Not everyone is a winner, and President Trump announced on Tuesday that he wants to put competition back at the forefront for American youth.

To prove this, Trump is reviving a nearly 70-year-old policy that was phased out by President Barack Obama in his second term.

'We want to make sure our kids have the best opportunity to succeed in life.'

The commander in chief brought a number of high-profile athletes, Cabinet members, and children into the Oval Office to sign a memorandum to bring competition back to kids all across the United States.

As part of an executive order signed last July that reinstated the Presidential Fitness Test, Trump announced at the White House that he would bring back the National Physical Fitness Award as well as the Presidential Fitness Award.

According to Harvard Health, President Dwight D. Eisenhower initiated the Presidential Physical Fitness Test in 1956. It included a one-mile run, pull-ups or push-ups, sit-ups, a shuttle run, and a sit-and-reach exercise for flexibility.

The test endured in different forms all the way up until 2013, when President Obama replaced it with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program.

Gone were the awards, once listed on a government website under the President's Challenge. The president's award recognized students who scored at or above the 85th percentile on all five activities, while the national award went to those who scored above the 50th percentile in all five activities.

RELATED: Make America Fit Again: Presidential Fitness Test returns after 13 years

- YouTube

President-elect John F. Kennedy is credited with popularizing the fitness craze in the 1960s after writing an article titled "The Soft American" for Sports Illustrated.

In his writings, Kennedy cited research he had come across that spanned 15 years, comparing the physical fitness of American children versus the fitness of children in Austria, Italy, and Switzerland. Kennedy wrote that for six tests evaluating muscular strength and flexibility, over 57% of American children failed one or more, while less than 9% of the Europeans did.

Kennedy later proposed the President's Council on Physical Fitness, which would later establish the awards program under President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. referenced his uncle's article at the White House on Tuesday, calling the physical fitness program "an enduring right of passage for us that everybody in my generation remembers."

"It was a benchmark for measuring national physical fitness," the secretary continued, adding that he hopes Americans "help each other get in shape so that we can prepare for our great future that this administration is providing for this country."

RELATED: The left can’t handle Hegseth’s combat stance

- YouTube

Also joining the president in the Oval Office were former professional athletes, including NHL player T.J. Oshie, MLB pitcher Noah Syndergaard, and golfer Gary Player, as well as current pro golfer Bryson DeChambeau.

DeChambeau's remarks were celebrated when he thanked the administration for prioritizing the physical health of American youth.

"We want to make sure our kids have the best opportunity to succeed in life. ... Their physical fitness is a huge priority in helping them become better human beings," he said.

Also in attendance were War Secretary Pete Hegseth, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

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When Viktor Orbán lost the Hungarian parliamentary election last month, most of the coverage told a familiar story: Liberal democracy had defeated nationalist authoritarianism. Left had beaten right. Those headlines, while partly true, left out an important point that has implications well beyond Hungary.

What actually drove ordinary Hungarian voters to the polls wasn't ideology. It was economic stagnation, rising inflation, and falling living standards.

Traditional right and left parties may be north or south, regardless of the partisan language we brand them with.

Widely classified as far right, Orbán had governed in a strongly interventionist manner: nationalizing industries, rewarding allies, punishing competitors. He did not lose because Hungary turned left. He lost because his brand of right-wing economic intervention had made people poorer, and they noticed.

That distinction points to a flaw in the political vocabulary we have been using for two centuries.

The left-right spectrum was born in the French National Assembly, where supporters of the king sat to the right of the presiding officer and revolutionaries to the left. Somehow we are still using it, as if the geometry of an 18th-century parliament contains all the wisdom we need for the 21st-century world.

It doesn't. And on some level, most of us already know it.

Instead, the political compass now looks more like an actual compass, with north, west, east, and south poles. The traditional right-left debate is between east and west. But there is an additional north-south debate that relates to political parties' support of competition, open trade, and property rights (north), or support of statism, industrial policy, and government intervention (south).

This north-south debate is every bit as important, and it illustrates how traditional right and left parties may be north or south, regardless of the partisan language we brand them with.

Here is the error of the traditional axis: It puts so much energy into the horizontal argument, left versus right, progressive versus conservative, that we have largely stopped asking the vertical question: not who should wield state power, but how much state power should exist at all.

The Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, which has measured market conditions across 184 countries for 30 years, finds that economies it classifies as “free” average around $112,000 in per capita GDP, while those it classifies as “repressed” average roughly $10,000. A tenfold gap, consistent across decades.

The Index has its critics. Jeffrey Sachs has argued that it measures current wealth better than it predicts growth. Even so, the broad pattern it documents is not seriously disputed. More economic freedom tends, over time, to correlate with more prosperity.

If you accept even a modest version of that premise, the compass begins to replace the old map entirely.

Due north, on this map, represents genuine economic freedom: voluntary exchange and limited coercion. Due south is the statist trap, whether administered by socialists or nationalists. What unites them is not ideology, but the same drive to expand state control over economic life, with the same results.

The distinction that matters is not the flag you wave getting there, but how far south you end up.

The horizontal axis doesn't disappear; it shifts from economics to culture. Both left and right have northern and southern variants. Market-oriented progressives sit in the northeast; market-oriented conservatives in the northwest. The southern quadrants — interventionist left and interventionist right — share more with each other than either would care to admit.

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The northeast quadrant is where the most instructive examples sit. Paul Keating in Australia and Roger Douglas in New Zealand were leaders on the left who pursued serious market liberalization. They were not ideological converts but pragmatists who concluded that the social programs they cared about required a productive economy to fund them.

Critics will note that both Keating and Douglas presided over substantial social spending alongside their market reforms, but this misses the point. Keating and Douglas understood something their ideological allies did not: that a government that destroys the market in pursuit of social goals will eventually have neither.

Orbán's Hungary sat in the southwest quadrant: culturally conservative, economically interventionist. It was as state-directed in practice as many of the left-wing governments it claimed to oppose. The southwest quadrant has no ideology. It has only consequences.

None of this means markets are perfect. But the relevant comparison is never between a flawed market and a perfect government. It is between a flawed market and a flawed government.

In that comparison, the historical record is not close. What this compass insists on is that voters stop evaluating politicians purely on cultural grounds and start demanding an account of the vertical axis too.

Hungarian voters, faced with the concrete consequences of statism, made an economic judgment. They didn't need an ideology. They needed cheaper groceries and a functioning future for their kids. It is a practical, unsentimental instinct. Focused on results, not rhetoric.

The left-right debate will continue. It probably should. But the question that matters comes first: not which side you are on, but how far north you are willing to go.

Ottawa and members of the eastern ruling class of Canada have made no secret of their contempt for Canada's resource-rich prairie provinces and their inhabitants, proving time and again their willingness to simultaneously exploit the West's wealth and hinder its progress.

'Albertans are engaged and this is an issue people want to have a say on.'

While the powers that be might not be losing sleep over alienating the residents of these provinces, they could soon lose something far more precious: a province roughly 1.56 times bigger than California that's home to over 5 million people, vast natural beauty, the fourth-largest proven oil reserves in the world, a large variety of valuable metallic and industrial minerals, and Atlanta's former NHL franchise.

How it started

Canadians — not so much those in the 18-to-34 age bracket, who largely voted Conservative, but those over the age of 55 — decided last year to award another four years to the Liberal government that in the preceding years oversaw a historic growth of the federal deficit, numerous tax hikes, an unprecedented influx of immigrants, a spike in illegal immigration, rising crime, unanswered church burnings, a worsening housing crisis, and the rise of state-facilitated suicide as a leading cause of death nationally.

