On Tuesday, my lawyers from the Goldwater Institute and I will appear before the Arizona Supreme Court to argue a proposition that, until recently, I would have thought too obvious to require lawyers: When the government violates a law enacted to protect you, you ought to be able to ask a court to make it stop.

Apparently this is controversial.

The question before the Arizona Supreme Court is larger than one professor, one university, or even DEI.

My case began with Arizona State University’s mandatory “Inclusive Communities” training. ASU required employees, as a condition of employment, to complete instruction on such fashionable academic doctrines as “whiteness,” “heteronormativity,” and “transformative justice.” An early version included a quiz requiring employees to select approved answers, including that land acknowledgments are important tools of accountability and that DEI should permeate every aspect of the university.

The course included material on “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” and the claim that American institutions normalize racial oppression. One segment even included a Starbucks employee describing an “existential crisis” when Americans could not pronounce her name.

There was, however, an inconvenience. Arizona has a law.

And the law says the state and its agencies “may not require an employee” to participate in training that presents “any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex.” It separately bars the use of public money for such training.

This is not an especially cryptic statute. One need not summon a seminar on poststructuralist hermeneutics to decipher the words “may not.”

I’ve alleged that ASU violated the statute. The merits of that claim have never been tried. Before ASU can be required to defend the training in court, the Arizona Board of Regents has argued that I cannot bring the case at all.

The trial court said I could. The Arizona Court of Appeals said I could not. The state Supreme Court has now agreed to hear the case and framed the question in the language lawyers love: whether the court of appeals failed to apply Arizona precedent for determining when a statute contains an “implied private right of action.”

That phrase sounds calculated to make normal Americans suddenly remember they have lawns to mow. But the principle behind it is important.

The law does not expressly say, “An employee may sue his employer for violating this section.” The Board of Regents therefore argues that no private cause of action exists. The Court of Appeals accepted that reasoning.

My attorneys argue that Arizona law does not end the inquiry there. Under state precedent, statutory silence “begins, rather than ends” the inquiry. Courts may consider a law’s language, context, purpose, subject matter, and consequences to determine whether a private right is implied.

RELATED: Feds probe ASU for racial bias — will other universities be held accountable?

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And the law is expressly directed at protecting state employees from being forced into prohibited training.

So here is the elementary question: If the employee the legislature meant to protect cannot enforce the protection, what exactly has he been given?

The lawmakers who sponsored the statute filed an amicus brief supporting my case and arguing that employees like me are exactly whom the law was intended to protect. That does not decide the legal question. It does underscore the practical one: If the protected employee cannot sue, who can?

A legal protection that government may violate without anyone able to invoke it in court has been demoted from law to suggestion.

That is why this case is not merely about DEI and certainly not merely about me.

Imagine a future Arizona government dominated by people whose politics are the reverse of mine. Suppose it mandates ideological training that violates a statute protecting progressive state employees. Should those employees be told, “Yes, the legislature prohibited this, but you are not permitted to ask a court to stop it”?

Of course not.

Conservatives, liberals, Christians, atheists, Republicans, Democrats, and the politically exhausted all have the same interest here. A government constrained by law is safer than a government permitted to decide for itself whether the laws restraining it will actually be enforced.

The larger controversy over DEI only sharpens the point. For years, university administrators embraced an ideology that purported to fight racial discrimination while rehabilitating racial judgment under new terminology. The vocabulary changed. The moral error did not.

Now legislatures are acting, parents are objecting, faculty members are speaking, and DEI offices are being renamed or reorganized.

But changing the stationery is not accountability.

RELATED: Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging: A new name for the same game

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Institutions regain public trust by telling the truth about what they did. Administrators who imposed unlawful training should answer for it if a court finds that the law was violated. Those who objected should be able to get through the courthouse door long enough to have that question decided.

When a government institution is accused of violating the law, its first instinct should not be to discover an ingenious reason the citizen cannot sue.

Let the case be heard.

If ASU’s training complied with Arizona law, let ASU prove it. If it did not, let the courts say so.

That is what courts are for.

The question before the Arizona Supreme Court is larger than one professor, one university, or even DEI. It is whether a law written to restrain government is something the people it protects may actually invoke against government.

Arizona has already told its agencies, “You may not.”

Now we find out whether an employee is allowed to answer, “Then prove it in court.”

I received my Fitbit Air near launch day back in May, and I’ve had it on my wrist ever since. In our original hands-on coverage, I loved it for its lightweight design, long battery life, and 24/7 wearability, despite a lack of GPS tracking for runs, questions around data privacy, and an inconsistently reliable AI coach.

Three months later, I have more thoughts on how Fitbit Air has aged and whether or not I still recommend the device.

I find that it’s an inconsistent health partner.

Things I still love about the Fitbit Air? For starters, the size and weight have proven to be a huge selling point for the Fitbit Air. It’s so light and unobtrusive, I forget I have it on most of the time. Unlike larger fitness bands or even watches, its bracelet-like design makes it easy to wear in tandem with jewelry or accessories on the other wrist. Personally, I pair mine with an Apple Watch (I’m a data nerd; don’t judge), and I rarely dodge judgmental glances in public, so it must look normal to most folks.

Its covert aesthetic is further complemented by reliably impressive battery life that lasts slightly more than a week per charge, though this window may shorten a bit if you’re a real exercise fanatic. I rarely have to take it off or acknowledge it’s there, which is the best thing you could ask for in a dedicated fitness tracker. Considering that the Fitbit Air samples heart rate data every five seconds, this kind of battery life cannot be overstated. It’s truly impressive, as far as wearable gadgets go.

Zach Laidlaw

If there’s anything to gripe about, it’s that the pebble module inside the Fitbit Air is made of plastic. Sure, it’s lightweight and cheap to produce, but it’s also easy to damage. Shortly after the Fitbit Air launched, some users reported scratches on the heart rate sensor, and one unlucky user found out that bug sprays and plastics don’t mix. Keeping these in mind, I’ve been careful with my Fitbit Air, and it’s held up quite well so far, despite getting drenched for daily showers, occasional exercises, and rounds of dirty dishwater in the kitchen sink. Let’s see if that trend continues.

Things I dislike about the Fitbit Air

That’s not to say that Fitbit Air is perfect. When the device launched, Google heavily pushed its Gemini-powered AI health coach as a key feature. The company even rebuilt the Fitbit app around it as Google Health. Unfortunately, Coach still needs some work.

Through my day-to-day musings with Coach, I find that it’s an inconsistent health partner. Sometimes, it’s really good at making recommendations to improve personal fitness or serving as a soundboard for discussing random health questions. Other times?

RELATED: Google's Fitbit overhaul is actually great. There's just one catch.

Zach Laidlaw

It hallucinates over the data stored within the app. I’ve had it misread my readiness score, undercut my daily steps, and send me a morning notification to tell me I woke up too early while I was actively still sleeping.

One time, it even invented its own stress score, which is a feature Fitbit used to have, but it was removed when Google Health took over. When I asked Coach where it got the number, it said that I could find it myself in Google Health, but naturally, it wasn’t there. I’m still not sure where it found that hidden data, if it existed at all.

At this point, Coach is an interesting feature to play with, but it’s not actually reliable or useful yet. If it wasn’t already included in my Google AI Pro subscription, I wouldn’t dare spend the extra money on a Google Health Premium plan to try it out.

Would I recommend the Fitbit Air?

It’s only been a few months, but Fitbit Air remains to be one of the most interesting fitness trackers I’ve used in the last 15 years. Shortcomings aside, it does the basics well. Build, comfort, and battery are all highly rated in my book. It’s also tough to find a reliable tracker with class-leading heart rate, sleep, and fitness metrics for under $100. For the money, you get a lot of gadget here, and I would recommend it to anyone who is even the least bit curious about your health.

Zach Laidlaw

The story doesn’t end there, though. Fitbit Air is about to get better. Google announced at its hardware event in mid-August that the wearable is getting a powerful software upgrade. As part of Google’s new Health Guardian system for Pixel Watches, Fitbit Air will receive several quality-of-life features: insulin resistance metrics and blood pressure trends.

Together, these could theoretically help users detect early signs of diabetes and hypertension. That said, the features are expected to roll out in September, so I haven’t had a chance to test them yet. When they’re available, though, I’m sure I’ll have some thoughts. You’ll just have to wait until the six-month long-term review to read them.

Meta is set to pay a staggering $17 billion settlement after allegations that its social media platforms contributed to addiction and other harms among young users.

The agreement marks one of the largest corporate payouts tied to the growing backlash against Big Tech — and BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan "Lomez" Keeperman aren’t exactly sure how to feel about it.

“So we had a ruling this week,” Rufo says, “a settlement this week that Meta, which is the kind of dumb rebrand, like, middle-aged man identity crisis rebranding of Facebook, has settled to pay $17 billion.”

“Meta has been found guilty, or admitted to, harming children with its Facebook technology,” he explains.

“Essentially, they’re saying social media is addictive and harmful to kids in the same way that kids might be, you know, lighting up cigarettes,” he adds, before asking Lomez whether it’s good or bad.

“I’m of like two, three, four minds about this, honestly. On the one hand, it does strike me a little bit as a moral panic, I should say, which is like, OK, we’re going down this path of increased social media use. People are addicted to their phones,” Lomez says.

