Virginia Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger is touting a series of major business investments as part of a new jobs push, but each of the headline projects she highlighted was first announced under her Republican predecessor, Glenn Youngkin. Spanberger announced she had signed legislation tied to several high-dollar investments across the Commonwealth, including projects from Avio USA, Hitachi Energy, Eli Lilly and Company, and AstraZeneca. “Attracting new companies and jobs to communities across our Commonwealth is a core focus of my administration,” she posted on social media. Collectively, the deals represent billions in capital investment and thousands of jobs in regions like Pittsylvania, Halifax, Goochland, and Albemarle counties. The announcement lacked details, but they were found in the press release sent to local journalists. However, each of those projects had already been publicly announced during Youngkin’s administration, in some cases months earlier. At the time, state and corporate leaders emphasized the long-term economic impact these projects would have on the Commonwealth. Then-Gov. Youngkin described Hitachi Energy’s $457 million expansion in South Boston as a “landmark investment.” Unveiled in September 2025, the project is expected to create more than 800 high-paying jobs in a historically underserved region. Youngkin described the project as “transformational for Southside Virginia,” noting that the facility would strengthen the electrical grid supply chain. AstraZeneca characterized its Virginia investment as a “cornerstone” of its broader U.S. manufacturing push aimed at boosting domestic pharmaceutical production and reducing reliance on foreign supply chains. Similarly, Avio USA’s planned rocket motor manufacturing facility, a roughly $500 million investment announced in late 2025, was framed by Youngkin as significant for both national security and Virginia’s growing aerospace sector. Eli Lilly’s project was likewise presented as a generational investment in both public health and regional growth, with company officials highlighting its role in producing cutting-edge treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases while anchoring a growing life sciences corridor in Virginia. The move comes as Spanberger faces mounting political headwinds early in her tenure. Recent polling has shown her support slipping, particularly among independents, the very voters who delivered her victory, alongside growing skepticism about her leadership and economic agenda. As previously reported, concerns about affordability and governance have already begun to erode her standing. Polling shows that 41% of Virginians believe Spanberger’s policies will make the state less affordable, compared to 31% who say she will make it more affordable, with independents breaking sharply negative. Even among Democrats, a notable share of respondents say her policies will either have no impact or worsen costs. The numbers reinforce ongoing concern about economic conditions in the state. Against that backdrop, highlighting investments, even those initiated under the Youngkin administration, offers a clear political upside. Spanberger can point to job creation, business recruitment, and economic wins that were aggressively pursued, prioritized, and developed by her Republican predecessor.  Taken together, the episode reads less like a routine policy announcement and more like policy piracy, an attempt to associate her administration with economic successes that voters already recognize, even if they were delivered by someone else. In Virginia politics, where economic development is often a long game, the timeline matters. And in this case, it points squarely back to the previous administration.

