky.

In addition to the Quakers who were pacifists and did not believe that war is permissible, some of the Colonists feared that the new American government might be worse than being under the king. It was amazing that Washington was able to do anything with such a diverse multitude.

Washington also had leadership skills when it came to the military. Many soldiers went without pay for months and sometimes soldiers’ rations were meager. What was it about Washington that made him so remarkable?

George Washington And The Bible.

Washington personally read the Bible and quoted the Bible. Those who deny America’s unique Christian roots will claim that many educated people in positions of prominence in the 18th century also quoted from the Bible. However, they also quoted from Greek and Roman authors of antiquity. Washington quoted almost exclusively from the Bible and applied its teachings to his personal life and role as a leader. Here are some of his most-quoted Scriptures:

Micah 4:4: “But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.”

Washington quoted this Scripture in his letters and speeches more than 50 times. The vine produces grapes, and being under a fig tree means immediate access to nutritious food. Notice it is “under HIS vine” and “under HIS fig tree.” This speaks about personal property. It is not a communal setting. “And none shall make them afraid.” If you are living under royal authority, you always live in fear.

Micah 6:8: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

We can all benefit from this reminder. We all have a duty to God and those in His world.

Proverbs 29:2: “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.”

Those who have lived under a king who believes in the divine right of kings say “Amen” to this Scripture.

America – A Continuing Testimony

In 1607, 125 years before the birth of Washington, the first permanent English settlement in the New World, organized at Jamestown in what is now Virginia, printed its First Charter. The settlement was for “the propagating of the Christian religion…” and for “the glory of His Divine Majesty.”

The real American dream is far more God-honoring than what we have today. The true American patriot is working and praying that Washington’s vision for America will once again claim the hearts of Americans.

Southwest Radio Ministries has been dedicated for 91 years to equipping people with Bible-based teachings on Bible prophecy to guide their understanding of the signs of the times. 

Source: The Real ‘American Dream’ Of George Washington Was Far More God-Honoring Than Many Have Been Led To Believe – Harbinger’s Daily

Independence was not guaranteed.

Two-hundred-fifty years ago, the Second Continental Congress lit the fuse for human freedom by declaring the United States of America independent from Great Britain.  Although we Americans celebrate the Fourth of July as our nation’s birthday, our country did not have an easy birth.

In July 1776, the men who became known as our “Founding Fathers” had many problems.  First among them was the reality that not everyone believed the United Colonies of North America (as they were then called) should sever ties with the Crown.  During the First Continental Congress, convened in Philadelphia for fewer than two months in the early autumn of 1774, delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies (Loyalist Georgia did not attend.) could not agree how best to respond to Britain’s naval blockade of Boston Harbor and Parliament’s imposition of the Intolerable Acts as collective punishment for the Boston Tea Party.  Staunch Loyalist and Pennsylvania delegate Joseph Galloway even proposed a Plan of Union to formally unite Great Britain and the North American colonies.  That did not sit well with Massachusetts firebrand Samuel Adams, and the proposal was eventually struck from the official record of the proceedings.

Following the April 19, 1775, Battles of Lexington and Concord — the first armed conflicts in America’s War for Independence — colonial delegates reconvened in Philadelphia on May 10.  For the next fourteen months, the Second Continental Congress debated what to do next.  Formal separation from Great Britain remained a contentious issue.  Even after fighting in Massachusetts had begun, most American colonists resisted calls for independence throughout 1775.  However, public support for the cause of liberty grew as Christian ministers exhorted members of their congregations to recognize the fight against political tyranny as a struggle for God-given rights and a duty to pursue His will (and our happiness) here on Earth.  Patriots of Massachusetts and Virginia worked tirelessly to shift public sentiment throughout the colonies and to persuade each colony’s representatives that the time for revolution had arrived.

Then an anonymously authored forty-seven-page essay was published in Philadelphia on January 10, 1776.  Written by Thomas Paine and “Addressed to the Inhabitants of America,” its title was simple: Common Sense.  Described by recently deceased historian Gordon Wood as “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era,” it remains the best-selling American work of all time.  In the first half of 1776, American colonists read aloud from its pages in taverns and secret meeting places while British soldiers passed on nearby streets.  Colonial sentiment quickly transformed from hopes for reconciliation with Britain to fervent cries for independence.  Paine ignited in Protestant Christians a passion that united the colonies in a righteous war for freedom against the Crown.