Unlike certain progressive regions that got what they wanted in the form of another Liberal government, the Province of Alberta flatly rejected World Economic Forum regular and self-identified "European" Mark Carney and his woke party.

The Conservatives netted 91.9% of the vote in Alberta, the province with the youngest population. The Liberals alternatively brought in a measly 5.4%.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith acknowledged her fellows' frustration at the time, stating, "A large majority of Albertans are deeply frustrated that the same government that overtly attacked our provincial economy almost unabated for the past 10 years has been returned to government."

RELATED: Priest breaks hip — now Canada apparently wants him dead

Elections Canada

While there has long been chatter about Alberta possibly separating from Canada, the 2025 federal election energized the secessionist movement.

Proponents of Albertan sovereignty were further emboldened after the provincial legislature passed amendments to the Citizen Initiative Act, which make it easier to start a referendum, including one on separating from Canada.

On Jan. 2, Alberta's chief electoral officer issued the separatist group Stay Free Alberta's citizen initiative petition, kicking off a 120-day signature collection period and setting the stage for a possible referendum in the event the group could secure at least 177,732 signatures, which amounts to 10% of eligible voters.

How it's going

Stay Free Alberta petitioners, accompanied by hundreds of supporters, delivered the goods to Elections Alberta's Edmonton office on Monday.

The separatists claim to have collected 301,620 signatures, state media reported. Another 1,500 signatures were allegedly late in coming owing to problems with Canada Post, the nation's strike-happy, government-owned postal delivery service.

Stay Free Alberta leader Mitch Sylvestre told the crowd, "This process shows that Albertans are engaged and this is an issue people want to have a say on."

Elections Alberta confirmed that Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure has received the petition and signature sheets from Sylvestre.

The verification is, however, on hold until Justice Shaina Leonard — an appointee of the Trudeau Liberal government — rules on a legal challenge advanced by a pair of Indian tribes that claim the petition process threatens treaty rights. Her decision is expected later this month.

Should the Indians' legal challenge fail, the province will have 21 days to verify the petition.

If deemed successful, the petition will be submitted to provincial officials, who will then decide whether to sign off on a province-wide referendum, which could take place as soon as Oct. 19. Premier Smith previously indicated that if the requisite number of signatures were collected, she would put the question to a referendum.

RELATED: 'AMERICAN INVASION': Flailing Canada PM Mark Carney invokes historical grudge in latest lob at Trump

Leah Hennel/Bloomberg/Getty Images

An Abacus Data survey of 1,000 Alberta adults conducted in late February found that 26% of respondents support Alberta ceasing to be a Canadian province and becoming a sovereign country. Sixty-four percent of respondents signaled opposition, and 9% said they were undecided. The idea of regional independence was apparently most intolerable to those in the 60+ age cohort, 71% of whom signaled opposition.

A poll conducted last month by Canadian state media, whose coverage has largely been critical of the independence movement, said that 57% of United Conservative Party voters — those who back Alberta's current ruling party — would vote for separation. Supporters of the province's socialist New Democrat Party were almost unanimous in their opposition to breaking from the federation and Canada's leftist central power, with 98% saying they would vote against the initiative.

When asked on Tuesday how he would prevent Albertan separatists from succeeding in a possible referendum, Prime Minister Carney said that "there's the rule of law — there's the Clarity Act which has been opined upon by the Supreme Court," and "any referenda in any part of Canada need to be consistent with that."

The Clarity Act sets out the conditions under which the federal government would negotiate the separation of a province.

Carney, who also appears hopeful that the Indian tribes' legal challenge might prevail, added that Ottawa will in the meantime act "in the spirit of cooperative federalism, making the country work, making it work for Albertans, making it work for indigenous peoples, making it work for all Canadians."

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While Jimmy Kimmel’s widow joke wasn’t calling for violence, BlazeTV host Ron Simmons explains that calling for violence isn’t the problem — it’s the normalization of political violence that is.

“I don’t think Jimmy is telling somebody to go out there and kill somebody, I do think that he is making light of what has been, as we already know, from the two previous assassination attempts, attempts on President Trump’s life, and the fact that we should be happy if he’s dead,” Simmons says on “Relatable.”

And the first lady is on the same page as Simmons.

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn’t comedy — his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America,” Melania wrote in a post on X.

The first lady went on to call for “ABC to take a stand” in response to Kimmel’s joke, while the president called for his firing in a post on Truth Social.

“He ought to be fired immediately,” Simmons agreed.

But Kimmel isn’t the only celebrity normalizing violent political rhetoric.

“There are other people out here that are inciting things that we need to pay attention to,” Simmons explains, before calling out Hasan Piker.

“The New York Times basically platformed him, allowed him to participate in some of their communications. And this guy, he’s even worse than Jimmy Kimmel,” he says, pointing out that in an interview with the NYT, he suggested that the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was justified.

“Engles wrote about the concept of social murder. And Brian Thompson as the United Healthcare CEO was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder, the systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit paywalled system of health care in this country,” Piker said in the interview.

“And the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of death,” he added.

However, Simmons notes that Piker has said much worse on his own Twitch stream.

“If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott,” Piker said.

In another clip, Piker calls for property owners to be killed “in the street.”

“Yeah kill them. ... Let the streets soak in their f**king red, capitalist blood,” he said.

“The New York Times, if they’re a legitimate journalistic output, they shouldn’t be platforming a guy like this,” Simmons comments.

“I mean, that’s just way, way, way over the line,” he adds.

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When Russell Brand published his 2007 memoir, "My Booky Wook," I bought it with no particular expectations. The lanky provocateur from Essex was already famous for his drug-addled, debauched adventures as a stand-up comic and onetime MTV host — a job he lost after showing up the day after 9/11 dressed as Osama bin Laden. I suspected this latest venture might be no more than a shoddy attempt to cash in on this notoriety.

I was wrong. "My Booky Wook" was engaging, witty, and painfully self-aware. Brand could write.

The unbuttoned shirts and Jim Morrison-like leather pants mask a keen intelligence and shrewd rhetorical instincts.

Born identity

And Brand can still write, in the strict sense. The sentences in his new book, "How to Become a Christian in Seven Days," are sometimes funny, often eloquent, and occasionally beautiful. The man has range. He has cadence. He has, by any measure, talent.

He also has a problem with the truth, as his subsequent New Age-inflected leftist activism has demonstrated. Now that he's taken a turn for the traditional, Brand still shows the same affinity for self-serving fabulation — and the same instinct for monetizing his "countercultural" views.

I am a Catholic. I take conversion seriously, which is precisely why I take this one so unseriously. I never agreed with Brand's anti-capitalism shtick, the Che Guevara cosplay, the Bernie Sanders lovefests — but I always thought he meant it. That was the charm. Like Jon Stewart, he used humor to make political points. Unlike the erstwhile "Daily Show" host, Brand showed real humility while doing so, presenting himself less as an authority than as a fellow truth-seeker.

It's precisely humility, ironically enough, that is missing from Brand's public embrace of Christianity.

Brand management

Part of it, certainly, is the convenient timing. In September 2023, a Channel 4 "Dispatches" documentary and a Sunday Times investigation surfaced allegations of rape and sexual assault against Brand. A few months later, Bear Grylls — yes, that Bear Grylls — baptized him in the Thames. Recently, in an interview with Megyn Kelly, Brand admitted on the record to sleeping with a 16-year-old when he was 30, calling himself an "exploiter of women." I watched the interview. He delivered the lines as eloquently as ever, but the remorse seemed rehearsed rather than felt.

