“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

Substack Dr. Brian’s Substack

Truth Social @BrianJoondeph

LinkedIn @Brian Joondeph

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

Success or failure? Here is your answer.

From the very beginning, and for a century afterward, Americans often referred to their country as an experiment.  And for very good reason.

At the time, almost all civilizations were monarchies.  Indeed, many Europeans expected Washington to become king of the colonies, or at the least dictator, and were surprised when he did not even try.  They were just as surprised when he stepped down from the presidential office, thereby cementing a peaceful transition of power.  (A minority of Americans also considered a monarchy out of habit.)

The type of government the Americans had concocted was a novelty.  Initially, soon after declaring independence without achieving it, they cobbled together the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union; in a reaction against authoritarian government, they created a government without any authority.  After independence, it proved worthless — what James Madison referred to as “in fact nothing more than a treaty of amity of commerce and of alliance, between so many independent and sovereign states.”  The Dutch Republic, the Amphictyonic League, and the Swiss confederacy were similarly organized, with mixed outcomes.  Indeed, some in the states’ governments thought of declaring war on others over boundaries and trade.  It must be kept in mind that people considered themselves Americans and Virginians (or Georgians, etc.); they still do.

They tried again.  But what to create?  The reader should not make the common mistake of thinking the present form of government was inevitable and logical.  It could have taken any number of forms.

The Founding Fathers, like all educated people, were well versed in the history of ancient Greece and Rome.  They, particularly Madison, had examined the forms of government that had previously existed, thereby learning the lessons of history.

A democracy was out of the question because of the sheer size of the country.  Leaving dictatorships, oligarchies, and monarchies aside, they settled on a republic — but of what form?  (For example, to avoid dictatorship, Rome had two consults [presidents], who alternated days when wielding power.)  Each region had its own concerns and identity.  How much authority should the executive have, and how far could it extend?  How much Congress, and how far?  What guarantee was there that the central government would not eliminate freedoms?  What guarantee was there for the central government to veto state laws?

Large states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania thought it absurd that tiny states should have the same importance as them (as in the Senate), whereas small states thought they would be ignored if representation went by population size (as in the House of Representatives).  Hence, the bicameral Legislature and the Electoral College.  Can the central government carry out actions not specifically outlined in the Constitution?  (Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were of the opinion that it did not; Jefferson jettisoned this principle with the Louisiana Purchase, even though there was nothing in the Constitution about purchasing additional territory.)

Eventually, the Founding Fathers crafted the Constitution and sent it to all the states to ratify.  Unanimous ratification was not a certainty, which is why Hamilton, Madison, and Jay put out a series of articles in newspapers giving the reasons for ratification.  Significantly, they used Roman noms de plume.

There could have been a United States of America without, say, Connecticut.  Some states announced they would not join unless a Bill of Rights was included.  Once the government was in session and the first ten amendments were passed, some of the holdouts joined the Union.

The Constitution is devoid of flowery language.  It is simply a manual on how to run the government.  Over the years, it has been tweaked — such as senators now being popularly elected instead of appointed by the states, which was originally a measure to prevent the federal government from crushing the states’ local authority.

Over the years, partly because of comity and partly because of planning, the rigid decentralization of political power became set in stone.  This was one of the things that has made the American Constitution truly unique.  The other is the Bill of Rights, which is a protection against government overreach.  By contrast, in so-called democracies in Europe (that look down on America), the people have lost free speech and a free press.  The Supreme Court has rigidly upheld the Bill of Rights and the principle of comity in legal matters not pertaining to the U.S. Constitution (such as how many persons can be in a jury).

When the United States was first created, European rulers were certain that the United States would follow historical precedent and become a dictatorship, dissolve, or plunge into civil war.  Though they were proven right in 1860 with regard to a civil war, the Union nevertheless held firm.  At the same time, America was seen as an example of what could be done in other countries.  To this day, the American flag has been flown by people in countries oppressed by dictatorships, such as Cuba and Hong Kong (at the same time that Democrats burn the flag).

So, to sum up, the experiment has been a success.

Armando Simon | July 4, 2026

Armando Simón is originally from Cuba, a retired psychologist and historian, author of When Evolution Stops, Stories for Lions and Other Felines, and The Transgender Cult: Psychology, Politics, Religion and the Media.

Source: A Verdict on the American Experiment – American Thinker

As America turns 250, it’s good to remember how young our country is. Let’s be patient with our new generation of Americans.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

—John Adams’s letter to the Massachusetts Militia, 1798

As we approach our country’s 250th anniversary, the Adams quote above remains an enduring summary of what the Founders envisioned for We the People.  Yet the long march through our institutions has sought to produce a different kind of people, characterized by President Obama’s pledge to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”

As a professor at a small American college, I can attest to the fruits of this effort.  In my less optimistic moments, I observe my students doom-scrolling before class and struggling to read (or pronounce) Plato and Descartes in class.  When they do engage, it is to correct Aquinas or Mill with what they have been told that Marx and Nietzsche said (as opposed to what they actually said).  The bottom line of our Social Contract — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — is pop-cultured into “I’m right, I get liberty, and you do, too, if you agree with me.”

Okay, that’s a bit of a hasty generalization.  In some cases, students submit truly engaging, non-A.I. essays in which they express a genuine desire to do better but struggle to do so.  In a word, they want virtue but aren’t even sure what this means.  For these students, I provide the following comments, which apply to my students’ youthfulness and, I believe, to the youthful age of our nation as well.

I find that most students resonate with this historical correction to the critical theory fire hose from which they are made to imbibe in most other courses.

Regarding politics, Aristotle states that the “main concern … is to is to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions.”

