If one were to believe that the survival of the West is at a crucial inflection point, it makes sense that America — the lone superpower, as an enfeebled Britain limps along self-righteously — would shore up allies in the Old Country. One way to do that is to send the most powerful man in the world’s Number Two to both extend the hand of goodwill and rapport, and to absorb the inevitable criticisms that have been hurled by the Continental class regarding the potential partnership. It tracks then that the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board cannot seem to comprehend why Vice President JD Vance is currently touring Budapest. “The Orbán affinity seems to be a combination of Mr. Vance’s ideological conviction and domestic coalition maintenance,” the paper writes, adding that, “Mr. Vance is convinced Mr. Orbán is on the front line of the West’s culture wars.” Orbán is. And Vance’s Budapest visit is possibly one of his career’s most important tests. Consider the VP’s own words. “Foreign influence is when other governments threaten, cajole, and try to use economic influence to tell you how to vote … That is fundamentally an assault on your sovereignty,” the VP said in an interview. Furthermore, he added, in a speech, “We were birthed from this continent,” reinforcing the civilizational ties. The WSJ is baffled at that. “Mr. Vance trotted out the word ‘sovereignty’ repeatedly during Tuesday’s appearance in Budapest to inveigh against putative EU meddling in Hungarian affairs.” The Hungarian election this year is important for two different reasons. The fact that the VP is flying to Budapest for a high-profile visit and speeches in Europe, as well as to Islamabad, for the peace negotiations with Iran, demonstrates which side won the ideological debate within the White House and to which direction the grand strategy of this country might lead. But there is another important factor. Beyond rhetorical symbolism about “civilizational ties,” the question is strategic. Within the European Union, Hungary remains one of the rare few states still considered neutral by both the U.S. and Russia, thereby positioning itself as a neutral ground for diplomacy. Furthermore, Budapest has prioritized de-escalation in Ukraine since 2022 and continues to simultaneously condemn the Russian invasion while arguing for negotiation, a traditional detached realist outlook shaped by Hungarian geography: Hungary borders Ukraine, and is concerned about ethnic Hungarians in the Transcarpathia region, and has taken in over a million Ukrainian refugees. Budapest is also a pivot point for U.S. trade rivalry with the EU. The Hungarian leadership consistently argued that EU sanctions on Russia have had unintended consequences, including energy shortages, inflation, and industrial strain in Europe, while Russia has continued to benefit from high global energy prices. Orbán has likewise warned against accelerating Ukraine’s membership in NATO, a position that has gained some reflection in recent U.S. strategic thinking. The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy clearly states that there must be a pause in NATO enlargement, there should be total “burden shifting” of conventional security to NATO, and that the EU shouldn’t fine American companies and trade through cynical legislation that also curtails free speech, such as the European Digital Services Act. There is only one country that is aligned with the U.S. on all those interests. Hungary faces its own challenges and contradictions. Eventually, it will have to either acquiesce to broader European oversight or follow Britain out of the EU. Orbán has sought to reform the EU from within rather than leave it, but that play won’t succeed without the U.S. decisively winning the trade and free-speech wars with the EU. His government faces ongoing pressure from Brussels through legal challenges and financial penalties, but being within the EU gives it veto power over European decisions that might harm U.S. financial interests. Hungary is also a testing ground and a source of inspiration for similar socio-political tendencies in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, particularly in natalist policies, even if its model is difficult to replicate in larger and more diverse societies. This is rooted in Hungary’s historical experience with external domination, against the Nazis and Soviets, which reinforces elite skepticism toward ceding total authority to Brussels. Continued electoral success for Orbán would sustain this fragile model but likely also intensify EU pressure and raise the risk of political and economic friction. A defeat, however, would probably lead to rapid alignment with mainstream EU trade and social policies, and would be detrimental to U.S. interests. It cannot be expected of the WSJ Editorial Board to be historically minded, but during the presidency of Millard Fillmore, the Hungarian nationalist Lajos (Louis) Kossuth visited and gave a joint address at the U.S. Congress, the second such foreigner after Lafayette. He then proceeded to visit Ohio, then the largest Hungarian diaspora in the country, and gave a speech stating that the spirit of our age is democracy opposed to imperialism. Whether he can pull the current Hungarian administration over the electoral line is a different question, but it is only fitting that a former senator of Ohio and the current vice president be visiting Europe and remind Europeans of that same sentiment, that sovereignty, free speech, and democracy are far more important than transnational imperialism. *** Dr. Sumantra Maitra is a historian based in Virginia.

