The top baby names of 2025 have finally been revealed. Olivia and Liam remain America’s most popular baby names for the seventh year, according to the Social Security Administration (SSA). The new rankings marked Liam’s ninth consecutive year as the most popular name. Liam — an Irish form of William — first claimed the top spot in 2017 and has remained there ever since. Olivia, whose name derives from the Latin word for “olive tree,” joined Liam at No. 1 in 2019, ending Emma’s five-year streak as the most popular girls’ name. Here’s how the top baby names stacked up, according to SSA’s latest data. Top 10 Boy Baby Names Liam Noah Oliver Theodore Henry James Elijah Mateo William Lucas Top 10 Girl Baby Names Olivia Charlotte Emma Amelia Sophia Mia Isabella Evelyn Sofia Eliana “Last year, America’s most popular baby names remained consistent with years past, with minimal shifts in the top 10 rankings. Charlotte climbed to second place among girls, ending Emma’s six-year run in the runner-up slot. A top-10 fixture for years, Ava dropped from the list entirely – replaced by Eliana, which debuted at number 10. On the boys’ side, the top four names – Liam, Noah, Oliver, and Theodore – held their places,” the SSA said. The list comes as policymakers renew efforts to support mothers and families amid a plummeting, record-low birthrate. On Mother’s Day, the White House launched a website to help expectant mothers locate pregnancy centers and learn about health and wellness, a move framed as a nod to the pro-life and “Make America Healthy Again” movements, The Daily Wire exclusively reported. Moms.gov addresses “the needs of mothers and fathers who face difficult or unexpected pregnancies and [ensures] the wellbeing of mothers and the health of American families,” the White House said in a statement. Finally a one-stop home for all the resources needed for expectant mothers including nutrition, pregnancy support, life saving care and more.

I spent my twenties and early thirties immersed in the world of “Red Pill” content, an online, male-centric subculture. I began as an observer and later became a recognizable voice within it. I spoke at Red Pill–themed conferences like the 21 Convention and the Conference of Masculine Excellence, appeared on shows such as “Fresh and Fit” and “Rich Cooper Unplugged,” and met many of the movement’s most influential figures, including Rollo Tomassi and the Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan. The Red Pill (TRP) comes from “The Matrix,” in which Neo swallows the red pill and sees reality as it is. Applied to relationships, it means believing that you have pierced illusion and uncovered the hidden rules governing attraction, hierarchy, and power. TRP is not a single organization but a loose constellation — pickup artists, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) purists, incels, entrepreneurial “alpha” influencers — offering explanations for men’s frustrations with women and modern culture. It sounds clarifying. In practice, it operates as a closed system that dismisses counterevidence and turns contradiction into confirmation. Its message is simple: You are the victim of a culture that favors women and discards men. To deal with women safely, treat them as adversaries. And now that you see the truth, the path forward runs through my book, my course, my subscription. TRP is not a criminal enterprise. But having grown up in public housing projects, I recognize its psychological resemblance to gang recruitment. Gangs promise power, recognition, and protection to boys who feel shut out of legitimate paths to status. In return, gangs demand loyalty and offer refuge from a hostile world. Both gangs and TRP promise masculine empowerment. Both cultivate grievance and reward anger. And both depend on insecurity that leaders can expand — and monetize. Like many men who enter TRP, I arrived after a devastating romantic experience. When I was 22, a woman I had been dating told me she was pregnant — and that I might not be the father. A paternity test confirmed that I wasn’t. When my mother learned of the pregnancy, she was ecstatic, and her enthusiasm was undimmed after the test results. She invited my now-ex and the child to move in and treated the boy as her grandson, hanging “family” photos that made my humiliation visible. In embracing them both, she signaled, intentionally or not, that my dignity was secondary to her desire for a grandchild. When I stopped visiting, she seemed surprised that I was hurt. I thus felt rejected by two women in my life — one of whom had raised me — and I wanted an explanation. The Red Pill gave me one. A 2024 Journal of Gender Studies article, “Swallowing and Spitting Out the Red Pill,” by Matteo Botto and Lucas Gottzén, found that entry into TRP often follows romantic rejection, humiliation, loneliness, or feelings of inadequacy. Many who arrive are nursing private wounds. TRP teaches that you were hurt because you don’t understand the true nature of women. That ignorance, it says, led you to choose the wrong woman or to lose her because of your “blue-pilled, beta” behavior. In TRP’s taxonomy, you are either an alpha — the man every woman desires and other men seek to emulate — or a beta, ignored by women and disrespected by men. These false dichotomies prime men to see the world as adversarial. Yet TRP packages this worldview with just enough sensible self-improvement advice to make it seem