State of the Day

Anne Frank’s Story Shows Humans At Their Very Best (And Very Worst)

John Loftus — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:31:48 GMT

Anne Frank at the Holocaust Memorial and the Holocaust Museum, which traces anti-Semitism and its consequences, in Paris, on October 6, 2025. (Photo by Magali Cohen / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images)

The year is 1944 …

And it has been over two years since Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in a warehouse along one of Amsterdam’s canals to escape the Nazi regime and the ongoing Holocaust.

Alongside another Jewish family and a single Jewish man, the Franks were hidden away in a sealed-off annex of the building, where Anne would write her now internationally known diary, chronicling the daily struggles of their lives and her own personal reflections on the horrors of the war. The entrance to their hiding spot was concealed by a bookcase that functioned as a hidden doorway. Friends of Otto Frank, Anne’s father, smuggled in food and supplies at great personal expense. The Franks didn’t even flush the toilet during the day because they feared that any unusual noise might create suspicion and lead to their detection.

Not long after the Allies successfully invaded France in June of 1944, Anne wrote her last diary entry. An extremely perceptive person for her age (she was 15 at the time), Anne described herself as a “bundle of contradictions.”

“As I’ve told you many times, I’m split in two,” she wrote. “One side contains my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life and, above all, my ability to appreciate the lighter side of things. By that I mean not finding anything wrong with flirtations, a kiss, an embrace, an off-color joke. This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one, which is much purer, deeper and finer.”

Anne went on to observe that she is the kind of person whose words sometimes betray her true nature, hence her reputation as a “flirt” and “smark alec.”

“The happy-go-lucky Anne laughs, gives a flippant reply, shrugs her shoulders and pretends she doesn’t give a darn. The quiet Anne reacts in just the opposite way. If I’m being completely honest, I’ll have to admit that it does matter to me, that I’m trying very hard to change myself, but that I’m always up against a more powerful enemy,” she went on to say.

Three days later, the Nazi Gestapo discovered their whereabouts, acting on a tip from an unknown informant. Frank and her family were arrested, along with two Christians who had assisted and supplied them with food. The Nazis first sent them to a concentration camp in Holland, then to the infamous Auschwitz death camp in Poland.

As the Soviets advanced into occupied Poland in the fall of 1944, the Nazis transported Anne and her sister Margot from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where the conditions were horrifying and heinous. It was there that the sisters passed away after catching typhus in February 1945. Tragically, the British liberated this camp weeks later.

Otto was the only one to survive and later published his daughter’s diary in 1947, titled “The Diary of a Young Girl” in English. He passed away at the age of 91 in Switzerland.

Anne’s story showcases the very best and the very worst of humans. The fact that Anne and her family managed to survive for so long, with Anne expressing her personality, hopes, and dreams throughout her diary during such dark times, is a testament to their resilience and courage. That others risked their lives to help the Frank family shows that people are capable of acting selflessly in service of life, even when it entails the penalty of imprisonment and death. But that the Nazis were even able to rise to power in the first place, let alone carry out a brutal Holocaust that killed millions of innocents, shows that while some humans are capable of heroism and sacrifice, others are capable of terror and malice. That an anonymous tip led to the Frank family’s capture shows that some humans can be worse than cowards.

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Unfit to Print: THE LEFT'S MEDIA REVOLT

Amber Duke — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:03:03 GMT

Image made with GenAI

Hey y’all, welcome back to Unfit to Print.

Democrats have spent years wondering why they cannot build their own Joe Rogan. The answer was staring right at them the entire time.

THE LEFT’S MEDIA REVOLT

After every disappointing election result, Democratic consultants emerge with the same diagnosis: The party needs more podcasts, more influencers and more “authentic” messengers capable of reaching voters outside the traditional media ecosystem.

The implication is that anyone on the left can be the new Joe Rogan if he just drops a few swear words and wears a t-shirt in front of a podcast mic.

What the Democrats fail to realize is that they already have their own insurgent media class. But they spent years ignoring them because they were too unpolished, too progressive, or too willing to criticize the party itself.

It Only Took Jesse Owens 10.3 Seconds To Stun The World And Rebuke The Nazis

John Loftus — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 20:49:49 GMT

Jesse Owens (1913 - 1980) of the USA (right) crosses the finishing line to win the 100 metres at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He won three other gold medals, in the 200 metres, 4 X 100 metres relay and long jump. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

The year is 1936 …

And American track and field athlete Jesse Owens is about to stun the world and dismantle Adolf Hitler’s racial supremacist propaganda in approximately 10 seconds at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

In one of the greatest athletic achievements in American history, Owens stormed into the Nazi capital, won four gold medals, and set individual Olympic records in the 100 meters, long jump, 200 meters, and the 4 x 100-meter relay. He won his first Gold in the 100-meter sprint with a time of 10.3 seconds on Aug. 3. It was a glorious display of talent, grit, and American exceptionalism.

Not only that, Owens, as ESPN writer Larry Schwartz put it, “single-handedly crushed Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy.” Hitler and the Nazi Regime believed that any human who was not a pure-blood German “Aryan” — whether Jewish, black, or from the British Isles — was physically and intellectually inferior, a subhuman creature who should be treated with contempt and cruelty. A Nazi official even whined that Americans were letting “non-humans, like Owens and other Negro athletes,” compete in the Games, according to Schwartz. It makes Owens’ victory, who was born into poverty in Alabama in 1913, so much sweeter.

Schwartz also made note of two surprising anecdotes about Owens and the 1936 Olympic Games. The first is that many Germans in the crowd actually cheered him on, with some fans seeking him out for autographs and pictures. The second is that Owens befriended a blue-eyed, blonde German long jumper, Luz Long, during the qualifying round. Owens made two foul jumps, but before his third and final one, Long suggested he mark his takeoff spot several inches back to err on the side of caution and avoid another disqualifying mistake. Owens listened to Long’s advice, and it worked.

“It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler,” Owens later said. “You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn’t be a plating on the 24-karat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment. Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace. The sad part of the story is I never saw Long again. He was killed in World War II.”

Sad, indeed. Tragic. But also inspiring. Not every German was a mindless Nazi. Clearly, some saw beyond the racialist ideology and the ramblings of a madman who had brainwashed so many people. Some saw in Owens what unites humans – a love of sports and good-natured competition – rather than what divides them.

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State of Monday: YOU NEED ID FOR THIS SOCIALIST UTOPIA

Geoffrey Ingersoll — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:03:49 GMT

Greetings, Dear Reader,

She hasn’t popped yet! I’ll let you all know when I’ll be out for the birth of my third. Until then … ONWARD!

YOU NEED ID FOR THIS SOCIALIST UTOPIA

At the risk of inflaming your PTSD, remember vaccine cards?

They were little cards issued by Pfizer or Moderna that in combination with state identification would allow you to enter a Burger King to place an order without getting viciously arrested in various tolerant liberal enclaves that had criminalized walks in the park at the time.

It’s been a few years since the cultural zenith of so-called “vaccine passports” and now a new version has arrived: Socialist Utopia Passports.

A reporter asked NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani how he planned to prevent fraud from hitting his new government grocery stores.

“How are you going to prevent people from taking advantage of that, uh, you know, that deal basically and is there going to be a limit of items someone can take that are discounted at the level from that essential basket?”

Let me do as my mantra says and strip the euphemism off this question, because it’s dripping in it.

Firstly: around 10-15% of NYC’s yearly food stamp budget is wasted on fraud, or roughly $500-700 million a year (it’s likely even higher). That’s both people fraudulently collecting benefits, but also people who sell their cards, buy and resell items for cash, so on.

In a capitalist society, when the government intends to sell necessary items 30% below the market rate, basically everyone with a pair of hands is going to rush the aisles to buy up and resell the items on the market (at the market rate) in order to make a buck.

That’s if you don’t roll out the grocery stores with a strict regulatory regime paired up with a beefy police presence!

Secondly: What’s to prevent out-of-towners and wealthy people from simply exploiting the program?

“So our RFP makes very clear that this is a program for New Yorkers to be able put food on the table not a program for people to make a quick buck through reselling,” said Mamdani, before calling up his socialist grocery store czar, Julie Su, New York City’s deputy mayor for “Economic Justice.”

“We are looking to make sure that we target New Yorkers, whether that’s through a library-card-esque [situation] and also we manage who’s buying and it’s focused on every day New Yorkers,” Su said. “So we are mindful of that and so we are going to make sure we have all the things in place so that does not happen.”

Oooookay, that’s a lot.

In other words, they have to make sure the people participating are actually poor (“everyday New Yorkers”), are actually “New Yorkers,” and they have to maintain a regulatory regime that prevents those people from ripping them off.

Sounds expensive!

It also sounds like you’ll need ID to enter a heavily policed Socialist Utopia.