Somewhere along the way, my young students have lost (or have yet to gain) sight of one crucial point: They are young.  According to Aristotle, “A young man … is not versed in the practical business of life from which politics draws its premises and subject matter,” an underdevelopment due “not to lack of years but to living … under the sway of feelings.”

But again, I see hope, primarily because of Aristotle’s qualifier of virtue pursued over the big-picture course of “a complete life … characterized by rational action.”  At age 61, I am in the fourth quarter of my life, and if I lack virtue, that fault rests squarely on me.  My students, though, are just starting out, and the opportunity to learn virtue is always before them.  As their lives go on and their tax bills increase, they will have the same opportunity we elders have had: to reject childish feel-goodism and pursue hard won but heart-satisfying virtue.

The same applies to our country.  This 250th Fourth of July, will our federal, state, and local governments seek to “engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions”?  Will our young people learn to move beyond emotion to reason and virtue?  Will we together play our part in the ongoing “complete life” of our “more perfect union”?  Much of that depends on the habitual choices that We the People — or more specifically, Each of Us the Individuals — make every day.

A notable time marker for our nation is upon us.  May it be a reminder, individually and collectively, that age is no guarantee of wisdom.  May the allure of maturity, rooted in liberty and the pursuit of happiness, be our focus in our coming week and remaining years.  And along the way, may our young people catch this same timeless vision of virtue.

C.H. Howard | June 27, 2026

Source: Bring Virtue Back for the Next Generation – American Thinker

More than two decades ago, in 2004, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington warned in his book “Who Are We?” that America was facing a crisis of identity. He argued that a nation cannot remain united without a common culture, a common history, and a common understanding of itself. Remove those foundations, and a society inevitably fragments into competing tribes, interests, and identities.

Huntington pointed to the Anglo-Protestant Creed as the core of America’s unifying identity. He argued that America’s political institutions and civic ideals did not arise in a vacuum but were rooted in a culture shaped by Protestant Christianity. If Huntington identified the foundation of America’s shared identity, educator E.D. Hirsch explained how that identity was transmitted: through a common biblical literacy that provided Americans with a shared vocabulary, history, and moral framework. Without that shared knowledge, the cultural foundations of national identity inevitably begin to erode.

The Founding Fathers were immersed in biblical imagery. Benjamin Franklin famously proposed a national seal depicting Moses at the Red Sea. The Israelites’ exodus taught lessons about liberty, tyranny, divine providence, and national purpose.

The Bible shaped how Americans understood freedom, law, covenant, human dignity, and self-government. Even those who were not orthodox Christians were influenced by the biblical worldview that permeated colonial America.

But what happens when that biblical literacy disappears?

A nation that forgets its story loses its identity. And when a people lose their identity, they become fragmented. That is precisely what Huntington warned about. Americans increasingly identify themselves by race, class, political ideology, or special interest rather than by a common national story.

The consequences of this loss of historical memory extend beyond America’s understanding of itself. They also affect America’s understanding of one of the most important sources of its cultural inheritance: the Jewish people and the biblical story of Israel.

America’s affinity for the Jewish people did not begin with the modern State of Israel. For generations, Americans viewed Jewish history through the lens of Scripture and found in Israel’s story lessons about liberty, covenant, and national purpose.

As biblical literacy declines, Israel is increasingly viewed only through a contemporary political lens, ignoring its biblical and historical foundations. Meanwhile, anti-Semitism has risen across America and the West. Certainly, anti-Semitism has many causes. Yet it is difficult to ignore the connection between a society that no longer understands the Bible and one that increasingly misunderstands the Jewish people whose history fills its pages.

The rise of anti-Semitism and the weakening of support for Israel did not occur overnight. The ground was prepared over decades as biblical literacy declined, historical memory faded, and Americans became disconnected from the sources that once helped them understand both their own identity and the identity of the Jewish people.

As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, we have an opportunity not merely to commemorate our history but to recover it. We can rediscover the biblical foundations that shaped our nation and strengthen the shared identity Huntington warned was slipping away.

The Bible is not merely a religious text but one of the foundational documents of American civilization. To understand America, one must understand the Bible. And when that understanding is lost, we lose not only part of our history but part of our identity.

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: What Happens When The Biblical Literacy That Shaped America’s Founding Disappears? – Harbinger’s Daily

The most alarming projections of climate change have been built upon a scenario known as RCP 8.5 and its successor, SSP5-8.5, which climate scientists now admit are “implausible” parameters.

For years, some of the most alarming projections of climate change were built upon a scenario known as RCP 8.5 and its successor, SSP5-8.5.

The public rarely heard those technical labels. Instead, they encountered the conclusions. Headlines warned of climate catastrophe. Studies projected severe economic losses, rising mortality, agricultural disruption, sea-level rise, and increasingly extreme weather. Governments cited such projections when developing policy. Courts referenced them in climate litigation. Businesses incorporated them into risk assessments.

Yet a significant development has received remarkably little public attention.

In the official CMIP7 ScenarioMIP design paper published in 2026, Detlef van Vuuren and more than forty climate-scenario researchers wrote:

For the 21st century, this range will be smaller than assessed before: on the high-end of the range, the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible….

The significance of that statement is difficult to overstate.

The shift became explicit in 2026 during the development of the CMIP7 climate-scenario framework that will help inform the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report. Researchers involved in designing the next generation of official climate scenarios concluded that the highest-emissions pathway widely used in previous climate assessments should no longer be regarded as a plausible representation of the world’s likely future.

This does not mean climate change has disappeared. Nor does it mean the IPCC has formally withdrawn SSP5-8.5 from climate modeling. The scenario remains available for analytical and stress-testing purposes.