plausible: get in shape, earn more money, develop real hobbies beyond video games and Netflix, and you will attract more women. If TRP did nothing more than offer that counsel, I would not compare it with street gangs. But the advice functions as a Trojan horse. Personal grievance binds the system together; outrage keeps it alive. TRP appeals to men who feel lost, doubt their value to women, and are searching for direction. Street gangs recruit from a similar population. Even in violent, low-income neighborhoods, most boys do not join gangs. Those who do typically enter between the ages of 12 and 15, when status anxiety and the need for belonging intensify. Longitudinal research — including the Rochester Youth Development Study and the Seattle Social Development Project — links gang membership to weak school attachment, delinquent peers, exposure to violence, and family instability. Poverty alone is not enough. Gangs flourish where identity is fragile and recognition scarce. They offer a ready-made script precisely when one is most needed. Movements cohere around enemies. As Eric Hoffer observed, “mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” Whether that devil is real or exaggerated matters less than whether it is clearly named. A defined enemy converts diffuse anxiety into a concrete target. Street gangs promise protection in a world of rivals. Retaliation confirms the threat. Police intervention becomes proof that the world is aligned against you. Each confrontation reinforces the premise: you are under attack, and only we can shield you. TRP operates in a similar psychological register. Masculinity is portrayed as besieged by cultural institutions, family courts, and modern dating norms. Romantic disappointment becomes proof of systemic betrayal. The Red Pill teaches that women are “hypergamous,” a term borrowed from evolutionary psychology and recast as a fixed law of female nature: women are said to be perpetually “trading up,” ready to leave when a higher-status man appears. The sentiment is captured in a common refrain: “She’s not yours. It’s just your turn.” Men are reduced to those two types: alpha and beta, the former dominant and desired; the latter compliant and tolerated. Masculinity becomes a hierarchy to climb rather than a character to cultivate. Men are told to “maintain frame” — never concede emotional ground, never empathize too deeply. Support becomes “simping.” Every interaction becomes a contest. This mentality conditions men to approach women with distrust and see other males as competitors. As one former TRP adherent admitted to Botto and Gottzén, “I couldn’t create natural human connections anymore because I was so focused on how to look like an alpha male. In a new group, I measured everyone.” TRP selectively highlights certain data points — divorce rates, custody outcomes, sentencing disparities — to amplify a sense of hostility. Some of these grievances are real: men face documented sentencing disparities, for example. Custody outcomes vary by jurisdiction and remain widely debated. Men underperform in education and die by suicide at higher rates. Many young men do struggle to find their footing in a rapidly changing culture. But real problems can be presented in ways that deepen distrust instead of encouraging careful analysis. Over time, the framework reshapes behavior. If a relationship fails, it confirms the doctrine. The ideology hardens. But what happens if the threat is neutralized? How does a movement sustain power if the problem that it organized itself around is resolved? Movements built on grievance promise improvement through allegiance. But when men gain stability, the market for grievance shrinks. Leaders lose influence and revenue. Instability has economic value: on the street, through illicit markets; and online, through subscriptions and monetized outrage. As Eva Bujalka, Tim Rich, and Stuart Bender argue in a 2022 study, TRP resembles an online protection racket, in which insecurity is amplified and monetized. And insecurity can pay handsomely. Whether through book and course sales, memberships, seminars, or YouTube ad revenue, top Red Pill influencers generate steady streams of income. Rollo Tomassi, a foundational TRP voice, has said that he doesn’t do it for the money. Yet his Rational Male series has found a wide readership, and his ideas now reach hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers. Even if income isn’t his primary motive, it is substantial. Inflammatory, adversarial content reliably generates attention. “Fresh and Fit,” known for confrontational debates with young women, earned over $1.5 million in fan tips, in addition to ad revenue, before it was removed from YouTube’s Partner Program. The “Whatever Podcast,” with 4.6 million subscribers, reportedly generates $106,000–$309,000 in ad revenue monthly, according to VidIQ. Its format — panels of young women debating dating and gender norms before a hostile audience — produces viral clips designed to provoke male outrage and backlash. Online, territory is digital and measured in subscribers and impressions. On the street, it is physical and marked by presence and retaliation. In both realms, status depends on visible conflict, and income flows from environments kept unstable. Why do boys leave gangs, and men leave TRP? The similarities are striking. Despite the mythology of “blood in, blood out,” most boys don’t leave gangs because of