Now comes the book. One hundred thirty-four pages. Thirty-three dollars. A man who once wrote a manifesto called "Revolution" about the predations of capitalism is selling salvation by the page at roughly a quarter a sheet.

The prose tells you what kind of conversion this is. Brand opens with a passage about how the title is "figurative" because seven days might take longer, then immediately explains that in the Bible, "days" don't really mean days because the earth's rotation, et cetera, et cetera and concludes: "This book has already paid for itself in cosmological bullion — 'Now I know what a day is!'"

That is, to be fair, a funny line. It is also the entire book. He cracks a gag, dresses it in Scripture, and bills you for the privilege. Later, he writes that he is "attempting to reinterpret the Bible," catches himself, and adds: "Phew, for a minute I thought I was an out-of-control egomaniac trying to rewrite the Bible and charge you for the privilege." The self-awareness is the alibi. He names the con and proceeds with it.

RELATED: What Shia LaBeouf's public struggle shows us about Christian redemption

MEGA/GC Images via Getty Images

Selling salvation

None of this is to say genuine conversion is impossible for the famous, the rich, or the disgraced. Augustine was a libertine before he was a saint. Dorothy Day had a common-law husband and an abortion behind her when she found Catholicism. Conversion is exactly the sort of thing that happens to people whose lives have spiraled. That is half of the point of the doctrine.

What separates those stories from this one is the absence of a sales pitch. Augustine wrote his "Confessions" 15 years after his baptism, in Latin, for an audience of fellow bishops, and he spent most of it agonizing over a pear he stole as a boy. Day lived a life of voluntary poverty and poured any money she made from "The Long Loneliness" back into her work for the poor. Neither of them timed their repentance to a court docket.

Any considering this purchase should realize that Brand, perhaps more than many celebrities, is a shrewd manipulator of the media. The unbuttoned shirts and Jim Morrison-like leather pants disguise a keen intelligence and shrewd rhetorical instincts; this is a man who has survived two decades in the crosshairs of the British tabloids (which, it must be said, operate with a brutality that makes their American counterparts look like Ladies' Home Journal). Brand is a warrior, someone capable of weathering the most brutal of storms.

Property of Jesus

He’s also capable of reading the room. In this case, the room is a world besotted with American evangelicalism, which tends to focus on dramatic tales of redemption more than on the day-by-day grind of repentance.

That this type of Christianity is so forthright about embracing the broken is its glory, but it can also be its blind spot. Brand has bet, with considerable shrewdness, that this audience will buy the book without interrogating the allegations behind it.

Every person is owed his day in court, presumed innocent until proven guilty. I am not here to litigate the allegations, but to question the suddenness of the transformation. People who knew Brand well have described him as sociopathic. That is plausible. If Brand's come-to-Jesus moment is no more than a way to leverage other people's decency for personal gain, the word would certainly apply.

In the meantime, the best we can do for Brand is pray, as we would for any fellow sinner. It's not for us to judge the authenticity of his conversion; that's between him and God. But we should be wary of supporting his attempts — whether cynical or simply misguided — to profit from it.

The United States has established a “red, white, and blue dome” of protection over the Strait of Hormuz to ensure the safe passage of commerce ships, War Secretary Pete Hegseth stated during a Tuesday-morning press conference.

Hegseth was joined by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine to discuss Project Freedom, which Hegseth described as an operation that is “separate and distinct from Operation Epic Fury."

'We expected there would be some churn at the beginning, which happened, and we said we would defend and defend aggressively, and we absolutely have.'

“Project Freedom is defensive in nature, focused in scope, and temporary in duration, with one mission: protecting innocent commercial shipping from Iranian aggression,” Hegseth stated.

Caine stated that the operation involves more than 15,000 American service members protecting the region by land, sea, and air. Hegseth explained that American troops would not need to enter Iranian waters or airspace.

“We’re not looking for a fight, but Iran also cannot be allowed to block innocent countries and their goods from an international waterway,” he said.

Hegseth accused Iran of being an “aggressor” by “harassing civilian vessels, threatening mariners from every nation indiscriminately, and weaponizing a critical choke point for its own financial benefit.”

Two U.S. commercial ships and American destroyers had safely passed through the strait, according to Hegseth. Hundreds of ships from nations around the globe have since lined up to pass through, he added.

RELATED: Mike Johnson denies the US is at war with Iran ahead of key congressional deadline

Handout photo by the U.S. Navy/Getty Images

“As a direct gift from the United States to the world, we have established a powerful red, white, and blue dome over the strait. American destroyers are on station supported by hundreds of fighter jets, helicopters, drones, and surveillance aircraft, providing 24/7 overwatch for peaceful commercial vessels, except Iran's, of course,” Hegseth stated.

The war secretary emphasized the temporary nature of the operation and stated that “at the appropriate time and soon,” the U.S. would hand over responsibility to allies and other nations ready to protect the strait.

RELATED: Hegseth warns European allies to stop 'free riding' and help reopen the strait

Amirhossein KHORGOOEI/ISNA/AFP/Getty Images

Caine explained that “Iran’s indiscriminate attacks across the region” had resulted in 22,500 mariners on over 1,550 commercial vessels being trapped in the Arabian Gulf, unable to pass safely through the strait.

Hegseth insisted that the ceasefire with Iran is not over.

“Ultimately, this is a separate and distinct project. And we expected there would be some churn at the beginning, which happened, and we said we would defend and defend aggressively, and we absolutely have,” he stated.

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Video game retailer GameStop says it has the best shot at becoming the next Amazon, and the company is ready to make big moves.

The story starts in early February, when GameStop says it began accumulating stock in order to position itself to buy one historic online outlet.

'eBay should be worth — and will be worth — a lot more money.'

In a press release on Sunday, GameStop said that for the last three months, it has built a 5% economic stake in eBay and is ready to pull the trigger on a sale that would allegedly allow it to challenge Amazon for online superiority.

GameStop's offer is to buy 100% of eBay at $125 per share in a 50/50 deal of cash and its own GameStop stock. This would total a $55.5 billion takeover.

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen said that with his expertise, eBay could become a "legit competitor to Amazon."

The proposal also promises that the newly formed company could reduce its costs by at least $2 billion in just 12 months. This includes cuttings its sales and marketing budget in half, shaving $300 million off of product development, and reducing its administrative costs by $500 million.

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David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

"There is nobody who is more qualified, based on my experience, to run the eBay business," Cohen said, per Gamespot. "eBay should be worth — and will be worth — a lot more money. I'm thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars."

GameStop boasted a massive turnaround under Cohen, who is credited with taking a fiscal year 2021 net loss of $381 million and turning it into a FY 2025 net income of $418 million.

This came off the back of the meme stock craze, a moment in 2021 when online forums — predominantly Reddit — rallied around a flailing GameStop and kept it alive for nostalgic reasons. The amazing part about the story is that GameStop has been able to keep that momentum alive for all these years.

The company was at historic lows in 2020, sometimes trading at less than a dollar per share. By December 2020, shares had risen to over $4 before the company's portfolio exploded in the next month.

RELATED: Viral video: Males in line for Pokémon cards begin arguing, then fighting — and then it gets way worse

Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

By January 1, 2021, shares were worth $81.25 before an inevitable sell-off. However, the company is still sitting at around $25 per share, double what it was in 2013 and about $10 higher than 2007, when physical video game sales were still a formidable source of income.