“There’s no ambiguity around that. That’s obvious and demonstrably the case. The question is, what harms are these doing? ... And I think there are real harms,” he adds.

One of these “harms” is the “pervasive mass psychosis” that Lomez explains is “dominating our public life in almost every respect.”

“People getting herded into these sort of algorithmic valleys, you might call them, where they don’t see outside of it. Their information environment is completely one-sided, and this is deranging to people,” he says.

However, is the responsibility on those who have created social media, or those who use it?

“I think it’s a little bit of both,” he says. “And certainly when it comes to kids, I think kids are particularly susceptible to this stuff. And there ought to be a certain kind of responsibility that’s placed on the people creating these tools to be mindful of the ways in which kids in particular are susceptible, are able to be manipulated, where their sort of weaknesses are.”

“So this is all to say, when it comes to Meta here, is it reasonable for them to pay out $17 billion to these states? My answer is actually, yeah, it is,” he adds.

Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

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Abdul El-Sayed did Americans a favor when he sat down with Jesse Watters on Fox News this week. The Michigan U.S. Senate candidate gave us a remarkably clear lesson in the philosophy behind America’s growing democratic socialist movement. The real question is simple: Who owns your property — you or the government?

The most revealing moment was not about Sharia law, transgender medicine, or even socialized health care. It came when Watters pressed El-Sayed about his proposal to tax the wealth of Americans with more than $100 million.

Before giving government more power, ask what happens when the people wielding it decide that you, too, have more than you need.

El-Sayed has made the argument before. Billionaires, he says, can surrender a substantial portion of their wealth and still remain billionaires. Their children and grandchildren will still be rich.

Notice the premise. This is not merely an argument that government needs revenue for legitimate functions, nor a dispute over whether the top marginal income-tax rate should be 35% or 39%. The argument is that you possess more than you need — and government gets to decide how much that is.

That is the part Americans need to understand.

Suppose you build a company. You work for decades. You save, invest, and take risks. The company becomes enormously valuable. Under the traditional American understanding, the presumption is that the property is yours. Government may tax under constitutional authority, but it does not acquire an unlimited moral claim on your property because politicians decide you have too much of it.

El-Sayed reverses that presumption. What are you going to do with all that money? Whatever your answer, the socialist argument says it is too much because you have more than you need.

The proper question is not what you intend to do with your property. The proper question is: By what right does the government take it?

That distinction takes us back to 1776. The founders understood that government is necessary to protect life, liberty, property, contracts, and the peaceful exercise of rights.

But precisely because government possesses coercive power, it must be limited. The founders built a constitutional order around the insight that human beings abuse power, so power must be divided, checked, and restrained.

Read the Declaration of Independence. The complaint against George III is repeatedly that political power has exceeded its proper bounds. The king interferes with colonial legislatures, imposes taxes without consent, and seeks to subject Americans to “absolute Despotism.”

The central political problem was not how government could solve every problem. It was how citizens could prevent government from becoming one.

RELATED: The data center mob wants your property rights too

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Compare that instinct with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s declaration that there is “no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.” That is nearly the photographic negative of the American constitutional tradition.

The founders asked: What powers have we actually given government, and how do we limit them? The new socialists ask: What problem is left for government to solve?

El-Sayed’s wealth-tax argument reveals why. Once we abandon the presumption that your property is genuinely yours, the limiting principle becomes hard to locate. If $100 million is too much, why not $50 million? Why not $10 million? If politicians may determine how much wealth you need, why stop with billionaires?

The issue is not whether anyone should feel sorry for billionaires. The issue is who owns the property.

Redistribution is politically easiest when it begins with somebody almost nobody identifies with. He has plenty. You do not. Why shouldn’t government take some?

Because a government powerful enough to decide how much property another person needs has been given a power that does not become harmless merely because its first target is richer than you.

Then there is the comic assumption beneath the argument: Government will spend the money more wisely.

El-Sayed’s home state offers a useful caution. The state auditor found Michigan’s Unemployment Insurance Agency ineffective during the COVID pandemic. Fraud controls were weakened, billions in improper or fraudulent payments went out, and later audits found serious failures in recovering them.

These are the institutions that will reliably improve on the decisions of people who built billion-dollar companies?

Government has legitimate but limited purposes, and legitimate taxation follows from those purposes. But legitimate taxation does not establish a standing claim to whatever share of your wealth politicians decide you do not need.

This debate is especially important because socialism has found a receptive audience among younger Americans. Harvard’s 2025 Youth Poll found support for capitalism among young Americans at only 39%, while nearly half of young Democrats expressed support for socialism.

That is, in part, a failure of education.

We have spent enormous energy teaching young Americans to critique power and too little teaching them why constitutional government was designed to limit it. Much of contemporary oppression theory condemns authorities who presume to know how others should live, then demands political power to impose its own answers.

The next generation needs a different lesson.

RELATED: The DSA’s history lesson has one big omission

Sarah Rice/Getty Images

Your life is your responsibility. Your neighbor’s property belongs to your neighbor. Wealth does not become public property when it crosses an arbitrary number selected by a politician. Government exists to protect rights, not to decide how much prosperity citizens are permitted to enjoy.

Freedom includes choices politicians consider foolish or wasteful. Save your money, give it away, invest it, build a business, leave it to your children, support your church, fund a charity, or buy something ridiculous. Within the law, those decisions belong to you.

That is what limited government protects.

The socialist temptation is perennial because it begins with an attractive promise: Give us more power, and we will use it to make life fairer.

The American answer is older and wiser: Before giving government more power, ask what happens when the people wielding it decide that you, too, have more than you need.

On August 10, a powerful magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia near the town of San José del Palmar in Chocó Department, killing at least 287 people, injuring thousands, and knocking down buildings in cities like Pereira and Cali.

While Colombia is the most recent example, it’s certainly not the only country to experience devastating earthquakes in recent months. Since May, Venezuela, Indonesia, Mexico, and Japan, among several others, have all experienced the ground-splitting force of major quakes.

On a recent episode of “Live Free,” host and Lakepointe Church pastor Josh Howerton, along with co-host and fellow pastor Carlos Erazo, dove into the biblical significance behind the uptick in earthquakes and other kinds of chaos.

“When you look at Scripture, there's only one time that Jesus actually specifically explicitly addresses earthquakes,” says Erazo, “and the one time He does it, it happens in the context of the end-times and the return of Jesus.”

He then reads Matthew 24:7-8, which documents Jesus’ answer to His disciples’ questions regarding the signs that will mark the end of the age: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.”

The earthquakes that are happening all over the world right now, Erazo says, are “literally what Jesus said 2,000 years ago would happen.”

He acknowledges that skeptics will argue that earthquakes have always happened, but they’re missing a critical distinction.

“There's always been earthquakes ... and that's true, but we haven't always had these amount of earthquakes in the context of literally everything else that we're seeing right now happening and unfolding in our world,” he says.

He points to another of Jesus’ end-time signs in Matthew 24 — “wars and rumors of wars.”

“Studies show today that in the last four to five years, there's been an increasing number in quote ‘active armed conflicts involving governments.’ 2025 set an all-time record high since World War II,” says Erazo.

“In 2026, the amount of countries that were involved as well in conflicts outside of their own borders nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and according to this same report, it says quote, ‘Global peace is at its lowest level since 2007,”’ he adds, citing the 2026 Global Peace Index from the Institute for Economics & Peace.

These natural disasters and global conflicts aren’t mere occurrences, Erazo argues, but signs that Jesus’ prophesies are coming to pass.

“When you see stuff like that — earthquakes, wars, persecution, the insanity happening out there, chaos — Jesus said this would happen,” he says.

For Christians, these signs herald the good news that Jesus’ final return draws nearer — but not so for the unbeliever, says Erazo.

“If you're not a Christian ... this should scare you,” he warns.

“Jesus spoke about birth pains, and this is just the beginning of something that's going to get worse.”

To hear more, watch the episode above. “Live Free with Josh Howerton” is on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Join BlazeTV+ and start watching Josh today at blazetv.com/JOSH. Use promo code JOSH40 to get $40 off your subscription.

Virtual Private Networks are meant to shield your browsing history from all manner of prying eyes, including your internet service provider, your workplace or school, and even potential hackers. If you use a VPN with your Windows PC, though, I have some bad news: Microsoft has a full record of your browsing habits, and it can even report your activity to the FBI.

According to court documents released on July 1, a 19-year-old young man working with the cyber criminal group known as Scattered Spider was caught hacking into a computer system belonging to a luxury jewelry store. While inside, the hacker stole company data and demanded $8 million in cryptocurrency for ransom. Ultimately, the jewelry store kicked the hacker out of its system without paying the ransom, and the perpetrator was later arrested and charged.

Every user is susceptible to unwarranted surveillance and government overreach.

It’s a simple case of conspiracy, digital intrusion, and fraud ... but there’s a catch.

The hacker’s identity should have been hidden from the feds.

Reports indicate that the hacker used a Windows PC to access the jewelry store’s system. Before breaking in, he installed a VPN onto his device that was meant to conceal his IP address, location, and identity. The VPN worked as intended, but it still wasn’t enough to keep his activity from leaking to the FBI. Even with protections in place, Windows itself was the thing that outed him in the end, thanks to a little-known device identifier called Global Device Identifier, or GDID.