A legislative package that promises to be the largest overhaul of kids’ online safety regulation in decades was advanced last month by the House Energy & Commerce Committee. A good sign of a bill’s efficacy, however, is how strongly the industry it aims to regulate opposes it. So far, most of the package — including the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection (COPPA 2.0) Act — has not drawn serious opposition from Big Tech. What gives? On balance, Silicon Valley has much to gain if these laws pass as drafted. For starters, the Senate version of COPPA 2.0 doubles down on the existing age of internet adulthood being 13, thus maintaining the industry-preferred status quo. This ignores the harms social media can cause teens well after 13, such as fueling depression, social isolation, or worse. David Molak, to offer just one heartbreaking example, was driven by online cyberbullying to commit suicide at 16 years old. That’s why eminent figures like Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt call for raising the age of social media eligibility to 16, and others call for 18. This is bad, but perhaps the legislation’s biggest gift to Big Tech is its numerous provisions to preempt or block a growing crop of state laws designed to hold these companies accountable. A look at the finer details of the legislation reveal that Congress would replace robust state regulation with a far lighter “federal standard,” setting a very low ceiling for kids’ online safety at the state level. Republican sponsors, of course, frame things differently. In the Washington Post, Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY), E&C Committee Chair and lead sponsor of the KIDS Act, described the package in adversarial terms, as Congress moving to correct Big Tech’s egregious failure to “self-regulate.” Guthrie is doubtless correct about Big Tech’s shortcomings. But this only makes it more noteworthy that the tech industry does not oppose this legislation. Big Tech hasn’t been silent about every bill in the package. The App Store Accountability Act, which has been enacted in four states (thus far), has received significant pushback. The Apple-backed App Association decried the bill as a “poison pill” that would stifle “innovation,” explicitly calling it a “fly in the AI package ointment.” By openly referring to the child safety package as “the AI package,” the App Association gives away the game. Insiders in Washington regularly admit that they are using the child safety package to mollify the concerns of parents and child safety advocates to pave the way for Congress to pass — what the White House calls — a “minimally burdensome” federal AI standard. In an unguarded interview, Amy Bos, vice president of governmental affairs for industry group NetChoice, speaks of “leveraging, or using, possibly, a kid’s package … to get AI across the finish line.” Big Tech is only interested in kids’ safety if it comes with a much bigger payoff: a federal law that would stop states from enforcing tougher AI regulations. In fact, with help from Republican leadership, Big Tech has already tried twice — and failed twice — to get Congress to do exactly that. According to a recent announcement by Senator Ted Cruz, one of Big Tech’s key Congressional allies, it looks like Silicon Valley is gearing up for a third attempt. And it seems they’ll have the buy-in to try again. As Politico recently reported, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that a federal AI standard is “a ‘big priority’ for the Trump administration, and [he] said a potential bill could be folded into a larger package with other proposals like a kids’ online safety bill.” But the American people see things differently. Weakening kids’ online safety legislation by tying it to a sweeping “AI package” is a non-starter for American families. Parents nationwide have heard the terrifying story of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old boy who was goaded into taking his own life by ChatGPT. They fear that their child might be next. It’s no surprise, then, why, according to a national poll by the Institute for Family Studies, American voters want Congress to prioritize kids’ online safety over industry carveouts by a margin of nine to one. Robust online safety for kids is a winning electoral strategy, but tying it to deregulation of AI is a political loser. As a second national Institute for Family Studies poll found, Republican voters in red states support Congressional candidates who protect children from AI harms and oppose those who push preemption. For a party expected to face serious challenges during midterms, it would seem that Republican leadership would be eager to champion the desires of its voters. Congress should, like countless state legislatures, side with voters and not protect Big Tech companies from responsibility. We have had enough of that. Ultimately, Rep. Guthrie is right: American families “deserve more than gestures and idle promises. They deserve laws that work.” That includes his. * * * Jared Hayden is a policy analyst at the Institute for Family Studies’ Family First Technology Initiative.  