The FBI has arrested a former Army employee accused of leaking classified information to a journalist. FBI Director Kash Patel said Wednesday that Courtney Williams, 40, a former employee at Fort Bragg who previously held top security clearance, has been charged with transmitting classified national defense information.  “FBI and our partners have arrested a former [Special Operations Command] employee, who supported our top-level military warfighters, for allegedly transmitting classified information to a member of the media. Outstanding work by [FBI Charlotte] and the FBI Counterintelligence & Espionage Division – as well as our [Justice Department] partners,” Patel said.  “Let this serve as a message to any would-be leakers: we’re working these cases, and we’re making arrests. This FBI will not tolerate those who seek to betray our country and put Americans in harm’s way,” he added.  In a subsequent post, Patel suggested that more arrests over leaks were “coming.” The arrest follows statements by President Donald Trump threatening jail time for reporters who decline to identify sources in connection with a leak about a downed American aircraft.  Williams held top security clearance from 2010 to 2016. Authorities say that from 2022 to 2025, she communicated with an investigative journalist through more than 10 hours of phone calls and 180 text messages. She allegedly shared “tactics, techniques and procedures” related to a special operations force.  While not named in court documents, the journalist appears to be Seth Harp, the author of “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.” An excerpt from the book appeared in POLITICO under the headline, “My Life Became a Living Hell’: One Woman’s Career in Delta Force, the Army’s Most Elite Unit,” and focused on Williams’ experience in Delta Force.  In a post on X, Harp claimed that Williams had done nothing criminal.  “Trump’s unhinged DOJ will not even say what ‘classified information’ she allegedly leaked,” he said. “Her arrest and imprisonment is an outrage.” Harp told WRAL-TV that “the government is going after Courtney for the sole reason that she exposed sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the unit,” adding, “This is a vindictive act of retaliation.” Text messages cited in court documents suggest Williams was aware of potential legal risk following the publication of Harp’s book. In one message, she allegedly expressed concern about “the amount of classified information being disclosed,” and in a separate message wrote, “I might actually get arrested . . . for disclosing classified information.”  Another message attributed to Williams said that she knew she was “probably going to jail for life.” Court documents show that Williams will be appointed counsel from the Eastern District of North Carolina Federal Public Defender’s Office. An attorney has not yet been publicly identified.

A ceasefire is not peace. It is not the formal end of hostilities. It is a pause. General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made that unmistakably clear at a Pentagon press conference on April 8, his first since President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran the previous evening: “A ceasefire is a pause, and the joint force remains ready, if ordered or called upon, to resume combat operations with the same speed and precision as we’ve demonstrated over the last 38 days.” Iran’s rulers should now understand that this president does not bluff. The United States and Israel remain, in Trump’s words during January’s anti-regime uprising, “locked and loaded and ready to go.” Since that warning, the landscape has changed dramatically. Domestically, more than 40,000 Iranians have died after the regime unleashed extraordinary violence against demonstrators. Militarily, Iran has been badly weakened by combined U.S.-Israeli operations: its navy crippled, air defenses penetrated, missile stockpiles and launchers significantly reduced, and key elements of its defense-industrial and economic-industrial base severely damaged. The supreme leader and 51 of his top commanders and advisors have been eliminated along with thousands of members of the IRGC, Basij, law enforcement, and intelligence apparatus. Diplomatically, nearly six weeks of attacks on Arab capitals have shattered what little trust remained between Tehran and its Gulf neighbors, and Iran is increasingly isolated even from American allies who have their fair share of differences with President Trump. Psychologically, Iran’s leadership has learned that beneath Trump’s social media theatrics — offensive to many — lies a president willing to act. As in many wars, both sides now claim victory. But Iran’s claim is far less persuasive. For now, the regime has achieved the minimum objective of survival. Yet survival under sustained military, economic, and political pressure is not strategic success. The possibility of an Iran freed from Islamic Republic rule remains very much alive. As talks begin this weekend in Pakistan to solidify the ceasefire, Washington should negotiate from a position of maximum leverage, not compromise. None of the 10 points reportedly included in Tehran’s public proposal deserves serious consideration: lifting all sanctions, preserving Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, demanding