Walking through London nowadays with your gaze raised above the crowd, you may wonder what has become of beauty. Not beauty as a decorative afterthought, nor as a subjective indulgence, but beauty as an ordering principle of the world that we build—a visible testament to our desire to belong, to dwell, and to affirm that life, even in its transience, is worthy of grace. The question is equally aesthetic and moral.

There was a time when London would have answered that very question with unpretentious confidence. Its streets unfolded according to an implicit logic that reached beyond the purely utilitarian, suggesting something unique and infinitely precious: civilization. Proportion, symmetry, and ornament were never imposed as luxuries; they arose from a shared understanding that the built environment is an extension of the human soul. Around St Paul’s Cathedral, before the Blitz, you would encounter not only a masterpiece of architectural composition, but also a setting that truly acknowledged its presence—streets that deferred, facades that conversed, spaces that prepared the eye and the heart for a solemn spectacle.

Like on the continent, the cultural rupture arrived in the wake of WWII. Yet it is essential to speak plainly: the war destroyed buildings, but it did not target beauty. What followed, however, did exactly that. In the name of progress, a generation of planners and architects set aside the accumulated wisdom of centuries, as though it were a burden rather than a gift. The city became not an inheritance to be tended, as it were, but a “problem” to be solved.

The work of Norman Foster illustrates the state of affairs with particular clarity. His buildings are often praised for their elegance, efficiency, and technological brilliance. And yet, standing before 30 St Mary Axe, you are struck not by a sense of belonging, but by a sense of estrangement.

The building does not continue the city; it interrupts it. It is a monolithic artefact to be studied/admired, not a place to be inhabited in the deeper sense.

This, then, is the crux of the matter: modern architecture, even at its most accomplished, has largely abandoned the attempt to create beauty in the full sense of the word. It has substituted for it a series of proxies—novelty, scale, transparency, technical prowess—none of which can satisfy the deeper human need that beauty addresses. For beauty is not merely seen; it is recognized. It speaks to us in a language older than reason, affirming that the place that we inhabit is not hostile or indifferent, but shaped with care—and love.

Nowhere is the abandonment of this ideal more evident than in the Brutalist landscapes that punctuate London’s post-war terrain. The Barbican Estate presents itself as a total environment, a self-contained world of concrete terraces and elevated walkways.

It is, in its way, an extraordinary achievement. However, it is a soulless monstrosity conceived in defiance of beauty rather than in pursuit of it. Its surfaces repel the eye; its spaces resist appropriation; its scale diminishes the individual—the person—to an incidental presence within an overwhelming design.

At the Royal National Theatre, the language of raw concrete reaches a kind of rhetorical climax. The building declares itself with uncompromising force, as though daring the observer to dissent.

And dissent you must, if you hold that architecture should invite rather than coerce, should welcome rather than intimidate.

It would be unjust to deny the intentions behind these aberrations. Supposedly, their creators aimed to build a better world, to provide dignity where there had been squalor, to replace chaos with order.

However, in rejecting the language of beauty, they deprived themselves of the very means by which such aspirations might be realized. For beauty is not an ornament added to function; it is the form that function must take if it is to be humanly meaningful.

Here, the reflections of Roger Scruton are indispensable. He reminds us time and again that beauty creates a sense of home, and that without this sense, we are left in a condition of metaphysical homelessness. A building may shelter us from the elements, but if it does not also situate us within a meaningful world, it fails in its deepest purpose.

The modernist credo, articulated with chilling clarity by Le Corbusier, that the house is “a machine for living in,” reveals the extent of this failure. For a machine, however efficient, cannot love us, cannot remember us, cannot bear witness to our lives. It operates; it does not dwell. To accept such a vision is truly to accept a diminished conception of ourselves.

And yet, even amid this landscape of loss, beauty persists. It survives in the timeless dignity of a Georgian terrace, in the measured rhythm of a Victorian street, in the sudden glimpse of a church spire rising above the urban fabric. These are not relics of a bygone age; they are reminders of what architecture can be when guided by love—love of place, of tradition, of the human presence.

The task before us is therefore not to mourn and criticize, but to recover. To recover the understanding that beauty is a public good, that it belongs not to the architect alone but to all who must live with the consequences of his decisions. To recover the humility that recognizes the city as a shared inheritance, not a canvas for individual expression.

For in the end, architecture is not about buildings, but about belonging. It is about the creation of a world in which the individual—the person, not as an abstract operator but as a being endowed with memory, longing, and affection—can find a place. A world in which the stones themselves seem to say: you are at home here.

Such a world is not beyond our reach at all. However, it will not be achieved through novelty or defiance. It will be achieved only when we once again dare to take beauty seriously—not as a luxury, not as a matter of taste, but as a moral necessity.

Lars Møller | April 30, 2026

Source: In Pursuit Of Beauty – American Thinker

A free society is not sustained by a constitution alone. It depends on habits, incentives, and the often-unseen cultural foundations that make liberty workable in practice. Laws may define freedom, but it is behavior that determines whether that freedom can survive.

Responsibility is the flip side of liberty. Liberty requires responsible citizens, yet many of our modern institutions — whether in public policy, education, or criminal justice — systematically erode the incentives for responsible behavior. When irresponsibility grows, so does the argument for restricting freedom.

This is not speculation — it is observable in policy debates. Consider firearms. The vast majority of gun owners never commit crimes. Yet when a minority acts irresponsibly or violently, the political response of the Left is not to isolate the offenders; it is to expand restrictions broadly. American philosopher Lysander Spooner pointed out the absurdity of this notion: “To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and lawless.” Nonetheless, the notion persists among gun control supporters and is routinely the knee-jerk reaction to any and all shooting incidents.

Irresponsibility provides big government advocates a rationale to expand state powers by enacting more regulation. It is a precursor to achieving a larger goal, which may explain policies that promote it. The welfare state is a great example of this. Great Society programs were sold to the public as a means of providing temporary help to the vulnerable but put into play incentives that alter behaviors in ways that perpetuate dependency rather than alleviate it.

The welfare state has led to family instability and economic dependence by altering incentives around work, marriage, and child-rearing. Research on welfare policy has long documented these effects. One study found that welfare reforms were associated with increases in certain delinquent behaviors among youth, suggesting that policy changes can influence behavioral outcomes in complex and sometimes counterproductive ways.

When benefits are structured in ways that penalize work, discourage family formation, or subsidize choices that would otherwise carry consequences, they foster precisely the conditions that discourage responsibility and thoughtful behavior. Over time, this creates a population more dependent on state support — and therefore more susceptible to state control.

Data consistently illustrates that cities with higher rates of single-parent households experience significantly higher levels of crime — up to 118% higher violent crime rates and 255% higher homicide rates in some analyses. While correlation does not prove causation, the association is too strong to dismiss lightly.

The same erosion of responsibility can be seen in education. Over time, grading standards have softened, disciplinary expectations have weakened, and the emphasis on measurable achievement has been largely replaced by an emphasis on self-esteem.

The intention may seem humane: to avoid discouraging students. But the effect is the opposite. When standards fall, the lesson that effort matters is diluted. Students are taught that performance and outcome are only loosely connected.

This does not produce confident, capable citizens; it produces individuals less prepared for the demands of a free society. It produces individuals with high self-esteem and little market value, susceptible to notions that race and other arbitrary factors determine success, rather than effort and hard work.

Criminal justice policy provides another illustration of how incentives can encourage irresponsibility. If laws are not enforced consistently, or if penalties are perceived as minimal or avoidable, the deterrent effect weakens. The justice system does not merely punish behavior; it signals expectations. When the reward of criminal activity is more compelling than the risk, behavior adjusts accordingly. And when accountability is ignored, calls for more comprehensive — and often more intrusive — forms of control inevitably follow.

These trends increase irresponsibility in measurable ways — crime, dependency, and instability. When the social costs of that behavior rise, the public demand for regulation, oversight, and control grows — and liberty contracts.

This cycle is rarely acknowledged because each policy is justified on its own terms — safety, fairness, and compassion. But the cumulative effect is a gradual shift from a system premised on individual responsibility to one premised on institutional management.

If liberty is to flourish, this trajectory must be reversed through a reorientation of incentives. Policies must be evaluated not only by their intentions but also by the behavioral incentives put into motion. A program that alleviates immediate hardship but entrenches long-term dependency does far more harm than good.

Policymakers must look beyond the next election cycle. Institutions must reinforce self-responsibility rather than displace it in favor of feel-goodism. In welfare, this means aligning assistance with work and self-sufficiency. In education, it means restoring standards that reward effort and achievement. In criminal justice, it means ensuring that laws are consistently enforced and that consequences are clear and certain.

Liberty is not merely a legal condition; it is a cultural achievement. It depends on millions of daily decisions made by individuals — decisions to act responsibly even when no one is watching.

Make no mistake, everyone acts in their own perceived self-interest. Rewarding good behavior and discouraging bad behavior encourages self-regulation. A society that cannot rely on the self-discipline of its citizens will inevitably rely on the discipline imposed by the state. That is the quiet trade being made by those who seek to empower the state and weaken individual liberty.

The defense of liberty must begin in the restoration of the incentives and institutions that make responsibility the rule rather than the exception. For in the end, a free society is not defined by how much it permits, but by how much it can trust its citizens to govern themselves.

Jim Cardoza is the author of The Moral Superiority of Liberty and the founder of LibertyPen.com. Read more of his essays there.

Source: The Role of Responsibility in a Free Society – American Thinker

Our long national nightmare of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) smearing innocent Americans for profit may finally be coming to an end.

On April 21, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, handed down an 11-count indictment charging the organization with wire fraud, false statements to federally insured banks, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The government charges that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donor money to paid informants tied to the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Party of America—the very extremists it claimed to be heroically battling. It allegedly hid the payments behind shell entities with names like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse.” While raking in hundreds of millions from triggered donors, the SPLC was purportedly subsidizing the hate it sold as an existential threat.

This indictment is not a partisan hit job. It is the long-overdue exposure of a racket that weaponized its “hate map” to brand mainstream conservative organizations as social lepers. The consequences to its targets were devastating: lost banking relationships, severed corporate partnerships, canceled events, and reputational destruction. Families, churches, and policy groups were financially isolated and socially exiled, all so the SPLC could keep the donations flowing.

My own organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), knows this playbook intimately. For years, the SPLC has listed FAIR on its “hate map” for the supposed crime of defending the rights of the American people from the harmful effects of reckless immigration policies. While politicians in both parties have spent decades eroding those rights—through porous borders, sanctuary policies, and the intentional demographic transformation of the country—FAIR has simply insisted that immigration policy should serve Americans first. That stance earned us the SPLC’s scarlet letter: “hate group.” No violence. No extremism. Just advocacy for American workers, taxpayers, and sovereignty.