THE DRAIN PIPE

Emily Kopp — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:53:40 GMT

Illustration by Avery Long for State of the Day

Socialists are winning elections across the United States. That’s not because voters suddenly love socialism. They don’t. Less than half of Americans say they’d support a socialist presidential candidate, a recent poll by Washington Post-Ipsos found. Instead, socialists are making waves because they’re laser-focused on Vlad Lenin’s “Peace, Land, and Bread” appeals while media outlets keep the hacky uniparty take machine humming.

However, though Americans see through the thin veil of socialism that reveals itself to be communism the minute a nation marries itself to it (communism killed over 100 million people, by the way), that doesn’t absolve America’s leaders from addressing the very real problems that make socialism seem so attractive to a growing segment of the population.

The Drain Pipe will pump out the stories you actually need to determine whether America is becoming a safer, freer, and healthier place to live. — Spencer Lombardo

THE EXECUTIVE

POTUS is in Washington this morning. He will sign an executive order at 1:30 p.m.

‘It Is In Your Best Interest To Not Be Stupid’

On Saturday night, Trump abruptly canceled a reported World War II-scale bombing campaign against Iran. The strikes were set to include attacks on energy targets, according to a Friday story by Axios bullet point list maker Barak Ravid. Instead, Trump signaled an impending too-good-to-be-true deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end Iranian nuclear development, and said that he had been asked by Iran and other Middle Eastern countries to hold off.

But you don’t need a bureau in Tehran or a degree from the Harvard Kennedy School to see that Trump isn’t telling the full story. You only need Google Translate.

Before the pull back, Iranian officials hectored Trump that they would further widen the war into all-out regional conflagration.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned officials in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan that the Islamic Republic would act “decisively” in the event of any further U.S. aggression, he said on Telegram.

Esmaeil Baqaei, spokesperson for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, claimed Saturday that Iran had sought to be a good neighbor to other Muslim countries, but asked “does welcoming the enemies of Muslims and providing support for their military operations against a neighboring Muslim state agree with the rights of neighbors and Islamic brotherhood?”

“If Iran is struck, we will return the entire region and its facilities to the #StoneAge,” said Ebrahim Rezaei, a member of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, on Saturday. “It is in your best interest not to be stupid.”

“The response to a possible enemy attack will not be limited to the Persian Gulf region; we will respond to all enemy bases and the origin of attacks from anywhere,” he said.

And before you accuse The Drain Pipe of being a mouthpiece for any foreign country’s bluster, consider that both Saudi Arabia and the U.S. State Department took Iran’s warnings seriously.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly voiced concerns to Trump about further escalation Saturday. Saudi Arabia had just days earlier first acknowledged its entry into the war via strikes in Iraq. The Saudi Ministry of Defense said the country seeks to deter further attacks on Saudi oil without further escalation.

Meanwhile, U.S. embassies across the Middle East — from Cairo and Jerusalem to Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Muscat — quietly issued identical messages to Americans to make escape plans Saturday, warning of “unexpected escalation.”

“The Iranian regime is unpredictable, as seen by its recent decisions to attack areas in the region without warning or provocations as well as to expand attacks to areas not previously targeted (such as Egypt),” the embassies said.

A few hours after the alerts, Trump announced he had canceled the attacks.

The Poster In Chief may have mollified the markets, yet it’s not clear whether negotiations will be successful.

Baqaei claimed Sunday that the Strait of Hormuz will never return to the pre-Epic Fury status quo and that there are no talks with Washington about reopening it.

Despite greater energy independence under the Trump administration, gas prices are nearly a dollar higher than they were this time last year, according to AAA.

The Boy Who Cried Wolfowitz

Trump has often announced an imminent conclusion to the war only for those glimmers of hope to evaporate.

Does the U.S. or Iran benefit more from the delays? Here are University of Chicago realist John Mearsheimer and Hudson Institute historian Walter Russell Mead:

Mead: “Assets and relationships cultivated over decades have been torched, and the longer the conflict lasts, the weaker Iran’s regional networks are likely to become. And while the regime’s internal opponents seem unlikely to rise up in protest, Iran can’t indefinitely function as a society without economic relief.”

Mearsheimer: “When the United States and Israel punish Iran in the way they’ve been punishing Iran since February 28, and in fact before February 28, it actually has a rally around the flag effect. You want to remember that President Trump talks about dealing with Iran in genocidal terms. And when you talk about dealing with Iran in genocidal terms, when you talk about putting them back into the Stone Age, that’s going to cause Iranians to rally around the flag, which cuts against the Walter Russell Mead line of argument. The second argument that I would submit to you is that we have a rich history of countries being pummeled by their adversaries and huge numbers of people dying in those countries — Japan in World War II, Germany in World War II, North Korea in the Korean War and Vietnam and so forth and so on — and in every single one of those cases the countries did not surrender because the population was being pummeled.”

Invasion

U.S. border security remains top of mind for the Trump administration after our social media feeds showed Spain being flooded with hundreds of thousands of migrants.

“You know, I saw Spain yesterday, and I watched the catastrophe that took place. It looks like an invasion of a country by hundreds of thousands of people. And that same thing is going to happen to us if Republicans don’t get elected,” President Trump said Friday at a meeting at Camp David.

The Department of Homeland Security boasted in July that it had deported a record 365,000 illegal aliens in the current fiscal year, but it’s important to read the fine print.

Further inspection reveals that DHS counts a hodgepodge of lesser enforcement actions as “removals.” Critics allege the top line numbers do not tell the whole story.

Shortly after those statistics were released, Office of Homeland Security Statistics Director Marc Rosenblum announced that he was “thrilled” to “end his relationship” with the Trump administration.

“Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “I’m also thrilled that my next role will allow me to continue working on immigration data and immigration policy, with goals that actually align with my values and those of most other Americans.”

It remains to be seen whether the hazy data reporting from DHS was symptomatic of the Trump administration capitulating to the Amnesty Lobby, or simply the sabotage of one liberal bureaucrat.

THE LEGISLATIVE

Will The Senate Confirm Trump’s Attorney General?

The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to mull Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s nomination to the full-time role Wednesday.

Blanche formally rescinded an order establishing an “anti-weaponization” fund of $1.8 billion late Sunday night, teeing up his confirmation.

Republican Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis had vowed to vote against Blanche’s confirmation unless the White House ended the anti-weaponization fund and rewrote an Internal Revenue Settlement to no longer protect Trump and his family from tax audits, the DCNF reported Wednesday.

Before the pivot, Sen. John Kennedy had expressed some pessimism about Blanche’s confirmation.

“The weaponization fund – Todd Blanche can say that it’s a dead letter, but the fact of the matter is, he conceded that there is a settlement agreement, which creates an enforceable contract, it could be revived at a later time,” Cornyn told reporters Thursday.

“I will always feel that these victims of government abuse should be paid back for what they were forced to endure, their lives have been ruined,” Trump posted Friday on Truth Social. “Millions of people agree with me, as was proven in my landslide Presidential win, where this was a major subject of debate, and so did John Cornyn, until he lost his Election to an opponent that I Endorsed. Todd Blanche, a good man, should be immediately approved as U.S. Attorney General.”

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is also scheduled to vote on more of Trump’s nominees Wednesday. Likely picks include Kari Lake for ambassador to Jamaica and Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano for ambassador to Slovakia — both of whom were endorsed by Trump during their respective gubernatorial campaigns in 2022.

The SAVE America Act Is Saveable

The fight to pass Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s SAVE America Act continues this week after the House passed it as part of a budget reconciliation July 22.

“Senator Lee is currently exploring a promising avenue to pass key provisions of the SAVE America Act through the reconciliation process, as new pathways have become viable. A lot will depend on negotiations through next week—stay tuned,” Lee’s communications director, Billy Gribbin, told the DCNF on Friday.

Lee previously announced on X that he will “object to any effort to put the Senate into recess in August” until the SAVE America Act is passed. Since his July 26 post, at least 13 senators have reportedly joined him in that vow.

The bill aims to require voters to present their ID when voting in federal elections. Roughly 83% of Americans support that, per an August 2025 study by Pew Research Center.

Other Hearings

Sen. Rand Paul’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) is expected to vote Wednesday on whether to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress during his July 29 appearance before the committee.

The Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care is scheduled to meet at 10:00 a.m. Tuesday to discuss strategies for reinforcing the healthcare system through biotech. Concurrently, the Senate Budget Committee will mull Medicaid fraud. Fifteen minutes later, the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to scrutinize Pharmacy Benefit Managers over many independent pharmacies being effectively priced out of the prescription drug market.

THE JUDICIARY

The Supreme Court won’t be hearing cases until Oct. 5 for the next term. Here are a couple of interesting cases to expect:

Give Me Back My Plane

In 2012, Kenneth Jouppi, an Alaskan bush pilot, was taking a passenger to a remote village in Alaska that banned alcohol. Before departure, state authorities checked Jouppi’s plane and found three cases of beer, the suit states. The alcohol was removed before takeoff. He was nevertheless ordered to forfeit his plane.