According to Marketplace, GameStop is still composed of mostly retail investors who own about 90% of its stock. This could pay off monstrously if CEO Cohen gets his way, as eBay's own stock has more than doubled since 2024.

Both companies seem poised to continue their rise so long as resales of media and tech trend upward, while a trading card boom continues to permeate throughout the collector's world, where both companies can thrive.

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A female broke the window of a Philadelphia home Sunday afternoon and tried to enter the residence, police told WCAU-TV.

The armed homeowner warned her to stop, but the station said she continued to try to break in.

'I guess he had to do what he had to do to protect his family. There was a stranger. He's a good neighbor. He's very good.'

The homeowner ended up shooting the female multiple times, and she died, police told WCAU, adding that the incident is being treated as a possible act of self-defense.

The homeowner stayed on the scene, tried to render aid before medics arrived, and is cooperating with investigators, the station said.

"At some point, the occupants of the home did make themselves known that they were inside, and this person ... based on the information we have, refused to stop," Philadelphia Police Inspector D.F. Pace told WCAU.

Pace added to the station that "it appears that this is a case of a person defending oneself inside their own home. Pace added to WPVI-TV that the person who fired the fatal shots is licensed to carry, and no arrests have been made.

RELATED: Armed crooks allegedly enter home in middle of night, but homeowner is prepared — and opens fire

Officers initially responded to reports of gunfire in the 2300 block of North Cleveland Street around 1:13 p.m., WCAU said.

Officers at the scene found an adult female suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, police told the station. WXTF-TV said officers found the female inside the home.

She was taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 1:49 p.m., WCAU reported.

The deceased female was listed as a Jane Doe, Pace told WCAU, which noted that it's unclear why she was attempting to break into the residence.

A neighbor named Shawnee told WCAU that the homeowner who fired his gun is a good family man: "I guess he had to do what he had to do to protect his family. There was a stranger. He's a good neighbor. He's very good.

Those with information about the incident are urged to contact the Philadelphia Police Department at 215-686-TIPS (8477) or anonymously online, WCAU noted.

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The first time I flew on a plane, I was 14 years old. It was my first time going to Europe and my first time anywhere outside the United States other than Canada. But Canada doesn’t really count, does it? Not really, especially back then, when you didn’t even need a passport to drive over the border.

That first time overseas I was alone — kind of. I was playing in an orchestra on a music tour. There were itineraries and things were planned, and there were adults making sure I was present. I was with 85 other high school students, eight counselors, and a director.

I think maybe that’s part of what I’m most thankful for when I think of those summers in Europe. I felt so far away then.

But I wasn’t with my family or my parents. At that age, at least for me, that counted as "alone."

Roughing it

This was back before we all had smartphones in all our pockets. I couldn’t text my mom and dad every hour, and I couldn’t check my email whenever I wanted. I didn’t even have an email. I could call them, however. And I did, every few days.

Of course, you couldn't just pick up a pay phone and make an international call. You needed a calling card.

Remember those?

The back was covered with instructions. How to call out of a country, what code to enter calling into a country, and a ton of numbers you had to enter before you even made the call. It was an insanely convoluted system, almost as if it were a test you had to pass. If you accidentally pressed a wrong number, you would have to start all over again.

But this system did work. And it allowed me to check in with Mom and Dad every three or four days, as they requested.

Warm welcome

Every stop of the tour, we would get divided up and stay with different host families — a few kids per household. They would give us a little tour in their broken English (the only language any of us spoke), offer their phone if we wanted to call home, and — if they were really cool — let us have a little wine with dinner.

On our last night, we would play a concert outside in the middle of the town. All the host families would come, sit there in folding chairs, and listen. There was food, sparkling water (then still rare in America), maybe some wine.

The next morning, we would get on the bus and drive to another tiny little town three hours away and do it all again. After four weeks of this it was time to get on a plane and head back home.

I did this every summer in high school. It was a blast, and I learned a lot — both about other people and myself. They were formative experiences for a kid from the Midwest like me, and they set me on a path I'm still on today.

Far and away

Still, I have to wonder if I would ever let my kids do something like that. The thought of sending my son off to Europe at such a young age with people I don’t know gives me serious preemptive anxiety. On the other hand, my parents were good parents and they let me do it. And I survived.

Fortunately, my son won't be 14 for years, so I have a little time to learn to let go. And if he does go, we'll have the full spectrum of modern technology keeping us connected, not just some dinky plastic card.

At the same time, I wonder if the end of the calling card didn't take some of the magic with it. Knowing everything that’s happening with all your friends back home while posting pictures every hour for all of them to see doesn’t quite plunge you into the unknown.

I think maybe that’s part of what I’m most thankful for when I think of those summers in Europe. I felt so far away then — far from Mom and Dad, my school, everyone I knew, and everything familiar. Maybe one of the blessings of having grown up when I grew up was the possibility of that kind of distance. Traveling meant just a little more when you could feel far away.

RELATED: A stranger asked me to have a conversation; here's why I'm glad I agreed

Imperial War Museum/Getty Images

Cozy connection

I’m in Europe again, though I have a smartphone and email now. I text my wife all the time, and she sends me pictures of the kids. I FaceTime with them, tell them I can’t wait to see them next week, and send them videos of what it looks like here. I manage business on my phone, write columns like this one one my computer, and continue my work as usual despite being across the ocean in the Europe that used to feel so far away.

I like this new reality quite a bit, but I think I liked the old one too. Distance doesn’t feel so great any more. The world is smaller and everything nearer. Maybe the whimsy of those childhood summers in Europe was simply the whimsy of youth and I’m only feeling all this because now I’m old and without that same wonder. But I’m not sure.

We are in the age of ever-present digital connection, and that’s not changing any time soon. Those final years before the mass adoption of the cell phone were the last gasps of a big, magical world. We didn’t really understand it at the time, but the cell phone, the smartphone, and email marked the end of distance and some kind of world of whimsy.

There’s no good in lamenting the things we can’t change, and there are quite a few advantages to this newer, much smaller world. But whenever I want to remember the old excitement of that wider, wilder world, I recall the feel of a calling card in my hand and smile.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a hugely consequential 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais last week, striking down the Bayou State's controversial 2024 congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and providing some much-needed clarity on "whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act can indeed provide a compelling reason for race-based districting."

Democrats and other liberals — including Justice Elena Kagan — condemned the ruling, construing it as a gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and a setback for racial minority representation in American politics.

Less than a week after its monumental ruling, the high court gave critics another reason to rend their garments.

'The dissent's rhetoric ... lacks restraint.'

While it customarily waits 32 days after a ruling to issue its judgment, the Supreme Court on Monday granted Louisiana Republicans' request to fast-track the process and immediately finalize its opinion in the case, thereby enabling the Bayou State to draw a new congressional map favoring the GOP in time for the 2026 midterm elections.

The court noted in its unsigned order that the usual 32-day delay ordinarily affords the "losing party time to file a petition for rehearing"; however, in this case, the defenders of the unconstitutional gerrymander "have not expressed any intent to ask this Court to reconsider its judgment."

RELATED: Obama, Mamdani, other Democrats throw ugly tantrums after SCOTUS strikes racial gerrymander

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. JACQUELYN MARTIN/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

Absent that expression of intent or any opposition from Louisiana, the court allowed its ruling to go into effect immediately, prompting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to lash out at her colleagues in an unhinged four-page dissent.

"The Court's decision in these cases has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana," Jackson said in her opening salvo.