What has changed is its status.

That distinction matters.

Now many of the scientists responsible for developing future climate scenarios appear to be reaching similar conclusions.

The implications extend far beyond an academic dispute among climate researchers.

RCP 8.5 was never merely another modelling exercise. It became one of the most influential scenarios in the history of climate science.

Thousands of academic papers relied upon it. Researchers used it to estimate future economic damages, heat-related mortality, agricultural disruption, sea-level impacts, and extreme weather losses. Studies based upon the scenario influenced adaptation planning, climate litigation, ESG investment frameworks, and government policy discussions throughout the Western world.

The distinction between a severe hypothetical scenario and a likely future became blurred.

This is where the controversy begins.

Imagine a pharmaceutical company promoting a drug using a risk model that later came to be regarded as unrealistic.

Imagine financial regulators restructuring the banking system around stress tests built upon assumptions later acknowledged to be implausible.

Imagine military planners justifying vast expenditures using threat projections that their own analysts no longer considered likely.

There would be serious questions.

How were the assumptions chosen?

How were the projections communicated?

Were policymakers given a balanced understanding of the uncertainties involved?

Yet when one of the most influential climate scenarios of the last decade loses credibility, there is remarkably little discussion.

There are no front-page reassessments by the media organisations that amplified the most alarming projections. There are few reflections from the institutions that used those projections to advocate sweeping policy changes. The climate narrative largely continues unchanged.

Consider some of the consequences.

Governments across the Western world declared climate emergencies.

Net-zero commitments were incorporated into legislation.

Public and private institutions adopted ESG frameworks.

Climate litigation expanded.

Schoolchildren were repeatedly told that they faced an existential crisis.

Entire sectors of the economy were reorganised around projected future risks.

Whether one supports or opposes those policies is ultimately a matter for democratic debate. The more immediate question is whether the assumptions underlying some of the most influential projections were communicated honestly and accurately.

There is nothing controversial about scientists revising a scenario when new evidence emerges. That is exactly what scientists should do. The question is why the public is hearing so little about a revision involving one of the most influential climate scenarios of the past decade.

The problem arises when institutions spend years promoting a particular narrative and then show little interest in examining whether the assumptions underpinning that narrative remain valid.

The issue is not simply climate science. It is what happens when worst-case scenarios and flawed assumptions migrate from technical modelling exercises into public policy, media narratives, court decisions, and investment strategies.

For years, projections derived from SSP5-8.5 were treated not merely as one possible future but increasingly as the future. The distinction matters.  Models are useful tools, but a model is not reality. Its conclusions depend upon assumptions, and when those assumptions change, the conclusions deserve re-examination.

That is precisely what appears to be happening with SSP5-8.5.

One of the most underreported climate stories of 2026 is that the scenario underpinning many of the most alarming projections is no longer regarded as plausible by those developing the next generation of climate models.

It may be the growing recognition among climate-scenario researchers themselves that one of the most influential pathways used to shape public understanding of climate change no longer represents a plausible picture of the future.

If so, policymakers, journalists, and citizens alike should be asking a simple question:

What else was built upon assumptions that no longer hold?

Mark Keenan | June 23, 2026

Mark Keenan is a former United Nations technical expert and an independent writer examining the intersection of science, technology, finance, and power. His work focuses on how dominant narratives are formed—and what lies outside them. He is the author of Climate CO2 Hoax, When Models Replace Reality, The Planned Pandemic, The Debt Machine, and Demonic Economics, where he examines the intersection of history, finance, and systems of power. His essays are read internationally and published on Substack (markgerardkeenan.substack.com). He writes to challenge assumptions, encourage critical inquiry, and invite readers to examine the structures shaping modern life. His work is archived at Reality Books.

Source: The Climate Scenario Behind A Decade of Alarmism Is No Longer Considered Plausible – American Thinker

This century-long experiment of demonizing, removing, and replacing men has failed.

I’d like to use Father’s Day to make a humble request: Let’s bring back the patriarchy.  Whatever we currently have just isn’t working.

Empowering an odd collection of feminazis, soy boys, pronoun people, emotional nutcases, women pretending to be men, and men pretending to be women has produced a dysfunctional world that makes no sense.  We’ve got gays celebrating Muslim jihadists who throw gays off buildings for sport.  We’ve got “Me Too” pink-hat-ladies defending pedophiles and rapists from decorated military veterans now serving as ICE agents.  We have male Democrat Party politicians harnessed with strange contraptions that allow them to “breastfeed” adopted babies.  We have Hillary Clinton clones wearing pantsuits and using the lowest register of their vocal chords to bark orders in the most raspy, gruff, masculine voice they can muster.

I remember when Hillary Clinton and other female politicians used to stare up at the stars just beyond the glass ceiling and wistfully ponder, “What a wonderful world it would be if only women were in charge.”  Even before the cancerous Clintons rented out the Lincoln Bedroom, traded military secrets for Chinese campaign contributions, and built a money laundering operation disguised as a family charity, it had become quite common for the chattering class to go all twinkly-eyed on television as corporate news mouthpieces told the public that wars would probably end once women were running things.

In 2026, does anybody believe women are the missing link to global peace?  Have you seen those Minneapolis harpies screaming in the faces of ICE agents?  And that coven of Cloward-Piven communists hail from a state so broadly admired for its distinctive generosity and graciousness that the rest of us once fondly described its spirit as “Minnesota nice.” “Nice” does not come to mind when I watch videos of angry women running over federal agents with their cars, blocking officers from arresting violent illegal aliens, and yelling all manner of profanities at guys and gals who risk their lives to keep Americans safe.