Jouppi sued, claiming that the attempted seizure of his plane was a violation of his Eighth Amendment rights stating that “excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” Jouppi vs. Alaska will be heard later this fall.

Video Privacy

Salazar vs. Paramount Global will present the question of whether streaming services can team up with social media companies to track what you watch, according to Ballotpedia.

Michael Salazar subscribed to an online newsletter for a website owned by Paramount Global. Paramount then shared information to Facebook about Salzaar’s video-viewing activity. Salzaar sued, claiming violations of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). It’s not clear whether the VPPA applies to streaming services.

MISCELLANEOUS

World Economic Forum’s Wooden Clog

Klaus Schwab — the former chair of the globalist World Economic Forum — previously called artificial intelligence the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” and some recent stats suggest that he may be closer to the truth than many Americans may hope.

AI may slow the wage growth of around 5.8 million workers in the United States, Fortune reported Thursday. Additionally, around 29% of employees admitted to sabotaging their company’s AI strategy, according to a study by enterprise AI firm WRITER published in April.

At least half of Americans admitted to being more worried than excited about AI’s growing role in everyday life, according to a 2025 study by the Pew Research Center.

This reaction shouldn’t surprise you. The origin of the word “sabotage” comes from the French word “sabot,” or wooden clog. One popular myth says that this is because French textile workers during the early 1800s would throw their clogs into automated looms over frustration with the machinery taking so many of their colleagues’ jobs.

The Twitch Election

A growing number of Democrats are turning away from establishment media, The Mercury News reported Wednesday. This follows conservatives leading the charge on anti-establishment politics since the 2010s.

One place this appears to be playing out is Michigan.

Bernie Sanders-endorsed Abdul El-Sayed is running against Rep. Haley Stevens for the Democratic Party’s nomination in Michigan’s 2026 Senate election.

Similarly to how Trump and Vance made appearances on independent media channels in the 2024 presidential election (“The Podcast Election”), El-Sayed appears on podcasts, streams on Twitch, and has a YouTube channel.

“I think in a lot of ways, where traditional media has been gatekeepers, we’re watching that gatekeeping function fall away,” El-Sayed — a long-time podcaster himself — told the paper.

El-Sayed reportedly said that the rise of independent media lets voters compare news across different channels and identify biases.

Michigan’s primary Tuesday might not just be a contest between one Democrat and another, but a stress test of one of the establishment media’s final fortifications.

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Real-Life Camp Of The Saints

Mary Rooke — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:31:18 GMT

(Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images)

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we discuss the real-life Camp of the Saints happening in Spain and what that means for the U.S.

Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.

By now, I’m sure everyone has seen the horde of illegal immigrants storming the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Fox News’ Bill Melugin reported that an estimated 60,000 mostly military-aged men invaded Spain’s territory Thursday. One video showed a steady stream of men screaming “Allahu akbar” as they made their way in.

It is radicalizing in a way almost nothing else in our society can match.

Socialism and communism are rising inside our country. The left has taken over our education system. Our economy seems to be getting worse by the day. Everything about our lives feels as though we are standing at the edge of a cliff, waiting for one small gust of wind to blow us over.

I know I can be hard on President Trump. Many of his policy decisions have frustrated and disappointed me. He has always looked to the base as a measure of his success, but lately it seems he’s forgotten how to do that. Maybe it’s the people he’s placed around him. Maybe he just doesn’t have his finger on the pulse of our movement as he did before. Whatever it is, there is a massive disconnect between his first and second term that has left me wondering where the 2016 Trump is hiding.

I’ve been very vocally against the Iran War since the start of the conflict. I knew we’d see this become a prolonged, chaotic engagement and that American blood and treasure would be sent to die in the Middle East. I was called a “Panican.”

Some of my readers told me I was complaining too much. They said I didn’t know what I was talking about.

But I have lived through war in the Middle East almost my entire life and saw what it did to our economy. I saw the devastation it brought to my friends who served. I knew the cost, and it was too much to bear.

The latest polling shows that American sentiment on the war has caught up to how I felt day one. Even Trump seems to have had enough and wants this to end. I take no pleasure in being right. I wish it had never happened.

Trump has accelerated AI in a way that worries me a lot. There seem to be few meaningful roadblocks to a technology that promises to transform nearly every aspect of our lives. States are not even permitted to regulate it independently.

I worry about how it’s going to affect my children’s ability to get a job. I have a daughter in high school. What specialty should I urge her to study in college? She used to want to be a lawyer. I’m not so sure that’s the smart move anymore.

And while I sit and wonder if Trump is even still listening to our concerns about his policy choices, none of this is as important as preventing what’s happening in Spain from happening here. There is no country to save if we can’t control who lives here.

So amid all of my frustrations with Trump and his administration, I know that he saved us from another four years of an invasion. The U.S. was (according to low estimates) averaging about 6,500 illegal immigrant encounters every day during the Biden years. There is no telling the exact number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S., but most Trump officials claim there are about 20 million who came in just under Biden. That doesn’t count any who came in during previous administrations.

State of Friday: BODIES + ‘SO MANY RIGHT WINGERS’

Geoffrey Ingersoll — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:00:54 GMT

(Photo by JORGE GUERRERO / AFP via Getty Images)

Greetings, Dear Reader,

Any day now, my wife will be giving birth to our second little girl. Pretty wild. I was up all night last night like a kid before Christmas.

It truly pains me to say: Our posterity, her posterity, rests solely on our ability to start saying “no more.”

BODIES + ‘SO MANY RIGHT WINGERS’

The most viral news item Thursday on pretty much every platform – including network news – were videos of tens of thousands of Muslim Moroccans storming across the border of one of Spain’s only African mainland territories.

Ceuta, Spain, is a historically strategic port because it controls the path between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean seas. Its population was about 85,000 people, equally mixed between ethnic Spaniards and North African muslims … until yesterday.

The last time it was conquered by Muslims was about 1200 years ago. Portugal owned it for some time. Then Spain.

Morocco has always considered it occupied territory. Yesterday, about 45,000 military-aged males stormed across the border. Most people would call that an invasion.

The results were and will continue to be catastrophic for local residents.

–

The oddest attribute of the folks most under the spell of “toxic” or “suicidal empathy” is their complete lack of empathy.

Empathy, by definition, is: “the ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of another person.”

When it comes to suicidal empathy, their ability to form a coherent theory of mind for almost anyone is almost always about as superficial as a “coexist” bumper sticker.

Republicans are simply “cruel” for wanting the border shut down or confused dudes out of women’s locker rooms. Likewise, Somalians simply want a “better life.” Border jumpers just want a shot at the “American dream.” “Give me your tired, your poor” immigrants who “built this country” and so on.

Their version of empathy is a flat interpretation of humanity. More often than not, it’s projection. They project their own hopes and ideals onto complex foreigners with complex views on society, cue the Statue of Liberty quotes. The same is true for the political right, but in the negative.

(We know because we’ve tracked it, Republicans tend to underestimate how much liberals actually hate them. It’s more than you think.)

In reality, Republicans usually have a detailed, multi-level view of the matter at hand. Boys competing in women’s sports is unfair competition. Also forcing people to call boys girls (often under threat of violence or professional reprisal) has linguistic, legal and philosophical implications that spills into other important realms of discourse. Both are obvious to Republicans.

Liberals interpret this as simply “hatred for trans people.” It’s flat, devoid of empathy, and says more about liberals than it does Republicans.

On the flip side for illegals, is it possible the flat “better life” frame actually has some exploitative qualities? Is it possible they’ve heard how easy it is to set up fake daycares? To fake H1Bs and college credentials? Is it possible that Muslim migrants have other motivations? Perhaps like exploiting the democratic process to take over the local city council and banning the gay pride flag?

Is it possible that the intent is not to become American, but to make America more like Somalia, Pakistan, India or Afghanistan?

–

Tens of thousands of military-aged men streamed over the border. At least five Facebook pages (now taken down) were coordinating the crowds. Literal truckloads of people were driven up to the border and dumped.

You could hear them bellowing “allahu akbar” as they cleared obstacles and made their way into Spain.

Almost immediately video began circulating of them assaulting locals. One depicted a man on a ladder attempting to break into an apartment. Looting broke out. Storefronts destroyed and businesses desecrated. Police overwhelmed.

Here’s how various leftist Spaniards reacted on social (aggregated by Grok).

The better life bumper sticker.

–

The year started off with a bang for leftist politicians in Spain when Spanish MEP Irene María Montero Gil begged “migrants” and “racialized people” to “please don’t leave us alone with so many” right wingers.

“Of course we want them to vote,” she said.

The theory of mind for a left-wing leader who sees past the bumper sticker platitudes is not all that hard to put together.

Importing migrants, regardless of nationality or creed, is the easiest way to regain power.

They never stop to think what happens next, however.

—

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Liberals and their gay friends were aghast in a small, mostly Democrat enclave in Michigan.