police crackdowns or harsher sentencing. The Justice Policy Institute’s report Gang Wars notes that the typical gang member is active for a year or less. The fantasy of power eventually collides with the reality of consequences. In interviews with former gang members, the most common turning point was direct exposure to violence. One man put it bluntly: “I watched a dude die. . . . It’s still pretty traumatic.” Others leave for quieter reasons. Former members describe “growing out of it,” taking on new responsibilities, or realizing that they are too old for adolescent posturing. On a Reddit forum where former gang members explained why they left, one poster wrote: “Eventually, you just get too old for that shit.” Fear of punishment rarely appears as the decisive factor. Arrest and incarceration are often treated as rites of passage. Law enforcement can disrupt activity, but it does not reliably produce the internal shift that leads a young man to walk away. The turning point usually comes from within. These patterns appear in the testimonies of former TRP adherents as well. In their 2024 study, Botto and Gottzén document accounts of men who initially embraced the ideology and later rejected it. One participant described internalizing the alpha hierarchy so completely that a physical injury felt like emasculation: “TRP always clowns ‘betas’ and insinuates that only affluent, muscular men are worth anything. After my injuries, I felt like less of a man. Any time a woman showed me attention, I assumed she wanted to exploit me as her ‘beta bux.’” Another recalled the moment when the framework collapsed. After a breakup, he reassured himself that his ex was hypergamous and had left him for an “alpha Chad.” “Funny enough,” he wrote, “it was not. It was a girl. The Red Pill was utterly wrong.” Others described psychological fallout. “After all those hours listening to their theories, I felt like not me at all. Like my brain was melted. I couldn’t socialize. I just wanted the old me back.” These men left when experience contradicted what TRP had promised. They saw successful relationships that didn’t fit the model. They encountered women who responded to vulnerability with care rather than contempt. Ironically, leaving TRP is how they began to see the world more clearly. Many describe exhaustion. Treating every interaction — whether on a street corner or in a relationship — as a power contest takes a psychological toll. Eventually, the cost outweighs the benefit. Others leave because they want different outcomes. An ideology built on cataloging women’s flaws makes intimacy difficult to sustain. As my relationship with my then-girlfriend — now my wife — deepened, I could no longer reconcile it with Red Pill doctrine. In the same way a young father may come to see gang life as incompatible with raising a child, a man who genuinely desires connection begins to recognize that TRP cannot provide it and, in fact, discourages it. In both cases, departure requires tolerating uncertainty. Leaving a gang means relinquishing a ready-made identity; leaving TRP means surrendering a totalizing explanation. The world becomes less rigid, more probabilistic. Women are no longer caricatures, rivals no longer omnipresent enemies. The transition is uncomfortable because it restores ambiguity — but also agency. The former gang member must find belonging without a uniform. The former TRP adherent must build relationships without a script that once protected his ego but guaranteed failure. Identity must be constructed instead of inherited. Movements organized around grievance struggle when their members mature. Stability — through work, family, and competence — erodes the emotional conditions that made the ideology compelling. And maturity is difficult to monetize. As my accomplishments in writing and as a professional boxer accumulated, TRP began to feel childish. Gangs and TRP do not invent insecurity; they attract men already wrestling with it. But instead of resolving that insecurity, they weaponize it — offering belonging at the cost of autonomy and flexibility. We don’t need to pretend naively that courts are perfect, dating is easy, or heartbreak is painless. The alternative is building forms of masculinity that feel strong without requiring an enemy. A man once told me that he avoided TRP because he found structure in sports and the military. Former gang members say the same about work, service, and fatherhood. Institutions that confer earned status meet the same psychological needs, without the same costs. My strongest male friendships were built on shared discipline and effort. At the boxing gym, strength was measured in improvement, respect earned through consistency. Intimacy works the same way. It requires risk — the willingness to be hurt again. The Red Pill promises insulation from that risk, but what’s necessary is the courage to face it. Men who leave eventually realize that adversarial thinking protects the ego but sabotages the life they actually want. The best and worst things in life walk hand in hand. If all you try to do is avoid pain, you will forfeit your chance to experience joy. *** This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute. The original can be found at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Ed Latimore is a former professional heavyweight boxer, an Army veteran, and the author of Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life.