What is GDID?

Every installation of Windows is assigned a GDID. Up until recently, there wasn’t a lot of information on exactly what this identifier could do, and even now, details are scant. However, thanks to this case, we can make a few deductions.

GDID can track and keep a record of the web browsing history on the device that it’s assigned, even if a VPN is installed. This information is saved over time, and it can’t be erased or cleared, even if with a system wipe or reinstall of Windows.

GDID can’t see what a user did on the pages they visited. It doesn’t know what that person saw or read on the screen. However, simply visiting a certain URL may be enough to draw conclusions and bring legal charges, as was the case with the Scattered Spider hacker.

What does this mean for regular users?

For the criminally inclined, GDID is just another way for the FBI to serve justice in a world increasingly plagued by cyber criminals, AI-powered security threats, and system breaches. As more of our digital infrastructure comes under attack at the hands of quantum computing and other innovations we haven’t yet imagined, the feds will need all the help they can get to stop criminals in their tracks.

And for the rest of us?

RELATED: New malware is crippling Android phones, but not yours if you do this

Jutharat Pinpan/Getty Images

The revelation that Microsoft created Windows with browser-tracking spyware baked directly into the OS is neither shocking nor acceptable. A feature that can monitor a hacker’s browsing activity is a fatal flaw that makes every user susceptible to unwarranted surveillance and government overreach. This is especially egregious when you take into account what this could mean for something like the age-verification bills that are currently at Capitol Hill.

Imagine what would happen if states begin to pass age-restriction laws. Instead of turning over their IDs, citizens would use a VPN to access the internet by routing their connection to a nonrestrictive state — a clear violation of the new law. A Windows PC would detect this behavior, and it could inform the government of such an infraction, resulting in legal repercussions.

At that point, there’s no going back.

How to disable GDID

This is usually the part of the story where I try to deliver some good news — a solution to keep you, your devices, and your rights safe from Big Tech and/or the government. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done here.

GDID is built directly into Windows. It is assigned to your device whether you use your Microsoft account to log in or you use a local account. It is also persistent, meaning that once assigned, it doesn’t change. That identifier is attached to your computer and you for the rest of its life, and when you get another Windows PC, the next identifier will follow you too.

The only way to avoid it is to choose a different PC platform altogether.

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently made headlines when she claimed during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” with Jonathan Karl that “Woke 1 was crazy.” She was specifically referring to the extreme progressive rhetoric and positions of the 2020 COVID lockdown era, particularly calls to defund or abolish the police.

Some have interpreted the DSA member’s words as evidence that the left is entering a more sane, commonsense phase — but BlazeTV’s Christopher Rufo believes the opposite is actually true.

On this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” Rufo and co-host Jonathan Keeperman sit down with foreign policy expert Zineb Riboua to dive into what Rufo predicts is the left’s next phase — a movement that will make the pinnacle of wokeism look tame.

“It's long been my thesis that what's next on the left is the ideology of Third-Worldism,” says Rufo.

Riboua breaks down what that term entails. “Third-Worldism is really about seeing everything through a very specific lens, where you show who is the colonizer, who is the colonized, who is the oppressor, the oppressed.”

This “very binary” way of thinking, she explains, pits “the global north” against “the global south,” with the explicit goal of seeing the latter “triumph.”

But this isn’t the massive shift some interpret it to be, she says. Third-Worldism, Riboua explains, is just “a different form” of the left’s longtime goal to take money and power from the West and give it to other groups via redistribution, reparations, and shifting power.

“My kind of pet theory is that there's also just a change in racial focus,” Rufo adds, highlighting 2020’s BLM era, which was hyper-focused around “black America's historical grievances [and] historical oppressions” — an era whose “leadership class” ultimately “collapsed.”

Rufo wonders if Third-Worldism is simply the shifting of the left’s racial focus off of black America and on to the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.

“Is it just a racial shift in the subject — seeking the same policies, yes, but seeking a kind of stronger leadership class?” he asks Riboua.

“While it's true that there is a change in ... which race we're going to give priorities for, I think that what is, I think, more fundamental about Third-Worldism is that it positions things in a way that anyone who feels oppressed can join,” says Riboua.

“In a way, Third-Worldism is much more, I would say, inclusive of all these grievances against anything that is Western and de facto imperial, patriarchal even though things are obviously very much complicated in history,” she adds.

To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.

Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

BlazeTV’s Allie Beth Stuckey recently debated progressive commentator and former evangelical Monte Mader on Jubilee’s “Face Off” series. Their hour-long discussion focused primarily on four claims — two from each participant.

Allie’s were “Christians must oppose abortion” and “Christians cannot affirm same-sex marriage,” while Mader’s were “America is not and will never be a Christian nation” and “Patriarchy, not feminism, is at odds with Christ's ministry and teaching.”

Allie defended biblical Christian positions on all four claims, and Mader critiqued them from her deconstructed progressive worldview.

On a recent episode of “Relatable,” Allie reflected on the debate and shared with her audience advice and tips for handling high-pressure exchanges as a Christian.

Tip #1: Back to brass tacks

Given the format of this particular “Jubilee” debate — time allotments for speaking, a shared clock, and a strict no interruptions rule — Allie acknowledges the difficulty of formulating responses to her opponent’s “monologue.”

“They make too many claims in a matter of say five minutes that they're talking. You've got to pick and choose what claims you are going to respond to,” she explains.

Her strategy in this scenario was to always get back to the “brass tacks” of the central claim.

While typical back-and-forth conversations aren’t limited by a ticking clock and allow for interjections and clarifying questions, honing in on an opponent’s core points instead of getting sidetracked on tangents remains an excellent debate strategy.

“That’s what I encourage you to do as well because it's really easy when someone is spouting a lot of information that might seem factual because they're very confident to kind of follow them down that trail, but that's called a red herring,” says Allie. “That is making an argument that is actually totally unrelated and irrelevant to the logic and the substance of the main claim. It's your job to get back to the main claim.”

Tip #2: Watch out for the ‘Gish gallop’

A Gish gallop, Allie explains, is a tactic where someone tries to “overwhelm” their opponent with a high volume of “rapid fire” claims.

The goal is to create a situation where the opponent is literally unable to respond to every claim presented.

“If you tried to go through each claim one by one, you would end up going down the trail of a red herring of something that actually doesn't have to do with the main point at all,” says Allie, “or you end up having this tangential conversation, and then you go off the reservation and you lose the spirit of what the debate is supposed to be about.”

But once spotted, a Gish gallop is simple to dodge.

“Your job is not to meet them by responding to every argument or talking just as quickly. Your response has to be ‘slow down,’” says Allie.

“You could even say that out loud — ‘Slow down. Hang on a second. I want to go back to the claim. I want to go back to what you originally said, and let me get down to what this actually means,”’ she advises.

3. Kindness and compassion ≠ compromise

The reason Allie says she agrees to do “Jubilee” or other kinds of debates is not to change the minds of her opponents or even their audiences.

“My debate is for you,” she says.

Allie shares that since the debate with Mader, some people from the “exvangelical’s” audience have sent her vile messages wishing for her and her unborn child’s deaths. But their callousness doesn’t discourage her because the debate was never for them in the first place.

“Me going into these situations to go back and forth with these ideas is to hopefully, by the grace of God, exemplify how you can respond with kindness, with respect, with peace, without compromising at all in what is good, right, and true,” she says.

“A lot of people, especially Christians, think that in order to love someone, you have to nuance your positions; you have to compromise a little bit; you have to give in in just a few areas in order to relate to someone. You don't have to do that,” she declares.

To hear more of Allie’s debate breakdown, check out the episode above.

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.

California tried to pass a law squelching dissident speech. Again. People are finally noticing.

Governor Gavin Newsom last week signed Assembly Bill 2624, aptly dubbed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.” The law establishes special privacy protections for qualifying “immigration-service workers” who claim threats or harassment. It also creates a formal process letting those workers demand restrictions on publication of their “personal information” and images — including names, employment, photographs, and video.

The First Amendment was written for precisely this sort of piggish government.

Shirley says this creates an obvious problem for investigative journalism. He’s right.

Suppose he investigates a taxpayer-funded hospice or nonprofit, films the people running it, and asks uncomfortable questions about where the money went. Under his reading of the law, one of those people could hand him a written demand not to publish his name or image. If Shirley publishes anyway and the subject claims fear or receives threats, Shirley says he could face legal consequences simply for reporting what he found.

That would be an outrageous law.

But the final law isn’t as broad as Shirley says it is. Not that it doesn’t deserve to be nuked. We need to be clear.

Somebody cannot simply hand him a piece of paper and prevent him from publishing a video. The enacted version requires “specific intent” to incite imminent great bodily harm or to threaten someone in a manner creating “objectively reasonable fear” for personal safety.

That distinction will matter when the courts take up the inevitable First Amendment challenge.

You know what else matters? What California Democrats originally tried to pass.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, the designated “victim” in Shirley’s investigations, was not merely a supporter of A.B. 2624. California’s own legislative analysis identifies the taxpayer-funded immigration organization as one of the bill’s co-sponsors.

So an organization receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer money helped sponsor a law creating a special legal regime under which the organization may demand restrictions on the publication of their names, workplace, photographs, and video.

That should raise an eyebrow.