Michael Toscano is the director of the Family First Technology Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro sat down with Peter Robinson on “Uncommon Knowledge” for a conversation that ultimately landed on a single, animating concern: what happens to a political movement, and a country, when it loses its grip on truth. “Every proposition, when originally proposed, is nuanced,” he said, “and by the time it is popularized, it becomes a bumper sticker.” That flattening, he argued, has reshaped American politics on both the Left and the Right, replacing argument with emotion and, increasingly, skepticism with outright conspiracism. That shift, in his telling, is downstream of collapsing institutional trust. Events like Russiagate, COVID-era policymaking, and the unrest of 2020 each contained “grains of truth,” he said, but those truths were “abstracted into a theory whereby the fundamental institutions of the West are themselves corrupted.” Once that belief sets in, “you’re susceptible to literally anything.” Nowhere is that dynamic more visible, he argued, than in the rise of grievance politics. On the global stage, Shapiro pointed to Israel as a case study in how success breeds resentment. “There’s only one successful state in the Middle East … a tiny state,” he said, noting its economic and military strength relative to the region. “That country is hated for its success because of that.” But the same instinct, he warned, is now taking root on the American Right. If people come to believe the United States is in managed decline, they begin searching for someone to blame. “You start to look at who’s had a pretty good 80 years?” he said. “The truth is that Jews in America have had an amazing 80 years … and the state of Israel has had a pretty stellar 80 years.” That line of thinking, he suggested, helps explain the overlap between populist grievance and rising anti-Semitism. Shapiro has increasingly taken aim at those tendencies within his own coalition. Reflecting on a recent speech at Turning Point USA following the murder of Charlie Kirk, he warned that “the conservative movement is in serious danger … from charlatans who … traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” In the interview, he was more blunt: “There is a market for conspiracism.” He dismissed criticism from figures like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly as beside the point. “They’re not even remotely arguments,” he said, drawing a distinction between censorship and judgment. “Anyone can have anyone on any stage at any time. This is America. If you decide to waste your time listening to the conspiratorial ravings of an incipient madman like Tucker Carlson, you can do that. This is America. But you are also wasting your time and you’re making your brain dumber.” That raised a deeper question: what actually defines conservatism today? Shapiro drew a sharp distinction between the Republican Party and the conservative movement, arguing the former is “a vehicle for victory,” while the latter has lost touch with its philosophical roots. The principles that once undergirded the right, limited government, federalism, localism, are no longer widely understood. “When you say to people, government should be as small as it can, most people’s reaction is, why?” he said. “Most politicians even have no capacity to explain that.” The result, he predicts, is fragmentation. The post-Trump coalition contains too many competing strains to hold together long-term. “It will fragment,” he said, pointing to a broader “withering of the ability to explain the philosophy undergirding these policy preferences.” That same erosion, he argued, is playing out in governance itself. Blue states losing residents to red states are unlikely to correct course anytime soon. “That’s like saying when will East Germany fix itself if they had left an open border,” he said. “It won’t — because everybody who wanted to fix it left.” Real change, he suggested, will only come through crisis: “The only thing that could happen that would prompt it is almost full-scale collapse of some of these states in terms of their financing and fiscal capacity. And I think that will come. I think that you will see bankruptcy of many of these states.” Still, Shapiro’s most pointed critique was cultural, not political: “One of the great disappointments of my life has been finding out that people follow people, not ideas,” he said. That reality, he argued, fuels everything from audience capture to the spread of bad thinking. It also undercuts what he sees as the core of the American experiment: the idea that problems are meant to be solved. “If you’ve got a problem in your life, it is solvable by you,” he said. “If you don’t have a solution, if you’re asking questions and you’re not interested in the answers, then as I’ve said before, you’re not really asking questions. You’re fomenting a proposition.” In Shapiro’s view, that shift, from solving problems to narrating them, is the real fault line in American life. And until it’s reversed, the politics built on top of it will remain unstable.