Is pop star Britney Spears back on the right track? Freshly returned from rehab following DUI charges, the 44-year-old singer posted an update to her Instagram account. But instead of another near-naked dance video with knives, Spears shared a photo of a yellow and white snake that she insists is a good omen. “Snakes are symbolic of good health, higher consciousness, and pure luck,” she wrote in the image caption, mentioning how she saw the snake while visiting the pet store with her sons. “I’m so damn thankful to my friends and so many new beautiful people I have met through my spiritual journey… all a blessing in disguise.”   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Britney Spears (@britneyspears) “I still have to learn how to be kind to myself and the way I speak to myself,” Spears continued. “It’s a never ending journey and sometimes I just stop, look up and say wow God I think that was you and smile on!!!!” This update comes after Spears took a deal on May 4, pleading guilty to violating California’s “wet reckless” law. This is a lesser charge offered at the county prosecutor’s discretion. She will serve 12 months of probation, enroll in a three-month substance abuse program, and pay a fine of $571, as The Daily Wire previously reported. On March 4, the California Highway Patrol arrested Spears on suspicion of DUI after officers observed her driving erratically and at a high rate of speed near Thousand Oaks. Spears was the “solo occupant” of the BMW and “showed signs of impairment and submitted to a series of field sobriety tests.” Her representative released a statement at the time, calling it an “unfortunate incident” and saying that it was “completely inexcusable.” “Britney is going to take the right steps and comply with the law, and hopefully this can be the first step in a long-overdue change that needs to occur in Britney’s life. Hopefully, she can get the help and support she needs during this difficult time,” the statement said. “Her boys are going to be spending time with her. Her loved ones are going to come up with an overdue needed plan to set her up for success for well-being.” Spears checked herself into rehab in April. The singer was charged with a misdemeanor hit-and-run in 2007, though the case was later dismissed. The following year, Spears was hospitalized for a psychiatric evaluation and placed under a conservatorship largely overseen by her father. The arrangement lasted 13 years, ending in November 2021 when a judge terminated it amid the fervent “Free Britney” movement.

Leftist special interest groups ran an ad that was supposed to make former MTV reality TV star-turned-Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt look bad, and they appear to have stepped in it. The ad, sponsored by L.A. Unions Opposed to Spencer Pratt for Mayor 2026 and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor AFL-CIO, lays out a number of things that Pratt has either supported or opposed — and accidentally paints him as an entirely reasonable person with an agenda that veers dangerously close to the dictionary definition of “common sense.” WATCH: The LA County Federation of Labor has a new committee lined up to go after Spencer Pratt, and they are dropping an initial $221k on this video & an additional digital ad. pic.twitter.com/vJnHCDunPb — Unrig LA (@UnrigLA) May 9, 2026 “Republican Spencer Pratt is the last thing Los Angeles needs for mayor,” the voiceover began. “Pratt opposes using taxpayer money to build brand new houses for our unhoused neighbors, saying it’s time for the homeless to get help or get out. Pratt thinks L.A. needs thousands more police officers rather than more social workers.” “And Republican Spencer Pratt thinks public employee unions should have less power, not more,” the ad continued. “L.A. is on the right track and needs to stay the course. Vote no on Republican Spencer Pratt.” Pratt responded to the ad, saying, “Wait. Unions are mad that I want firefighters and city workers to get better pay and safer working conditions? What are they actually … for?” The majority of those responding commented on the fact that the unions, in attempting to paint Pratt as an extreme Republican, had only helped him to outline his positions in ways that would sound entirely reasonable — even good — to the average person. Red State’s Jennifer Van Laar had a similar reaction, saying of the ad, “Do these people know nothing of branding and sales? I get that the point of it is to make sure everyone knows that Spencer is Republican (since it’s a nonpartisan race that isn’t on the ballot) but damn. Saying his name so many times can really backfire. And they’re associating him with getting rid of homeless encampments and adding cops. Oh, the horror!”