If the women of America’s “nicest” state can be so venomous, just imagine the unholy scenes of female madness that erupt outside of a New York City Chick-fil-A when a young employee politely says, “Thank you, sir,” to a bearded man in a dress who demands to be addressed as a “Ma’am.”  Women jump on tables and start throwing things faster than J.B. Pritzker and Chris Christie tag-team-devouring a buffet.  (Nota bene: Never suggest to a woman ransacking a restaurant that she behave as a lady; such suggestions produce the opposite result.)

Say what you will about “toxic masculinity,” but when boys grow up learning how to take and throw a punch, they become men capable of both aggression and restraint.  You don’t have to get hit in the face too many times before figuring out a few things: (1) Don’t start what you can’t finish.  (2) Not every personal slight requires a response.  The art of compromise is practiced best by those who have witnessed firsthand the cost of conflict.  When fighting and warring are dismissed as unnecessary aberrations arising from “dangerous” masculinity, vital human lessons are never learned.  Being a leader is not about shouting orders; it is about putting yourself in harm’s way enough times to learn the safest passage through future hardship.  Successful leaders are not anointed; they struggle and keep moving forward until everyone else is following.

Protecting others means that masculinity is sacrifice.  It is a willingness to put yourself between a loved one and a threat.  It is a recognition that you will give everything you have — including your life — to shield those under your protection.  It is an acceptance that, although you will not win every fight, you will fight, regardless.

Whatever kind of society we currently have, it is certainly not a patriarchy.  We have far too many children growing up without fathers.  We have far too many men who say and do nothing as evil men do evil things.  We have far too many men who have chosen to leave society behind rather than defend it.  They have been called names.  They have been told that they are culpable for every bad thing that has ever happened.  They are described as redundant or even anachronistic in the modern family.  Television shows and movies depict them as stupid, boorish, privileged, unwanted, unneeded, and easily replaceable.

Western societies that have rejected masculine virtue produce the same natural result: Everything breaks.  Families stop functioning properly.  Neighborhoods are overrun with crime and violence.  Communities turn into bickering tribes.  Love of country is replaced with self-hate.  Personal sacrifice fades.

What happens when men stop building, protecting, and sacrificing for the countries that they call home?  Barbarians breach the gates.  Countries get conquered.  Innocents die.  Towns vanish.  Mass invasion does not succeed simply because the United Nations, the European Union, and the political Establishments of Britain and the United States prefer to sow chaos and make money from open borders.  Invasion succeeds because men have disappeared.

Right now, unfortunately, too many men have been cowed into silence.  Those calling themselves “men” spend their energies defending “transgender” predators who hunt inside women’s restrooms and child sex-slavers who hide behind the virtue-signaling smokescreens of mass amnesty advocates.  When masculine virtue dries up, the wolves start preying on the weak.

There’s only one way out of this mess: We must bring back the patriarchy.  Men must be roused from their slumbers and reminded what’s at stake.  They must do the hard things once again no matter how much civilization’s destroyers complain.  This century-long experiment of demonizing, removing, and replacing men has failed.

What happens next will not be for the faint of heart.  In fact, bringing back order to a society addicted to chaos will require more heart than most men have ever used.  But it’s the only way to save the West from those who wish to put it in the ground.  It will require men who are willing to be called horrible names while they protect others.  It will require men with calluses, purpose, and restraint.  It will require men of courage, sacrifice, strength, and honor.  These men will not be appreciated by everyone alive today.  They will, however, be remembered by every generation that follows.

J.B. Shurk | June 21, 2026

Source: Bring Back the Patriarchy – American Thinker

Tulsi Gabbard releases docs exposing Fauci’s role in funding Wuhan gain-of-function research.

Tulsi Gabbard’s last day as the director of national intelligence is upon us, after she resigned because of a major illness in the family. In her resignation note to the president, she cited her husband Abraham Williams’ recent diagnosis with sacral chordoma — an extremely rare tumor that develops in the sacrum at the base of the spine. In her resignation, she wrote that “He faces major challenges in the coming weeks and months. At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle.”

That said, there is good news there. The surgery to remove bone and surrounding tissue lasted almost seven hours and was described as successful. Gabbard shared that he had a rough night following that surgery and was in a lot of pain, but was finally home resting, adding “Now recovery begins.”

Gabbard also expressed gratitude for the public support: “We’re so grateful for the outpouring of prayers and kind messages from all of you. Our hearts are full.”

As wonderful as that news is, and as cheered as I am about it, alas! That’s where the feel-good part of this piece ends.

As the exit sign looms, Gabbard has released the following statement:

And here are the documents she declassified and released:

COVID-19 Release Index
COVID-19 Release Part 1
COVID-19 Release Part 2
COVID-19 Release Part 3
COVID-19 Release Part 4 

The ODNI press release accompanying the release states that Anthony Fauci, as head of NIAID, provided millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — work the release describes as “widely viewed” as the source of an unintentional lab leak.

I spent some time last night — several hours in fact — going over these documents that I’ve linked above. They lay out the flat-out accusations of Fauci of teaming up with his fellow travelers in the Intelligence Community to kill the lab-leak hypothesis and bury his own fingerprints on the research funding.

And apparently that wasn’t enough — these documents show three specific roles for him:

• Fauci caused our government to bankroll reckless and illegal gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan while chasing the trillion-dollar dream of “universal vaccines,” an item worth billions to Big Pharma;
• Fauci worked the phones behind the scenes to steer IC analysts toward a convenient (and false) natural-origin conclusion;
• Fauci then stood in front of cameras playing the part of America’s trusted pandemic czar and — per the release — fed the public a steady diet of lies, disinformation, and censorship.

Quite the résumé, wouldn’t you say? But wait, there’s more!