The SPLC’s internal rot makes the hypocrisy even more scandalous. In 2019, founder Morris Dees was fired amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment. Former employees described a workplace rife with racial and gender discrimination, retaliation against women and people of color, and a toxic culture that stretched back decades. One group of staffers wrote that leadership had been “complicit in decades of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment.” A former insider, writing in The New Yorker, described the SPLC’s fundraising operation as a “highly profitable scam”—a marketing machine that preyed on liberal donors by inflating threats and manufacturing moral panic.

Yet none of this stopped the media or the Biden administration from treating the SPLC’s word as gospel. Legacy outlets like CNN faithfully reproduced the SPLC’s “hate map,” using it to smear conservative Christians, parental-rights groups, and immigration reformers as the moral equivalent of Klansmen. The Biden Justice Department went further, partnering with the SPLC by scheduling regular meetings, granting early access to law-enforcement data, and even allowing SPLC staff to train federal prosecutors. Internal memos cited the group when targeting “radical traditional Catholics” and other disfavored Americans. While the SPLC was allegedly cutting checks in secret to actual extremists, the highest levels of the federal government and the press corps elevated it as the gold standard of credibility.

The cost went far beyond damaged reputations. The Family Research Council faced a 2012 shooting at its offices by a gunman who cited the SPLC map. Parental-rights organizations like Moms for Liberty were lumped in with neo-Nazis, leading to debanking threats and vendor boycotts. PragerU and countless others lost access to financial services and public platforms. All because the SPLC’s “hate” industrial complex needed villains to justify its $700-million-plus endowment and lavish salaries.

The indictment gives credence to what critics have said for years: the SPLC did not fight hate—it monetized it. It conjured an epidemic, profited from the fear, and destroyed lives and livelihoods in the process. Its “hate map” was never a public service. It was a blacklist designed to generate profits and enforce ideological conformity.

Whatever the outcome of the current charges, the remedy is clear. Every corporation, bank, media outlet, and government agency that once deferred to the SPLC must now treat it as radioactive. Defund it. Delist it. Refuse its data, its “experts,” and its seal of approval. The SPLC should become a pariah in polite society—never again trusted as a source on extremism, civil rights, or anything else. Its donors should demand refunds. Its enablers should apologize to the organizations they helped smear.

The Southern Poverty Law Center spent decades telling America who the haters were. A federal grand jury believes the SPLC manufactured much of that hate for its own benefit. It is time to retire the map, repudiate the myth, and hold the profiteers accountable. American democracy—and simple decency—demand nothing less.

Dale L. Wilcox is executive director and general counsel at the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington, D.C.

Source: How the SPLC Profited by Smearing Groups Like Mine

A Stark Contrast: As The Bible Is Read In The Nation’s Capitol, Vast Anti-Christian Corruption Rises To The Surface

Last Sunday, I joined House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and others to kick off the week-long “America Reads the Bible” initiative, where President Donald Trump read an appeal to God from 2 Chronicles 7:14. Meanwhile, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) spent the weekend saying we don’t need any help from on high.

Speaking at a Democratic Women’s Caucus luncheon, Booker warned, “Ladies and gentlemen, there is a storm in our nation!” Then, pointing upward, he declared, “What we need is not from on high. We need foot soldiers of our democracy willing to stand up.”

I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, so we contacted his office to see if he was referring to Chuck Schumer or God. We didn’t get an answer.

Regardless, many of us were looking upward to the One who can provide what our nation needs. And as the Word was read, the words of the prophet Amos came into focus: “Let justice run down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

And as the Word was being read, the Department of Justice announced a multi-page indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center.

An Alabama grand jury charged the organization with 11 criminal counts, including wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and money laundering.

According to the indictment, SPLC raised millions claiming to dismantle white supremacy, while allegedly funding leaders and organizers of the very groups they said they opposed.

Prosecutors allege SPLC used shell organizations to funnel money, not to informants, but to individuals organizing extremist and violent activity. The indictment references funding tied to a member of the online leadership behind the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia. The unnamed individual, who was paid $270,000 by SPLC, also helped organize transportation to the event — at the direction of SPLC.

That raises an obvious question: why?

Fundraising appears to be part of the answer. In the week following Charlottesville, SPLC reportedly saw a surge in donations, with millions coming from George Clooney, Apple Inc., and JPMorgan Chase.

But money alone may not fully explain it.

The existence and amplification of these groups also provide a basis for labeling and marginalizing others. The same organization that allegedly funded extremist groups compiled “hate” lists that placed mainstream Christian and conservative groups alongside these alleged hate groups.

Those lists have been used by media and corporations to determine who falls outside the acceptable standards of discourse, in other words, who should be silenced, canceled, or worse.

That’s not theoretical.

In August 2012, a gunman entered the Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, D.C. with the goal of killing “as many people as possible.” He later admitted he targeted the organization after seeing it listed on the SPLC’s hate map because of its biblical views on marriage and sexuality.

And that biblical view was read over the nation this week as Jesus stated in Matthew 19: “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning made them male and female?”

So while some insist what we need is not from on high, the exposure of SPLC reminds us we need the standard of truth and justice that comes from above.

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: A Stark Contrast: As The Bible Is Read In The Nation’s Capitol, Vast Anti-Christian Corruption Rises To The Surface – Harbinger’s Daily

Viktor Orban wasn’t as good as many believe, and Peter Magyar may be better than many people expect.

Viktor Orban, the valiant populist, the restorer of the Christian faith in Hungary, the welcome thorn in the side of the EU Establishment, and the strong ally of President Trump since his first bid for office, has lost his own re-election bid. I had a feeling it would come to this.

Sixteen years of uninterrupted administration as a strong force for conservative, right-wing nationalist populism have come to an end, at least under Orban’s leadership.

Sometimes, voters have a strange fatigue when it comes to governments. Fourteen years of a “Conservative” UK government ushered in the Labour Party in 2024. However, fatigue doesn’t explain Orban’s crushing loss.

What set that off?

Corruption charges and the argument that his administration had looked the other way when sex abuse scandals broke out at a local school.

Economics also reared its ugly head when the EU cut off its funding. Orban’s supposed lack of judicial reforms, as well as his uniform check on EU policy, frustrated Brussels.

Orban faced a crisis election, and inviting US VP JD Vance to campaign on his behalf didn’t help.

Why would Hungarian voters care what a foreign politician thinks? This desperate move only exacerbated how out of touch the Orban government had become. Critics also saw him as too close to Russian “president” Vladimir Putin and unhelpful in resolving the Russo-Ukrainian war. The EU had been waiting for this opportunity: an unpopular Orban facing electoral collapse.

They were salivating for a post-Orban Hungary, one that would stop its Christian restorationism, welcome more LGBT promotion, tolerate more spending, and open its borders.

Would the Orban replacement accomplish their scheme?

His challenger, Peter Magyar, was trained and prepped as an Orban acolyte.

In 2024, he broke from his party, but not over core policy. Magyar (whose name means “Hungarian,” for what it’s worth) campaigned to end corruption and restore good government in Hungary. He campaigned to the right of Orban, calling for an end to importing cheap labor into the country. He campaigned on cracking down harder on immigration—illegal and mass—than the incumbent!

His message, if anyone was listening, wasn’t pro-EU. He was still asking, “What about us Hungarians?”

Supporters of the cultural restoration Right thought that Orban was not getting the job done. Was he failing?

On April 12, 2026, Magyar’s Tisza Party swept the elections, securing a supermajority of up to 140 of 199 seats. Orban won 56 seats, and another far-right party won the rest.

Sure, EU progressive elites celebrate Orban’s loss, as did Barack Obama and George Soros. They view Orban’s downfall as a harbinger of the end of Republican hegemony in Washington later this year.

Yet look again at the results of the Hungarian parliamentary elections. I mentioned three parties that won seats: three right-wing parties. Not one left-wing or centrist element came to power or won seats. A minimum threshold of five percent in the election results is required for a party to place. The left was shut out of the Hungarian parliament.

The Right Wing won Hungary. Orban may have lost his premiership, but Orbanism is standing strong.

This election focused on personalities, not principles.

Magyar is just as socially conservative as Orban. He has already pledged to end the foreign permit workers. He wants to give Hungarians abroad a chance to return to their home country and thrive again. That’s about as “Hungary First” as it gets!

Magyar has already stated that he will not support fast-tracking Ukraine’s membership into the EU. Huge move for ending the Russo-Ukrainian war!

He announced a diversification plan for energy. Instead of relying predominantly on Russia, he wants to draw oil from the South and the West, as well. This sounds like real economic freedom for Hungary. National populism is great, but it must face economic realities. Too many right-wing populist governments are shoveling out money to voters for school supplies, raising families, and pensions. Where is the money supposed to come from? More taxes?! From whom?

Right-wing socialism is still…socialism, and Orban had a problem here.

Eventually, the government runs out of others’ money, or inflation bites whatever purchasing power the government intended for the people. Inflation and tariff pressures weighed down Orban’s reelection chances.

Orban’s Hungary was still not the perfect social conservative paradise for other reasons. Prostitution is still legal. Abortion is also still legal. While countries need to encourage their native populations to bear children, that vision will collapse in the face of easy sex and no responsibility. Cultural norms need reinforcement, with no tolerance for deviance.

Orban and his party imposed vaccine passports and health mandates during COVID. How is this good for the working public? Where is the freedom? Too much state-sponsored anything is bad for a country.

Even now, Hungarians cannot own a gun without passing strict major government demands. Czechia made self-defense a right, and in Switzerland everyone owns a gun (Though it’s registered with the state).

Throughout his tenure, Orban strengthened ties with China, joining the deceptive Belt and Road initiative. He even allowed Chinese police to operate in his country! American citizens voiced righteous outrage when the local press exposed former New York City mayor Eric Adams for allowing a CCP-run police station in the Big Apple. Yet no one on the Right complained about Orban allowing the CCP into Hungary? That’s wrong.

There’s room for improvement, and Magyar can exceed Orban’s victories while correcting his mistakes.

He is already doubling down on stopping mass migration!

He is committed to putting all Hungarians first and fighting for the rights of ethnic Hungarians in other countries.

Magyar must revive and restore Hungary’s economy. One can hope he will place his country in a better position to profit without dependence and root out undue Chinese influence.