After criticizing Louisiana's eagerness to ditch its unlawful congressional map in the wake of the Callais ruling, Jackson said that "to avoid the appearance of partiality here, we could, as per usual, opt to stay on the sidelines and take no position by applying our default procedures. But, today, the Court chooses the opposite."

Jackson said further that the court's expedited certification of the ruling "is tantamount to an approval of Louisiana's rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map" and represents an abandonment of constraints and principles that is "unwarranted and unwise."

Evidently it was Justice Samuel Alito's turn to dunk on Jackson over the latest in her series of trademark screeds.

Alito underscored in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch that the charges leveled in Jackson's dissent "cannot go unanswered."

The conservative justice pointed out that if Jackson had her way, the 2026 congressional elections in Louisiana would be "held under a map that has been held to be unconstitutional" and that the Biden-nominated justice had failed to make the case for why it is somehow now too late for Louisiana to adopt a new, constitutionally compliant map and "not feasible for the elections to be held under such a map."

In response to the two reasons Jackson did provide for dooming Louisiana to use an unconstitutional map in the midterm elections — first, that the court should observe the customary 32-day delay, and second, that the court should do so to avoid the appearance of bias — Alito wrote that "one is trivial at best, and the other is baseless and insulting."

Turning on its head the assertion by Jackson that an expedited ruling-certification process screams bias, Alito noted that the Biden-nominated justice failed to explain why "unthinking compliance" with the custom "does not create the appearance of partiality (by running out the clock) on behalf of those who may find it politically advantageous to have the election occur under the unconstitutional map."

Alito called Jackson's claim that the decision represents an unprincipled use of power "a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge."

The conservative justice concluded, "The dissent accuses the Court of 'unshackl[ing]' itself from 'constraints.' It is the dissent's rhetoric that lacks restraint."

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Like many of her fellow liberals, progressive podcast host Jennifer Welch used the latest attempt on President Trump’s life to show her true colors.

In a segment on her podcast “I’ve Had It,” Welch mocked Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, for her response to the assassination attempt.

Dressed in all black with a black baseball cap to match what Kirk wore in her video message, Welch said, “How would you feel if the president of the United States said he wanted to wipe out an entire population? How would you feel if your husband said, ‘Because he’s famous, he can grab them by the p***y?’”

“What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do to the black pilot? How would you feel if your husband, president of the United States, was an adjudicated rapist? How would you feel about that? How would you feel?” she said.

Welch also promoted her new anti-fascist book, saying, “Make sure you preorder my book, which I would like to dedicate to one Erika Kirk.”

“Erika, the person that I’m talking about today, fascist, is you. You. You were the racist fascist about whom I am talking to. The work that your husband’s company and that you are doing to America’s youth to make them racist, narrow-minded, hateful, and bats**t crazy is an absolute disgrace. And thank you for the outfit, hashtag inspo,” she added, while her co-host laughed uncontrollably.

BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is disturbed by liberals’ new “radical leftist hero.”

“It’s alarming to me that a lot of people are watching this content, let alone like one person. I don’t understand the other worthless shrew that comes into frame and starts cackling like it’s just so hilarious,” Gonzales says, calling it “low-IQ content.”

“You’re talking about Erika Kirk’s dead husband and saying that he’s a fascist because he created Turning Point USA so that young people could have a conservative organization to look up to so that they weren’t just inundated by leftist indoctrination,” she continues.

“It’s kind of depressing that people are, anyone is, consuming this content,” she adds.

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Quantum computers, capable of breaking the public-key cryptography that underpins the modern internet, do not exist.

Yet.

But that is all about to change.

So "not yet" is not the right frame. The relevant adversary does not need a quantum computer today. He only needs to be patient: to collect encrypted traffic now, store it, and decrypt it later, once the technology cooperates. “Harvest now, decrypt later” is not a speculative threat model but a rational strategy and almost certainly already happening. Any communication that must remain confidential for a decade or more is therefore a present-tense vulnerability. The threat is future; the organizational work is now, and most organizations are moving slowly.

The migration to post-quantum cryptography is the kind of story that resists being told. Its central drama is administrative. Its heroes work in standards bodies. Its most celebrated outcome will be the absence of any dramatic outcome: browsers connecting, messages delivered, apps syncing, signatures verified, billions of small transactions occurring without incident in a world where the mathematics underneath them has been quietly replaced, the way a crew replaces the cables of a bridge while traffic flows underneath, while commuters listen to the radio and think about dinner.

The engineers who get it right will not be celebrated.

This is what infrastructure looks like from the inside. You do not see it unless it fails.

In August 2024, the National Institute of Standards and Technology released the first principal post-quantum cryptography standards. NIST points toward a transition timeline that deprecates and ultimately removes quantum-vulnerable algorithms by 2035, with high-priority systems moving earlier. The U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre gives milestone dates of 2028 for discovery and planning, 2031 for early migration of critical systems, and 2035 for completion. The NSA pushes national security systems harder, with 2027 expectations for new deployments and 2030 phase-out milestones. The bureaucratic infrastructure of transition is in place. The transition itself remains.

A comparison keeps surfacing in technical circles: Y2K. The comparison is usually made to suggest scale, urgency, or the difficulty of explaining a threat that has not yet materialized. The deeper resonance is structural. Y2K mobilized enormous institutional effort whose success could only be measured by the absence of disaster. If it worked, nothing happened. The public event was a non-event.

Post-quantum migration has the same shape. It is infrastructural prevention, not technological theater. The engineers who get it right will not be celebrated. They will simply not be blamed.

RELATED: Unless something changes fast, datacenters could crash the electrical grid

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Devil's in the details

The new algorithms use more space than the old ones, and in cryptography, size is no minor concern. ML-KEM-768, used for key exchange, has a public key of 1,184 bytes and a ciphertext of 1,088 bytes. SLH-DSA, used for digital signatures, has a minimal signature of 7,856 bytes. For comparison, a classical elliptic-curve signature is typically under 100 bytes. These size increases change handshake packetization, certificate-chain behavior, hardware security module design, logging, and storage assumptions. Post-quantum cryptography is unlike earlier cryptographic updates because its properties force protocol redesign.

Meta’s internal TLS rollout provides what amounts to a field report from the transition. The company chose a hybrid design combining classical elliptic-curve exchange with post-quantum ML-KEM, preferred the higher-security 768-parameter version, but dropped to the smaller 512-parameter version in some internal cases because packet-size constraints and handshake latency were otherwise too costly. The company reported roughly a 40% increase in CPU cycles during early hybrid rollout and discovered a multi-threading bug in the underlying cryptographic library during deployment at scale. This is what migration looks like in practice: engineering trade-offs among latency, compatibility, and fault discovery, made under production conditions, with real consequences. The ML-KEM-768 client share was large enough to threaten the TLS packet budget, sometimes adding an extra network round trip. A major security transition can hinge on whether a cryptographic object still fits in one packet.

This migration rewards organizations that already know where their cryptography lives. Meta’s migration framework describes a maturity ladder moving from “PQ-Unaware” through “PQ-Aware,” “PQ-Ready,” and “PQ-Hardened” to “PQ-Enabled,” and the prerequisite for any rung above the first is a working cryptographic inventory. An organization that does not know which of its systems use RSA, where its certificates are stored, or what its hardware security modules support cannot migrate. The migration rewards institutions that already behave like maintainers of infrastructure rather than its consumers. NIST calls this broader capacity “crypto agility,” indicating institutional self-knowledge under conditions of future threat.