Testimony gathered during the declassification review includes accounts of a contractor who was terminated shortly after coming forward as a whistleblower, analysts being told that advocacy for the lab-leak hypothesis would affect promotions, and senior leaders allegedly removing anonymity from the whistleblower complaint process by requiring managers or attorneys to be present at ODNI meetings. These accounts have been referred to the IC Inspector General. No action has been taken yet.

Remember Fauci getting up on his hind legs in a CNN interview, after Trump won the election but before he had even taken the oath, saying that Trump would face a pandemic?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puqaaeLnEww

How would he know? Because as the evidence in hand shows, he directed and financed it, with our tax dollars.

Remember the old saying? When you’re up to your belt loops in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original mission was to drain the swamp. And draining the swamp, you’ll recall, stood at the very center of Trump’s campaign. How convenient!

The more I look at all of this, the more it resembles the “insurance policy” crowd’s backup plan — the one Peter Strzok and Lisa Page seemed so eager to discuss in those now-infamous texts about stopping Trump. They lost the election, but it appears they never abandoned the objective. They simply moved to Plan B. More pointedly and succinctly: was the lab leak unintentional?

When COVID-19 first emerged, I couldn’t point to much beyond instinct. Still, my gut kept telling me these events were connected in ways the public, including myself, didn’t fully understand yet. Understand: COVID-19 is a real, if artificially created virus, but politics quickly became the real and overriding story.

Every instinct I have tells me that this was a coup, in every sense of the word. No tanks rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue. No soldiers stormed government buildings. Instead, fear, censorship, bureaucratic power, and economic devastation achieved what normal politics could not, and no army could get close to.

Yes, people died, in numbers that dwarf the actions of every dictator in history. Millions of them. The elderly, the vulnerable, and those already struggling with poor health paid the highest price. Estimates place the worldwide death toll in the tens of millions. The scale of the tragedy remains almost impossible for us to comprehend.

Fauci’s legacy won’t consist of magazine covers or glowing media profiles that he so eagerly sought as he basked in celebrity status, collected accolades, posed for photographs, and lectured the public from television screens. His legacy will consist of elderly parents and grandparents dying alone in nursing homes. Families who lost final conversations, final embraces, and final goodbyes. Bureaucrats locked relatives out while infected patients were crammed into those same facilities. My own mother became one of those stories. I do not seek sympathy here; I merely hold out personal experience as an example. Certainly, millions of families will forever carry similar scars.

Am I being harsh? Yes. Absolutely. I understand that. In fact, this deserves more harshness, but I don’t have the words to describe all this without pushing my editors over the edge.

The accusations carry enormous weight, and I fully understand exactly how serious they are. But after watching these same people distort facts, weaponize institutions, silence dissent, and excuse one abuse after another for the better part of a decade — and beyond — all aimed at one solitary goal, a fair question remains:

Would you really put it past them?

All that’s left is jail time for the guilty. Given the timing of this release, and the lack of prosecutions thus far, I wonder if we will ever see that day. That, perhaps, is the most damning point in all of this.

Eric Florack  | 11:30 AM on June 21, 2026

Source: Turns Out ‘Trust the Science’ Came With Receipts – PJ Media

An analysis of Democrats’ policies impacting American cities like Los Angeles in 2026.

A picture of a near-empty downtown Los Angeles appeared on “X” recently with this caption under it: “Los Angeles has one of the deadest downtowns in the world, according to a new survey.” I’d like to know a little more about that survey and how the surveyors arrived at their conclusion, but there’s not much debate among patriotic Americans that most metropolitan areas of the country are currently in horrible condition. That doesn’t need “surveys” to prove.

I’d like to ask, which one of these great cities has had even one Republican mayor in the last 50 years? Very, very few of them, I suspect. This tragedy, in American big cities, has been caused, 100 percent, by the Democrat Party and its policies and politicians. Not just their policies, but the decadent lifestyle they encourage people to live can only lead to desecration and ruin.

Why do people continue to vote for Democrats when they see the horrors they produce? Well, there are many reasons, I guess. Some do it out of tradition—”my family has always voted Democrat, so I do, too.” That’s super-intelligent reasoning, isn’t it? Some vote Democrat out of hate: “I will never vote for Donald Trump.” Others do it out of apathy; they just don’t really care too much about politics as long as their lives are moving along acceptably to them. Many do it out of ignorance—they simply don’t know (or care) what Democrats have done to these big cities. They may see a politician they like, and they believe anything he/she tells them, regardless of how big a lie it is. Ignorance, apathy, and frankly, stupidity, are all serious problems in any democracy.

Of course, sadly, countless Black Americans populate the bigger cities now, “white flight” having occurred in most of them. So, many of these metropolitan areas have Black Democrat Party mayors. The horrors could hardly be worse. In 2024, 15,795 people were murdered in America. Of those victims, 6,753 were white, and 8,158 were Black. That was actually less than 2023, when 8,070 whites were murdered compared to 11,060 Blacks.

This is amazing, considering that only 13 percent of the population of America is Black. Yet, they make up a majority of the people murdered. Somebody is failing them—and sometimes it is themselves. It must be said that many of these hideous inner-city problems, frankly, are the fault of the people living there. When 69-70 percent of Black babies are born out of wedlock, that is a recipe for crime, poverty, and maladjusted children—God intended for families to have both mothers and fathers for a reason. But where are the Democrat Party—and Black—political leaders who are urging black to quit fornicating and having babies out of wedlock, and for fathers to take responsibility for their offspring and raise them “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord”? Well, Democrats can’t have that, can they? That plan is Judeo-Christian, and the Democrat Party would rather watch blacks suffer poverty, misery, and murder than submit to godly wisdom.