war reparations, permitting continued uranium enrichment, and insisting on an indefinite halt to hostilities would amount to strategic surrender by the United States. Tehran’s original 10-point proposal was fundamentally unserious, unacceptable, and, as the White House put it, “completely discarded.” That should remain the administration’s posture. The central reality has not changed during these volatile weeks: The Islamic Republic remains the most dangerous force destabilizing the Middle East and a direct threat to American security. Replacing it with a government that allows Iranians to reclaim their country should remain the central objective of U.S. policy. That requires abandoning illusions about trade-offs. Unlike the Obama administration’s pursuit of the 2015 nuclear deal, the Trump administration should not seek to persuade, incentivize, or rehabilitate Iran’s rulers. It should present terms and insist on compliance. That means no enrichment. It means surrendering Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile. It means intrusive, unannounced inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a prelude to dismantling Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and ballistic missile program. It means freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. It means maintaining all sanctions until Tehran proves over time that it has ended support for regional terror proxies and complied fully with American demands. And if protest conditions re-emerge inside Iran, Washington should stand openly with those protesters regardless of diplomatic timing. Claims that Iran’s protest movement is dead ignore a quarter-century of repeated uprisings. Again and again, the regime has crushed dissent; again and again, outside observers have declared the opposition finished; again and again, they have been wrong. Since the 12-Day War of June 2025, when U.S. and Israeli aircraft struck Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure, Tehran has learned what maximum pressure actually means. There is no reason to ease it now — and every reason to intensify it. If Iran refuses — as it almost certainly will — then the alternative to accepting American defeat is exactly what Gen. Caine described: resume combat operations. *** Mark Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the presenter of “The Iran Breakdown” podcast. Ben Cohen is a research fellow at FDD. 

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** For years, progressives have been shrieking about book bans, insisting conservatives want to pull classics from library shelves or burn fantasy novels for promoting witchcraft. It was always a straw man.  The real fight was never about classic literature; it was about books like “Gender Queer,” which includes illustrations of oral sex and masturbation, and which 90% of voters in a 2023 poll said was inappropriate for public school libraries. Or it was about “This Book Is Gay,” which introduces dating apps to teenagers. Those books are undeniably gross, but they do have exactly one redeeming quality: They are obvious. If your kid came home with a copy of “Gender Queer” or “This Book Is Gay,” it would immediately signal that it was time to attend a school board meeting. But there’s a much more dangerous form of young adult literature out there, and it’s lurking behind an intentionally deceptive cover that’s meant to trick parents into thinking everything is fine. Rebecca Bendheim, the author of a YA book for teen readers, posted on social media about deliberately designing the cover art to hide the book’s theme from parents while simultaneously advertising it to children. “When Penguin [Random House] asked me what I wanted for my cover, I said I wanted it to be gay enough for queer kids and teens to clock it, but for homophobic parents to just think it’s a friendship story,” the author and middle school teacher bragged on Instagram. The book is called “When You’re Brave Enough” and was released on Tuesday. According to the publisher, it is recommended for children ages 10–14. “So I said, no holding hands, make my character look gay,” Bendheim explained. She went on to point out subtle details she and the cover artist agreed on, including flowers growing between the pair to represent a crush that’s “growing.” In a follow-up video, Bendheim showed her book cover to random people on the street to see if they could guess what it was about. “Shoutout to the people who answered and to librarians who help kids and teens find subtle queer books if they need them,” she wrote in the caption. “I’m a firm believer that positive representation saves lives!! Would you be able to tell?”   