In a media masterstroke, he appeared on state television to discuss his plans for the country. Without missing a beat, he dressed down the reporter interviewing him, castigating the news organization for not allowing him on their program over the last year and a half. He then scolded them for lying about him and his family.

Then came the coup de grace: he announced his government plan to cut their funding and shut them down. Hungary needs honest independent media, he said, not government-funded agitprop that would inspire envy in Joseph Goebbels or North Korea.

He is not hostile to Putin, but he will not engage him aggressively either: sounds a lot like Trump!

He will not participate in the EU migration pact. He is keeping up the border fences, but he has also pledged to find a way for the EU to release the funds the country needs.

He is making inroads with his Slavic neighbors, including the more populist, nationalist leaders in Slovakia and Czechia

Magyar reminds me of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He isn’t just talking the national populist talk. He is walking the walk, and he is sprinting ahead with major reforms.

Orban was T-800. Magyar may well be T-1000, and the EU Left is going to find that he will be worse for their globalist, leftist, secularist agenda.

Source: Orban Versus Magyar: What Happened? – American Thinker

There was skepticism when President Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be secretary of Health and Human Services.  He was grilled by Democrats in Congress over his vaccine statements, and there were even Republicans, including Senators Tillis, Murkowski, Cassidy, and McConnell, who questioned the choice.

It’s been just over a year since Kennedy took office, so it’s a good time to ask: How’s he doing?  Compared to his predecessor in HHS — whom no one can name, actually — what has he accomplished so far?

In his short time in office, RFK Jr. has done a lot to save America.  He has directed food manufacturers to remove artificial dyes from their products.  He has overseen the issuance of a revised food pyramid stressing whole foods over processed ones and restoring saturated fat to the diet.  He has revised guidelines for vaccinations that are not based on the science.  He has stepped up studies of chronic childhood disease, and he has ordered unhealthy processed foods to be removed from SNAP and school lunch programs.  He has also proposed reinstating the presidential fitness test in schools, and his MAHA Commission is charged with examining the role of fitness across the board.

Certainly, RFK Jr. is facing an uphill battle in changing America’s lifestyle choices.  A brief tour of any grocery store reveals part of the problem: aisle upon aisle of chips, cookies, sweetened baked goods, overly salted canned goods, and an oversupply of meat and other animal products — far more than our ancestors consumed even fifty years ago.  These choices mirror the habits of consumers.  If the public wanted more soy milk and kale crackers, these items would dominate the aisles, but lifestyle choices take decades to alter.

Sixty years ago, government began educating the public about the cancer risk of smoking.  It took decades, but now smoking has declined from 85% among men in the 1950s to around 20% today, and the incidence of lung cancer has declined along with it, with lung cancer incidence declining between 1990 and 2007 by 15.3% and from 2007 to 2015 by another 25% among males.  But heart disease, diabetes, and other cancers continue to plague America.

What stands out is that it took so long for the public to change its ways.  The first mandatory warnings appeared on cigarette packages exactly sixty years ago.  RFK Jr.’s agenda focuses on banning toxic chemicals in food and food packaging, including PFAS, BPA, BHA, BHT, and industrial solvents; elimination synthetic food dyes; and reducing consumption of processed food.  Along with this, he is promoting organic and whole foods and food from grass-fed and free-range animal products.  Taken together, I believe that these changes would go a long way toward making America healthy again, but so far, Kennedy’s emphasis has been on removing what is toxic and not on adding what is healthy.

Healthy eating is a niche in America, and only that.  Healthy living videos by Dr. Joel Fuhrman and others are popular on YouTube, but the percentage of the population that watches them is infinitesimal.  It’s estimated that McDonald’s alone sells some 2.63 billion hamburgers annually, and that is just one fast food chain.  Frozen prepared food is often not very different from fast food in terms of fat, salt, and sugar content.

Occasionally, politicians have tried to impose food choices on the public, such as when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg limited the size of soft drinks to 16 oz., but always with disappointing results.  The public will not change until it wants to change.

In fact, the consumption of pizza and burgers, and hot dogs and sausage, and luncheon meats and fried foods — and the corresponding lack of consumption of fruits and vegetables, greens, tofu, nuts, and seeds, and the lack of daily exercise — contributes to many of America’s health problems.  There is abundant evidence for this statement.  The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified processed meat as “Group 1: Carcinogenic to Humans.”  The American Diabetes Association recommends eating less processed food and specifically less in refined carbohydrates and less in added sugars.  The American Heart Association offers a succinct guideline for healthy eating that includes eating more nuts and whole grains along with fruits, vegetables, beans, fish, and low-fat dairy and avoiding processed foods.  The information is out there, but it has not yet sunk in.

Kennedy has also done less to promote exercise than might be expected of a MAHA advocate.  It will take more than a 90-second shirtless video with Kid Rock (which many mocked) to get Americans off the couch.  JFK’s U.S. Physical Fitness Program, headed up by Coach Bud Wilkinson of the University of Oklahoma, set modest goals, such as 15 minutes of physical exercise for all students and testing to track improvement.  In many schools, the program involved much more than 15 minutes, and the results were substantial in the short run, but JFK’s fitness program ended with Kennedy’s death in 1963 and would probably have faded away regardless.

One could argue that some form of fitness program in the schools is far more important today than it was in 1961, when JFK’s program began.  A 2019 article revealed that 27% of potential Army enlistees were too obese or overweight to enlist and that another 47% of men and 59% of women failed the entry-level training test following enlistment.  But nothing the government has done, including the Army’s own attempt to prepare recruits in advance, has made much of a difference.  Obesity rates have doubled over the past 30 years, and they continue to rise.

As always, government programs, however well meaning, cannot alter habits that the public does not want to change.  Tobacco usage declined slowly over decades as the public came to understand tobacco’s relationship with lung cancer and heart disease, but the public made these changes largely on its own.  Government can ban certain toxic chemicals, but essential lifestyle changes have to come from individuals.  Once the public comes to see the dangers of unhealthy habits, it will make the necessary changes, but it will take time.

America is fortunate to have an HHS director who is passionate about making America healthy again.  Some of his actions will have almost immediate benefits, whereas others, such as the Kid Rock video, will have none at all.  What can actually make America healthier is the realization that lifestyle changes may lead to a happier and longer life.  Government can promote that idea, but until it actually sinks in, health changes will be slow to come.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, most recently Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Source: RFK Jr. Is Doing Well – American Thinker

A shocking 94 percent of California teenagers and young adults report experiencing “mental health challenges” in an average month, according to a new poll commissioned by Blue Shield of California’s BlueSky “youth mental health initiative.”

When asked, “How is your mental health today,” almost half of the youth in Los Angeles reported that it was “fair” or “poor.” Statewide, almost a third said the same, with the numbers getting worse and worse as time goes on.

The polling results correspond with the latest CDC data showing 40 percent of youth feel “persistent sadness or hopelessness.” Even more shocking, the national survey found 20 percent seriously considered attempting suicide. Almost 10 percent actually attempted suicide, just over the past year

Ironically, the record levels of mental issues among young Americans come even as government at all levels and public schools roll out more “mental health” and “social-emotional learning” schemes than ever before in history. Some critics suggest there is a link.

Under the guise of dealing with what self-styled experts are calling an unprecedented mental health “crisis,” Big Pharma-funded policymakers are working to make dangerous psychotropic drugs more widely available to young people.

As The Newman Report exposed last year, an official “mental health app” backed by the state of California is targeting vulnerable children with controversial propaganda involving the occult, the New Age, homosexuality, transgenderism, fornication, and more.

With God and the Bible increasingly sidelined, much of the angst being felt by youth in the Golden State is due to confusion. In fact, indoctrination and propaganda in government schools and so-called “social media” are key, the survey results revealed.

According to the poll, 85 percent of youngsters pointed to “gun violence” as a major stressor contributing to the supposed mental-health challenges. Almost eight in 10 cited concerns about alleged man-made “climate change.”

The constant race mongering and “LGBTQ+” propaganda is also taking a toll, with almost 80 percent reporting concerns about “racism” and nearly 70 percent pointing to “discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.”

Concerns about supposed discrimination against immigrants were even more stressful to the state’s increasingly indoctrinated young people, with over 80 percent calling it a “stressor.”

No doubt responding to establishment efforts to promote and normalize censorship, some 84 percent of youth are concerned about the negative impact of “misinformation” online. Virtually all of the young people—97 percent—reported using social media for “fun and entertainment.”

“The data shows youth are deeply affected by the world around them, from climate anxiety and safety to social media pressures,” argued Dr. Nicole Stelter, director of Behavioral Health at Blue Shield of California. “Young people are concerned about the future and how we treat one another.”

“It’s more important than ever that clinicians, educators, policymakers and caring adults listen to what our youth are saying and treat this seriously for what it is — a youth mental health crisis,” added Dr. Stelter.

To help deal with this supposed “mental health crisis,” the Blue Shield of California health plan launched its scheme known as “Blue Sky.” According to a press release, the initiative has supported tens of thousands of “youth” and “educators” while engaging in “youth-driven advocacy.”

Blue Shield’s Blue Sky initiative chief Paula Ambrose suggested that ever-larger quantities of young people must obtain “professional mental health support” to help deal with this. Apparently, “stigma” is holding some back, and so visiting “professionals” must be promoted and normalized.

“It’s clear that stigma is still standing in the way of healing,” said Ambrose. “Reducing stigma isn’t just about encouraging youth to speak up — it’s also about making sure we’re listening and acting on what they’re telling us.”

Ironically, despite the mushrooming growth of “mental health” schemes, drugging, and “social-emotional learning,” the numbers keep getting worse. When Blue Shield polled youth in 2023, 87 percent reported “mental health challenges,” compared with 94 percent in 2025.

The Blue Shield survey was conducted by an outfit called “Children Now,” described as a “leading nonpartisan, California-based research and policy organization.” It was conducted last year and polled some 750 California residents between the ages of 14 and 25.

In Illinois, lawmakers recently approved universal “mental health” screening for all children in government schools. Critics from across the political spectrum and even leaders from within the field of psychiatry slammed the move.

Legendary Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin blasted the schemes of lawmakers to screen all students and normalize the idea of ubiquitous “mental health” issues among children while peddling drugs.

“The idea of screening school children for mental problems is equivalent to screening them for the drug market,” Breggin explained. “This will stigmatize increasing numbers of children, lead many of them to taking dangerous psychiatric drugs, and push some into a lifetime ‘career’ as mental patients.”