And Black churches, which are supposed to be teaching the precepts of Jesus, have, rather, exalted the policies of the Democrat Party. Those “churches” have been virtually no help at all. Therefore, the evil that the Democrat Party is perpetuating will persist as long as Blacks and other inner-city dwellers (and massive numbers of Americans) ignore the only true answer to these horrifyingly tragic problems—live virtuous, responsible, godly lives. Why people can’t see that, I do not know.

The Democrats don’t want to see it, or don’t want to admit it, because if people were virtuous, responsible, and godly, they wouldn’t need government. “If all men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison said. But, of course, government power is all Democrats are interested in. So, the Democrat Party and its politicians, both white and Black, have a vested interest in making sure cities like Los Angeles remain decadent, and their downtowns remain dead—in more ways than one. And they’ve been able to tell the “Big Lie” long enough that they continue in power. They have convinced millions of Black people that the fault comes, not from Democrats or Black promiscuity, but from “white supremacy.” If there is an organization on this earth more evil than the Democrat Party, I do not know what it is. Even the Chinese Communist Party isn’t this revolting.

So, Los Angeles’s downtown will remain dead because the people of Los Angeles are going to elect another Democrat mayor who cares absolutely nothing about the people of her city. She only cares about stealing money from one group of people and giving it to those whose votes she hopes to buy. But beyond that, the city—like every major American metropolis—will remain a cesspool of crime, poverty, filth, corruption, decadence, and debauchery. It will be totally the fault of the Democrat Party. And the poor citizens will continue to suffer because of politicians’ selfish lust for power and their own lack of self-control.

Well, those citizens get what they vote for; thus, ultimately, it is their own fault. “The government you elect is the government you deserve,” (Thomas Jefferson), but it’s still sad.

Mark Lewis | Jun 21, 2026

Source: What Democrats Have Done to a Once-Great American City

Was Hitler a Christian? Historical evidence reveals his hostility toward Christianity and helps answer a common objection raised against the faith.

Despite the fact that Adolf Hitler had a Roman Catholic background, he became adamantly anti-Christian and believed in evolution. As other dictators have done, he took over the churches and used their organizational structure to influence the citizens—though the teachings allowed were anything but biblical. William Shirer, who chronicled the Nazi regime, stated that “the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany” and substitute paganism.

Hitler’s vision for Germany was defined in a thirty-point program for the “National Reich Church,” which “categorically claims the exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich.” Some of the points of the program include the following: The National Church is “determined to exterminate irrevocably the Christian faith”; churches have no pastors or chaplains but only National Reich orators may speak in them; publishing and dissemination of the Bible must immediately cease in Germany. The National Church declared that “the Fuehrer’s Mein Kampf is the greatest of all documents” and “embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation.” Therefore, churches must remove all Bibles and crucifixes, only Mein Kampf may be on the altar, and all crosses must be replaced by “the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika” (W. L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 240).

The following quotes by Hitler reveal his true personal views (taken from Hitler’s Table Talk):

National Socialism and religion cannot exist together…The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity…Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things. (pp. 6–7)

The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity. (p. 75)

Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery…Let’s be the only people who are immunized against the disease. (pp. 118–119)

There is something very unhealthy about Christianity. (p. 339)

I realize that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors—but to devote myself deliberately to errors, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity… My regret will have been that I couldn’t…behold [its demise]. (p. 278)

Ray Comfort is the Founder and CEO of Living Waters, a bestselling author, and cohost of the award-winning television program Way of the Master, which airs in 190 countries. Comfort also wrote the commentary for “The Evidence Study Bible“

Source: Despite The Distorted Claims Of Many, Hitler Was Not ‘A Christian’ – Harbinger’s Daily

Calling Balls And Strikes On The M.O.U.

For most of my adult life, Saturdays in the spring and an occasional weeknight game or two have been spent at the same Little League baseball field I played on when I was a kid. I have coached, managed, been on the league’s board, but I had the most fun doing what I love – calling balls and strikes behind home plate.

One of the benefits of being a fixture behind the dish for 46 years was that you got to know a lot of families that came through this community. In a lot of cases, I got to ump games featuring kids and grandkids of people I played with. Regardless of the personalities involved, when I threw the ball to the pitcher and said, “Play ball,” all that went out the window. Whatever priors I had going into the game, I zoned in and reacted to what was taking place in front of me, pitch by pitch.

I am not a dispassionate commentator when it comes to the 47-year war the Islamic Republic of Iran has been waging with the United States and Israel. I have been a hawk as long as I can remember, and was thrilled when President Trump finally decided that enough was enough and gave the go-ahead for Operation Epic Fury. He will always be held in high esteem with me for doing what no one before him would dare tackle.

Now that the Memorandum of Understanding is in force, signed by both President Trump in Versailles yesterday (of all places) and by Iranian puppet President Masoud Pezeshkian, I’m going to set aside my opinion of the agreement and analyze what went right, what went wrong, and what remains to be seen as objectively as I can. But for the record, I think I feel about the M.O.U. the same way Secretary of State Marco Rubio looked standing behind President Trump at the G7 press conference.

The four stated objectives of Operation Epic Fury going into hostilities at the end of February, were simple enough.

1. Destroy Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal and its production capacity Trump emphasized eliminating both existing missiles and the industrial base capable of producing new ones.

2. Annihilate the Iranian Navy This included ships, submarines, coastal missile batteries, and naval command infrastructure.

3. Ensure Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon Trump repeatedly framed this as a non‑negotiable objective of the campaign.

4. Sever Iran’s support for terrorist proxies This meant eliminating the IRGC’s ability to arm, fund, and direct regional militias.