When the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression looked at A.B. 2624 in April, the bill was substantially worse. The original version allowed a “protected person” to send someone a written demand and bar that person for four years from publishing “personal information” or an image — without the specific-intent requirement now written into law.

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FIRE warned that the bill could suppress criticism, newsworthy reporting, photographs, and ordinary social media posts. The original even contained a special exemption for journalists covered by California’s shield law.

Why would lawmakers need a press exemption if the bill merely prohibited “threats” and “doxxing”?

Then people complained. FIRE complained. UCLA First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh complained. Republicans like Assemblyman Carl DeMaio of San Diego complained loudly.

And Democrats retreated — a little.

The legislature added the specific-intent language, narrowed the publication restriction, and removed the journalist carve-out. FIRE now says the amendments prevent the law from being unconstitutional on its face, although the group still warns that the written-demand system could chill lawful speech.

Could?

At a raucous Capitol rally Wednesday, Shirley insisted that it absolutely will. Newsom’s office responded that critics were either “lying to create up fake conspiracy theories” or did not “know how to read.”

That is awfully cocky coming from an administration defending a law that had to be substantially rewritten to have a prayer of surviving First Amendment scrutiny.

And A.B. 2624 is hardly an aberration.

In 2024, Christopher Kohls, who posts online as “MrReagan USA,” created an obviously satirical AI-generated Kamala Harris campaign ad. Elon Musk shared it. Newsom saw it and declared that manipulating a voice in an ad “should be illegal.”

When Newsom signed A.B. 2839, he reposted Kohls’ parody and bragged: “I just signed a bill to make this illegal in the state of California.”

A federal judge almost immediately blocked the law on First Amendment grounds and later permanently enjoined its enforcement against Kohls and the other plaintiffs.

Newsom’s appalling candor was refreshing in a way. He saw political speech he disliked, announced it should be outlawed, then used the power of the state to try to make it so.

He would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling First Amendment.

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Then there is Mirabelli v. Bonta, involving a preposterous law that allowed public schools to hide students’ “gender transitions” from their parents. California defended the law to the hilt. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that the parent plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their constitutional claims.

Different subject. Same censorious reflex.

Who gets to say what? Democrats think they decide.

So never confuse retreat with innocence.

California Democrats did not begin with a carefully limited A.B. 2624 and painstakingly protect innocent victims while respecting the First Amendment. They reached much farther into protected speech and backed off only after people caught them.

If the problem was doxxing and threats, why did the original bill reach names, employment information, photographs, and video? Why did lawmakers think they needed a special exception for journalists? And why does the final law retain a formal four-year “do not publish me” demand if the only publication California may punish is a threat or incitement?

Patrick Henry had the proper American disposition toward government power: “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel.”

Especially in California.

Kohls was no accident. Neither was Mirabelli. Nor did A.B. 2624 accidentally offend the First Amendment. Scratch a “liberal,” find a censor.

Again and again, California Democrats reach for state power to control what people may say, publish, parody, disclose, or hear — then retreat only when courts, civil libertarians, or public outrage force them to.

The First Amendment was written for precisely this sort of piggish government.

“I complained because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

We have all heard that expression. I happen to live with someone who has no feet.

Yet during my decades of marriage to a bilateral amputee, there have been plenty of times when I complained that my feet hurt. I have limped around the house nursing a blister while living with a woman who leans her prosthetic legs next to the nightstand.

You would think that daily reminder supplied all the perspective I needed. It did. Perspective was never the problem. Gratitude was something else.

We live in a culture that has industrialized comparison. Social media serves it to us by the scroll: Someone has more than we do, and someone else has less. The algorithm knows how to make us envious, aggrieved, or smug. It cannot make us grateful.

Seeing someone with greater challenges can put our difficulties into perspective. It may even stop us from complaining out loud for a while. We say, “I don’t have anything to complain about.” But we usually do. We simply tamp it down for decorum’s sake before returning to our regularly scheduled grumbling.

Perspective may embarrass us into silence, but silence is not gratitude. Besides, what kind of gratitude requires another person’s misery? “I was feeling sorry for myself, but then I looked at your life and felt much better” probably will not land the way we intend.

Gratitude is not looking across the room and saying, “At least I’m not you.” It is looking at mercy and saying, “You saw me.”

I learned something about that during one of Gracie’s hospitalizations.

One afternoon, I drove home from the hospital for clothes and supplies before heading back. Some friends called and asked me to stop by their home. They ushered me into their kitchen, where a place had been set for one person.

There sat a bowl of homemade vegetable beef soup, a thick slab of cornbread, and a tall glass of sweet tea. As a Southerner, it was about as fine a meal as I could imagine.

My friends quietly said, “Your boys are safe with their grandparents for spring break. Gracie is safe at the hospital. And you are safe here. Sit down, eat, and rest. We’re watching over you.”

They saw what I had not yet recognized. I had spent so much of my life watching over someone else that I did not know how to admit I needed someone to watch over me.

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I have eaten costlier meals I can barely remember. Decades later, I still remember their kitchen, the table, the chair, and that meal with clarity.

What produced gratitude in that moment? Not perspective. I already had perspective by the truckload from countless hours in hospitals and surgical waiting rooms. What moved me was not that someone else had less. It was that my friends saw the burden in my stooped shoulders.

C. S. Lewis wrote of being “Surprised by Joy.” That afternoon, I was surprised by mercy. My friends prepared a place and came toward me before I asked.

That is a picture of the gospel.

God did not rescue us by pointing to someone whose sins were worse than ours. He saw us stooping beneath a burden we could neither understand nor remove. He did not wait for us to straighten ourselves, find the right words, or properly explain our condition. He saw us, and then He came toward us.

Paul writes, “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Luke tells of 10 lepers whom Jesus healed. All 10 received something beyond their reach, but only one returned to thank Him. Receiving something, even something miraculous, does not automatically produce gratitude. One man connected the mercy he received with the One who gave it.

Jesus asked, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?” I find that question uncomfortable because I have spent a good bit of my life among the nine.

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I have too often received mercy and hurried on to the next problem. I have prayed for provision and complained about the packaging. I have asked God to open a door and grumbled because it squeaked.

My problem was not a lack of perspective. My problem is gospel amnesia.

“Bless the Lord, O my soul,” David wrote, “and forget not all his benefits” (Psalm 103:2). Gratitude requires remembering.

Self-centeredness says, “I deserve more.” Perspective says, “Someone else has less.” Gratitude says, “I have received mercy.”

My friends did not solve our crisis that afternoon. The hard road still waited outside their home, and it continues to this day. But for a little while, I rested while someone else stood guard.

I never knew grace could smell like vegetable beef soup and warm cornbread.

That afternoon, gratitude tearfully accepted a second bowl.

Is it possible there exists an ancient mystery that lies behind the events of the modern world, an object connected to everything from the rise of Adolf Hitler to the spread of Marxism, socialism and communism, the two world wars, nuclear destruction, the Cold War, and even the future of the world?

Could a mystery that began in the last book of the Bible be a key to some of the greatest evils and calamities ever to fall upon our world? It sounds like something out of a movie, a science-fiction novel, or a Hollywood fantasy — but it’s real.

Thus Hitler addressed the enormous Nazi rallies at Nuremberg from a structure deliberately modeled on the ancient monument some have identified with the 'throne of Satan.'

For more than a decade, the Pergamon Altar — a massive monument built more than 2,000 years ago in what is now Turkey — has been inaccessible to visitors as Berlin's Pergamon Museum undergoes a vast renovation. When the museum partially reopens next year, the altar will once again be revealed.

'Satan's throne'

To most visitors, it will be an archaeological treasure, admired for what it reveals about a long-gone civilization. But the altar has another history — one that begins in the last book of the Bible and, I believe, runs through some of the darkest events of the modern world.

The ancient city of Pergamon was one of the great centers of the Hellenistic world. In the second century B.C., its rulers constructed a monumental altar on its acropolis, on a foundation roughly 35 meters square. A huge staircase led upward through a colonnaded structure, while a marble frieze depicted a violent cosmic struggle: the Olympian gods crushing the rebellious giants.

Centuries later, Pergamon would appear in the book of Revelation.

In a message to the Christians living there, Christ declares: “I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is.”

What exactly was “Satan's throne”?

Scholars have proposed several possibilities. Pergamon was a center of pagan worship and of the Roman imperial cult. But one interpretation has long identified the phrase with the city's enormous altar, whose architecture itself resembled a giant throne.

I believe that identification is significant.

Sinister discovery

With the advent of Christianity and the passing of the ancient world, the altar fell into ruin. Eventually parts of it were incorporated into later structures, and for centuries it disappeared from history.

Enter a German engineer named Karl Humann. Humann first encountered the ruins in the 1860s while working in the Ottoman Empire. He saw ancient marble sculptures being broken up and burned for lime and alerted the museums in Berlin. With permission from Ottoman authorities, German archaeologists began excavating Pergamon in 1878.

They soon uncovered the remains of the great altar.

Thousands of fragments emerged from the earth, including much of its enormous sculpted frieze. Under arrangements with the Ottoman government, the finds were transported on the backs of animals, then by ship and train, until pieces of the ancient altar began arriving in Berlin in 1879.

What would we expect to happen with the return of “Satan’s throne” to the world?