“Nothing is worse than telling a child they have a mental problem, first because it demoralizes them, and second because the problem, if there is one, is corrected by improving how we relate to them,” added the psychiatrist, whose work exposing everything from lobotomies to Prozac has led to profound changes in the industry.

The Illinois legislature, where almost 90 percent of politicians’ campaigns are funded by Big Pharma, is also working on bills to mandate “mental health education” and more “social-emotional learning” for students in government schools.

Ironically, a peer-reviewed study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “youth suicides are closely tied with in-person school attendance.” When school is out for summer, the number of suicides among students plummets, before skyrocketing again when school begins.

When the Bible, prayer, close-knit family, and biblical education were the norm, there was no “mental health” crisis among children — no epidemic of child suicide, school shootings, or persistent hopelessness. This is all a modern phenomenon.

What the youth need is not “climate” hysteria, gender-bending indoctrination, endless “race” mongering, or even more “mental health” schemes at their government school. What they really need is Truth and love.

In the end, only parents can rescue and protect their children from this escalating horror show. The wellbeing of their precious progeny literally depends on taking urgent action, before it is too late.

Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist, the Founder of Liberty Sentinel, and a Contributor to Harbinger’s Daily.

Source: When Biblical Education Was The Norm, There Was No ‘Mental Health’ Crisis Among Children – Harbinger’s Daily

President Trump’s Truth Social post last weekend which seemed to depict him as the Great Physician (though he later deleted it) serves as a reminder of why the biblical principle often described as the separation of church and state still matters.

Yes, I support that separation and always have. Let me explain.

When many on the Left invoke “separation of church and state,” they often mean the exclusion of God from government, suggesting He has no authority or place in public life. That is neither biblically grounded nor practically sustainable. As the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 13:1, “there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.” Civil leaders get their authority from God.

And when governments deny or marginalize that truth, they ultimately erode the very foundation of their own authority.

Scripture draws a clear boundary. Civil leaders are not to assume roles or authority that belong to God or His ordained institutions, yet spiritual leaders are responsible for upholding those boundaries.

We see this vividly in 2 Chronicles 26 during King Uzziah’s reign. Israel was flourishing, economically strong, militarily secure, and territorially expanding. But success gave way to pride: “But when he [Uzziah] was strong, he grew proud, to his destruction. For he was unfaithful to the LORD his God and entered the temple of the LORD to burn incense on the altar of incense. But Azariah the priest went in after him, with eighty priests of the LORD who were men of valor, and they withstood King Uzziah and said to him, ‘It is not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the LORD, but for the priests…’” (2 Chronicles 26:16-18)

He entered the temple to burn incense, a duty reserved exclusively for the priests. Azariah and 80 priests confronted him, warning that he had crossed a line established by God. Uzziah’s judgment was swift and sobering.

The lesson is clear: God establishes both authority and limits. The king was not above those limits. The priests had the authority not only to defend the sacred but also to confront and correct the king. To do so, they needed to be independent of the king.

This is the proper understanding of the separation of church and state: civil leaders must not assume spiritual authority, and spiritual leaders must not surrender moral authority. It protects the church’s independence so it can speak truth to power — and it restrains the state from assuming spiritual authority it does not possess.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. captured this well in his sermon “A Knock at Midnight”: “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”

When any political leader is portrayed — or allows himself to be portrayed — in explicitly messianic terms, a line has been crossed. And when the church remains silent, the line fades.

The question is not merely about one post or one moment. It is whether the church will faithfully serve as the conscience of the state — or quietly surrender that role.

Because when the line disappears, both institutions suffer — and truth is the casualty.

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: Biblical Authority And Limits: The True Meaning Of The ‘Separation Of Church And State’ – Harbinger’s Daily

It should go without saying that the First Amendment freedoms of conscience, religion, and speech are foundational to our constitutional order. The more these rights are eroded, the faster we will find ourselves on a path toward the type of political and social decay afflicting so much of Western Europe.

This should be a completely bipartisan position. Unfortunately, the Left’s growing hostility to people of faith – and particularly, to Christians who oppose abortion – has created an environment in which progressive politicians feel empowered to trample upon the First Amendment rights of pro-life individuals and organizations.

Thankfully, President Trump is prioritizing the protection of conscience rights and is taking long-overdue actions to address the many abuses of the previous Administration. A new report by the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group has revealed the full extent of the Biden Administration’s efforts to undermine the First Amendment rights of pro-life Americans. An extensive review of internal records confirms that the Biden Justice Department systematically weaponized the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act against pro-life Americans – an outrage that the ACLJ has fought for years to expose.

The findings of the report are damning: showing that the Biden DOJ worked with pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood to monitor and target pro-life activists with legal harassment; sought significantly harsher sentences for pro-life defendants than pro-abortion defendants; and ignored or downplayed violent attacks on faith-based Pregnancy Resource Centers.

Since the Supreme Court struck down the constitutionally factitious Roe v. Wade decision, progressives have intensified their persecution of pro-life activists and organizations, as well as the Pregnancy Resource Centers that provide ultrasounds and other services that encourage women to bring their pregnancies to term. Ironically, the people who never stop shouting about “choice” apparently do not want women to have the opportunity to do just that if it means choosing life.

The collusion between the Justice Department – an arm of the Executive branch tasked with the fair and impartial administration of justice to all Americans – with pro-abortion activists against their ideological foes flies in the face of the DOJ’s mission, and the animating spirit of our Constitution. This doesn’t just compromise the rights of pro-life Americans – it opens the door for future abuses by government officials of all political and ideological stripes.

As a person of faith and as an American, I am grateful to the current Administration for doing the necessary to defend the First Amendment liberties of pro-life Americans. We cannot have a country in which the government treats our constitutional rights as conditional, or as favors to be granted to preferred political constituencies rather than God-given liberties.

But the fight doesn’t stop here. While we can hope that the legal remedies being pursued by the Trump DOJ will chill future efforts to engage in this type of behavior, there can be little doubt that pro-abortion activists will continue to use their power within the increasingly radical far-Left base to push for these tactics to continue. I give thanks every day for organizations like the ACLJ, which are truly doing the Lord’s work to ensure that these anti-constitutional, anti-faith zealots do not prevail.

Mike Pompeo is the former Secretary of State and former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He is currently Senior Counsel for Global Affairs at the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ).

Source: Mike Pompeo: We Must Resist The Left’s War On Religious Freedom – Harbinger’s Daily

Only after my release from Iran’s notorious Evin prison in 2009 did I begin to learn about the extent of the wide, grassroots support my friend and I received from around the world. At one point, one senior prison official angrily let me know about the huge number of letters of support that were sent to us in prison, though we were never given access to any of them. The number must have been vast, in that it’s believed that the widespread pressure on the Islamic regime was at least in part responsible for our being released from death row, fearing the possibility of being executed by hanging at any time.

It’s no secret that since 1979, the Islamic Republic has used arrests, torture, and execution as a means of repressing the Iranian people. Hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered over the decades, some following fake, staged trials like mine, where the verdict was predetermined. Others have been executed in cold blood on the streets, many of whose remains “disappeared” by being buried and literally paved over, thrown in lakes with their hands bound, and other sick, inhuman acts that define the Islamic Republic.

With hundreds of thousands of Iranians executed, what made my case different? Why the international outcry from people as influential as the Pope, and why does that matter today?

I was arrested in March 2009 and convicted of “apostacy,” carrying an automatic death sentence. My “crime?” I converted to Christianity a decade earlier. When my friend and I were arrested, all the authorities knew was that we had become Christians. That was a crime enough for them, and reason enough to sentence us to death by hanging. They did not know that we had distributed 20,000 Bibles across Iran, that we ran two home churches, that we spoke openly about Jesus and the Gospel, bringing many other Iranians who were hungry for truth and a relationship with the true God to Christianity as well.

Since being released from prison due to the pressure on the regime and moving to the United States, I have spoken out and written widely about the need to bring down the Islamic Republic. In a dream, God once told me He was giving them a chance to repent, otherwise He would destroy them. Given the evil it represents and the death and suffering it has inflicted, no means to do so are illegitimate. I speak from my personal experiences, but also as a Christian. So it’s shocking to hear Christians directly or indirectly defend the Islamic regime by not standing up and speaking out for oppressed Christians in Iran, the Iranian people, and supporting any means necessary to eradicate the Islamic regime when Islam is at its core the enemy of Christianity.

Recently, there has been friction between President Trump and Pope Leo related to the war against the Islamic Republic. The president wrote that the Pope “should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church.”

Pope Leo responded, “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do…there has also been this threat against the entire people of Iran. And this is truly unacceptable! There are certainly issues of international law here, but even more, it is a moral question concerning the good of the people as a whole, in its entirety.”

What I know as an Iranian who spent nearly a year on death row, and a lifetime subjugated by the evil Islamic regime as a woman and as a Christian, is that the threat to the Iranian people comes from the Islamic regime. Not only should pressure not yield, but pressure on the regime works. The Islamic Republic is evil. The Iranian people and Christians in Iran must be supported through all means necessary. If Pope Benedict spoke up on my behalf, I can’t imagine him not speaking up for all Iranians, and Iranian Christians in particular. Where was Pope Leo’s moral outrage when the Islamic regime slaughtered tens of thousands?

The Islamic regime has slaughtered tens of thousands of Iranians this year alone, injuring hundreds of thousands. The regime is evil, satanic, to its core. It must be stopped. How can the Pope do anything other than support the Iranian people, the persecuted Iranian church, and every effort to bring down the godless ayatollahs, mullahs, and IRGC, who have repressed Iranians for so long, not to mention being responsible for the death and harm to hundreds of thousands around the world?

The Pope also recently stated that God does not hear the prayers of those who make war. Forget that this is biblically unfounded, that God Himself designated people who led and fought wars to be some of the greatest Biblical role models; sometimes, war is necessary. In the case of Iran, it is. If the Islamic regime is not eliminated and Iran is not freed from the darkness of Islam, it will continue to infiltrate Western society, erode our Judeo-Christian values, and see many more victims inside and outside Iran who will not be as lucky as I was.

But if Pope Leo doesn’t believe me, hopefully he’ll listen to the words of the prophet Jeremiah (49:34-39), who says that God Himself will destroy Elam (modern Iran) and establish His kingdom there. Rather than being critical of the war to destroy the regime, the Pope should be celebrating it as a prophecy fulfilled.

Marziyeh Amirizadeh is an Iranian American who immigrated to the U.S. after being sentenced to death in Iran for the crime of converting to Christianity. She endured months of mental and physical hardships and intense interrogation. She is the author of two books (the latest, “A Love Journey with God”), a public speaker, and a columnist. She has shared her inspiring story throughout the United States and around the world, to bring awareness about the ongoing human rights violations and persecution of women and religious minorities in Iran, www.MarzisJourney.com.