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Rebecca Bendheim (@rebeccabendheim) Bendheim’s approach is insidious for what it hides. But other YA authors aren’t bothering to hide anything at all. A “Good Morning America” YA Book Club selection, “Sibylline,” apparently includes graphic sex scenes depicting necrophilia, threesomes, and rape, with no warnings for unsuspecting parents. The novel, written by Melissa de la Cruz, is advertised as “a heart-stopping dark academia romantasy series” in the YA genre. Typically, these books are aimed at middle and high school children, with characters around that same age range. “Sibylline” was published on February 3. When the main character Atticus dies, two other characters attempt to revive him by engaging in sexual acts with his apparently lifeless body. The scene — presented from the perspective of the dying character — depicts a graphic, non-consensual sexual encounter between all three characters. There are no content warnings anywhere on the book. The book has been earning mostly one-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, with readers noting the themes are wildly inappropriate for its target audience. “The audience is children and there are graphic descriptions of sexual acts between characters. Yes, the characters are older. No, they’re not always consenting,” one reviewer wrote. “The main three characters participate in a threesome that is graphic, and this book is listed as appropriate for 9th through 12th graders, which is completely insane,” another said. “If we think that it’s appropriate to market sex — let alone a threesome — to 12-year-olds, there’s a serious problem in this industry.” Child sexualization used to be something the culture at least pretended to oppose. The exploitative imagery around a teenage Britney Spears, the Calvin Klein ads featuring a 15-year-old Brooke Shields — society claimed to reckon with all of it. So why have people in the publishing industry decided those lessons don’t apply to them? The answer, it turns out, is that some of the people running that industry don’t think there’s a problem here. Andrew Karre is an executive editor at Penguin Random House’s Dutton Books for Young Readers, the same publishing house behind “When You’re Brave Enough.” In an interview with PEN America published in November 2025, he was remarkably candid about his worldview. “Once you approach it that way, what is a part of teenage experience?” Karre said. “Sex. Whether actually having it or imagining having it, sex is inextricable from 13- to 19-year-olds.” He went further, saying that a YA publishing industry without sexual content was essentially unimaginable. “If, all of a sudden, it became impossible to publish YA novels with sex in them, I think it would effectively become impossible to publish YA novels as I understand them,” he said. “I don’t think that’s hyperbolic at all.” Karre also argued that since teenagers will encounter sex anyway through what he called “ethically problematic” avenues like pornography, books serve as a healthier medium to instruct them. Those who would prefer sexual content removed from YA books, in his view, are simply making an error. He speaks for an industry that seems to indicate it knows better than parents what children should be reading. This all amounts to a multifaceted attack on parental authority. On one side, authors and publishers are deliberately designing books to slip past parents’ radars with cover art engineered to look innocent. On the other, you have publishers saturating the YA market with graphic sexual content that has no warnings, all in service of providing instruction to sex-curious teens. The Supreme Court pushed back last year. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court ruled 6-3 that parents retain a constitutional right to shield their children from objectionable material in public schools. That ruling was a start, but it doesn’t solve the problem of YA publishers believing they have the moral duty to impart sexual instruction on minors. Parents need to know these books exist, and they need to keep speaking out against them. The publishing industry has made it abundantly clear it’s not censoring anything.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** Dax Shepherd made headlines earlier this year for telling his 11-year-old daughter that he’d pay for her to freeze her eggs when she turns 18 so she won’t “have to think about that.” By “that,” what the actor presumably meant was any trade-offs at all. A woman’s window for having children is biologically determined, starting in her adolescence and ending in her forties, with declines in fertility beginning on average in her mid-to-late thirties. Egg freezing, proponents tell us, is a way to extend that window as much as possible and stave off any declines. The idea is that if a woman freezes her eggs at the peak of her fertility — in her twenties, or perhaps even earlier — she can buy herself time in her thirties and forties, and maybe even beyond that if she’s willing to use a surrogate. Clearly, more and more people find it compelling: Between 2014 and 2021, the number of women undergoing egg freezing nearly quadrupled, and many employers now offer it as a health benefit. Egg freezing, in other words, has been successfully presented in the culture as a trade-off-free solution to trade-offs that have traditionally been forced by biology and social mores. There’s no rush to date, or marry, or have kids; your eggs are frozen, you can relax, you have all the time in the world. The problem is that no matter the cultural narrative that has formed around egg freezing, technology has yet to supersede biology. Egg freezing, like any other treatment, comes with real trade-offs and potential side effects, and it should be treated as the medical procedure it is, rather than a means of prolonging family