No comprehension, no consent

Cloudflare reports that well over 60% of human-generated TLS traffic to its network is already protected with hybrid ML-KEM. Apple has deployed iMessage PQ3 since iOS 17.4 and now enables quantum-secure TLS by default. Signal introduced the Sparse Post-Quantum Ratchet so that ongoing conversations, not just initial handshakes, gain post-quantum forward secrecy. Signal’s public explanation emphasizes that the user experience does not change.

This is the governing aesthetic of the entire transition. The strongest form of cryptography is the one whose complexity has been absorbed into protocol design so completely that ordinary users require neither comprehension nor consent. Security succeeds when it disappears into the ordinary path. The future of trust arrives as extra bytes, silently negotiated in a handshake no one watches.

The European Union agency for cybersecurity, ENISA, found in its 2025 survey that post-quantum adoption sits at roughly 2% in the space sector. The technical standards have outrun much of the institutional world that must absorb them. The destination is clear, but parts of the road are still being paved. Somewhere, in data centers that do not advertise their purposes, traffic is being stored against a future that the collectors cannot yet quite see.

As this school year comes to an end, I hear parents talking about what university their children got into and how excited the family is about this next phase of life. As a university professor, I relate to this wholeheartedly. Raising your children to finish high school and go on to university is one of the biggest duties Christian parents will accomplish.

But there is a question Christian parents almost never ask: Why do we send our children into institutions that will work against the very faith we spent 18 years trying to instill?

You will routinely find professors lambasting Christianity in their classes as an oppressive colonizer religion that must be deconstructed.

No one says it that way, of course. Instead, the conversation sounds something like this: “We’ve found a good campus. There’s even a strong Christian student group.”

Now, let me say plainly: Those groups can be wonderful. I thank God for them. But pause for a moment and consider what that assumption reveals. You are already expecting that Christian community will exist outside the mission of the university. You are hoping your child will find a refuge within an otherwise hostile environment.

In other words, you are not sending your child into a place that reinforces truth, but into a storm, and praying they find a bunker. And you are probably paying tens of thousands of dollars to do it.

That should trouble us more than it does, because it wasn’t always this way. Institutions like Princeton, Harvard, and Yale were not founded as neutral arenas of inquiry. They were explicitly Christian. Their purpose was to cultivate piety, train ministers, and teach the knowledge of God to all students.

Universities have always had a vision of truth. The only difference now is that the vision has changed.

RELATED: The pipeline from university radical to would-be assassin

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Today’s university is not neutral. It is structured around a set of ideas that systematically undermine Christianity while presenting themselves as morally superior. Take the influence of Michel Foucault. Students are taught, often implicitly, that truth is not something discovered but constructed. Knowledge is tied to power. What earlier generations called “truth,” we are told, is really just the perspective of those who happened to win.

Then there is Paulo Freire, whose approach to education has become foundational in teacher training and pedagogy. Education, in this view, is not about learning what is true but about liberating the oppressed. The world is divided into oppressors and oppressed, and students are trained to dismantle the oppressors.

Guess which category Christianity lands in?

Add to this the ever-present language of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” along with intersectionality. These frameworks redefine truth itself as something tied to identity. Moral authority is assigned based on lived experience, and disagreement is often recast as harm.

The Bible, under this lens, is no longer read as the word of God. It is treated as a cultural artifact, one that has historically supported systems of oppression.

None of this is presented as an attack on Christianity. That would be too obvious. Or at least, you would have thought so even 10 years ago. But now you will routinely find professors lambasting Christianity in their classes as an oppressive colonizer religion that must be deconstructed.

And all of this is framed to the students as compassion and empathy. It is justice. It is only fair. And “that’s not fair!” is a very powerful argument for university students.

Young people have a strong instinct for fairness. When they hear, “That’s not fair,” they lean in. But what they are rarely told is that the definition of fairness itself has been quietly replaced.

Disagreement is recast as harm, hierarchy becomes injustice, and truth becomes a tool of whoever is in power. The Bible is a social construct invented by the patriarchy to retain power.

First comes disorientation: “Everything I learned growing up is being questioned.”

Then pressure: “If you don’t agree, you’re part of the problem.”

Then isolation: fewer Christian friends, fewer edifying conversations. More immoral filth where “love is love” is used to justify the basest forms of lust.

Then internal shift: Doubt feels like intellectual maturity.

And finally, exit or compromise. Some abandon the faith outright. Others keep the label but redefine it until it fits comfortably within the system that once challenged it.

Parents are often blindsided by this. They assume education is neutral. Sure, they had atheist professors and the standard left-wing nut, but those professors were just that: nuts.

Now, the crazy is normalized and the sane, holy, and faithful are institutionalized. Don’t assume that if your child finds a good group, everything will be fine.

This is not a neutral environment occasionally disrupted by bad ideas. It is an environment structured in a particular direction, with occasional pockets of resistance. Those Christian groups we celebrate are the bastions, not the foundation.

So what should parents do?

RELATED: Christian students are pushing back — and universities are cracking

WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP/Getty Images

First, don’t just ask whether your children will succeed academically or professionally. Ask whether they will remain faithful to Christ. Help them equip themselves with the armor of God described in Ephesians chapter 6.

Second, prepare them intellectually. They need to understand not only what they believe, but why, and how it contrasts with the frameworks they will encounter. Teach them the Bible and the historic Christian faith.

Third, help your children make faith in Christ their own. This is not merely an intellectual enterprise. Teach your children to love Christ and put their trust in salvation by Christ alone. When they know Him as their savior and trust His promises, they will stand firmly in that day of spiritual battle.

Third, expose hostile frameworks early. Teach them about Foucault, Freire, and the assumptions behind DEI before they hear those ideas in a classroom. If they have already heard the anti-Christian, anti-Bible arguments because you covered them together as preparation, they will be ready to dismantle them.

Fourth, stay engaged. Ask what their professors are teaching. You can look up their professors on the university webpages. Their bios probably won’t say “DEI anti-Christian radical,” but you will get a good sense of what they think by looking at their published works and conference presentations.

Above all, stop assuming neutrality where none exists. This is a spiritual battle of good vs. evil.

The real question is not whether universities shape your children’s beliefs. They will. The question is whether you will prepare your child to recognize that shaping and to stand firm in the truth.

Because if Christ is Lord of all truth, then no institution gets to undermine Him under the guise of “social justice advocacy.”

All parents should prepare their children for this spiritual reality. These university professors want your child’s soul.

A 57-year-old Louisiana woman was convicted of manslaughter after her 4-year-old granddaughter died from acute alcohol poisoning.

Roxanne Record was arrested by Baton Rouge police after they responded to the residence before 11 a.m. on April 21, 2022, and found China Record unresponsive.

The grandmother told police 'she messed up' and 'ruined everyone's lives.'

The girl was treated by emergency medical personnel but was later declared dead.

Police said the grandmother admitted that she forced the girl to drink the rest of the whiskey in a bottle after discovering that she may have taken a sip. It was reportedly Canadian Mist, an 80 proof whiskey, which translates to 40% alcohol.

She made her drink the alcohol while on her knees in the kitchen hallway as the girl's mother, Kadjha Record, allegedly watched on.

The grandmother told police "she messed up" and "ruined everyone's lives."

An autopsy found that she had a 0.68 blood alcohol level, which is more than eight times the legal limit for an adult driver.

Assistant District Attorney Dana Cummings said the grandmother did not have a good relationship with the child.

"China never had that because her grandmother never, ever took to her, never liked her, treated her differently than she treated the other children," Cummings said during opening statements.

RELATED: Teen faces horrific rape and murder charges after 2-year-old foster child dies with suspicious injuries

Police reported that the mother gave conflicting accounts of her actions and accused her of failing to stand up to the grandmother or stop the drinking.