She is also the founder and president of NEW PERSIA, whose mission is to be the voice of persecuted Christians and oppressed women under Islam, to expose the lies of the Iranian Islamic regime, and restore the relationships between Persians, Jews, and Christians. www.NewPersia.org.

Source: The Pope, Iran, and My Being Sentenced to Death As a Christian in Iran

The magnitude of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s defeat is surprising, perhaps even shocking. The fact his Fidesz party lost by a solid margin, however, should have surprised no one.

Orbán is widely derided by Western elites as an autocrat, and it is true that the state and most privately owned media are relentlessly supportive of him. But that’s never why Orbán was re-elected three times. He won because he did what every good democratic politician does: Provide peace and prosperity while respecting the nation’s values.

From 2010 through 2022, Hungary’s economy grew steadily, bringing comfort and some luxuries to the former Communist nation for the first time. The country did not get sucked into the nascent conflict in Ukraine and proudly refused to take in the any of the millions of mainly Middle Eastern migrants who swarmed into Europe in the last decade.

Those latter stances may have annoyed many other Western European leaders, but there is no evidence that average Hungarians wanted something different. Many current leaders probably wish their nations had been more like Orbán as they figure out how to deal with the growing internal unease over the migrants whom their predecessors let in.

Orbán also had the luxury of running against a largely discredited centre-left, Budapest-focused opposition. Hungarians had decisively rejected that path in 2010 after the Socialists ran the economy into the ground in 2008. Even had they wanted to change horses, they knew they didn’t want that one.

He lost on Sunday because he took his eye off the ball following his decisive 2022 re-election. Cronyism, never far beneath the surface, seemed to increase. The clemency scandal that caused the resignation of the President and Justice Minister added to the sense that Fidesz now served a clique rather than the people.

Fidesz wasn’t entrusted with government to enrich its friends and protect them from justice. It was elected to make Hungarians richer materially and spiritually. The fact that Fidesz elites would pardon a paedophile in their circle severely weakened the national spiritual bond the party had spent so much time building up.

Orbán also stopped delivering material riches. Inflation has been much higher in Hungary than elsewhere in Europe since 2022, and real GDP has been essentially flat. The country isn’t in recession, but it is in the fourth year of stagnation – and that is never good news for an incumbent government.

Any Western European government that had experienced scandal and a stagnant economy would expect to be tossed on its rear come election time. That’s what happened to Britain’s Conservatives in 1997 and 2024, and that’s what happened to Viktor Orbán.

The fact that this seems so surprising to Fidesz backers – presumably including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance – makes this landslide defeat stand out, however. It seems that the media empire Orbán created also built a bubble for the regime’s allies.

Regime friendly pollsters churned out surveys that told them what they wanted to believe, that Orbán was sure to win re-election. Other polls were discredited for being connected to the opposition, which in many cases was true. But just because someone is your adversary doesn’t mean they are lying.

A genuinely independent poll from Atlas Intel, a South American firm, showed the same thing as the non-Fidesz pollsters. I saw a privately commissioned poll by James Kanagasooriam of Britain’s Focaldata that not only showed Tisza with a large double-digit lead but did a seat-by-seat analysis using an MRP to find Tisza with a huge majority and a shot at a supermajority.

These polls were accurate and mainly backed up the opposition polling narrative. Yet Fidesz supporters I met in the last few days were supremely confident of re-election with only relatively minor losses. They believed their leaders – and those people were either lying to themselves or to their backers or both.

Hungarian populist conservatism may be down but it’s not out. It took an enterprising politician, Tisza leader Péter Magyar, and a complete rebranding of the opposition into a centrist-to-centre-right entity to give it even a shot at winning. Keeping a centre-right policy focus while depending mainly on centre-left voters is going to be very difficult.

Magyar will also find it easier to talk about restoring economic growth than bringing it about. He surely will soon be rewarded with a resumption of suspended European Union funding, which should help. That won’t do anything to improve Hungary’s lacklustre entrepreneurial culture, nor can it shield the country from the energy insecurity that affects everyone.

Magyar was also aided by the magnitude of Fidesz’s complacency. Orbán should have known he needed to shift gears, and the older Viktor Orbán would surely have done that. That’s what he did when the far-right nationalist Jobbik party rose in the early 2010s, pushing Orbán make opposition to migration a centrepiece of his platform.

Instead, we saw the government doubling down on its old playbook. It added even more subsidies for families and pensioners rather than spend on the decrepit health service. It tried to tie Magyar to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky even though its simply not plausible that Hungary is going to get dragged into a war that has been a stalemate for years.

No wonder Hungarians rejected him.

It’s difficult to see how Orbán can remain as Fidesz’ leader. His successor will surely realize that the party needs to reform to regain credibility. Magyar may not get the chance to run again against a tired, overconfident foe.

The Brussels elite surely thinks it has won, and indeed it has for now. It also thought it had won a permanent victory, though, in Poland in 2023 when Donald Tusk’s coalition unseated the populist Law and Justice party. Tusk found it hard to govern, though, and the Law and Justice-backed candidate for President, Karol Nawrocki, won last year. Victory, it seems, can be fleeting.

Hungarian conservatives will get over the shock and start the painful but necessary task of rethinking and reforming. Populist conservatives elsewhere – I’m looking at you, President Trump – should take note that cultural affinity will not trump economic stagnation at the ballot box. In short, this is a setback for populist conservatism, not a final defeat, as long as they take away the right lessons.

In democracies, ultimately the people rule. Orbán forgot that. We will see if other populist leaders learn from his demise.

Henry Olsen

Source: SPECIAL What actually happened in the election: Our poll expert takes apart Orbán’s defeat – Brussels Signal

(Queensland, Australia) — This week’s news takes us “across the ditch” to New Zealand. Although our Kiwi cousins rarely generate negative news, particularly since Jacinda Ardern left office, recent military exercises have aroused the interest of believers in the southern hemisphere.

The military exercises in question were conducted in late-2025 and involve a fictional conflict where an armed faction is depicted as emerging from “Christian communities.” The scenario involved use of the training system known as DATE (Decisive Action Training Environment). New Zealand is not the only nation to utilise this system.  It is primarily used by the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. According to the Australian Army website, use of the DATE training system enables “an immersive suite of doctrine and tactics, and underpinned by realistic modelling of both the pacing threat and regional operating environments.”

Although most of the training packages involve fictional state actors, the one which caught the interest of Christians involved a fictional non-state actor known as the “Visayan Peoples Front”.  According to the training video (which is available for viewing at the Australian Army’s official DATE site) the fictional Visayan Peoples Front is a longstanding separatist insurgency that uses guerilla tactics and criminal activities to resist the ruling fictional government. Amusingly, the training video goes on to state that the Visayan Peoples Front “began as a far-left populist movement” but “over time it devolved into an Evangelical Christian socialist insurgency”.

The target of this so-called insurgency was not only the ruling government but also “the Muslim minority.” In detailing the operational aspect of the Visayan Peoples Front, the video goes on to state that the group “advocates for adherence to conservative Christian values” but also engages in roadside bombings, theft and drug trafficking. Information published at a website aligned with The US Army Training and Doctrine Command (now the US Army Transformation and Training Command), gave further details to the backstory, claiming that the Visayan Peoples Front “demanded the exclusion of Muslims and creation of a Christian nation” and that the group’s “ideology is a strange mishmash of extreme left wing, evangelical Christian, and nationalist separatist” beliefs.

These training scenarios continue to feed into the narrative that conservative Christians are an armed, angry, and apocalyptic gang who need to be treated like every other terrorist organisation. The reality is that underpinning the constant assault on Christianity is the fact that globalists seek to advance the narrative that Christianity is intolerant of global ideas because patriotism is divisive. By doing this, the hope amongst the ruling class is that by equating Christians with fanatics and conspiracy theorists, they will silence and sideline Christians from participating in the political process because Christians are supposedly nefarious, subversive and violent.

In so doing, what they really demand is that Christians operating in civil life must adopt either a secularist or non-threatening religious posture. Because what they want is to ensure that Christianity is either rendered harmless or that it can be harnessed to advance a secularist global agenda.  Key to this is their attack on the Bible. You see, in the elitist (and thoroughly neo-Marxist) mindset, if they can convince the world to completely reject the Word of God, then they are able to firmly establish themselves as the ones who may rewrite the script at will.

But to do this, they must aggressively destroy the credibility and influence of Judeo-Christian faith, which insists the true script has already been written and is not only binding but divinely assured. Marxism cannot tolerate rival sovereignties because within the ecosystem of a sovereign rival is a centre of loyalty that threatens their revolutionary aims. This is why power structures which are sympathetic to, or dominated by, Marxist ideology target traditional family structures, churches, and even individual Christians who, in the spirit of Acts 5:29, obey God rather than men. So, how better do you foment distrust of such rivals by connecting their existence to extremism and terrorism?

Although Marxists have deceived themselves into believing they determine their own destiny, in Acts 17:26-28 we read: “And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’”

God’s purpose in regulating times and boundaries was so that people would realise His sovereignty and seek Him.  However, for those who uphold the Marxist worldview, they not only reject God’s sovereignty, but seek to establish their own in place of God.  We know of a prideful creature who adopted that same philosophy, don’t we?

Dean Dwyer serves as a Senior Columnist at Harbinger’s Daily, where his thought-provoking articles engage a global audience of millions. With more than two decades of leadership as Pastor and President of Eiser Street Baptist Church in Toowoomba, Australia, Dwyer brings sophisticated Biblical discernment and analysis to examine world events and issues through the lens of God’s Word.

Source: New Zealand War-Game Involves Training Scenario, Connecting ‘Evangelical Christians’ To Extremism And Terrorism – Harbinger’s Daily

In Donald Trump’s America, many Americans think “woke” gender and sexual issues are settled. They should think again.

Alaska proves it. The state’s lawmakers are currently advancing Senate Bill 238, which would protect Alaska librarians who promote sexually explicit books to children. The bill grants libraries — represented by the American Library Association (ALA) — sweeping power to stack kids’ shelves with pornographic material, even when parents object.

Oftentimes, conservatives stretch the definition of “woke” to include anything they perceive as liberal. But the Alaska debate has nothing to do with kids learning about different religions or the history of slavery. It has to do with exposing kids to topics like anal and oral sex, bondage, masturbation, and pederasty.