The Hamtramck City Council voted to ban all displays of the pride flag in the city. They have a Muslim mayor and all six of the city council members are Muslim. Four of the six are first-generation immigrants from Bangladesh, one is from Yemen.

That was 2023. The city became the first Muslim majority city in America in 2015.

The prior majority going back to the early 1900s was Polish Catholic.

—

There really is no other way to look at it. It’s an us-or-them scenario.

There is no kumbaya. There is no compromise. The West is under siege and will be overwritten if we continue on.

Thankfully, Spanish politicians promising mass deportations are surging in the polls and the (right-wing) Italian PM is basically threatening to dissolve the EU if this kind of open-door policy continues.

Violence has already started. It’s hard to think Spain will retain that territory. It will become Moroccan and then the Moroccans there will want to go somewhere else (once they’ve looted and destroyed everything).

There’s no way this ends nicely. It will end with bodies hitting the ground.

I really don’t want to see sweeping machine gun fire on western borders, but you can’t have a sovereign country if hordes of military-aged males can swarm across the border like that.

The real empathy should be in the direction of your own countrymen.

George Washington Signs America’s First Patent

John Loftus — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:30:27 GMT

A photo taken on June 22, 2026 shows a tractor loading muriate of potash fertiliser into a hopper at a fertiliser depot in the small rural town of Buffalo, some 163kms south-west of Melbourne. Importing 90 percent of fertilisers, Australia is facing a severe shortage due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. (Photo by William WEST / AFP via Getty Images)

The year is 1790 …

And President George Washington, Attorney General Edmund Randolph, and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson are about to sign the United States government’s first ever patent, the first of over 12 million that will be issued by the U.S. Patent Office in roughly the next two-and-a-half centuries.

Patent No. 1 was granted to Samuel Hopkins, of Philadelphia, for an improvement “in the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process.”

Potash was “America’s first industrial chemical,” an “impure form of potassium carbonate, mixed with other potassium salts,” according to the late scientist and MIT professor Henry M. Paynter. During the Revolutionary War, potash was a crucial component in the making of gunpowder, which required saltpeter, or potassium nitrate. The potassium nitrate was made with potash and a nitrogen-rich dung, oftentimes the nutrient-rich poop of bats.

Before Hopkins’ patent, potash was mainly a backwoods production process carried out by colonial settlers, according to Paynter. “In brief,” he wrote, “ashes from huge open fire of hardwood logs were gathered and leached and the resulting solution was then simply boiled down and melted into a crude black potash.”

Hopkins invented a new process by “burning the raw ashes in a furnace before they were dissolved in water.”

“This second burning resulted in much greater carbonate formation, apparently because the free carbon in raw ashes (which partly accounts for the black color) was more completely oxidized and because of exposure to concentrated carbon dioxide gas from the fire,” Paynter wrote.

Potash became a lucrative export for the United States, and, according to Paynter, during the 14-year term of Hopkins’ patent, at least twenty million dollars worth of potash was traded abroad. By 1860, America was the world’s leading producer.

But that would change when Germans discovered they could mine potash directly from natural deposits, wiping out the U.S. industry. For a time, America was fully dependent on potash imports from Germany and other countries before discovering its own mineral deposits in New Mexico, California, and Utah.

Today, though, America produces only 2% of its own potash while importing the rest from Canada.

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The Room Where It Happens

Reagan Reese — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:45:26 GMT

Government officials love a roundtable.

Here’s how they usually go: reporters get invited for the beginning, the host offers opening remarks, the key guests take turns thanking the host for having them and advocating for the issue at hand. Then the press gets ushered out so the “real talk” can begin without pesky reporters reporting on every detail.

So what actually happens once the door closes? On Thursday, I flew to Columbia, South Carolina, to find out.

There, the DOJ’s Fraud Division hosted a roundtable with eight U.S. attorney’s offices, seven state attorneys general, five federal law enforcement partners, and more than 50 state officials from seven southeastern states.

They’d come to sign a Memorandum of Understanding, entering them into a data-sharing partnership that gives the DOJ access to “publicly available corporate registration and public benefits payment data held by these state agencies.” The idea is that pooling it will help the department spot fraud patterns faster.

Before any of this was announced to reporters at a press conference, those 50-plus officials packed into a cavernous conference room for the “real talk.” I was the only reporter in it.

Orwell, Please Help!

John Loftus — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:25:23 GMT

Illustration by State of the Day

How many times have you heard the buzz phrase “saving Western civilization,” or “we need to save Western civilization,” in the past few months or years?

Probably a lot. Personally, I hear it so often that it has completely lost its punch. What does that even mean? What exactly are you referring to? Do you have the faintest clue what you are talking about? It almost seems like every political issue, no matter how big or small, is framed in terms of how the issue or a possible solution is “saving” Western civilization or, conversely, destroying it.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked “Western civilization” during a speech in February.

“We are part of one civilization – Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir,” he told the audience at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

Stephen Miller has used it often, as well.

And here’s right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh discussing a once-hot culture war issue in 2023:

“I truly see the fight against gender ideology as the last stand for Western civilization... Because if the sane side loses this, it’s over.”

Is it really, though?

I am not here to give you an answer as to what “Western civilization” means, because I really do not know. I do not think Rubio, Miller, or Walsh know, either. I just want to point out how political figures use words as heavy ideological clubs to make you think or feel a certain way.

In his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote about this. He argued, correctly, that all political language is fakery “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Wow. Does Orwell ever miss? Of course not. He was right then, and he is right now. He will always be right. He was monstrously original, ahead of his time, and we badly need his wisdom to decode the oftentimes poisonous language of our modern politicians, government officials, military leaders, CEOs, etc., etc., etc.

Because, today, we are drowning in buzzwords and “newspeak,” a word coined by Orwell in his novel 1984. It is a tsunami after tsunami of euphemisms and sloganeering. As Orwell argued, this corrupted language corrupts our thoughts, clouds reality, and allows people in power to, literally in some cases, get away with murder.

Aside from “Western civilization,” here are some examples that drive me crazy:

“Free Markets”

The term “free markets” has no meaning. But if it means anything, it means “deregulation.” When you hear people say, “We need to support free markets,” it means, “We want to deregulate this or that industry.” Okay, that’s fine. That could be a good thing, or that could be a bad thing. But is any market actually free? Of course not. We have laws. We do not live in an Adam Smith utopia. The next time you hear the stock market cited as a prime example of a “free market” working smoothly without government interference, ask yourself: but isn’t it regulated?

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“Defang” or “Degrade”

You might have heard these words since the start of the Iran War. I heard a lot of hawks use the word “defang” right at the beginning when the U.S. and Israel vaporized the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. I saw it a lot in the digital pages of National Review because it sounds fancy. It’s a great word, admittedly. It’s easy to pronounce. A nice Latin prefix and an Old English word. But it’s deceptive. The U.S. did not “defang” the Iranian regime. It assassinated some of its leaders in a surprise sneak attack.

“Degrade” is similar. How many times have you heard the Pentagon use the phrase, “We have degraded Iran’s military capabilities?” So, you blow up a rusty piece of scrap metal that has zero effect on whether the Strait of Hormuz will reopen?

Speaking of the Pentagon …

Anything the Pentagon Says

This right here is a gem:

“One-way attack surface drones.” “Unmanned surface vessels.” “Employed.” “Degraded Iran’s ability.”

The U.S. military bureaucracy speaks entirely in newspeak. That post translated into plain English: “We blew up some sh*t with a kamikaze RC boat, and we have no clue if this does anything to help, but we will pretend that it does so you think we are not losing and release this footage so you know your tax dollars are not being wasted.”

***

I’ll be the first to admit: I have used buzzwords before. I have used them when I felt stuck. I might even have used some in this article. I try not to, but sometimes your mind is tired, and you’re running out of time, and you use them - unwittingly or consciously. When I read Orwell’s essay for the first time, I felt shame. I’ve done that myself, haven’t I? I suffered an “existential crisis,” as they say.

But it was nevertheless a good lesson (that always needs re-learning, apparently) and a good reminder to try to see the true meaning of things.

So, what do politicians really mean when they say “Western civilization”? I’m not sure. But I know what it is not. It is not carbonized Ancient papyrus scrolls that were buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It is not the smooth texture of Michelangelo’s marble statues. It is not the smell of the Globe Theatre during a Shakespearean performance on a cold, rainy day.

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Unfit to Print: CNN DISCOVERS AMERICA

Amber Duke — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:01:10 GMT

(Photos by Jason Kempin/Getty Images)

Hey y’all, welcome back to Unfit to Print.

The media has finally heard of a hot new country singer. They’re only a little late to the news.

CNN DISCOVERS AMERICA

Ella Langley currently has the biggest song in the country. “Choosin’ Texas” has spent fifteen weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, breaking a record previously held by Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston for the longest-running non-holiday No. 1 by a solo female artist.