Depending on the source, whether it’s our military intelligence, the Israelis’, or open source information, best estimates are that roughly 60-70% of Iran’s available missile stockpile was destroyed. As for what remains, the final volleys Iran launched at Israel resulted in several that disintegrated or failed before defensive weapons had to be fired. Iran was down to the shelves of stuff that was sketchy whether it would even fly or not.

Iran’s defense military complex suffered about the same percentage in damage. 60-70% of their drone production was destroyed, including one facility they had running in Venezuela before the United States came calling to pick up Nicolas Maduro in the middle of the night.

40% of their missile or fuel propellant development is gone. Roughly half of their electronic guidance systems are gone. Remember that the drone launched last week that took down our Apache did not detonate on impact as was designed. It malfunctioned, even though it brought down the helicopter.

Was Objective 1 completed? No. Was it decimated, to use the oft-misused term of art? Yes, and decimated at least five times over. Iran could certainly choose to take the sanctions relief coming with the M.O.U. and sink it into the hundreds of billions it would take to rebuild their missile and drone programs. Drones would be the cheapest and fastest weapon to reconstitute, probably coming back online to pre-war levels in a year or less. However, by the end of kinetic action, U.S. destroyers were being outfitted with directed-energy weapons, or lasers, to begin knocking them down effectively. Within a couple of years, that technology will be refined and ubiquitous throughout our military. That threat has been, or will soon be, neutralized.

Missile launchers will take a few years and tens of billions. Missile production will take half a decade or longer, costing hundreds of billions. Keep in mind that Iran, the country, has been put in a several trillion dollar hole because of the war, and that’s not going to all get made up in six months of oil sales.

The Iranian Navy, such as it was, is reef lattice at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. If you wish to call ski boats with machine guns tied to them naval vessels, go right ahead. But Houthi pirates are more organized than that. Several levels of their IRGC naval commanders were killed. That objective was accomplished.

Objective three – ensuring Iran never gets a nuke – well, that’s the whole enchilada, isn’t it? We don’t know if that’s been achieved or not. President Trump believes so, but the proof will be in the pudding over the next two months while the final deal is negotiated. But what do we know?

Whatever enriched material they have, whether it be near-weapons grade or even the 2% low-fat stuff (really 3-5%) which can be spun up to weapons grade, is, at worst for us, buried under mountains of rubble. Iran certainly can’t get at it very easily, and in fact, there are reports that the Iranians have sealed off access, collapsed the tunnels, and boobytrapped the entrances. Even if they tried to go back in and extract it, we’d see it, and it would be an instant violation of the most important paragraph of the M.O.U., Paragraph 8. And the one point Trump made no less than five times during his press conference and again on the tarmac at the airport later, that if they tried to go after the material and restart their nuclear program, he’d bomb the hell out of them again.

If Iran opts to resume their drive to become a nuclear power, it will do so without centrifuges, heavy water facilities, scientists who know what they’re doing, universities to teach future scientists about how to know what they’re doing, and the ability to hide it from us seeing it and responding. I was extremely worried about how close they were at the end of last year. I do not have that same concern now. But how Iran performs in this area while the M.O.U. is in force, and how Paragraph 8 is resolved in the final negotiated deal, remains to be seen.

And the fourth objective, severing Iran’s desire to support and grow terror proxies, was definitely not achieved by the United States. Israel was well on their way, having all but destroyed Hamas and going to work on Hezbollah methodically by crossing the Litani River and hitting them on their turf instead of just playing missile pickleball. If the M.O.U. gets violated and we go back to kinetic action, it likely will be because a Hezbollah terrorist working in Lebanon will have not gotten the memo from Tehran and launch something that kills Israelis. It’s almost inevitable. If Hezbollah suddenly abides by the terms of this M.O.U. and ceases hostilities towards Israel for any significant length of time, my opinion of the M.O.U. will go up.

As for Iran, it already doesn’t sound promising.

According to the M.O.U., Iran will be able to sell oil and have some frozen assets released. Other sanctions will have waivers, but the money flow will still be tracked. If Treasury Secretary Bessent gets wind of resources from Tehran flowing back into Hezbollah, that has to be a deal breaker, and all bets are off.

Regime change in Iran was always a goal for Israel, but it wasn’t for us. However, severing Iran from being the patron of proxy terror groups encircling Israel was one of our objectives, and that’s one that we cannot allow to be a failed goal. It’s yet to be determined whether Iran is just blustering for domestic purposes or if they intend to cheat immediately, believing President Trump has lost the stomach to push back.

What went right during Operation Epic Fury? A whole lot. The United States and the world are safer today than they were before the war. That’s just an objective fact, and those who tell you different are reacting emotionally, not rationally. We demonstrated a new brand of warfare and coordinated with the region’s hegemon, the Israeli Defense Forces, in a way the world has never seen. We had intelligence, the right force posture, the element of surprise, and almost flawless execution by our servicemembers. Even when things went wrong, the precision demonstrated by the extraction of our downed airmen outside of Isfahan was nothing short of awe-inspiring. There’s a lot to crow about, and if you just look at the people that were killed and the things that were broken in Iran, quite simply, they got their collective hindquarters kicked.

By deploying Operation Economic Fury, including the naval blockade against Iranian ports, we triggered a series of global maneuvers that portend very good things for the United States economy in the years to come. We are now the largest exporter of oil in the world, passing OPEC. That’s never happened before, and we’re still ramping up production. When Alaska’s development comes fully online, the ports available to feed energy to Asia will be too much for the Pacific Rim countries to pass up. It’s closer, not nearly as perilous of a journey, and a much shorter trip.