What is pederasty? Sex between a man and a young boy — yes, shown to little boys and girls. Seeing Playboy in a middle school would be bad enough, and this is even worse.

If SB 238 passes, it would become virtually impossible for parents to speak out against the ALA’s most controversial books. These include Gender Queer: A Memoir, a recommended “trans read” that contains multiple pages of illustrations depicting oral sex. One scene shows the author masturbating with a sock, while another portrays the use of a strap-on harness. Such inappropriate images have been entered into the congressional record for all to see (buyer beware).

How could the ALA possibly object? By labeling concerned parents as “book banners.” The world’s largest association of libraries claims that objectors simply oppose the “freedom to read,” a mantra echoed by pro-ALA legislators.

As the ALA’s chief critic, I am a firm believer in the importance of reading different books at a young age; I just don’t want fifth graders reading about blowjobs and strap-ons. Most parents agree: Democrats, Republicans, and independents believe that schools and libraries shouldn’t peddle porn to kids, and they believe in parental involvement.

To silence parents like myself, ALA activists argue that the Supreme Court’s 1973 “Miller test” is the proper standard for inclusion in school libraries, allowing librarians to stock kids’ shelves with all materials that are not explicitly deemed “obscene.” Based on the Miller test, which determines whether material is legally obscene, even the most pornographic adults-only magazines and movies are difficult to challenge. As Sarah Lamdan, Executive Director at the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, recently suggested, the Miller test is broadly applied to stifle parental dissent.

Under the Supreme Court’s more applicable Pico standard of 1982, inappropriate books that are educationally unsuitable don’t need to go to a judge. They can be contested by a school board or superintendent, with parents having a direct say. But that would require the ALA to respect parents in the first place.

From Alaska to Washington, D.C., the ALA’s agitprop is a serious wake-up call to parents. Here is a new Miller test: Fear the worst when the ALA brings it up. If school policy names Miller or the “as a whole” test, it is safe to assume that foul play is afoot. We only hear about the Miller test or “book banning” or the “freedom to read” in cases where ALA librarians are handing out sexually explicit books to children.

Parents have no choice but to come together, and the rest of America has to wake up. We need support from institutions such as the mainstream media and influential leaders like Elon Musk or Robert Kraft, who have long championed free speech but can take a stronger stance on porn in school libraries. We also need the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services to step in as a viable alternative to a fundamentally broken library association.

Against the woke ALA, parents need all the help we can get. Our kids’ future is at stake.

Dan Kleinman | April 14, 2026

Dan Kleinman is the owner of SafeLibraries educational services. He is also executive director of the World Library Association, an alternative to the American Library Association.

Source: Stopping Pro-Porn Librarians and Lawmakers – American Thinker

It makes perfect sense that Democrats freaked out when DOGE started following the money. Look at what they’ve been up to all these years.

There’s a reason Al Capone spent a few years in Alcatraz for tax evasion: Money is harder to hide than bodies.  Any thug can take a few bucks from someone weaker.  But when used, money leaves a trail.  The key to criminal success is making ill gotten booty look as though it’s not ill gotten.  That’s way easier said than done.

This brings me to the Democrat party’s current woes.  It is a political organization in the same sense that Tony Soprano was a garbage collector.  In both cases, their organizations are or were merely tools to fleece the public.  But as noted above, stolen money must be laundered to be useful.  One can’t attract the attention of the taxman while spending money one shouldn’t have without acquiring an unwashed roommate with “flexible” sexual preferences, that is.  The cash from a criminal enterprise must appear legit, or it’s worthless.

In the Netflix series Ozark, white-collar criminal Marty Byrde solves that problem by maintaining the appearance of middle-class normalcy, while methodically laundering money for a vicious drug enterprise, the Navarro Cartel.  In the program, Marty funnels truckloads of cash through front companies, casinos, and foreign accounts, until its origin is a complete mystery — as in, can’t be tied to drug-trafficking.  Only then can the cartel use it for boats, planes, mansions, and payoffs without attracting the unwanted attention of law enforcement.

If you substitute “Democrat party” for “Navarro Cartel,” Ozark could be the story of the donkey party’s approach to financial solvency.

Tulsi Gabbard recently learned that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were being sent to Ukraine as green energy grants.  But the money didn’t build windmills or solar farms.  The Ukrainians planned to send it back to America and launder it through a maze of NGOs, eventually to land back in the control of the Democrat party.  The Dems would then use our hard earned money to fund Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, and probably the First Son’s “ho and blow” habit.  That Hunter Biden (D-Hazelden) was pals with the Ukrainians was just a coincidence — wink, wink.

The list of suspicious Democrat interactions with money goes on and on:

• DOGE uncovered a mountain of government grants from USAID funding non-profits that secretly funneled campaign contributions back to Democrat party operatives.  It was the classic Marty Byrde scheme — which was designed to fool humans, not A.I. engines, much to their chagrin.
• San Fran Nan (D-Tent City) amassed something north of a quarter of a billion bucks of personal wealth by outperforming the world’s best investors.  Supposedly, there’s no link between her wealth and the fact that she and her husband made it while trading on companies that she regulated.
• Robert Menendez (D-Boardwalk Empire) was convicted after investigators discovered gold bars hidden in his sock drawer, with no accompanying 1099 forms.  He should have taken notes watching Ozark.  Instead, he’s spending a few years behind bars, learning group showering etiquette.
• Ilhan Omar (D-Northern Somalia)’s net worth surged 3,500 percent in one year, to over 30 million bucks.  On a salary of $174K per year, the math seems suspicious to me.
• Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Hanging Chad Land) has been indicted for embezzling 5 million dollars of FEMA funding and laundering it through family members, for use on bling and campaign expenses.  She screwed up when she started sporting jewelry she couldn’t afford on a government paycheck.  A criminal’s downfall is always her spending.
• Power Forward Communities went from an almost empty bank account to a 2-billion-dollar grant just after making Stacy Abrams (D-Federation of Planets) one of its leaders.  I wonder how much of our money she got as her taste.
• And of course, the financial shenanigans of the Clintons (D-Epstein Island) and Bidens (D-La-la Land) are too numerous to cover in any article shorter than War and Peace.

Can we finally admit the obvious?  The Democrat party isn’t a political organization competing to represent the American people.  It is a crime syndicate, using a political party to loot Americans on a scale that makes the Sinaloa Cartel look like pikers.

Our country has amassed an astronomical $39T of debt.  (I had to use a “T” because the required number of zeros didn’t fit on one line.)  Given what we’ve learned in the last year, would it surprise anyone if much of that mountain of cash landed in the hands of Democrat party launderers operators: foundations, non-profits, NGOs, politicians, propagandists, and such?

Suddenly, it makes perfect sense that the Dems freaked out when DOGE started following the money — something they didn’t think anyone would or could do.  But Elon Musk and his merry band of A.I. jocks turned out to be adept at unraveling the maze of money transfers that took taxpayer funds and illegally transferred much of it back to campaign and personal coffers, after siphoning off an appropriate taste processing fee, of course.

For as long as I can remember, the Dems have had an almost insurmountable funding advantage over Republicans — which they’ve used to mobilize radicals and gaslight voters.  But for the first time in decades, the Dems are going into a campaign season with less cash than their opponents, and a mountain of debt left in the wake of the Kamala Harris train wreck.  Is it possible their financial woes are tied to the exposure of their NGO money-laundering complex?

John Green is a political refugee who escaped Minnesota, writes for The American Free News Network, and is a state content writer for Convention of States Action.  He is an engineer with 40+ years of experience in systems and organizational development.  He can be reached at greenjeg@gmail.com.

Source: It’s Always the Money That Gets Them – American Thinker

In the second half of the 20th century, she already had prescient insights into America, circa 2026.

Maggie Thatcher, easily one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century, was a no-nonsense woman. She became Prime Minister of the UK in 1979 and would rescue her nation from the economic quagmire her leftist predecessors had created.

Maggie was the daughter of a merchant. And as one might expect from the daughter of someone who had to deal with customers and vendors and regulators, all the while making sure there was something left in the bank at the end of the month, she was a straightforward and pragmatic leader.

For someone born almost exactly 100 years ago, she had a vision of government and culture that we could use more of today. She was something of a combination of Nostradamus, Mark Twain, and (rather sadly) Cassandra rolled into one.

Her thoughts and observations provide an extraordinary insight into many of our problems today.

The clarity began even before she was Prime Minister. In a series of campaign speeches before her historic election, she repeatedly stated a variation of this principle: “If a Government can’t protect citizens and their property against violence, vandalism, and theft, there is little point in having a government at all.” If anything resonates with Americans today, it’s the fundamental failure of government to do exactly that.

She also had a clarity on the economics of leftism, saying,

Let us never forget this fundamental truth: the State has no source of money other than money which people earn themselves. If the State wishes to spend more it can do so only by borrowing your savings or by taxing you more. It is no good thinking that someone else will pay—that ‘someone else’ is you. There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money.

Maggie clearly understood what most American politicians don’t, namely, that government can spend only as much as citizens produce. Only through taxes or IOUs can the government spend a single penny. Given that our national debt is almost $40 trillion and our unfunded liabilities are approaching $100 trillion, financed by a GDP of $30 trillion, another of her quotes drives home the reality:

We are told that the present Government have learned from their mistakes. I say that they have not learned. They still believe that you can spend your way out of recession and that you can create jobs by inflation… and that is the road to ruin. … You can’t tax and spend your way into prosperity. Eventually, you run out of other people’s money.

(This is more commonly remembered as “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”)

Thatcher hit the bullseye with this idea, too, summed up in a common paraphrase: “The patronage state is an arrogant state. It assumes it can spend your money better than you do. Yet it expects you to work for it in the first place.”

Along those same lines, Thatcher anticipated the evolution of the left’s political MO beginning with the ascent of Barack Obama, where every critique, criticism, or disagreement was labeled racism, then expanded to every element of American politics: Homophobic, Islamophobic, Sexist, etc. She clearly recognized the tactics: “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”

The Iron Lady addressed what would become one of America’s biggest problems when someone like Donald Trump, who is not a creature of the Swamp and wanted to upset the apple cart, came into office:

Whether it is in the United States or in mainland Europe, written constitutions have one great weakness. That is that they contain the potential to have judges take decisions which should properly be made by democratically elected politicians.

If there’s anything that characterizes America in 2026, it’s the army of black-robed judicial activists who think they have the power to transform themselves into the Executive. These leftist judges are making a mockery of our Constitution, and sadly, Congress and the White House are allowing them to do so.