Langley has performed on “The Tonight Show,” “Today” and “The Voice.” She has won major country music awards, sold out arenas and built an enormous fan base. She spent part of the summer opening for one of the biggest artists in the world, Morgan Wallen — who is also a country singer.

But according to CNN, “no one had ever heard of” Langley before she suddenly made music history.

No one?

Or just no one at CNN HQ?

Poof! Just Like That, Jimmy Hoffa Disappears Forever

John Loftus — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:31:22 GMT

11th August 1958: American labour leader Jimmy Hoffa (1913 - 1975), President of the Teamster's Union, testifying at a hearing investigating labour rackets. Rumoured to have mafia connections, Hoffa disappeared in 1975 and no body has ever been found. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

The year is 1975 …

And Jimmy Hoffa, the famous American labor union leader who served as the president of the Teamsters, is pacing around in a restaurant parking lot in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. He is about to disappear and will never be seen again.

Long believed to have ties to the mafia, Hoffa’s disappearance is one of the most mysterious criminal cases in American history. The day he went missing, Hoffa planned to meet with two well-known mafia figures: Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano and Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone.

Tony Pro was a New Jersey Teamster leader and a caporegime (captain or “capo”) in New York’s Genovese crime family. Tony Jack, long acquainted with Hoffa, was also a high-ranking captain, but in Detroit’s mafia, known as the Detroit Partnership.

Hoffa had served prison time from 1967 to 1971 following a conviction on charges of jury tampering, attempted bribery, and wire and mail fraud. He was released early, though, after President Richard Nixon commuted his 13-year sentence. It is believed that Hoffa wanted to meet with Tony Pro and Tony Jack to settle old disputes and regain control of the Teamsters Union.

However, it is also believed that the mafia had much different plans for the Teamsters. Although organized crime previously supported Hoffa’s presidency, they now favored his successor, Frank Fitzsimmons.

Hoffa set up the meeting with Tony Pro and Tony Jack on July 30, 1975. Early in the afternoon, Hoffa left his home in Lake Orion and stopped in Pontiac to visit his friend, former Teamster official Louis Linteau. Linteau was not at his office, so Hoffa left a message, then drove on to the restaurant, Machus Red Fox.

Sometime between 2:15 and 2:30 p.m., Hoffa called his wife from a nearby payphone to complain that they were late and he was getting stood up. His wife said that no one had called his home phone, and he told her he’d be home by 4 p.m. to grill steaks for dinner. Hoffa also called Linteau. Linteau later said this call happened around 3:30 p.m., though the FBI believed it happened earlier. The FBI also believed that Hoffa left the parking lot without a struggle between 2:45 and 2:50 p.m., while one witness said he was last seen getting into a maroon car with three other people.

Hoffa never made it home.

It is widely believed the mob whacked Hoffa. In his 2004 book, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and the Closing of the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, author Charles Brandt wrote that Frank Sheehan, an alleged mob hitman and Hoffa’s friend, confessed to killing Hoffa. But this account has been disputed.

Hoffa was declared dead in absentia July 30, 1982, but the case remains open to this day. One rumor is that he was buried in concrete poured for the New York Giants’ football stadium, which opened in 1976. If so, he was never found. The location of his corpse, as well as the identity of his killer(s), is still shrouded in mystery.

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America’s Getting Sold Off, And Nobody’s Noticing

John Loftus — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:30:46 GMT

A man walks past an electronic quotation board displaying the Nikkei 225 stock prices on the Tokyo Stock Exchange along a street in Tokyo on June 29, 2026. (Photo by Kazuhiro NOGI / AFP via Getty Images)

Asia is buying America.

For decades, American and Western capital flowed into Asia. American companies bought Asian firms, as well as Asian assets, fueling the region’s rapid economic growth.

(Screenshot/National Bureau of Economic Research)

But now, that trend is beginning to reverse: Asian capital is flowing into America and the West more than ever before. The shift has profound implications for the global economy and geopolitics. Yet, nobody’s really paying attention.

State of Thursday: A FATHER'S DEBT

Geoffrey Ingersoll — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:23:01 GMT

(Photo by Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images)

Greetings, Dear Reader,

I’m realizing I’ve left you all in the dark.

My wife is due any day now. Specifically next Tuesday, but if you’re parents, you know that means any day.

I’m expecting to be out for two weeks, but I might still make time during baby/mama naptime to write in to y’all.

A couple years ago, before the birth of my son, I wrote a SOTD about fathers, specifically what they owe their families. It went out over email and as was our infrastructure at the time, if you didn’t get it, it appeared nowhere else.

Well, I’m rerunning it today.

A FATHER’S DEBT

This was originally sent to our subscribers Sept. 18, 2024, five days before my son was born.

I had been thinking deeply about what a father owes his family. Those thoughts became quite acute after I realized I would be having a son.

Curious about your thoughts, Dear Reader, so sound off in the comments or in emails to me.

Best,

Geoff

Survive:

There is nothing more worthless than dead. If you are a dad, don’t be dead.

Obviously there are things we cannot help, tragedies, accidents, etc. Barring those, in order to be a good dad, you need to be alive. At this point, you probably think I’m joking, and I am to an extent, but what I mean by this is that taking care of yourself is taking care of your family.

Among the things I find perplexing in this country, and there are many, is the general apathy for the mental and general wellbeing of dads and men. No, lol, I don’t expect anyone to go out and start a 501c3 dedicated to helping 40-year-old guys, that’s absurd. I also don’t expect society to declare September international dads awareness day, that is also absurd.

(Leave dad alone in September, that’s when football starts.)

What I mean more specifically, is among the dads themselves. Every time I see a 300+ pound dad, I’m not just disgusted, I’m disappointed. When did this become acceptable? Put the meatball sub down, man.

As a dad, you need to take care of yourself. You need to train for the worst. You need strength, and not just physical strength, strength of mind and character. How can you stand for anything if a flight up the stairs makes you wheeze? How can you instill discipline if every slice of pizza is an Odyssean Siren?

You need to be able to run a mile. You need to be able to carry something moderately heavy for an indeterminate amount of time. You should, in America, own and know how to shoot a gun. You need to learn to say no, and not just to others, but yourself.

I had kids late, near 40. Do the math and I’ll be 70ish by the time they’re all capable. I need mental and physical fortitude. I need to be capable, vicious even, until then.

No way to do that if I die due to bad habits aggregating in my bones.

Provide

Dads who don’t provide aren’t dads. They’re leeches. What’s more, they promulgate little ones who themselves, on the father’s example, become leeches.

When I say provide, I mean a number of things.

In this day and age, first and foremost dads must provide means. Money, in other words. Dads must be employed. I don’t care if your wife is an Instagram influencer (first of all, why’d you even marry her?). Get a job. If not, you are at best a confusing mom, at worst you are just an au pair with a penis attached.

Security. This goes back to #1. You need to provide security. That means not being limp-wristed. Stop spending money on urban scooters and just walk. Or run. Learn how to fight. Yes, I’m serious, literally go to classes. Spar other full-grown men. You need to fight to learn how to fight. If you can’t defend yourself, you can’t defend your family.

Purchase a firearm. Learn how to shoot and maintain a gun. Also learn how to fix things. Replace your own sink at least once. You don’t have to take apart a car engine, but replace a headlight or two.

Finally, provide a steadfast and positive example of masculinity. Your sons will model themselves after it and just as importantly, your daughters will seek it out in a mate. Your wife will be happy even as she sometimes wishes you wouldn’t embarrass her in a country club parking lot because the parking attendant who caught you illegally parking wouldn’t take her apology not once but twice and now you’re absolutely berating a complete stranger.

But I digress.

Security isn’t constant demonstrations of capability, but rather the known potential that capability can be, at any given time, demonstrated.

So in short: Means, security and an example. Provide all of those.

Thrive

This is among the hardest to achieve, but given the aggregate nature of life and habits, it’s perfectly achievable.

Thriving doesn’t mean you have to be Elon Musk. That’s insane. Also, the jury’s out on whether that guy is actually a good dad.

Wherever you go, whatever you do, growth should follow. Not immediately, but over time, you should demonstrate the capacity to thrive under basically any kind of obstacle. It’s as old an obligation as nature itself.

Thriving can be maintaining an optimistic attitude. It can be failing three times and succeeding the fourth. It can even be the proverbial corporate ladder and climbing that sh*t. Become bigger (but figuratively, chaps) as time passes.

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Thriving is also being satisfied when enough is enough. My uncle for years was a highly paid economist at a major company. Now he teaches math at a local high school and loves it. I mean the guy truly loves it. He thrived then, he’s thriving now.

So is his family.

You owe it to them to take the hits and keep on ticking. Thrive in all things.

Teenage Southern ‘Belle’ Charmed Union Troops And Shared Their Secrets With The Confederacy

John Loftus — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:56:22 GMT

Belle Boyd, Confederate spy, circa 1860-1865. Artist Unknown. (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images/via Getty Images)

The year is 1862 …

And Union soldiers are about to arrest 18-year-old Isabelle “Belle” Boyd for spying on behalf of the Confederacy.