Kadjha Record was also arrested and faces trial. The grandmother faces up to 40 years in prison when she's sentenced on Aug. 10.

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Emma Morris was only 27 years old and six months into her employment at the New York Post when she got a call in late September 2020 from former Trump adviser Steve Bannon saying he had a story that would “change her life.”

“He says, ‘I have Hunter Biden’s computer,”’ Morris recounts on “The Glenn Beck Program.”

Initially, Emma was “skeptical of the source,” given that both Bannon and Rudy Giuliani (who was in possession of a copy of the hard drive) were campaigning for President Trump. Despite being a dedicated conservative who likes Trump and “wanted the story to be true,” Emma was committed to true journalism and thus determined not to be blinded by her political views.

“My capacity as an editor is to relay the truth as closely as I can, not to campaign for Trump,” she tells Glenn.

When the New York Post gave her the greenlight to pursue the story, Emma was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer volume of documents she had to sort through just to pinpoint the angle the story would take.

“I called my boss, my editor in chief, Michelle Gotthelf, ... and I was like, ‘I don’t know how to make sense of all of this. It’s too much,’” she recounts.

Gotthelf’s advice was brilliant: “Find me where Joe Biden comes into this.”

“And that was when it clicked,” Emma says.

Her search narrowed in on roughly “10 documents” that involved Joe Biden, which then had to be verified for authenticity given the laptop had been through “a chain of custody.”

“The way that we were able to do that was very simple. ... We had the contact lists in his phone book, which was also on the laptop. ... And we just called them and said, ‘Hey, it’s the New York Post. I’m going to read you something. Can you tell me if it sounds familiar?’” Emma says.

As she began making these calls, one thing became clear: “It wasn’t Hunter, you know, scurrying around the world himself.”

“There was business partners, and some of those partners had either been burned, some of them had gone to jail, some of them had realized that this is too much. Everyone was receptive,” Emma says.

The response to the story the New York Post broke was shocking.

“I expected conservative media to pick it up. ... And that wasn’t what happened at all. As it turned out, the CIA was upset,” Emma says.

“We published at 5 a.m. By like 7 a.m. latest, it was completely blacklisted on Twitter. ... Within two hours, it was classified as child porn internally,” she explains.

It later came out that the FBI had been in possession of the physical laptop since December of 2019 and was actively preparing Twitter executives to treat any breaking story about Hunter Biden as Russian disinformation.

To hear more of Emma’s insider scoop, watch the video above.

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In its coverage of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s recent cast vote record decision, Democracy Docket framed the ruling as a dangerous victory for “election deniers” and claimed it gave a “DHS conspiracy theorist access to 2020 election data.”

That framing misses the central point of the case: The court did not authorize the exposure of anyone’s private vote. It allowed access to election records that help the public verify whether reported vote totals match recorded vote data.

In a republic, ballot secrecy protects the voter. Transparency protects the result. Both principles can coexist, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court understood that.

Americans across the political spectrum have lost faith in election systems at different moments and for different reasons.

The court’s actual holding was straightforward: Cast vote records, or CVRs, are not the “contents of ballot boxes or voting machines” under Pennsylvania’s Election Code and therefore are not categorically exempt from public disclosure.

A CVR is not a physical ballot. It does not contain information about voters. It contains information about ballots — and ballots do not contain personally identifying information.

A properly configured CVR cannot link a ballot to a voter in a way that compromises ballot secrecy. In the Lycoming County system at issue, the data was randomized and did not contain personally identifying voter information.

The court explained that the CVR numbers do not correspond to the order in which voters checked in or cast ballots and that those randomization features “significantly decrease the likelihood” of identifying an individual vote. The court concluded that disclosure would allow the public to check the math without violating ballot secrecy.

There is a line of thinking that says a CVR can be kept from the public if there is some edge case where the voter behind a ballot could be reasonably guessed. What that argument misses is that ballot secrecy exists to protect voters from the state — not to protect the state from public scrutiny.

If a government builds or certifies a voting system that allows officials, vendors, or anyone else to identify which voter cast which ballot, the problem is not the citizen asking for public records and the remedy is not secrecy for the government. The remedy is fixing, randomizing, or decertifying the system.

If a county claims that it cannot disclose a CVR because the public could determine how individual voters voted by matching multiple records together, that should trigger an immediate and serious response from state election authorities.

A voting system that allows ballots to be connected back to voters is not merely inconvenient for public-records compliance. It is a direct threat to ballot secrecy.

Public access to CVRs is not about exposing voters. It is about allowing citizens to confirm that election totals add up. Bloomberg Law captured the ruling more accurately: Pennsylvanians may review raw voting records to ensure elections are accurate; the court said disclosure promotes trust, confidence, and legitimacy without violating voter secrecy law.

Americans across the political spectrum have lost faith in election systems at different moments and for different reasons. In September 2024, Gallup found that only 57% of Americans were confident that presidential votes would be accurately cast and counted nationwide, with a massive partisan gap: 84% of Democrats expressed confidence, compared with only 28% of Republicans.

After the 2024 election, AP-NORC found that about six in 10 Americans believed the presidential vote was counted accurately nationwide, while independents remained notably less confident.

In April 2026, Reuters/Ipsos found sharp partisan divides on election fraud beliefs, while also finding that majorities of both Democrats and Republicans remained confident their own ballots would be counted.

This is not a one-party problem. Republicans have raised concerns about mail ballots, voter rolls, citizenship verification, ballot harvesting, and machine tabulation. Democrats, too, have raised serious concerns about election technology when the perceived threat came from foreign interference or insecure electronic systems.

RELATED: The FBI should get a warrant before reading your messages

J. David Ake/Getty Images

After the 2016 election, the Clinton campaign joined recount efforts in key states, with Marc Elias writing that the campaign had examined allegations involving hacking, outside interference, and voting technology.

In the years that followed, prominent Democrats pushed aggressively for paper ballots, audits, and replacement of insecure voting machines. Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden’s PAVE Act, backed by Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Cory Booker (N.J.), Kamala Harris (Calif.), Tammy Baldwin (Wisc.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), and others, would have mandated hand-marked paper ballots and risk-limiting audits in federal elections.

Let’s be honest: Concern about election technology was not invented in 2020. Democrats were warning about electronic voting systems, paperless machines, hacking, and public confidence long before the current fight over CVRs.

In the case of Pennsylvania, election researcher Heather Honey asked a basic question: Can the public inspect the data necessary to verify the count? The Pennsylvania Supreme Court answered yes, subject to the election code and subject to the protection of ballot secrecy. That should be an easy win for anyone who claims to care about democracy.

Instead, Democracy Docket labeled Honey a “conspiracy theorist” and portrayed the ruling as a victory for sinister forces. But the court did not adopt a conspiracy theory. It adopted a transparency principle. In fact, the court said disclosure promotes “fair, honest, and transparent elections.”

I know Heather Honey as a hard-working, dedicated patriot, a wonderful person, and a loving parent. Her biggest personal failing, as far as I can tell, is that she is a Philadelphia Eagles fan — a burden no court can remedy.

The attack on Heather Honey is totally misplaced. If Democracy Docket disagrees with the legal reasoning, it should argue the law. If it believes certain CVR formats in certain counties could threaten secrecy, then the correct response is not to smear citizens who request public records.

RELATED: Age verification laws do not make us safer

Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto/Getty Images

The correct response is to demand voting systems that protect ballot secrecy by design: randomized ballot records, standardized public CVR formats, and certification standards that make it impossible to connect a ballot back to a voter.