Germany had now become its new home. And as the ancient altar was being pieced together there, an old evil was taking a new and ominous form as well: anti-Semitism. In 1879, as pieces of the altar began arriving in Berlin, political agitator Wilhelm Marr popularized the term Antisemitismus and founded the League of Antisemites, helping transform a centuries-old hatred into a modern racial and political movement.

Altar of anti-Semitism

A decade later, in 1889, Adolf Hitler was born. The coincidence alone proves nothing. But the two threads — the ancient altar taking shape again in Germany and the country's increasingly racialized anti-Semitism — would converge with remarkable literalness after Hitler came to power.

After coming to power in 1933, Hitler commissioned his chief architect, Albert Speer, to transform the Nazi Party rally grounds at Nuremberg. Between 1935 and 1937, Speer constructed the massive grandstand at Zeppelin Field. His architectural model was the Pergamon Altar.

Thus Hitler addressed the enormous Nazi rallies at Nuremberg from a structure deliberately modeled on the ancient monument some have identified with the “throne of Satan.”

From that stage, Hitler raged before the world as his regime plunged Europe into war and carried out the Holocaust and the murder of millions.

And this was not the end of the altar’s strange journey.

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Stalin's prize

As the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, the Red Army entered Berlin and took possession of the altar’s friezes. Along with enormous quantities of German cultural property, they were carried east into the Soviet Union, where they remained for more than a decade. The ancient sculptures that had traveled from Pergamon to imperial Germany and witnessed the rise and fall of Nazi Germany had now passed into Stalin’s Soviet Union.

In 1958 and 1959, the Soviet Union returned approximately 1.5 million cultural objects to communist East Germany, among them the frieze panels of the Pergamon Altar. By 1959, they were once again on display in Berlin — this time behind the Iron Curtain.

Pergamon. Imperial Germany. Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union. Communist East Germany.

And this is only part of the mystery. In my book "The Altar of Pergamon: The Mystery of the Dark Angel and the Future of the World," I explore what I believe are further connections between the altar and the forces and events that shaped the modern age — Marxism and communism, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the Atomic Age, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even events that may yet shape the future of our world.

Pergamon's return

When I wrote it, I had no idea that the altar itself would soon be revealed to the world again. But I believe that timing is itself part of the mystery.

It can be hard for our modern sensibilities to grasp the possibility of such a thing as a “throne of Satan” altering the course of history. But the connections are grounded in concrete facts and remarkable historical convergences — more than 200 of them.

Though we like to imagine that we are in control of the world’s destiny and that we can solve our problems through our own resources, powers, and technologies, the Bible tells us something else: There is more to the world and to our lives than what we can see with our eyes. There is another realm, a spiritual realm, that can shape the course of our lives and our world.

What will happen when the altar is once more revealed to the world? We cannot say. But the ancient object connected to some of the greatest evils and cataclysms of the modern age may not be finished with history yet.

Kathy Griffin hasn’t learned a single lesson since crashing her own career.

The “D-list” diva shared a horrifying image of herself holding a fake, bloodied head of President Donald Trump, ISIS-style, in 2017. The backlash proved swift and furious. She apologized (then took it back) and watched her stand-up gigs evaporate.

Country singer Jelly Roll famously shed a whole lotta weight in recent years. Good for him! Now he’s hoping to shed fans.

It took years to rebuild a semblance of a career, and she eventually leaned into her Trump derangement syndrome.

Now she’s playing the Victim Card™ via the “Talk Your Head Off” podcast with Gen Z host Adam Mockler. Mockler complained of the “chilling effect” created when President Trump goes after his critics in the media and the legal arena.

Griffin’s response? She knows the feeling.

“I actually was a victim of that myself in 2017 when I released a controversial photo that I thought everyone else would agree with me,” Griffin said, referring to BloodyHeadGate. “I was very, very wrong.”

That last sentence might be the first wise thing she’s said in ages ...

Hostin-ator

AI just got dumber.

"The View" host Sunny Hostin just sold her likeness to AI startup Fountain O. That means the company can use Hostin’s name and brand for AI-based TV shows and movies based on Hostin’s novels.

Wait … she has enough time to share TV’s most idiotic opinions and write novels? Respect!

The deal means her fans can not only see AI reproductions of her stories but watch Hostin herself in them.

“To be able to bring my novels to life in movie and TV form, and actually have my image inserted in the productions, so that audiences can relate to me through my stories beyond my role as an author, is incredibly exciting to me.”

Maybe those “Terminator” films depicting computers conquering humanity didn’t anticipate the Hostin factor …

Jelly rolled

Is anything more fickle than pop music stardom? The list of one-hit wonders may literally be a mile long, and even today’s red-hot stars could run cold in a New York Minute.

Remember Jewel? Right Said Fred? Young MC? That should keep today’s chart-toppers hungry and humble.

Not Jelly Roll. The country singer famously shed a whole lotta weight in recent years. Good for him! Now he’s hoping to shed fans. How? He hosted “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” this week and read straight from the far-left show’s cue cards.

Trump bad. Trump dumb. Trump [fill in the blank]. “Funny” rarely enters the equation on the show, and Mr. Roll did nothing to change that approach. And, naturally, some of the singer’s fans recoiled at his liberal lurch.

He is a country crooner, after all. His response? To paraphrase he Critical Drinker, “Go away now.”

“For those who threatened to stop listening to my music based on my comments last night, I just want to say with conviction: go right ahead.”

Sounds like a plan. In related news, look for Jelly to join Chumbawamba on their 2027 "That One Song You Kinda Liked" tour.

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Ali who?

Sacha Baron Cohen was king of the comedy world following his gonzo 2006 film “Borat.” It’s been downhill ever since.

Even worse, Cohen went woke, tackling predictable targets (Trump!) and demanding that the real estate mogul be kicked off of social media.

Sad.

Still, there’s always hope for a creative rebound. And Cohen’s next project is a film-length “documentary” based on his classic Ali G character. “Ali G: Who Iz I” hits theaters this fall, and while the trailer isn’t a hoot, perhaps the best bits are being saved for the film itself.

We’ll see come the film’s release day — Oct. 23. Right now, some comedy pearl-clutchers are coming after Cohen.

A media “watchdog” group, NewsCord, is trying to coax movie houses to ban the film. His routines, it claims, have “enforced harmful stereotypes across marginalized communities through his characters.”

Will that effort get traction? It’s not 2020 any more, thank goodness. For now, Cohen is leaning into his old bad-boy shtick, ignoring how he abandoned his principles over time. Maybe he thinks being unwoke is cool (it is … but not thanks to him).

“In an age when a single comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back,” he shared on social media.

With the “Women’s” NBA twisting itself into knots rather than plainly defining woman, gender ideology is back in the news.

The first problem is linguistic. Using “gender” when one means sex invites confusion. Jay Richards has explained gender ideology as the view that the sex binary does not fully describe human identity and that a person may possess an internal “gender identity” incongruent with sex.

‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’

That framework helps explain a related question: Why can stating ordinary biological distinctions provoke such extraordinary hostility — even death threats — when the dispute concerns women’s sports and other sex-separated spaces?

One answer is that the argument is not only about biology. It also draws on an older revolutionary tradition that treats inherited institutions and categories as instruments of domination. Hence the old line: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Start with Marx and Engels. In “The Communist Manifesto,” they called for “the most radical rupture with traditional relations” and “traditional ideas,” while attacking private property, religion, and the bourgeois family. Paul Kengor has written that later leftist movements continued this attack on traditional marriage and family.

The intellectual path from Marx to contemporary gender theory is not a straight line, however. Antonio Gramsci did not simply replace economics with culture; he broadened Marxist analysis by emphasizing culture, institutions, and “hegemony” as sources of social power. What is commonly called cultural Marxism grew from this shift in emphasis.

Herbert Marcuse likewise looked beyond the industrial working class to marginalized groups as possible agents of radical change. Rudi Dutschke popularized the idea of a “long march through the institutions,” while Mike Gonzalez has noted the Gramscian strategy of a long-term “war of position” aimed at reshaping culture before political victory.

Critical theory pushed the analysis further. Frankfurt School thinkers such as Marcuse and Max Horkheimer examined capitalism, authority, culture, and repression through a Marxist-Freudian lens. Other Frankfurt School theorists treated social structures — including family and sexuality — as possible mechanisms of domination.

Postmodern and deconstructionist thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida came from different traditions, but their work converged with critical theory on one crucial point: suspicion toward claims of neutral, universal truth. In this intellectual climate, truth itself was dismissed by some theorists as inseparable from power.

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As Bishop Robert Barron has written in a related discussion of deconstruction, “There is no final truth, no ultimate settling of a question. There is always something new.” Once inherited categories are treated principally as products of power, even apparently basic questions — “What is a woman?” — become open to endless renegotiation.

Judith Butler’s 1990 book “Gender Trouble” brought these currents directly into gender theory. Butler argued that gender is performative and challenged the stability of the sex/gender distinction and traditional sex roles.

This does not prove that every person who supports transgender rights is a Marxist, or that modern gender theory can be reduced to a single ideological source. It does show why the rhetoric so often sounds revolutionary rather than merely therapeutic.

When transgender discrimination is called the “civil rights issue of our time,” the claim places gender identity within a familiar oppressor-oppressed framework. Christopher Rufo has said that some trans activists explicitly describe their movement as a successor to Marxism, with transgender people cast as a new revolutionary vanguard.