Working out of her father’s hotel in Front Royal, Virginia, Belle had been wooing Union troops to pry out any valuable secrets that she could then pass on to the rebels. The information she gathered proved quite useful, and in one instance, she gave it to the famous Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, helping him secure victory in the First Battle of Winchester.

Belle would be arrested six times and imprisoned on three occasions. Her willingness to spy for the Confederates appears to stem from an early encounter with Union soldiers at the start of the war in 1861. A group of soldiers had gotten word that she was hanging a Confederate flag in her bedroom. The men came to her house to investigate, at which point one of them cursed out her mother. Furious, Belle pulled out a pistol and shot him dead. She was exonerated, but from then on, sentries were stationed outside the house to keep a close eye on her activities.

After the war, Belle married a Union captain who had previously captured her. She later became an actress, dying on stage in Wisconsin in 1900. She was 56. To say she lived an interesting life would be an understatement.

Over the years, newspapers have had a field day with Belle’s story, dubbing her the “Cleopatra of the Secession”, “The Siren of the Shenandoah”, and “The Confederate Mata Hari”.

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Trump's Joke Sent Media Spinning

Mary Rooke — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:30:34 GMT

Photo by Steve Eason/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we discuss Trump’s ability to expose the left for the frauds they are.

Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.

It has been funny to watch the left attack President Trump over his joke about Kaitlin Collins and Bud Light. Their media headlines keep calling it “transphobic.” Yet the same coverage repeatedly described the comparison as an attempt to demean or insult Collins by linking her to Dylan Mulvaney. They come so close to reality, but their adherence to transgender ideology won’t allow them to tell the truth about why they found it offensive.

The ideology demands they attack Trump and use the approved language of “transphobia,” while their emotional reaction treats the comparison between Collins and Mulvaney as lowering a biological woman by association with a biological man. Trump’s joke was for us. He told it in a room full of people who pretend not to get it, but their cold expressions and silence exposed how hard it truly hit.

A man who had plastic surgery and is apparently on hormone replacement therapy to feminize his body can never be a woman. If Mulvaney was simply another woman, you wouldn’t have heard of the joke at all. If the slogan “trans women are women” were taken as literal truth rather than a loyalty test, then comparing a woman to a trans woman would carry no weight. The fact that leftist commentators and media treated it as demeaning to Collins reveals that, beneath the required affirmations, they still register Mulvaney as male.

A man in a dress, a man on cross-sex hormones, a man who has undergone facial feminization and other procedures, remains a man. Our bodies cannot be rewritten. Sex is binary. No amount of exogenous estrogen, breast implants, or voice training changes the underlying reality of chromosomes, skeletal structure, or the developmental pathway that produced a male human. If they truly believed that Mulvaney was a woman, the outrage wouldn’t be necessary.

Still, women are expected to pretend otherwise. They are told that noticing the difference is bigotry, that protecting single-sex spaces is exclusion. The ideology demands that women rewrite their language, their boundaries, and sometimes their physical safety in service of the ideology. A woman who says “I do not want to share a changing room with a man, no matter how he identifies” is labeled hateful. A female athlete who loses medals, scholarships, or records to a male is told to get over the loss and pretend it’s a sign of our society progressing.

The same ideology that insists Mulvaney is a woman also insists that any woman who refuses the premise is the problem.

This is why Collins could only post vague messages about not allowing others to make you feel inferior. And also why media outlets were only allowed to call Trump’s joke “transphobic” and not what it was.

Of course the joke was insulting. It was meant to be a roast. Still, no woman wants to be compared to a man, regardless of how much surgery or hormone therapy he has undergone. Female identity is not a costume or a feeling. When a man is held up as the equivalent or the aspirational version of womanhood, it erases that reality. It tells women their sex is optional and easily mimicked. Women know they are different from men. The media reaction confirms they know it too, but they are too cowardly to admit it.

As a mother, I can’t help but be mad at women like Collins. She has the pulpit to call this insanity out. She sits in the White House briefing room, on national television, with a platform that reaches millions. She could state the obvious: that a man cannot become a woman, that sex is real, and that forcing women and girls to pretend otherwise is an attack on their rights and safety. Instead, when Trump compared her to Mulvaney, her response was weak.

If Collins truly believed that Mulvaney was a woman, she would have accepted Trump’s joke as a compliment. The cameras would have captured her smiling and proud to have been compared to a cultural icon. Instead, she posted an Eleanor Roosevelt quote about not consenting to feel inferior and later told Jon Stewart she was unsurprised by the insults and preferred to keep the focus off her personal reaction. Doing this leaves the larger issue unaddressed.

Women in positions of visibility and influence have a particular responsibility when an ideology demands the erasure of their sex. Her remaining silent or treating the comparison purely as a personal slight leaves the rest of us to fight the battles alone. Collins is not alone in this; many high-profile women in media and politics have chosen to normalize the idea that female reality is negotiable and that mothers who object are the ones being unreasonable.

Trump’s joke forced the left to demonstrate, in real time, that they do not actually believe the doctrine they enforce. They could not simply shrug and say two women were being compared.

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Women should not have to pretend. My daughters should not have to accept that a man using their bathroom is normal. They should not have to smile through the erasure of their sex. They should not have to accept that a male body, however altered, is the same as theirs. Collins and women like her ignore those of us raising the next generation of girls who will inherit the consequences of their inaction.

Trump’s joke exposed all of this. The emperor has no clothes. The man in the dress is still a man, and women are being asked to pretend otherwise at the cost of their own clarity and rights. Our daughters deserve so much more than this.

Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to goodlife@dailycaller.com

Heard It Through The Grapevine:

I’ve written about therapy in the past. Still, Amber Duke’s latest on the field of sociology completely reaffirms how I feel about the industry. Unfit to Print: The Science Of Grievance

I always love it when John Loftus gets in the weeds on a topic because he does a beautiful job of taking us along with him. This is especially true with: Infamous Revolutionary Reaps What He Sows As Head Literally Rolls

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State of Wednesday: DR. FAUCI AND MR. DRUMPF

Geoffrey Ingersoll — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:21:08 GMT

Greetings, Dear Reader,

I’d have done this sooner, but to be frank, running a journalism training program takes up most of my time and the trove of Anthony Fauci docs Rand Paul released was like 1000+ pages.

So yes, I’m late to the party.

Good thing for you, Dear Reader, my one and only rule about showing up late is to show up dressed to the nines.

Then everyone forgets you’re late!

DR. FAUCI AND MR. DRUMPF

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the Donald Drumpf the left always imagined Trump to be.

The trove of documents Rand Paul described as Fauci’s “diary” – really just notes for an eventual memoir – show that Fauci’s inner monologue was so self effusive, self congratulatory, and hyperbolic it would make Trump’s outer monologue blush.

Discussing Trump’s eventual turn on him, Fauci referred to himself as “the most credible scientist in the world.” He called himself “the most famous and talked about person in the world.” He recounted with bizarre self aggrandizement finding prayer beads with a picture of himself depicted as a Catholic saint.

We always knew Fauci was duplicitous. We’ve known for years that he lied about the lab leak, his role funding the Wuhan lab, his role in gain of function research and his role in the misinformation campaign — and so on. While I think it’s quite worthwhile to make hay out of all that – especially his concession that most scientists believed the virus was engineered from the start – none of that is news to me.

Should he go to jail for all of it? Absolutely. Nevertheless, the most revealing element of all these new documents to me is just how psychologically deranged Anthony Fauci the man is on the inside. He believed himself to be godlike. He had no business leading anything. We had every reason to be skeptical, aggressively so.

He noted that American university students “illegally sitting” on a campus lawn “enjoying themselves” applauded him when he walked onto campus. The “and then everyone clapped” meme was real life for Fauci. He noted applause he got at restaurants and standing O’s he received before speeches. He gleefully recounted talking to Barbara Streisand and then butt dialing her later. He recounted all the praise he received from celebrities and celebrity media personalities, just like Trump is known to do on stage, saying “people” “call” him all the time to say what a great job he’s doing.

Except … Fauci is not Trump giving a campaign speech. This is a “diary.” He’s talking to himself about himself. It adds another dimension to the profoundly disturbed inner person of Anthony Fauci. Trump is often just boasting. Fauci is looking in the mirror like Marky Mark at the end of Boogie Nights.

“I’m a star … I’m a star, I’m a star, I’m a star,” Mark Wahlberg says while his (prosthetic movie) genitals are exposed.

“Press is going wild with me,” he wrote on March 22, 2020. “Front page in Washington Post yesterday and Op Ed by Maureen Dowd in NY Times today about me and my relationship with the POTUS. Profile by Peter Nicholas on me in The Atlantic.”