President Donald Trump is headed to China this week, and according to the legacy media, he is in a weak position. He has no cards to play. The Chinese have the upper hand. This is total crap. President Trump has spent a decade totally reshaping the global power map. China is in trouble, and Trump is heading into the summit in a power position on every front. Go back 10 years. Everyone said that China would be dominant 10 years ago. Wrong. Today, the Left and the woke Right — which is basically the New Left —  say that America should cede global power to “multi-polarity,” which means China and Russia. That’s not just stupid. It makes them useful idiots for the world’s worst regimes. According to some sources, China is overconfident. They believe that they have the upper hand. The Chinese government is allowing people in China to see what’s happening in America, and because that coverage is often negative about America, it’s reinforcing the Chinese government’s perception of its own strength. Now, Trump is headed to China, and our beloved legacy media is chanting that multi-polarity is happening. Wrong. China is in its weakest global position in at least a couple of decades. China is an awful, terrible, autocratic, economically fascist, one-party state. They’ve had serious systemic problems for years, decades, even up to today. Those problems have been masked over the last three decades or so by China’s shift from a completely closed economy in the 1970s to one that engages with world markets, moving from communism at home to a form of mercantilism under the predecessors of Xi Jinping. There are always moronic economists here in the West who are in love with the idea of a mercantilist, centralized state, meaning a state in which the government directs where private money should be spent and determines which trade deals can be made. Everything is government-sponsored. Everything is government-subsidized. Everything is government-regulated. A lot of economists love this stuff because it gives them the illusion of control. But China is not the economic powerhouse they’re making it out to be. China can direct its economy in a few different directions with serious power, and it can take whatever it has of its economy, cobble that together, and then can punch in one direction. For example, if they want to generate extraordinary levels of power, they can build many nuclear plants or dig for coal, and they don’t care about the environmental effects. Thus, they can really out-produce us in terms of energy. And they can build some new cars that are pretty competitive by stealing and adapting Western technology, which they do. But let us be real. The Chinese economy is not truly competitive with the American economy in any serious sense. Their products are not better than ours. Their services are not better than ours. Their economy is not better than ours. Not even close. They lack innovation. So they can build these gigantic labs, and they can force a bunch of people into those labs, but when you don’t have free markets, you have a problem. The system of free markets allows for better products and services because of competition. You want to know why every major AI company is located in the United States? Because they’re all competing with each other. In fact, many of them are located a few blocks from one another in Silicon Valley. That is not atypical in a free market economy. China has a serious debt problem. They hide their debt problem by stealing money from their citizens. We’re always hearing about the Chinese military; they have a gigantic nuclear arsenal. But technologically speaking, they are far behind the United States now. Maybe they can pick it up, but not if they’re also lagging in AI, which is why we need to win the AI race. The only thing that can solve China’s demographic, productivity, and military problems is winning the AI race. This is why it’s so stupid when you see people from the Left to the woke Right making the case for AI in the United States to be set back. It’s nuts. That would hand global power to the Chinese. You’re constantly hearing about China’s gigantic army. It’s huge, but manpower isn’t everything, as we saw in the Ukraine war. Similar to Russia’s, the Chinese military isn’t up to snuff. China relies on older, less sophisticated chips. What’s more, China doesn’t yet have the capacity to project deepwater power. They have many boats in their navy, which is effective in coastal zones, but they have no capacity to project power beyond those zones. China’s entire governmental system is built around a lack of competition. The problem with Chinese centralized control is that it cannot produce innovation or building or thriving. President Trump knows all of this, and he has been spending the last 10 years putting the screws to China. It is the through line of his foreign policy. People look at Trump’s foreign policy and ask, “What’s he doing in Iran? I don’t understand what he’s doing in Venezuela. I don’t understand what he’s doing with Japan.” All of it is oriented to China. All of it. President Trump is opportunistic in foreign policy terms. He waits for an opportunity to arise, and then he takes advantage of it. A dozen years ago, people were talking about China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or what they called the Silk Road Initiative. It was designed to basically create massive debt traps for countries. China would give them free money, but it wasn’t free; it would come with constraints. Those countries that were poor would take the loans, and then Beijing would basically foreclose on the loans and take control of property in strategic areas. Countries were joining because they saw free money. But it turns out the countries have been withdrawing from the Belt and Road Initiative, and even Chinese investment in the Belt and Road has been dropping precipitously. The reality is that when it comes to the economic battle between China and the United States, we have the upper hand.