And she understood that the left was not only a danger at home, but was an equally dangerous threat on the world stage. Her frequent speeches about Marx have resulted in this paraphrase: “To the extent that the West is to blame at all for the ills of the Third World, it is to the extent that the West created Marx and his successors, among whom must be numbered many of those who advised the Third World leaders in post-war years.” From the UN to the EU to the Democrat party, Marxism has almost certainly caused more death and destruction across the country and around the world than any other philosophy in all of human history.

And particularly resonant today is the fact that Thatcher understood what it meant to be an ally. After allowing Reagan to use US bases in the UK to strike Gaddafi, while other European allies wouldn’t allow him to use their airspace, she is reputed to have said the following, although it’s a paraphrase of several speeches, not a quotation:

It had the effect of cementing the Anglo-American alliance. What’s the good of having bases if when you want to use them you’re not allowed to by the home country. It made America realise that Britain was her real and true friend, when they were hard up against it and wanted something, and that no one else in Europe was. They’re a weak lot, some of them in Europe you know. Weak. Feeble.

There were many other jewels, of course. These are two of the best:

“Many of our troubles are due to the fact that our people turn to politicians for everything.”

“Being powerful is a lot like being a woman: If you have to tell someone that you are, invariably, you are not.”

Maggie Thatcher had a clarity of vision and an understanding of the nature of man and the nature of government that few Americans (or Brits for that matter!) appreciate today, and sadly, even fewer politicians.

Vince Coyner | April 11, 2026

Source: Maggie Thatcher’s Timeless Wisdom – American Thinker

This year’s midterm elections aren’t just about who wins in November; they’re about who wins fights over gerrymandering taking place right now. Nowhere is the battle fiercer than in Virginia, a state where voters just six years ago approved a constitutional amendment to take partisanship out of congressional redistricting.

Now Democrats want to make an exception to the rule Virginia voters approved by a nearly two-thirds majority in 2020: They want this year’s congressional map to be drawn up by their own state legislators, erasing the districts set up by the bipartisan board established by the amendment just a few years back.

It’s no surprise when a state like Texas or California that leans overwhelmingly toward one party indulges in partisan gerrymandering. But Virginia is a purple state, and its congressional representation—six Democrats, five Republicans—currently reflects that.

Yet, if Democrats get their way on April 21, they’ll be able to seize 10 of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats for themselves, in the most brazenly unjust reapportionment seen anywhere in decades. This isn’t about making a blue state bluer or a red state redder; this one’s an effort to manufacture a virtual monopoly for one party, depriving millions of the other party’s voters of their representation.

One thing the sheer audacity of this move suggests is that Democrats nationwide aren’t quite as confident as they pretend to be about winning the midterms fair and square. If they expect voters coast to coast to repudiate Trump’s GOP in a landslide, why resort to such extreme measures in a place like Virginia?

Either Democrats are more worried than they let on, or they want to do more than just win—they want to annihilate their competition. They’re proving far more ruthless than Republicans, who balked at the opportunity last year to redraw Indiana’s congressional map from a 7-2 partisan split to a 9-seat GOP sweep.

What Democrats are attempting in Virginia is tantamount to legalized election theft, if voters are unwise enough to approve the amendment they’re pushing. There’s a political cost for this attack on small-d democracy: Gov. Abigail Spanberger, for one, is paying a price in her polling.

She was elected by a whopping 15-point margin last year and was soon touted as the Democrats’ new face of moderation, which is why she was the party’s choice to respond to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address this year. Yet her approval ratings are already poor, with a Washington Post survey at the end of March finding 47 percent of those polled gave her a passing grade, while 46 percent disapproved of her performance in office so far.

The numbers are similar to polling on the amendment to give Virginia’s Democrat-controlled legislature the power to draw the congressional districts for the midterms: 50 percent say they approve, 47 percent disapprove. The amendment can pass with a simple majority, but if the polls are right, Democrats have no margin to spare, and early voting reports so far indicate there’s particularly strong turnout in Republican areas of the state.

The early vote is outpacing early voting in last year’s gubernatorial election, too. Arguably, the amendment shouldn’t be on the ballot at all: it’s faced several legal challenges, with the state Supreme Court ultimately deciding the April 21 election can proceed even while doubts about its legality remain to be settled later.

The very wording of the amendment is illegal, Republicans contend, since state law specifies the text accompanying the measure “shall be limited to a neutral explanation,” while the amendment itself is tendentiously worded as an attempt to “restore fairness.”

Who wouldn’t vote to restore fairness?

The campaign for the amendment has been a master class in deceit and manipulation, with even news outlets in the deep-blue D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia noting the copious use of “pink slime” techniques by the “Yes” side. Those techniques involve propaganda disguised to look impartial—like a made-to-purpose publication branded as The Virginia Independent, which the Arlington-based news site ARLNow.com describes as “a partisan newspaper advancing Democrats’ arguments.”

That slime has been flooding into voters’ mailboxes, including mine. Maybe my blue suburb hasn’t been a target of whatever efforts the Republicans are making—though the other possibility is that the GOP just isn’t trying as hard.

Texas kicked off the latest wave of redistricting ahead of the midterms, as Republicans there looked to widen their advantage over the Democrats. Yet as the divergent examples of Indiana and Virginia show, it’s the Democrats who are more hellbent on winning, even if they have to turn state constitutions into confetti to do it.

Politics is a test of wills-and if Republicans fail this one, they’ll almost certainly fail in November, too.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

April 6, 2026By Daniel McCarthy

Source: Virginia: A New Extreme in Gerrymandering – Chronicles

‘Mental Heath’ And Progressive Propaganda: A Deeply Controversial Agenda In Schools That Should Alarm All Parents

Illinois lawmakers’ obsession with getting in children’s minds is getting creepier, with multiple controversial bills in the legislature this session targeting students in the state.

From mandated “social-emotional” indoctrination to more forced “mental-health education,” Big Pharma-funded lawmakers appear to believe that doing more of the same thing will somehow achieve different results for Illinois children. It will not.

The initiatives are disguised as efforts to improve the social, emotional, and mental wellbeing of children. But in reality, the bills are yet another foundational step toward a national system for psychological conditioning and manipulating children’s attitudes, beliefs, and worldview. The language being used to support the rollout is merely a mask to conceal a deeply controversial agenda that should alarm all parents.

SEL Indoctrination

One of the schemes, HB 4855, purports to require that every school district in Illinois force every child to receive direct instruction in “social and emotional learning” (SEL) throughout the year.

Introduced by Democrat State Rep. Janet Yang Rohr, the legislation amends the Children’s Mental Health Act to force SEL into everything. First, it mandates direct SEL instruction four times per year. But it also forces teachers to reinforce the SEL programming by intentionally integrating it into curricula and classroom activities.

Under the bill, school districts are required to provide “professional development” to help educators align their teaching with SEL principles. The SEL indoctrination, which focuses on giving children government-approved attitudes and beliefs on a wide range of issues, must be aligned with the Illinois Learning Standards for Social/Emotional Learning.

Those SEL standards were developed in partnership with the Bill Gates-funded Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). The organization has publicly boasted about using SEL to turn children into “global citizens” and activists for “social justice.”

But perhaps even more troubling, CASEL admitted on its website that the whole idea came from a New Age institution deeply tied to the occult known as the Fetzer Institute. The institute’s leading luminary on SEL, Professor Linda Lantieri of Columbia University, has openly acknowledged in webinars getting insights from spiritual beings she claims to communicate with.

Earlier this year, lawmakers in Utah considered a bill to ban SEL in government schools. The legislation did not pass. But many more bills are expected nationwide next year.

“Mental Health Education”

Another bill being considered by Illinois lawmakers, HB 2960, orders schools to incorporate “mental health” instruction into their “health education” courses. The legislation includes a broad range of required topics, including “symptoms” of alleged mental problems, supposed “services” to deal with those problems, and more.

Introduced by State Rep. Laura Faver Dias, a Democrat whose campaign was lavishly funded by Big Pharma interests, the legislation will mainstream Big Pharma’s highly profitable understanding of “mental health” among students. The bill also brings in all manner of progressive propaganda on race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and more.

Big Pharma and Big Psychiatry

Even a brief analysis of the effort reveals the unchallenged assumption that the secular Big Pharma-backed view of “mental health” is unquestionably true and good. But even many leading psychiatrists and psychologists have rejected that notion as absurd. Legendary Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin, whose work exposing everything from lobotomies to Prozac has led to profound changes in the industry, blasted the schemes of Illinois lawmakers.

There is a long history of collaboration between “organized psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry” to “make a market out of children” by reaching them through schools, he explained.

The bills come as government schools prepare to begin mandatory “mental health” screenings of all children soon as part of an edict passed last year.

“The idea of screening school children for mental problems is equivalent to screening them for the drug market,” Breggin said when the bill was being considered. “This will stigmatize increasing numbers of children, lead many of them to taking dangerous psychiatric drugs, and push some into a lifetime ‘career’ as mental patients.”

“Nothing is worse than telling a child they have a mental problem, first because it demoralizes them, and second because the problem, if there is one, is corrected by improving how we relate to them,” added Breggin.

Psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry have “much too narrow an approach” to dealing with children’s problems, he told IFI. Instead of pushing drugs and social engineering on the children via “mental health” programs, Dr. Breggin argued for other approaches. “Their ‘problems’ may disappear with a different teacher or a different school,” he said, adding that many so-called “mental problems” are really spiritual or emotional in nature.

Mental Health Crisis?

It is true that there is a so-called “mental health crisis” afflicting not just Illinois students, but children across America. In fact, according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), some 40 percent of high-school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.

Even more alarming: one in five U.S. students in public schools “seriously considered suicide,” and about 10 percent actually attempted suicide just in the last year. Perhaps even more insidiously, children in Illinois are being used as props to advance the Big Pharma’s “mental health” agenda.

“I think something that we’re seeing on a day-by-day basis throughout middle and high schools is that education is unable to address this issue,” argued Abhinav Anne, an Illinois high-school student who is supposedly involved in pushing the legislation.

“Bullying, anxiety, how to combat depression,” continued Anne. “We teach students how to recite tables and memorize every state and country on a map, but we’re not really teaching students these fundamental issues…we’re seeing this gap in knowledge.”

Just this month, the Illinois Senate Behavioral and Mental Health Committee unanimously approved a bill to promote a deeply controversial “suicide prevention” hotline to students. The hypersexualized “hotline” has become infamous for promoting LGBT ideology and for grooming children, even directing children to the horrifying “Trevor Project.”

Ironically, the mandatory “suicide prevention” demanded under the bill has been known to plant seeds in children’s minds.