That is the more defensible connection. Gender ideology did not simply fall out of “The Communist Manifesto.” It developed amid intellectual traditions that increasingly interpreted social categories through power, oppression, liberation, and the deconstruction of inherited norms.

Its political alliances reinforce the point. Gender politics routinely appears among the current things the activist left leverage as part of its war on capitalism and Western civilization generally. Jonathan Butcher has noted how intersectionality explicitly links “identity movements based on gender and racial liberation” through a common theory of social domination.

From Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors describing herself as a “trained Marxist” to the pro-Hamas red-green alliance that includes Queers for Palestine, the coalition repeatedly joins causes that appear unrelated on the surface but share a politics of oppression and liberation.

The issue is not always literally the issue. Increasingly, the issue is the revolution.

Are young Americans expecting too much, or has homeownership genuinely become out of reach? According to BlazeTV host Nick Freitas, the answer is obvious.

While older generations often point to bigger homes and modern amenities to explain rising housing costs, Freitas says the data tells a different story. Even after accounting for those differences, the cost of buying a home has skyrocketed relative to income, leaving many young people feeling frustrated and demoralized.

“When younger people are saying that they have a real problem here, that they’re frustrated, that they’re demoralized, you can’t just dismiss that as, 'Well, they’re being demoralized by TikTok or online or whatnot,'” Freitas says.

“One of the things in this is every time this gets brought up, people will say, ‘Well, yeah, you can't compare a home in 2026 that is 2,500 square feet and four bedrooms and has all these amenities and central heating and air with what your grandpa bought on a single income that was an 800-square-foot, two-bedroom house with no AC,’” he explains.

“That’s all fair, but when you account for all of that, when you account ... for all of these other factors, what you end up finding out is that the median house price is still significantly higher. Not like a little bit. It’s not like it’s gone up 20%. No, it’s significantly higher,” he continues.

“Now all of a sudden, it’s far more difficult to buy that first house, and what everybody is telling you is, ‘Well, you just need to work harder’ or ‘you expect too much,’” he adds.

But, Freitas says, they’re not expecting too much, pointing out that if you want to buy a home close to where you work, depending on where that is, an 800-square-foot home could run you close to a million dollars.

“You’ve got building codes, and you’ve got taxes. You’ve got multiple factors impacting that price,” he says.

“Your income is never catching up with what you actually need to live. And that is a very real and a very genuine concern,” he continues. “And again, if we have people just easily dismissing this, they are missing the point.”

“Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK40 for $40 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

Bill Gates is a repugnant individual. He puts the ick in sick, the sin in sincere, and the con in concern. But rest assured, he cares deeply about your well-being and the future of the human race.

The bespectacled billionaire recently penned a remarkably revealing essay. The central message is that although AI is probably coming for your job, your social life, your education, your children, and perhaps your sanity, he has a plan.

This two-facedness is infuriating, but it’s an old trick.

Gates argues that AI “can substitute for human cognition” and that “many jobs will disappear forever.” He even says that if someone had a credible plan to slow AI globally, he would “likely support it.” But, conveniently, he immediately concludes that this isn’t "going to happen,” so we’d better learn to live with this rather depressing reality.

And who helped build the world in which this revolution became possible? Gates’ own Microsoft is now one of the biggest players in AI. Gates acknowledges that he still has “financial ties to” the tech industry, then assures us his views aren't motivated by money. Believing that takes a level of blind faith usually reserved for doomed cults.

The giveaway is his proposed solution.

Meet “Human Reserved,” a tiny tax-bracket sanctuary where some of us get to exist like protected wildlife. Don’t save work because human beings deserve meaningful lives; reserve some jobs because society still needs people employed. Although Gates talks about the “broader value of work,” the argument keeps circling back to stability, government funds, and the social consequences of mass unemployment.

That’s the true nightmare keeping him up at night. Starving people don’t splurge, and desperate people tend to break things. His concern is not that lives will be ruined, but that an economy without paychecks stops consuming. He wants us to revere him as a high-minded public intellectual, yet he operates like a landlord calculating how much mold a tenant will tolerate. He advocates for AI taxes and automation caps with one hand while funding the companies behind the technology with the other. Preserving a few human roles in nursing homes and kindergartens is less an act of mercy than a recognition that a fully automated world could harm his bank balance.

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He notes rather glibly that he likes the phrase "Human Reserved" because it makes him "think of nature reserves." In his eyes, human labor is no longer an organic expression of dignity, purpose, or community. Instead, it’s more like an endangered species trapped inside a fenced-off sanctuary, permitted to exist solely because the park ranger feels an odd burst of sentimentality. He treats working-class survival like a protected wetland. Essentially, a scenic spot where we could build data centers, but we choose not to because the sight of total extinction gives him a slight headache. It’s the ultimate condescension: an absolute elitist granting us a small, artificial habitat to graze in while he clears the rest of the forest for his server farms.

Shortly after his patronizing essay was published, word emerged that Gates is actively arranging a trip to Beijing to meet personally with Xi Jinping.

The Manchurian candidate

China spends millions of dollars every day running continuous cyber operations against American infrastructure, stealing military IP, and breaching government servers. Yet this supposedly great American philanthropist wants to help the Chinese Communist Party navigate the risks of the very technology it actively weaponizes. He plays the homegrown hero, preaching the need to protect American workers and secure the nation, while simultaneously plotting to help a strategic rival become more powerful. Gates wants to discuss global safety standards with an authoritarian regime, acting as a self-appointed shadow secretary of state.

This two-facedness is infuriating, but it’s an old trick in the slimy septuagenarian’s playbook.

In the 1990s, when the Department of Justice dragged Microsoft into federal court for using its desktop monopoly to strangle Netscape Navigator, the world got a front-row seat to the real Bill Gates. The trial exposed a savvy street fighter who treated entire software sectors like nuisance weeds in his garden. Rather than outcompeting his rivals, he wanted to cut off their oxygen supply. He spent that decade playing the ruthless corporate terminator, extracting tribute from every PC sold on earth, and turning the free market into his personal fiefdom.

When the antitrust hammer finally came down, he didn't change his nature. But he did change his wardrobe. He swapped the courtroom depositions for knitted sweaters and rebranded overnight as America’s doting uncle. But the killer instinct never vanished. The same instinct that drove him to annihilate competing web browsers now drives him to carve up the future of global technology with Beijing, ensuring that he controls the rules of the game no matter which superpower wins.

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This is not an exaggeration. Xi has described Gates as an “old friend” — indeed, his “first American friend.” A friend of China is no friend of America. And Bill Gates, a man actively liquidating the livelihoods of the domestic workforce while offering to manage their post-economic survival, is certainly no ally of the everyday, decent, hardworking American.

Gates wants software algorithms to process trade decisions, draft legal documents, write code, and manage logistics chains. In exchange, he generously offers to let humans retain a few low-margin positions in elder care and education. How kind of him.

Those specific fields survived his filter for an obvious reason. Software can’t change a physical diaper or offer genuine affection to an aging patient. He frames these designated human roles as an act of moral generosity, when he’s actually just identifying the physical tasks that robots can’t perform.

Only the most foolish would mistake his ruthless risk management for human compassion, and only the most foolish would believe that Bill Gates cares at about our well-being.

For years, Americans have been told that faith belongs in church while public policy should be guided by supposedly neutral, secular principles.

But BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey says that distinction is a fiction, as progressives beliefs are not neutral at all — and somehow make their way into plenty of public policy.

“I also notice this idea that you know, we can leave our Christian faith behind and then when we go into the public sphere, we don this like neutral secular ideology, but this neutral secular ideology says that babies don’t become people until they go through the birth canal,” Stuckey tells Pastor Josh Howerton.

“That’s a superstitious, nonscientific, weird belief,” she continues, noting that it's not much different than the idea that “kids can be born in the wrong body.”

“So people who believe that they get to insert their definitions, their weird beliefs into school curriculum, into public policy, they define policy,” she adds.

Our bureaucracy, Stuckey says, is “defined by progressive ideology, which is not neutral,” but instead “superstitious.”

“So why does a progressive secularist who has their own dogmas and their own pseudo religion, why is their view seen as neutral?” she asks.

Howerton couldn’t agree more.

“What you’re talking about is loaded into the phrase, ‘You can’t legislate morality.’ The worldview behind the phrase, ‘You can’t legislate morality,’ is the myth of neutrality,” he says.

“It’s a myth of neutrality that there’s some way for us to sort of just order society to where nobody’s beliefs are infringed upon,” he continues, noting that it’s easy to “rip that mask off really fast.”

“A great example of this is with abortion. So somebody may say to a Christian that has a consistent pro-life ethic ... ‘Hey, when you advocate for pro-life legislation, you’re trying to force your morality on the mother,’” he explains.

“And honestly, the answer to that question is yes. Yes, that is what is trying to happen. But the question is not whether morality is going to get legislated. The question is whose morality is going to get legislated,” he adds.

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Although the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and civil rights laws dating back to 1866 prohibit nearly all racial preferences, most Americans oppose these preferences, and Donald Trump was elected vowing to eliminate DEI — progressives won’t give up.

Their race-obsessed thinking reduces America to intersectional classifications of oppressed and oppressor. This addled concept is a self-defeating dialectic in which no amount of progress on race relations is ever enough — or even acknowledged.