Chris Wallace at Fox gave him advice. Chuck Todd gave him advice. Jake Tapper gave him advice and invited him to dinner. The press more generally comes out of all this looking like a useless boob. They gripe about Trump threatening “Democracy” but serve no clear interest of the people in their approach to Fauci, an unelected bureaucrat who recalled with self reverence closing schools in New York and California with a couple of phone calls.

Mob bosses who end lives with phone calls are more self aware than Fauci, whose notes give off a sense of marvel at his own influence. I can shut down schools! I can shut down entire states with phone calls!

Noting with meticulous detail the “swag” exploding around his image, the mugs, bobble heads, bottle openers, magnets and St. Fauci imagery, he concluded unconvincingly, “I do not like this one bit.”

Fauci was lying even to himself in his own diary!

He recalled his travails in high society frequently. “I was totally swamped,” he wrote with no sense of irony, “all night by people wanting to say hello, shake my hands, and take pictures with me. I could not get away from it … some people may think that this is great to have people treat you like Elvis Presley.”

Again, at the end, he calls it “unnerving” as if he didn’t actually find attending parties with “the highest level of AAA list you could imagine in Washington DC” so great.

“Super A list at party,” he recalled to himself. “Senator Mark Warner, Kellyanne Conway, Andrea Mitchell, David Ignatius, David Frum, Zeke Emanuel, etc., etc.”

And if there’s one party that looks in particular like the sucker of the bunch, it’s the media.

I know it’s an old drum for a conservative to beat, but my god do they all look like total boobs now. The so-called defenders of big D Democracy. If an umpire in the bigs got as many calls as consistently wrong as the media over the last two decades, they’d be out on their asses, unemployed.

Iraqi WMDs, DEI, illegal immigration, toppling dictators, gender affirming care, Joe Biden’s brain melting one might think would be the worst of all, but really, it was covid and Fauci.

That pitch was up in the stands and Jake Tapper, Andrea Mitchell, Meet The Press, CBS, the NYT, Atlantic and Wapo were looking right into America’s eyes and calling a strike.

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The cult of Anthony Fauci, beginning in his own damned head and heading outward in concentric circles to overtake the brains of the most powerful people in DC, has arguably been the most damaging subversion of the American Republic in US history.

We’ve only just begun to understand the damage done. The learning loss. The universal scars on American childhood. The death and destruction. Businesses annihilated. 20+ million dead. China unaccountable. Risky science unaccountable. US taxpayer funded WMD research run by the PLA. People locked in their homes. Mostly liberal adults turned clinically neurotic, shrieking about mask use in 2022.

All of it sourced to the truly bobbled noggin atop Anthony Fauci’s torso.

Now we know. Dr. Fauci was the Mr. Drumpf the political left always accused Trump of being.

And they welcomed him in. Destroy democracy, Dr. Fauci, do it harder. Wreck our credibility worse than Trump ever could. Wreck our economy. Empower China. Ohhh yeah, St. Anthony, to you we pray.

I guess the bright side of it all, Dear Reader, is that our side had him pegged from the start.

Yes, the hapless rubes the media scorns so frequently. They had the real conman pegged from the absolute get.

At least we know there are real stewards of the American spirit out there, who will resist the power hungry dorks and science nerds to the very end.

Amen.

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Karma: Infamous Revolutionary Reaps What He Sows As Head Literally Rolls

John Loftus — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:31:25 GMT

(Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)

The year is 1794 …

And Maximilien Robespierre, a French lawyer and radical who is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, is about to meet his bloody fate – perhaps a fate he fully deserves. His rise and fall, and the most unsavory and barbaric aspects of the revolution, bear a striking resemblance to several modern American political figures and movements, as well as the general atmosphere of paranoia that has engulfed the country in 2026.

Born in 1758 to a lawyer and the daughter of a beer brewer, Robespierre demonstrated a great deal of talent and literary ability early in his life. He was fascinated by the ancient classics and the ancient world, deeply admired the Roman Republic, mimicked the rhetorical skills of Cato, Cicero, and Lucius Junius Brutus, and won a rhetoric contest in 1776 during his school years. He was academically gifted and studied law at the Sorbonne for three years. After passing the bar, he became a judge on a criminal court in 1782, but – in an ironic twist – resigned over ethical concerns stemming from his opposition to the death penalty.

By 1789, Robespierre had secured a position in France’s Estates-General, representing the French-Flanders region. At the beginning of the revolution, Robespierre closely associated himself with the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, a radical political club later known as the Jacobin Club (or simply, the Jacobins). He rose through the ranks and in 1792 was leading the charge against King Louis XVI, fervently pushing for his trial and execution. The Jacobins eventually overpowered another major faction of the revolution, the Girondins, who were appealing for clemency. The king was found guilty of the crimes of conspiracy and attacks on the “public safety,” and in January 1793, the revolutionaries sent him to the guillotine. It is believed that during Louis’ trial, Robespierre looked on from the front row.

This was the peak of Robespierre’s influence. From here, the revolution devolved even further into political infighting, paranoia, and ultimately terror and bloodshed. The country was on the brink of civil war as numerous aristocrats and federalists led uprisings in Lyon, Normandy, and elsewhere. After the assassinations of Louis-Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, the revolutionary who cast the deciding vote in Louis’ execution, and Jean-Paul Marat, a Jacobin leader who was stabbed to death by a young woman as he lay in his bathtub, Robespierre lived in constant fear that he would be the next to die – and he had every reason to be paranoid. Marat’s assassin, Charlotte Corday, was only 24 years old when she committed the murder in July 1793. Corday detested the Jacobins, especially Marat, whom she believed was evil, and was sympathetic to the moderate Girondin faction. When asked during her trial how she knew to strike Marat’s heart, she swiftly replied, “The indignation that swelled my own showed me the place.”

Historians have debated the exact beginning of the French Revolution’s infamous “Reign of Terror,” but many point to September 1793 when the Revolutionary Tribunal began hearing more criminal cases against political opponents under the paranoid “Law of Suspects.” The Committee of Public Safety, established in early 1793, also played a monstrous role in fueling the revolutionary paranoia that swept through France. With broad administrative and spying powers, the committee acted as the state police, forming local networks to root out any perceived domestic enemies of the newly formed republic. Fears that foreign agents were working from within France to sabotage the nation and destroy the revolution’s “progress” worsened what was already a violent and chaotic time.

It is estimated that between 1793 and 1794, approximately 17,000 people were officially executed. Another 10,000 died awaiting their trials in prison, while tens of thousands were killed in unrecorded mass murders in regions that had rebelled against the revolutionary government. The preferred method of execution? The guillotine, which has since become synonymous with the French Revolution, as well as a symbol of the often violent, brutal nature of revolutions and their unintended consequences.

Along with the thousands of commoners and peasants who were convicted of sham crimes and sentenced to death by beheading, Robespierre would also face the music, eventually, in July 1794. At this point, dozens of members of the National Convention had been executed in the Reign of Terror, including the Girondin Georges Danton. Robespierre had turned on Danton after he called for moderation and the pace of terror executions to be slowed and ended altogether, pushing for his arrest and accusing the Girondin of corruption and treason. Danton also faced an unfair trial because Robespierre’s allies refused to allow witnesses to testify in his defense. He was executed in April 1794. All the surviving members now feared that others would turn on them and have them brought before the sham tribunal, as was the case with Danton, or else assassinated in their sleep. Several members feared Robespierre the most, as he was considered to be a particularly ruthless and vengeful man in the wake of Danton’s death.

But it came to pass that Robespierre would be the next Jacobin to receive his violent comeuppance. In what would be his final appearance at the National Convention in Paris on July 27, Robespierre was shouted down by his fellow members but lost his voice and could not muster a response. “The blood of Danton chokes him!” shouted one member, Antoine Marie Charles Garnier. Finally, Robespierre found his voice, yelling out, “Is it Danton you regret? ... Cowards! Why didn’t you defend him?” Robespierre and five of his deputies were later arrested, but managed to escape to the Hôtel de Ville. Accounts differ as to what happened next, but it is believed that as French soldiers stormed into the hotel, Robespierre attempted to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head. He failed, however, when a security guard intervened, instead shooting himself in the mouth. He also failed to escape.

By noon the following day, the Revolutionary Tribunal assembled and sentenced Robespierre and other Jacobins to death without a cursory hearing. They were carted off to the public guillotine, where an angry crowd gathered, hurling insults as they passed. A sketch attributed to Jacques Louis David depicts Robespierre on the day of his execution, with a bandage wrapped around his face and mouth to cover his gunshot wound and secure his broken jaw. Right before the guillotine drops onto his neck, executioner Charles-Henri Sanson rips off the bandage. Robespierre cries out in pain. The heavy steel blade plummets. His head rolls. And the crowd cheers.

It is an entertaining, if extremely bloody story, to be sure. But it also gives us so many valuable insights applicable to modern America.