Big Picture

The state and its schools are aiming to sideline and ultimately replace parents on these critical issues. It is true that children are suffering badly today. But it is not due to a lack of SEL and “mental health” schemes. In fact, for centuries, children were thriving without any such programming. What they had was faith and family.

Remember, the government’s own data prove its schools cannot even teach reading, writing, or math properly. Clearly, government and its “educational” institutions are not cut out to serve as parents, therapists, mental health counselors, or anything of the sort.

Even if well intentioned, lawmakers should recognize the danger of these SEL and “mental health” schemes.

Children need God, truth, parents, and families — not occult-themed SEL, dangerous “mental health” indoctrination, and psychotropic drugs. Unfortunately for those still in government schools, that is not an option.

Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist, the Founder of Liberty Sentinel, and a Contributor to Harbinger’s Daily.

Source: ‘Mental Heath’ And Progressive Propaganda: A Deeply Controversial Agenda In Schools That Should Alarm All Parents – Harbinger’s Daily

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin walked onto the Heartland Institute’s climate summit on Wednesday and did something the radical left can’t tolerate: He told the truth about the climate racket.

He blasted the fear merchants, defended American energy, and made it clear that the days of handing blank checks to climate zealots are over. For the left, which has treated climate alarmism like a religion, to hear that from the EPA administrator has to sting.

For years, the climate crowd has treated every weather event, every policy debate, and every energy decision like a prelude to apocalypse, requiring billions of dollars to stop it. How many times have we heard “We only have X years to prevent” stop some devastating climate event, only for that event never to come to pass?

I’ve lost track.

And Zeldin called it out. He said that mentality has warped U.S. policy and pushed Europe into a mess of higher costs, weaker security, and dangerous dependence on foreign energy sources. That’s what happens when “save the planet” becomes a slogan for self-inflicted economic sabotage.

He also put his finger on the political shift that changed everything. The Trump victory in 2024 ended the era of speculative, expensive, self-harming climate policies getting a free pass from Washington. As Zeldin put it, “Now, if the election didn’t go the same way, in November of 2024, I’m pretty confident that whoever would be in this position instead of me might not have been here [at the conference] this morning.”

That line may seem trivial, but it’s not. It tells you exactly how much these people counted on power, not persuasion. “I’m pretty confident that instead of grants getting canceled to the tune of tens of billions, instead the grift would be continuing,” Zeldin said. And that’s the whole game in one sentence. Billions in wasteful grants, endless alarmism, endless pressure… it was all about stoking fear and empowering those who elect Democrats.

Zeldin went even further, describing how climate policy was captured by elites who decided they alone could define science. “What happened for years and decades in this country is that the elite, the ruling class, the people who had run the agencies, the people who have decided that they are in charge of the science, the politicians, the biggest grifters — there would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology.”

And we all know how that worked out.

That’s the part the media can’t stand. They call these gatherings “climate deniers” because they don’t want the public asking whether the so-called consensus has been used as a political weapon. Which, of course, it has.

And then came the line that will drive the alarmists into full meltdown mode: “It’s controversial that we won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end.”

That is exactly why this speech matters so much. It rejects panic as policy. It chooses science over fear.

Zeldin also pointed to Europe as the cautionary tale. The “sky is falling” crowd pushed leaders there to weaken their own energy systems and security, and now European nations rely far more on foreign energy sources. That dependence is not a virtue signal. It is a vulnerability, especially given how much of their oil passes through global chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz.

I should point out that there is nothing wrong with wanting to be a good steward of the environment. Conservatives have said that for years. But being a good steward means realism, not panic theater, and it certainly does not mean kneecapping your own economy while pretending the sky is about to fall. Democrats have been pushing that for years, and it doesn’t accomplish anything but lining the pockets of their donors.

The reason Zeldin’s speech matters so much is that he spoke like someone who understands the difference between environmental protection and ideological crusading. He didn’t apologize for American energy. He made it clear that the EPA should follow the law, not invent authority because the latest doomsday script demands it.

And frankly, it was refreshing to hear an EPA administrator say it.

Full Video of Event

Matt Margolis  | 9:29 AM on April 09, 2026

Source: This Is the Best Thing You’ve Heard an EPA Administrator Say – PJ Media

Matt Margolis is a conservative commentator and columnist. His work has been cited on Fox News and national conservative talk radio, including The Rush Limbaugh Show, The Mark Levin Show, and The Dan Bongino Show. Matt is the author of several books and has appeared on Newsmax, OANN, Real America’s Voice News, Salem News Channel, and even CNN. You can also subscribe to his newsletter for free!

We’ve been reading and hearing a lot about the brilliant operation to bring home one of our people, an as-yet-unnamed F-15E Weapons Systems Officer (WSO). I won’t go into the details of that operation, as that’s already been revealed; suffice it to say that the War Department and our people in the air and on the ground performed brilliantly, did the seemingly impossible, even building an improvised airfield deep in Iranian territory, only a short drive from a good-sized Iranian city. The WSO followed his training, escaped and evaded, and managed to surmount a ridge from where he could be extracted while American munitions pounded the goblins who were after him.

The WSO is now on his way home. He’s safe. And that’s as it should be. We’re Americans. That’s one of the great things about being an American — knowing that your country will come for you. There have been lapses in this matter; some of us are old enough to remember when Iran held American hostages for over a year, until a president took office who even the mullahs feared: Ronald Reagan.

In some parts of the world, in some cultures, the WSO would have been abandoned. Some countries, some cultures would have decided he wasn’t worth the risk, wasn’t worth the cost. Not America. Not now. And we should note that this brilliant operation was planned and carried out, literally, in a matter of hours: Special operations people brought in, briefed and deployed, equipment staged forward, even that improvised airfield built and held for the time we needed it. Yes, we had to leave some aircraft behind, destroyed to deny the enemy any intel. So? We can build more.

This was important. There was an American out there whom we had to bring home. And we did.

We’ve done this kind of thing before; just read about the Vietnam War operation to bring in Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Iceal Hambleton, call sign Bat 21 Bravo. Read about the Balkans war rescue of Air Force aviator Scott O’Grady. Read about the 1945 raid at Cabanatuan, where we freed prisoners of a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines.

We did these things not because it was strategically or tactically important. We did these things knowing there would be costs involved, certainly of equipment, very likely of people. We did these things not because the war effort depended on it. We did these things because there were Americans in captivity, in trouble, and we had to bring them home. We did these things because being an American means your country’s men-at-arms will never, ever leave you behind.

That’s what being an American means: Every one of us is valuable. That’s why you can’t just make someone an American by having them pass a test and sign a piece of paper. Being an American means more than that. Being an American means you know that, regardless of where you came from originally, you have value to your fellow citizens, and they, to you. Being an American means that if you’re in trouble in a foreign place, America will come for you, and get you home — even if that means building an improvised airfield deep in enemy territory, even if it means the loss of some equipment.  We’ve fallen short of that standard a few times, but not today, not this time. This operation, this rescue, epitomizes what it means to be an American: A fighting spirit, a loyalty that has been unknown to most cultures throughout human history. It means knowing that if you’re in trouble, your country will come for you.

So we lost some equipment. So what? After all, we can build more equipment. But every one of us is worth more than an airplane or a helicopter, because we’re Americans.

That’s what that means.

By Ward Clark  | 11:50 AM on April 05, 2026

Ward Clark hails from Alaska’s Susitna Valley, where he maintains his rural household in one of America’s last free places.  Ward is a twelve-year veteran of the U.S. Army, including service in Operation Desert Storm and (in Germany in support of) Operation Joint Endeavor, and today is a staunch minarchist libertarian, along with being an author, novelist, self-employed small businessman, woods bum, and semi-professional bad influence. You can see some of Ward’s fiction writing here, and be sure to follow Ward on Rumble!

Source: Bold, Brave, Unstoppable: US Rescue in Iran Defines Our Spirit – RedState

When God delivered the children of Israel from bondage in Egypt and defeated Pharaoh’s army, Moses responded with a song, recorded in Exodus 15. He declares, “The Lord is a man of war, the Lord is His name.”

That description is revealing. Scripture repeatedly presents God as one who defends His people, upholds justice, and ultimately triumphs over evil. He is not a distant observer of human conflict, but a righteous judge who acts in history.

And this imagery is not confined to the Old Testament. In Revelation 19, Jesus Himself is depicted as a warrior riding a white horse, bringing judgment against the nations, with a sword proceeding from His mouth. The biblical witness is consistent: God is both Redeemer and Righteous Judge.

War, therefore, is a tragic but real feature of a fallen world. The Bible does not ignore it — it regulates it. From these biblical principles, Augustine of Hippo articulated what would become known as Just War Theory, later refined by Thomas Aquinas. This framework has guided much of Western moral reasoning about war for centuries, recognizing that while war is never ideal, it may at times be necessary to restrain evil and protect the innocent.

Which is why recent comments from Pope Leo XIV in a Palm Sunday homily are both puzzling and concerning. He stated, in part, that Jesus “rejects war” and does not listen to the prayers of those who wage it.

Was the Allied effort in World War II — undertaken to stop Adolf Hitler and the atrocities of the Third Reich — contrary to the will of God? Were the prayers of leaders and soldiers, offered in humility and desperation, somehow rejected?

On June 6, 1944, as American troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, Franklin D. Roosevelt led the nation in prayer. He asked God’s blessing on those risking their lives to defeat tyranny and secure freedom. It was not a prayer for conquest — it was a prayer for justice, for deliverance, and for peace.

Likewise, during the brutal winter of the Battle of the Bulge, George Patton called for prayer. Facing impossible conditions, he urged his troops to seek God’s intervention. Two hundred and fifty thousand copies of that prayer were distributed to the soldiers of the Third Army.

And when the weather broke and the tide of battle turned, Patton famously remarked to his chaplain, “Well, Padre, our prayers worked.”

And thank God they did.

Scripture gives us confidence in this very truth. As the Apostle John writes in 1 John 5, if we ask anything according to God’s will, He hears us — and if He hears us, we have what we have asked of Him.

That is the key: according to His will.

Not every war is just. Not every cause is righteous. But when those entrusted with authority act to restrain evil, defend the innocent, and pursue a just peace, they do not stand counter to God, they stand within the very purposes of His justice.

And in those moments, prayer is not rejected — it is heard.

The question is not whether God hears the prayers of those in battle.

The question is whether those who lead — and those who fight — are aligned with the will of the One who is both Prince of Peace and the righteous defender of the innocent.

When they are, they can pray with confidence.

And history suggests — He answers.

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.