After the Virginia Convention then meeting in Williamsburg instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress to push for independence, Richard Henry Lee proposed this motion in Philadelphia on June 7:  “Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”  A year of back-and-forth debate was finally brought to a head.

Although the mood among delegates to the Second Continental Congress had shifted toward general acceptance that a war against Britain was inevitable, unanimity was far from certain.  The colonial governments of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina had not authorized their delegates to vote for independence.  Lee’s resolution was therefore tabled for three weeks, so that delegates could return home and make the case for a formal declaration of independence.  After a “trial vote” on July 1 indicated that South Carolina and Pennsylvania would vote against Lee’s resolution and that Delaware’s vote was split between two delegates present in Philadelphia, South Carolina’s Edward Rutledge requested that the official vote be postponed until the following day.

What happened next is the part of history that often gets left out of textbooks.  Between Monday and Tuesday, Benjamin Franklin strongly suggested to two of his fellow Pennsylvania delegates that they be absent for the final vote.  Rutledge managed to convince South Carolina’s delegates to flip in favor of independence.

Meanwhile, Delaware’s pro-independence delegate, Thomas McKean, had already dispatched an urgent letter to Caesar Rodney, Delaware’s third delegate to the Continental Congress and a consummate patriot in favor of independence.  Rodney was eighty miles away in Kent County training Delaware’s militia and providing General George Washington’s Continental Army with needed supplies.  He was also suffering from a serious facial cancer that took his life eight years later at the age of fifty-five.

McKean’s letter arrived in Dover on Monday, July 1.  Rodney, realizing that he was the tie-breaking vote for Delaware, did not hesitate.  Disregarding warnings from the physicians treating his cancer, he mounted his horse and took off.  Through thunderstorms and lightning, Rodney rode through the night over poor roads and across wild terrain.  Stopping only once to change horses, he made it to Philadelphia in eighteen hours, a trip that normally required two full days.

Just as the voting in Philadelphia began, delegates heard heavy hoofbeats on the cobblestone outside of the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall).  Exhausted, still in his riding clothes with spurs attached, covered in mud, and wearing a green silk scarf around his cancer-ridden face, Rodney strode in and took his seat.  “As I believe the voice of my constituents and all sensible and honest men is in favor of independence,” Rodney announced, “and as my own judgment concurs with them, I give my vote for independence.”  His fateful ride secured Delaware’s vote for the cause of liberty.  (Next time you find a Delaware state quarter in your pocket, take a look at the man riding on a galloping horse; that’s Caesar Rodney!)

Virginian Richard Henry Lee’s resolution for independence secured support from twelve of the thirteen colonies, with New York’s delegates abstaining from the vote as they still lacked formal approval from their colonial government (an error remedied seven days later when it voted tardily to “join with the other colonies in supporting” independence).  Unanimity among the colonies was important.  It deprived the British of the opportunity to exploit colonial divisions.  It also demonstrated to the American people that the colonies were united in purpose.  The history of the War for Independence could have been much different had the delegates to the Second Continental Congress not found a way to come together.

The Pennsylvania Evening Post reported on July 2: “This day the CONTINENTAL CONGRESS declared the UNITED COLONIES FREE and INDEPENDENT STATES.”

John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail: “The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America.  I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.  It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.  It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

The American people, on the other hand, immediately recognized July 4 — the date the Declaration of Independence was unanimously ratified and first published by a local printer — as America’s Independence Day.

The delegates to the Second Continental Congress committed acts of high treason against the Crown — crimes punishable by torture and death.  We Americans celebrate their treason every year on this day.

Our country was birthed in adversity, nourished on liberty, christened as the land of opportunity, guided by God, and preserved by His blessings.  Two-hundred-fifty years later, let us pray for two-hundred-fifty more.  Happy Independence Day!

Hat tip to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who died two hundred years ago today!

J.B. Shurk | July 4, 2026

Source: America Did Not Have an Easy Birth – American Thinker