As for the Strait of Hormuz, there are seven countries, excluding Iran, that use the narrow waterway to ship out oil. The top three countries – Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates – account for nearly 75% of the oil that goes through the Strait on a normal basis. All three have implemented plans, and two of the three are within three years of bypassing the Strait altogether and moving the same quantities of oil, and probably more, by way of pipeline. Those plans will continue regardless of whether Iran lives up to the M.O.U. or not. This means that if and when Iran violates the deal, and kinetic action once again must be taken, the floating hostages on their southern border will no longer be around to use for ransom.

What went wrong? The messaging for why the war was necessary was slow and inconsistent in the beginning. By a month into the campaign, the administration had largely gotten its messaging coordinated. But it took way too long in the early days to make a repeated case for why this had to be done now.

We did not have nearly enough defensive weapons to secure our bases in the region, and we couldn’t protect our Arab state allies nearly enough. We’ve had a military industrial complex problem of our own for quite a while, thanks largely to Democratic Congresses and administrations defunding and hampering the Pentagon’s ability to forward procure with budget certainty. And the results of that bad policy were on display during this war. Where we had the resources, we were very effective and very lethal. But my gut tells me we didn’t have enough anti-missile batteries remaining to protect Arab infrastructure by last week, and our Arab partners got very squeamish about more ongoing kinetic activity, and the President did not want to lose the cooperation he’d gotten from this part of his coalition. So he looked for an off-ramp.

The idea to arm individuals in Iran so the odds would even out if another color revolution broke out was a good one. Arming the Kurds to be the de facto ground force was a mistake. In actuality, it may be that it was just the wrong Kurds, but nevertheless, I’d like to think that if we had to do this all over again, we’d have worked with the Israelis to identify the right element within Tehran to equip and train with munitions that would give the IRGC and Basij forces something more worrisome to consider. Crumbling the regime from within might have shortened the war for us and taken care of a lot of the problems Iran posed.

I think it was a mistake to end Project Freedom after 36 hours, regardless of the blowback from the Arab states at the time. We should have, and I believe could have, opened the Strait for tankers and freighters to pass while interceding Iranian traffic. Former Senator Jim Talent and I have often said on my Duane’s World podcast that moving ships through the Strait, rubbing the regime’s nose in it, was the checkmate move. If I had an audience with administration officials, that’s one of the questions about which I would ask.

Regarding the M.O.U. itself, it is fraught with uncertainty and opaque conditions that almost guarantee Iran will immediately probe at it with small violations, and move onto larger ones in order to discover how much the Americans no longer wish to confront them. Outside of the President and Vice-President, no one seems to believe the Iranians have had a sincere change of heart. They’re like a baby shark that you bring home and feed, nurture, watch grow from aquarium to aquarium, and then one day be surprised it bites your hand off when you try to pet it. We just gave them oxygen by taking our boot off their neck. Once their vision clears from nearly blacking out, they’ll most likely go back to doing what they do best – killing Jews, Americans, and Sunnis in whichever order presents itself first.

But where problems arise for us in the compliance department is that the IRGC remains in charge of the construction of everything important in Iran. The IRGC is also listed on our terror watch list, meaning no company can legally work with them. The $300 billion fund for rebuilding Iran, if Iran does reopen the Strait and cooperates on nuclear material in future negotiations, would run afoul of U.S. law, which there is no appetite in Congress with either party to overturn. Noah Rothman has more on that nightmare scenario in today’s National Review Morning Jolt column.

The political timing for this may work out very well for the President and Republicans. Oil is already in the mid-$70’s, and there is evidence that engines on tankers have fired up and movement through the Strait is finally commencing. With those lower oil prices come lower fuel costs, and with that, lower prices on all the stuff that started to become expensive again this spring. By the time our economy recovers from the war months, along with the robust job growth and manufacturing and construction boom underway, life will become much more affordable right around the time early voting begins in the midterms. That certainly helps Republicans just as much as Democrats nominating antisemites, Nazis, and 37-year-olds that share their checking accounts with their mother. It very well could ensure they hold the Senate.

And once Trump clears the midterms, presuming he has one house, maybe both if he catches a tailwind, when Iran inevitably does impregnate the proverbial pooch, he’s got another six-month window to whack at the regime until the 2028 cycle gets underway.

I don’t like the deal all that much. I understand it, and I don’t think it’s going to amount to much more than a formality to a quasi-ceasefire until it’s violated. If it provides enough stability through the election, all the better.

As a three-time cancer survivor, I tend to look at a lot of events in life in those terms. Iran without question is a cancer. We hit it hard with chemo for a few months with Operation Epic Fury, and then followed up with another couple of months of radiation called Economic Fury. The tumor shrank two-thirds, by most objective measures. But we didn’t kill it. It will grow back. Malignant growths are almost never coerced into becoming benign. Could we have killed off the cancer? Probably not without ground troops, which I don’t think the American body would have tolerated. That would have been too toxic for the public to tolerate.

So Trump chose to do what he could do – knock the hell out of the cancer the best he could for as long as the body would stand it, and then hope it doesn’t come back with a vengeance too soon.

Could the M.O.U., and the forthcoming final deal cut off the metastatic parts of the tumor in other regions, like Hezbollah and the Houthis? Perhaps. If so, the deal becomes a great deal. If not, we have to concentrate on getting the body healthy again and ready for another round of treatments to come.

That means more money spent on Defense, more weapons, more firepower, and more resolve. This period of time isn’t retreat, and it’s not redemption. It should be time to reload, and when finished and when warranted, repeat.

Duane Patterson 10:00 AM | June 18, 2026

Source: Calling Balls And Strikes On The M.O.U. – HotAir