Numerous companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Costco, Delta, and Cisco, openly continue their DEI programs.

Despite enormous advances, with the possible exception of Palestinians and transgender people, no group is seen as more oppressed and deserving of preferences than African-Americans.

In 2025, President Trump issued executive orders that revoked President Biden’s whole-of-government mandates interweaving DEI into all facets of the federal government. Since then, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department under Harmeet Dhillon has filed numerous administrative actions and lawsuits to end racial preferences that disadvantage whites, and some universities, corporations, and charities have limited their DEI programs.

Conversely, many universities have defied the Supreme Court’s 2023 holding in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard by renaming or reformulating their DEI programs. Some are using a loophole in the SFFA decision that acknowledged colleges may consider how an applicant’s race affected his life.

In just the last three months, the Justice Department announced at least 25 investigations, lawsuits, and settlements involving allegedly unlawful racial preferences by the College of William & Mary, Duke University, a Jersey City college prep course, City University of New York, the state of Minnesota, the city of Evanston, Illinois, Arizona State University, University of California Davis Medical School, University of California San Diego Medical School, and 15 other medical schools.

A State Department internal review announced last week found that the Biden administration required foreign service officers to read materials on critical race theory, slavery reparations, anti-racism, and so-called “white fragility.” To be eligible for promotion, they had to discuss DEI with foreign counterparts to demonstrate “allyship.”

They were trained on how to talk about “Black Lives Matter” and “systemic racism” in foreign languages and to use progressive-approved terminology. The State Department claims that it has finally “put an end” to these practices.

Then last month, a federal judge in California ruled that the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Interior exceeded their authority by imposing conditions ending DEI in grants to California cities. Defending Education, an education watchdog, found that America’s two leading teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, are embedding DEI principles into policies for classroom use of AI.

Numerous companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Costco, Delta, and Cisco, openly continue their DEI programs, and the pace of litigation shows that many other companies and institutions covertly do so.

RELATED: California regulates everything — except the trial lawyers exploiting it

Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

In 1996, California stunned the nation when 55% of voters approved Proposition 209, which amended the state’s constitution to prohibit public institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in employment, contracting, and education. In 2020, Democrats unsuccessfully sought to repeal Prop 209.

California next tried to require public companies to include blacks and other “underrepresented” minorities on their boards. The California courts struck that down. Now, California is moving toward authorizing reparations for its black residents.

A decade after ratification of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court declared that the purpose of the Equal Protection Clause is that “the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States.”

Progressives don’t care.

On Real America’s “Get Real,” RealClear publisher David DesRosiers seeks common ground across the political spectrum. One progressive panelist recently explained that blacks require preferences because it’s not “what you know” but “who you know.” Whites know all the right people, but blacks do not. What a dated perspective. How patronizing of blacks. How wrong.

More than half of all blacks in major metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, and their children are educated in suburban schools. About 12% of the students in Ivy League colleges are black, even after SFFA. There are 61 black members in the House (14%), five black senators (5%), two Supreme Court justices (22%), and about 184 black federal judges (8%). Blacks comprise about 10% of first-year medical school students, 8% of law school students, 2% of Fortune 500 corporate CEOs, and 13% of all Americans.

I am confident that most of these people know someone who can help them and their families, as do black professional athletes, artists, and actors, as well as more than 1,000 African-American mayors, 1,000 state legislators, 14 billionaires, and about 1.4 million black millionaires.

While listening to the panelist, I thought about the middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn where I grew up. My neighbors were policemen, firemen, teachers, and plumbers. Good people. Not one of them was in a position to help me in my career or introduce me to someone who did.

I made my way with hard work and some luck, but never with help from anyone I knew growing up. Of course, I received support from people I met along the way at Columbia University and during my career, as did my black colleagues. It’s called “networking,” not racism.

RELATED: Why young men are done with Mike Pence ‘conservatism’

Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Yes, affluent people know more of the “right people” than poor people and have other advantages as well. Children from poor and low-income families typically face many obstacles due to their socioeconomic status. They often attend inferior K-12 schools and have less time for homework because of jobs or chores. They are less likely to benefit from two actively involved parents and receive, on average, less guidance and assistance.

Students from families in the bottom 25% income bracket comprise only 3% of enrollment in our most competitive colleges, while those from the top 25% comprise 72%. Studies show that high-achieving, low-income children who have lower GPAs and SAT scores than affluent children achieve college grades and graduation rates at the same level as affluent students. Their scores can be “normed” for these differences, even without special programs.

Blacks are more likely to be poor than whites, and consequently, would disproportionately benefit from this approach. That’s fine with me — and more importantly, with the Constitution. Racial preferences are unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral; helping low-income Americans is not.

I defy any children of Michelle Obama, Eric Holder, Jeh Johnson, Beyonce, or Ibram X. Kendi to deny that they have every advantage, including a terrific education and a network of contacts that millions of white Americans lack.

More than once, the U.S. Supreme Court has observed that “distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people." As Chief Justice John Roberts declared, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

When the Constitution, federal laws, and opinion align, progressives should respect our values. Here, that would mean restoring equality and the dignity of blacks by ending the disgrace of DEI.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

You might call it a school bus ride from hell.

"Everybody was screaming and stuff because they were excited to get off the bus," a 12-year-old student told KCRA-TV after his ride Monday aboard a homebound Calaveras (California) Unified School District bus.

'Parents are now sending their children to school to be parented instead of parenting their children at home, and that is a concern.'

The student told KCRA the bus stopped when another student climbed out of the bus through a window.

"That's when the bus driver was like, 'Sit down, roll up the windows,'" the student noted to the station.

The student also noted to KCRA that the driver told those aboard the bus they would have to wait for law enforcement before getting off it.

Parents who spoke with the station said students remained on the stopped bus for about an hour as more parents began arriving.

Nichole Wellington told KCRA her son called her from the bus and was scared — and she drove to the bus and asked the driver to release her son.

"I went right to the door, and I was like, 'Dude, open the door. Let me have my kid.' And he's like, 'I'm not doing that,'" Wellington noted to the station.

Wellington added to KCRA that she soon gave her son permission to climb out of the bus through a window while she waited outside.

"If he would have handled that situation and gave the parents their kids that were there, I think it probably would have went a little bit differently than it did," Wellington noted to the station.

KCRA said video provided by a student aboard the bus shows a student climbing out of the bus through a window and a parent later climbing into the bus through a window — and confronting the driver.

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The Calaveras County Sheriff's Office noted to the station that deputies responded to a disturbance involving a parent and the bus driver: "During the incident, the parent struck the bus door, breaking the glass. The parent was ultimately taken into custody at the School District's request for vandalism."

The sheriff's office added to KCRA that some passengers also were reported to have exited the bus through open windows, and that students should only use a bus window as an exit during an emergency.

Another parent, Rebecca Glover, whose two children also were aboard the bus, told the station she instructed her kids to remain seated and wait — and that she believes the driver was trying to keep students safe.

"There was not just one child they had to think of," Glover told KCRA. "They had to think of every single child on that bus at that time."

The school district told the station that the incident began with concerns over student behavior but declined to provide additional details.

"Yesterday, student behavior concerns on a district bus escalated and ultimately required law enforcement involvement," Superintendent Kassie Meeks said in a statement, according to KCRA. "As a result of the incident, one bus route has been impacted today, Tuesday, August 25, 2026."

The station added that the incident also raised questions among parents regarding how similar situations should be handled in the future.

Wellington told KCRA she believes another adult aboard buses to manage student behavior could help drivers better focus on the roads.

"I do feel that maybe that bus driver, especially when he's driving, should not have to deal with all those kids by himself," Wellington also noted to the station.

But Glover told KCRA she believes more responsibility should fall on students and their families: "Parents are now sending their children to school to be parented instead of parenting their children at home, and that is a concern."

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As yet another U.S. bombing halt takes effect in the sixth month of the Iran war, the United States has demonstrated that it can smash Iran’s military piece by piece, but it continues to lose the information war in Iran, here at home, and around the world.

American forces can and do strike targets across Iran and hit Tehran's regional allies, especially the Houthis in Yemen. By every conventional military measure, Iran is taking severe losses. Yet a growing domestic and international audience believes Tehran is fighting the United States to a standstill. Why?

Iran is gaining ground in the information war because it has adapted to the global media environment far more effectively than has Washington.

It is because too many senior American officials are still treating television as a record of an event rather than a battlefield in its own right. The Department of War treats global visual media as though it had forgotten about 1991’s Desert Storm media triumphs and as though there was no need for domestic and foreign public support. The little bit being tossed out is reminiscent of a kind of bureaucratic "let them eat cake."

That strategy will work right up to the U.S. midterm elections when the Iranian influence campaign ever so slightly tips the balance the wrong way.

Iran is gaining ground in the information war because it has adapted to the global media environment far more effectively than has Washington.

U.S. military planners still tend to think in Clausewitzian terms: that war is the extension of politics that uses the controlled application of violence to constrain the enemy to accomplish our will. That formulation reflected the technology of the early 19th century. It does not account for an information age in which images cross the globe in milliseconds and political effects can precede, outweigh, or even replace battlefield effects.