First, as we celebrate 250 years since Independence Day, we should count our lucky stars that the American Revolution succeeded in the manner in which it did. It just as easily could have spiraled out of control, like the French Revolution, and devolved into chaos and terror. The Founders had their fair share of bitter disagreements. Still, it never reached the boiling point where they imposed violent tyranny on commoners while purging political rivals through hoaxes and sham trials.

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Second, contrary to popular myth, the French Revolution was not a bottom-up rebellion waged against the king by farmers and peasants; it was very much driven from the top down. Robespierre is a prime example of how elites are usually the ones who trigger revolutions as they seek to usurp fellow elites — in Robespierre’s case, the monarchy and the clergy of the Catholic Church. In today’s world, look no further than caviar communist Hasan Piker, who wears luxury designer clothing while calling for America’s working class to seize the means of production, or members of the Democratic Socialists of America who have college degrees from top universities and Ivy League institutions but want to abolish police departments and even the U.S. Senate.

Finally, one way terror spread so rapidly through late 18th-century France was through accusations of treason and sabotage on behalf of foreign agents. This was a key smear tactic used by radicals to character assassinate their opponents, and, in some cases, get them literally assassinated. America is weathering a similar hurricane of paranoia surrounding foreign influence campaigns, commonly referred to as “ops.” “Ops” has probably become one of the most popular words in the political discourse, as “influencers”, pundits, and politicians use it to attack those with whom they disagree, rather than engaging with the substance of their arguments or policy ideas. Of course, foreign influence is a very real problem. On the right, there are, in fact, MAGA-aligned shills who are paid to propagandize for a foreign country. To say nothing of all the foreign money sloshing around Capitol Hill. However, this is a problem overshadowed by the countless – but ultimately baseless – “foreign op” smear campaigns waged by the hivemind of commentators and operatives jockeying for attention and political clout.

Karl Marx famously believed the first French Revolution was a tragedy, but the second, the 1848 coup led by Napoleon’s cousin Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, was a farce. If a coup in 1848 was considered farcical then, whatever sort of revolution is in the air in America in 2026 is uber-farce – a giant, raving carnival of social media clowns. But that is not to say it can do no harm to the country. Speaking for myself, I find clowns terrifying.

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State of Tuesday: ALLAH TOLD ME TO

Geoffrey Ingersoll — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:03:06 GMT

Some devout Shia Muslims bleed from self inflicted cuts on their heads to express their faith during the tenth day of Ashura. (Photo by Guy Smallman/Getty Images)

Greetings, Dear Reader,

Welcome to my daily jihad, State of the Day, where I strip the euphemism and misdirection off the day’s news and give it to you straight, no ice, no mixer.

Guess what? Islam is corrosive.

ALLAH TOLD ME TO

Right now there’s a Dem-sponsored bill in Massachusetts to create a commission strictly dedicated to carving out government jobs specifically for Muslims.

The commission, should it be adopted, would also be compelled to make recommendations that would enshrine “Islamophobia” in various state lawmaking. In case you might be thinking of burning a Koran or calling Muhammad a pedo.

Just a rock’s skip away over in Europe, a number of explicitly pro-Muslim laws are already on the books in places like Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany and so on.

So they import the Muslim hordes, who rape and pillage, and then they make it illegal for you to call them rapists. Unlike the Catholic church, about which we hear this charge constantly from the liberal left, raping and pillaging is literally institutional in Islam. It’s a lawful mandate. Throw in child marriage/buggery as well.

Murdering apostates and infidels is also a command. You can actually read it for yourself. It’s not very hard to find.

There have been three Islamic extremist attacks in Europe in as many days. Following the attack on a gay pride event, LGBT activists tripped over themselves to express their discontent. Specifically, they were mad it wasn’t a “white, Christian man” and encouraged the public to keep the discourse nonpolitical.

Can these people even be helped?

Reuters coverage of the Muslim man who prowled the streets stabbing people in broad daylight in Paris couldn’t get any more comical.

Here’s the copy verbatim:

“It is Allah who commanded me,” the man lying on the floor says.
Nunez said the man had been detained by an off-duty police officer. “I pay tribute to him; it was a courageous act,” he added.
The motive for the attack remains unknown, Nunez said, adding that police could not verify the identity of the attacker, whose declarations were “incoherent” while he was being arrested.

Literally nobody in charge has any idea what they’re doing. The activist class responds to murderous Islamic extremism by openly wishing war on the religion that acted as the moral underpinning of the Western Enlightenment. (That would be Christianity.) Journalists and their mastheads print that motives are “unknown” despite perpetrators explicitly stating their motives. And police are perennially incapable of identifying threats to public safety.

So in case anyone’s still having trouble, let me spell it out: It’s the Muslims, stupid.

“Do you really believe that?” A friend asked me yesterday.

I had said in a group chat that 30 million people needed to be deported from the US, particularly the vast swaths of third-world Muslims we’d imported. My rationale was pretty simple: Islam is bad.

“Believe what?”

“That Muslims are no good?”

My son loves his daycare lady. She’s an elderly Pakistani woman who wears hijab. She’s great. I’m fond of her as well. I’m still fond of the fixers I worked with in Muslim countries. I’m fond of their dedication to religion and family. There are interpreters I’d have defended with my life. In fact, I pray the Angelus three times a day myself because of influence from Muslim friends.

But the religion itself is a fraud on par with Scientology, and the culture that comes with it is utterly corrosive to Western values. It takes just a few hours of reading Islamic scripture to conclude as much.

“Individually, they’re fine … but the call to prayer in suburban America is bad, the religion itself is bad, the culture is bad, their governments are bad. Virtually none of it is redeemable. But you can’t blame the individuals for that. They’ve been fooled.

“The culture is horrible … It’s antithetical to the West.”

In short, it should stay where it is. Firmly if necessary.

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Really, this goes for all of the Middle East, especially. Generations of tribalism and religious conflict have bred a culture of paranoia among Arab Muslims, Arab Christians, and Israeli Jews that is alien to Western ideals. The region’s entire culture — steeped in identity politics, religious fanaticism, and tribal loyalty — is at odds with the Western world’s belief in non-violent political transition, tolerance, and free speech. It seems hard, if not impossible, for the West to stop a group of regional cultures that refuse to let go of centuries of bloody feuds, and importing — or allying with — any of them is even more foolish.

Still, the Marxist Islamification of Democrat politics is far and away the biggest threat facing us at home right now. Mamdani is turning the mayor’s residence into a mosque and rolling out socialized grocery stores that are doomed to fail. Homos for Palestine. That’s the burgeoning face of lefty politics. Murderous, destructive absurdity.

And even as the Muslim hordes victimize them, as they certainly will, lefties will dream about “white, Christian men” to persecute.

The whole thing is perverse.

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How the AI Surveillance State Just Took to The Skies...

Ashley E Brasfield — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:14:32 GMT

Well guys, Flock just got wings.

Those street-side cameras that are already all across America, what if I told you they’re not stopping there? The same company behind the cameras are now putting autonomous surveillance drones in the sky. And depending on who you ask, it’s either the The future of public safety or the more likely option, the biggest expansion of government surveillance we’ve seen yet.

Now the company’s automated license plate readers have spread across the country creating one of the nation’s largest interconnected video surveillance networks. The drone sits inside a waterproof docking station, waiting for a call, and when a 911 report comes in, The drone can launch automatically and fly up to 60 miles per hour.

Officers don’t even have to be standing nearby. They can deploy it directly from one of these little things, a smartphone.

And this thing isn’t just flying overhead.

It’s got thermal imaging, high definition cameras, and powerful optical zoom. And well, according to Flock, it can even read a vehicle’s license plate from 2,000 feet away. That’s not terrifying at all.

We’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on. And we’re using AI to monitor the video.

Well, Flock says that’s exactly the point.

The company claims that its product can help locate missing children, track dangerous suspects, monitor police pursuits, and give first responders critical information before they arrive on scene.

And that sounds great and all, but let’s be real. When you combine autonomous drones with millions of license plate scans and all its bells and whistles, and then you put it in the government’s hand, you obviously create something far more powerful than a typical police tool.

Groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation argue this dramatically expands law enforcement’s ability to monitor where ordinary Americans go every day. Because flawed cameras just don’t record suspected criminals, they collect information on virtually every vehicle that passes by.

And when it’s necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.

And concern has grown so much so, it’s made its way to Capitol Hill. Republican Congressman Tim Burchett recently introduced the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act. The bill would stop federal agencies from purchasing, operating, accessing, or contracting for mass surveillance systems, including flock cameras.

Another lawmaker is taking aim at Flock as well.

Congressman Thomas Massey says he’ll soon introduce legislation cutting off federal funding for cities and police departments that use Flock or similar systems to surveil law-abiding Americans. His slogan? Don’t Flock me.

Because once drones can launch themselves, track vehicles from the sky, streamline video, and connect with one of the largest license plate databases in the country, the question isn’t just what technology can do, it’s who decides when it gets used and who can access it.

Well, those questions remain largely unanswered.

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