formation indefinitely. To be clear, there are cases where egg freezing has obvious pros: For instance, ovarian cancer patients can freeze their eggs prior to chemotherapy to help preserve their fertility. Women with endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome can also often benefit from egg freezing at younger ages, as those conditions often make natural conception more difficult. It is a great blessing of the modern world that we can avail ourselves of these options. That said, there are also cons to egg freezing that almost no one talks about. Julie Fredrickson, a venture capitalist in Montana, wrote on her blog that she chose to freeze her eggs in her early 30s as “an insurance policy” when she and her husband were struggling to establish their careers. But by the time the invasive egg extraction procedure was over, Fredrickson began to develop an autoimmune condition that left her too sick to be able to carry a pregnancy. Her rheumatologist believes it was caused by the egg freezing process itself. “I’m honestly astonished no one said a f*cking thing,” she wrote. “No maybe you should talk to a counselor. No here is what could go wrong. No here is how you might feel. No disclosure or discussions of some of the outlier cases of how these hormones might impact me … I’d struggled with some inflammatory conditions as a kid … But no one ever brought up that being stimulated to produce eggs for harvesting might set off a chain reaction with my latent autoimmune complaints.” Fredrickson’s story, while perhaps rare, shows the importance of informed consent that is often glossed over by free advertising from stories in the mainstream media. Dismissing possible side effects while overselling efficacy rates is ultimately harmful to women, whether they choose to freeze their eggs or not. Take Brigitte Adams, who went viral in 2014 for being on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek on an issue titled “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.” At the time, the idea was new, even revolutionary. And yet, per a Washington Post article that profiled her four years later, when she was in her mid 40s, she was unable to have a child from any of the 11 eggs she had frozen.  Unfortunately, her story is not uncommon: The overall chance of a live birth from frozen eggs is just 39%, which is lower than the overall chance of a live birth from embryo transfer. That’s not even considering the logistical challenges. Women who freeze their eggs not only pay the cost of the medical procedure, but the steep cost of keeping their eggs frozen, often entailing two or three decades worth of subscription fees. They are also physically storing their potential futures in an external space that’s out of their control, which entails real risk, too; there have been cases, including in California and Ohio, where eggs and embryos have been lost or destroyed by clinics.  Additionally, because frozen eggs have to be fertilized in vitro, and embryos have to be created outside the womb, women should also consider how they might feel about having frozen embryos down the line that they might never implant. For some women, it’s no problem at all, but for other women, it can become (sometimes unexpectedly) a cause of real moral concern. None of this is to say that egg freezing is inherently a bad decision, just that it’s a more serious one than the media and industry make it out to be. Beyond that, only 6% of patients use their eggs within five to seven years, with higher rates of use among older women. While there may be many reasons for this — including the possibility that many women with frozen eggs wind up getting pregnant naturally — it implies that at least some of these women are having difficulty getting to a place in life where they feel prepared to have children. Given the steep cost of egg freezing, it’s less likely that most of these women feel unprepared financially, and more likely that even with what has been touted as an “insurance policy” and “extra time,” they are still having difficulty meeting men and settling down. Acknowledging this shouldn’t entail shaming single women; rather, it should make us consider just how much contemporary dating culture is failing women. We expect women to tolerate what Hadley Heath Manning, in a report for Independent Women, calls “the decade of dating — often a decade of drifting through life — that the average American experiences today between their late teens and late twenties.” This expectation of “drifting” hurts men, too, but ultimately it is women who have the most to lose in the precious years of their youth. Rather than encouraging egg freezing as a means to enable even more wasted time among men and women alike, we should encourage young people to align themselves with biological reality. At its best, egg freezing can be a means to work with that reality, but it should not be seen as a way to escape the very real choices that all humans inevitably face. After all, the ultimate biological clock, for men and women alike, is death. Even if modern technology gives us a wider array of reproductive choices than people had in the past, we can only kick down the can for so long. *** Neeraja Deshpande is an Independent Women policy analyst and senior IW Features contributor.