Early Monday morning, April 6, an assailant fired 13 rounds into the front door of Indianapolis Councilman Ron Gibson’s home. A note left on the doorstep read, “No Data Centers.” Gibson’s eight-year-old son was inside at the time. This was an act of political violence against a public servant and his family. No policy disagreement justifies targeting a residence where a child sleeps. However, this event forces a necessary question: Does the anti-AI movement possess a limiting principle? When activists and astroturf groups spend years asserting that artificial intelligence poses a civilizational catastrophe and that data centers destroy communities, they must reckon with the logical conclusion of that rhetoric. This violence is not a detached incident; it is a predictable outcome of escalated alarmism. The movement appears caught between two identities. It is either a genuine revolution in which “true believers” act on the conviction that humanity is at stake, or it is a performative outrage — “clicktivism” — fueled by apocalyptic language used for political utility rather than its truth. Neither path leads to a stable or productive society. This hyper-reaction and doomsaying are familiar. During the net neutrality debate at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under Chairman Ajit Pai, staff, including myself, received death threats because of claims that undoing Title II telecommunications regulation would be the “end of the Internet as we know it.” The internet survived, and the rhetoric intensified. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced legislation to freeze all new data center construction. As they proudly note, at least twelve states have considered moratorium bills. While presented as a grassroots uprising, the anti-data center movement functions more like a sophisticated “astroturfing” campaign. This involves creating the facade of widespread, spontaneous public support for a cause while the momentum is actually manufactured by elite entities. The Future of Life Institute received a single cryptocurrency donation valued at over $660 million, while the broader “AI Existential Risk Ecosystem” has directed over a billion dollars toward AI existential risk advocacy. This is regulatory capture masked as moral concern. These organizations use their capital to mobilize local communities against infrastructure projects under the guise of safety. Yet, as Pirate Wires has documented, many claims regarding water consumption and grid instability rely on misleading or inaccurate statistics. In fact, the entire myth about water usage stems from an uncorrected error in a 2025 book by tech journalist Karen Ho. There is a stark hypocrisy in this opposition. Every critic posting against data centers on social media relies on the physical infrastructure they seek to dismantle. Data centers power the cloud and the AI tools that 58 percent of small businesses now utilize. One cannot demand the destruction of the digital economy’s foundation while simultaneously benefiting from its output. Public discourse regarding energy, water, and land use is a vital part of democracy. Civil discussion in public hearings is the proper forum for debate. Shooting at a councilman’s door is an assault on that process. Councilman Gibson stated that this violence would not deter him. It shouldn’t. The United States should lead the way in AI development and enable all Americans to participate in the digital economy. However, those fostering public panic must decide: are they leading a revolution or a performance? If it is a performance, it must end. *** Nathan Leamer is the executive director of Build American AI and a former policy advisor to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

“Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” star Taylor Frankie Paul has been granted visitation rights for the 2-year-old son she shares with ex-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen, but only under supervision. The exes had their first hearing on Tuesday, during which Utah Third District Court Commissioner Russell Minas expressed concerns about the behavior of both parents. He described Paul’s conduct as egregious. “I’m concerned about her volatility,” the judge said, according to Page Six. “When she snaps, there is significance to it.” “Even if [Mortensen] was trying to provoke a response, the actions that occurred are very troubling,” Minas added, responding to Paul’s attorney’s argument that she had been goaded. “Dakota pushes buttons, he’s excellent at that,” her attorney said. “As long as they stay apart, then there is no risk to the child … the child is safe with Taylor, the child thrives with Taylor.” Minas referenced the video footage from a 2023 incident that went viral and ultimately led to Paul’s season of “The Bachelorette” being yanked from the air days before it was scheduled to premiere. The judge said Paul’s apparent failure to recognize that the child was in danger contributed to his decision to allow only supervised visits. “She did not realize that the child was being exposed,” he said. “That’s one of the concerns I have.” Paul was granted up to six hours of supervised visits per week with her son, Ever, which can be broken up into two or three-hour increments. The ruling will stand until the next hearing later this month. The 31-year-old reality star filed a temporary restraining order request against Mortensen ahead of the April 7 hearing, alleging a “pattern of abusive conduct and coercive control” during their relationship between 2022 and 2025, according to People. Paul shares Ever, 2, with Mortensen. She is also the mother of Indy, 8, and Ocean, 5, whom she shares with her ex-husband, Tate Paul. Indy was allegedly injured in the previously reported barstool-throwing incident.  Mortensen gained temporary custody of Ever on March 20 after he filed a restraining order against Paul. The former couple is scheduled to battle it out in court on April 30, when Minas is expected to evaluate both petitions for protective orders.  “We’ll have a showdown on the 30th,” Paul’s lawyer Eric Swinyard said. “Hopefully it won’t be a showdown,” Minas said. “I’m hoping you can come to some resolution.”