I call this form of conflict "SOFTWAR": the hostile use of global visual media to shape another society's will by changing its view of reality. Three other like-minded colleagues and I have taught this kind of warfare to U.S. War College, Staff College, and Intelligence College graduate students since the early 1990s. But very few have actually adapted.

Unfortunately, the entire Iranian military and intelligence structure has adapted, since at least 2003, and has even stolen the term “SOFTWAR” in its own publications!

The Iranian use of SOFTWAR helps explain why the United States has spent billions of dollars over five months while Iranian drone and missile attacks continue and Iranian defiance continues.

Washington is using Cold War systems and industrial-age doctrine against an asymmetric enemy that has organized itself for the infosphere.

RELATED: Want to squeeze Iran? Trump has one clear move

EDUARDO SOTERAS/AFP/Getty Images

Iran's theocratic dictatorship is fighting a four-dimensional asymmetric war across land, sea, air, and information. Its military losses have reduced its ability to retaliate against U.S. forces directly.

Its remaining attacks are therefore selected less for battlefield effect than for global media impact: Oil tankers and cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a desalination facility and power plant in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil hub, a liquefied natural gas facility in Qatar, a U.S. communications center in Jordan, and American naval facilities in Bahrain all produce frightening images and headlines.

Iran times its “onesie-twosie” counterattacks in its own early-morning hours, so that the images arrive during the American prime-time news cycle. The objective is not merely to damage a target but to shape the story being told about the war here, there, and around the world.

Meanwhile, Iranian propagandists study the American audience, especially younger people hostile to the Trump administration, and target them with AI-generated Lego-character videos. The goal is to unite disparate American factions, erode domestic support for the war, and above all, influence the midterm elections.

When Iranian military officials such as Brig. Gen. Ebrahim Zolfaghari or IRGC spokesman Abolfazl Shekarchi speak, they are usually seated behind a desk with the Iranian flag visible. Their uniforms are immaculate, their beards trimmed, and their war faces dramatically lit. Most importantly, they look through the camera lens directly at the audience. This is television 101.

Viewers who speak no Farsi still receive the intended message: discipline, seriousness, and defiance.

American military spokesmen often squander the same opportunity. They ignore, disdain, or have never considered acquiring the skills to effectively communicate on television.

General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is informed and capable, but at his Pentagon press conferences, his televised manner is that of a serious squadron commander consulting his notes as he briefs the weather to the three rows in front of him.

He should instead address the millions watching beyond the room. Place the camera a few feet away, frame him from mid-bicep to just above the head, and have him look through the lens to establish and maintain direct eye contact with the intended audience. The reporters can sit on either side. The difference would be immediate.

The United States is not losing the military contest with Iran. It is losing the contest over what the world believes the military contest means.

Admiral Brad Cooper, the combatant commander of U.S. Central Command, makes a similar mistake. He often appears in a green camouflage uniform designed to defeat electro-optical observation — including television — rather than in the Navy service uniform designed to convey authority, experience, and command. He also stands too far from the camera for viewers to read his face. His folksy Ozzie Nelson manner may work before Congress or the Navy League. It does not put an enemy on his heels.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, whose warrior credentials are undisputed and whose television experience is well noted, knows more about television perception than his military subordinates but is underperforming. To quote from his address to general officers last year: "We just have to be honest. We have to say with our mouths what we see with our eyes ... to point out the obvious things right in front of us."

So Mr. Secretary, from an instructor who has been teaching strategic information warfare since you were in grade school, here are the obvious things in front of us: You are no longer pitching to the Fox demographic. You need a tighter camera shot, better lighting, and a visual style designed for wartime communication.

Your presentation is crowded with distractions: a tight European-cut suit, patterned tie, clashing flag pocket square, and hair product that makes your scalp appear to glisten under studio lights. Deep-set eyes require careful lighting. Without it, viewers may read strain or evasiveness where none exists. The Pentagon has fixed studio lighting for briefings at the podium, and it should be properly adjusted for you.

Alfred Hitchcock understood the rule: Dress the leading man simply and light him properly so the audience watches the man rather than the costume. Cary Grant in "North by Northwest" remains a timeless example.

Iranian officials would earn an “A” in my information warfare seminar, I'm sorry to say. Too many American officials are still treating television as a record of an event rather than a battlefield in its own right. The American officials bungling this information war would receive an “F” ... and three hours of detention.

That needs to change. Now.

The United States inadvertently helps Tehran by concentrating almost exclusively on visible military targets while leaving the regime's domestic television system intact.

Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting continues to broadcast dozens of TV channels across Iran giving only the mullahs' view of the war. Thus, the only information that the vast majority of Iranians are getting comes from television and radio stations controlled by the Iranian government. With access to the internet long ago cut off by the regime, the only “news” the body politic receives is pure propaganda.

Meanwhile, Washington destroys weapons and commanders but fails to effectively contest the information environment that gives those losses political meaning. It seems no one has thought to bomb the TV transmitters and follow up with drones to broadcast information to the Iranian body politic.

Iran's real engine is that selfsame body politic — a population that has endured repression and the reported killing of tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators. Yet today, outside of a small fraction of Iranians who may have Starlink receivers, the United States has no coherent means of speaking directly to those people.

It's not as though the United States lacks the technological wherewithal; the military has simply weakened its own capacity to respond. In 2024, the military decommissioned the EC-130J aircraft of the 193rd Special Operations Wing, the only U.S. airborne radio and television broadcast platform.

The aircraft were judged too vulnerable for modern combat, but no announced drone replacement has assumed the mission.

RELATED: The Navy has a choice: Get better or become less relevant

HUGE PERALTA/AFP/Getty Images

The solution is simply to take any drones with the proper range and endurance, such as the dozen or so now-obsolete Predators sitting in the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, and strip them of their reconnaissance gear. Next, rewire the on-board Ku satellite antenna to optimize its broadband receive function and then hook that to any Phase Alternating Line TV transmitter and dipole antenna compatible with Iranian home TV receivers.

By flying the drones from semi-autonomous Kurd areas in eastern Iraq 300 miles to Tehran, each will have about a five-hour endurance over downtown. By orbiting at or above 15,000 feet, the drones will not be easy targets for shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles.

As the drones reach their selected orbit points, precision-guided munitions launched from distant attack aircraft take out all the transmissions towers in the area, leaving the airwaves clear for live programming from the drones.

The Iranian dictatorship, which absolutely must control information flow, will then be forced to turn on its radars so that its sophisticated antiaircraft missiles can shoot down the drones. Except that when they do, every U.S. air defense suppression weapon known to man will be directed at those sites.

Programming the video from the drones on a real-time basis can be fixed by reactivating the 1st Joint SOFTWAR Unit (Virtual) that I designed for the War Department’s Office of Net Assessment a decade ago. That unit, composed of some 50 men and women from the California Air and Army National Guard, used their state-of-the art civilian occupational skills from Hollywood and the Silicon Valley to pioneer new and effective methods of information warfare.

Unfortunately, the Obama sequestration chopped the 1st JSU(V) with the grace of a blunt meat ax. But fortunately, it could be up and running again in about two weeks.

At present, America possesses overwhelming kinetic power but lacks a direct means of reaching the Iranian public at scale: a doctrine that resembles a mechanic who responds to an engine warning light by cutting the wire to the bulb. The warning disappears. The failing engine problem remains.

The United States is not losing the military contest with Iran. It is losing the contest over what the world believes the military contest means.

A nation can destroy every designated military target and still lose the war if its enemy controls the images, the timing, and the story. Information warfare is not an optional elective. It is the core course. And America, so far, is failing.

The answer is a genuinely four-dimensional American military capable of operating on land, at sea, in the air, and throughout the infosphere. Information warfare should be driving the organization and the direction of the campaign, with kinetic operations supporting the strategic influence objectives — not the other way around. Iran already understands this hierarchy.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

A Kentucky mother was arrested for her reaction to seeing her husband abusing their 3-month-old daughter from security cameras as she was working, according to police.

Carleena Webb returned from work on Aug. 21 to confront 36-year-old Shaun Webb about the alleged abuse but instead of removing the child, police said she went back to work.

Webb admitted to suffocating his daughter by covering her mouth and nose, not to harm but to deprive her of oxygen, as he put it, to 'train the behavior.'

The 33-year-old mother was charged with first-degree criminal abuse for leaving the child in her husband's care.

The mother did not report the abuse to police, nor did she seek medical treatment for her daughter.

Police were made aware of the alleged abuse by the parents' family, who live out of state. They also provided video of the abuse.

"We get to the house as quickly as we can to get those children out of that environment and certainly separated from the person who is perpetuating some pretty horrific violence against them," said Sheriff's Major Philip Ridgel.

Ridgel said that the man confessed to the abuse when he was questioned by officers.

Police said the video showed him slapping her with an open hand while she lay on the ground crying.

Webb allegedly told police that children are like dogs, explaining, "You have to train them and set boundaries."

He also said that his daughter's crying triggered him like "nails on a chalkboard."

Webb admitted to suffocating his daughter by covering her mouth and nose, not to harm but to deprive her of oxygen, as he put it, to "train the behavior."

The video allegedly showed him covering her face for 10-13 seconds at a time.

Police said he was arrested at the end of the interview and transported to the Boone County Jail.

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He was charged with 10 class B felony counts of criminal abuse in the first degree.

The mother was arrested three days later and also transported to the same jail.

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