Marc Elias, the founder of Democracy Docket, has built a platform devoted to voting rights and election litigation. He knows better than most that election legitimacy depends not only on access to the ballot, but on public confidence that lawful votes are accurately counted.

CVR transparency is one way to earn it. It does not reveal who someone voted for or publish private voter choices. Properly handled, it lets citizens, researchers, journalists, campaigns, and watchdogs compare reported totals against underlying tabulation records. It is a public audit trail.

And if any county says its CVRs cannot be disclosed because the records would allow ballots to be matched back to voters, then the public-records request is not the scandal. The voting system is.

Democracy does not become weaker when citizens can verify government math. It becomes stronger.

So Democracy Docket should correct its framing, and Marc Elias should leave Heather Honey alone. She is simply defending one of democracy’s oldest and most important rules:

Trust the voters. Protect the secret ballot. And let the people check the math.

A lockdown at the White House was caused by a U.S. Secret Service officer shooting a "suspicious" armed individual who shot a juvenile, according to the Secret Service deputy director.

Reporters said they were ushered from the north lawn of the White House into the press briefing room after the lockdown was called at about 3:30 p.m. Monday.

'Whether or not it was directed to the president or not, I don't know, but we will find out.'

Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn held a media briefing later near the site of the shooting at the intersection of 15th and Independence Ave.

Quinn said a plainclothes officer who was patrolling the White House perimeter observed that the suspicious adult male had a "visual print" of a firearm not far from the White House complex.

Several uniformed Secret Service police officers then confronted the man, who tried to flee on foot and then fired in the direction of the officers. They fired back and struck the man.

The man was transported to a hospital, but Quinn had no comment on his condition. A juvenile was also struck by the gunfire from the individual. Quinn said the juvenile did not sustain life-threatening injuries.

A weapon was recovered by police.

He also noted that the motorcade for Vice President JD Vance had just driven by before the incident.

"Whether or not it was directed to the president or not, I don't know, but we will find out," Quinn said.

Quinn said there's an active investigation into the use of force.

RELATED: Judge APOLOGIZES to suspected would-be Trump assassin — and compares him to Jan. 6 defendants

He also would not say if the adult suspect said anything to the officers during the confrontation.

The shooting came only a week after an armed man allegedly tried to assassinate the president at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and was arrested.

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The president of Cornell University is defending his actions after he was accused of recklessly driving his vehicle through a group of protesters angry about an Israel-Palestine debate hosted by the college.

The incident unfolded on Thursday when a group of people, including students, followed university president Michael Kotlikoff to his car after the debate.

'I don't even have the words for it. I was pretty shocked and offended.'

Kotlikoff got into his car and drove off as the people crowded around his car.

One student said the car hit him and ran over his foot, and others said they were peacefully trying to talk to the president.

"As we were still trying to talk to him, he just immediately started reversing into us," said Aiden Vallecillo, a member of the Students for a Democratic Cornell.

Kotlikoff accused the protesters of trying to harass and intimidate him.

"These individuals are known to Cornell for their past conduct, including a long history of ongoing verbal and online abuse toward numerous members of Cornell's administration and staff, as well as disruptive protest resulting, in the case of two individuals, in bans from campus," the president wrote in the statement.

He said the students banged on his car windows, refused to stop yelling questions at him, and blocked the car.

"I waited until I saw space behind the car and then, using my car's rear pedestrian alert and automatic braking system, was able to slowly maneuver my car from the parking space and exit the parking lot," Kotlikoff added.

Another student expressed her outrage at the president's actions.

"I don't even have the words for it. I was pretty shocked and offended,” said Sophia Arnold, president of the Students for a Democratic Cornell. "A random pedestrian pulling out of a supermarket parking lot would probably have shown more care."

She went on to claim the students were not intending to block his car.

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Surveillance video of the incident was published in the news video report from WSYR-TV.

"The behavior I experienced last night is not protest," Kotlikoff concluded in his statement. "It is harassment and intimidation, with the direct motive of silencing speech. It has no place in an academic community, no place in a democracy, and can have no place at Cornell."

It's unclear if there's an investigation under way or if charges will be filed over the incident.

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While a growing number of Christians on the right believe Islam is compatible with the West, BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is not among them — and is looking for a solution to what others view as an Islamic takeover across the country.

Ex-Muslim Shahriq Khan, who now heads the Christ Underground ministry, agrees with Stuckey — and he has that solution.

“It’s not compatible with the West. I mean, under Quranic standards, we would be under Sharia law, which directly conflicts with the Constitution. And the Muslims know this,” Khan tells Stuckey on “Relatable.”

“What’s the solution?” he asks.

“Like, we can’t deport all of them. We can’t put them all in one area and have a genocide. That’s not very biblical. We can’t become Amish and ... you know, the Christians, we’re going to have our side of the world and then let the Muslims come in like crazy, and you guys have California.”

Khan believes the actual solution is to “make them Christian.”

“Like, I was a liberal Muslim. I was a very liberal Muslim. I voted blue all the time ... because we were very anti-evangelical Christian,” he explains.

“For us in Islam, that’s like the spawn of Satan is what’s happening with that,” he adds.

“And would you say there’s an aspect of being anti-Israel and perceiving Republicans as being pro-Israel as part of it?” Stuckey asks.

“Totally,” he answers, pointing out that many Americanized Muslims are sending money to places like Pakistan.

“They’re still funding Islam. They still send thousands of dollars to mosques, to overseas initiatives ... Nigeria or Ethiopia or Afghanistan or Pakistan, they’re all getting discipled by the same people,” he explains.

This is why Khan believes that the only solution is to convert Muslims to Christianity, but Stuckey has her reservations.

“I think that a lot of people are afraid that going into a Muslim community and sharing the gospel, that you’re going to get hurt, that you’re going to get threatened or killed or whatever,” Stuckey points out.

“Should they have that fear?” she asks.

“I purposely go to Dearborn and the mosques, and I go right to them. They all know my face. I get recognized immediately in all these places, and I still have fruitful conversations with them because I’m not doing what a lot of the big Christian apologists are doing,” he explains.

“The truth is, it’s Hebrews 2. It says the fear of death is from Satan and that Christ became one of us to break that fear of death over us,” he says. “And so, we need to get really radical.”

“If we are Christian, and we really believe that Islam is a stronghold, a demonic stronghold on two billion people, there’s going to be a very muddy and bloody consequence to a lot of things. But the thing that I cling to personally is He did it first,” he continues, adding, “Christ did it first.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Journalists were ushered from the White House North Lawn after the White House went into lockdown over a report of gunshots on Monday afternoon.

Initial reports said the shooting happened blocks away from the White House at the intersection of 15th and Independence Ave.

'No confirmation as of now as to what the threat was. Agents are still out.'

Some reporters posted on social media about the alert.

"U.S. Secret Service just evacuated us from our camera position at the White House north lawn. We’re now gathering in the briefing room," wrote CNBC correspondent Megan Cassela. "No indication as to what’s going on."

"We’ve been cleared from the briefing room, back to our camera spot. No confirmation as of now as to what the threat was. Agents are still out," she posted at about 3:53 p.m. local time.

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The U.S. Secret Service posted a statement about the shooting that appeared to cause the lockdown.

"U.S. Secret Service personnel are on the scene of an officer-involved shooting at 15th Street and Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C.," the agency wrote on social media. "One individual was shot by law enforcement; their condition is currently unknown. Please avoid the area as emergency crews are responding."

This is a developing story.

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