On the campaign trail, Democrat candidate James Talarico often describes his faith as “biblical Christianity.” But the Senate hopeful once credited Islamic mystics with shaping his faith just as much as Christian writers, audio unearthed by The Daily Wire reveals. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Talarico asserted that his faith was rooted in “biblical Christianity.” During an appearance on The State of Belief podcast in April 2024 alongside Muslim state Rep. Salman Bhojani, Talarico praised Islam for shaping his religious beliefs. Those comments could come into play as debate heats up in Texas about Islam’s growing presence in the state.  “I know personally that I’ve learned as much about my faith from Salman’s tradition, from the Islamic mystics, from poets like Rumi, as much as I have from Christian authors and Christian writers,” he said. “This kind of interfaith dialogue, it doesn’t water down your tradition, in fact it strengthens it, it brings out new flavors and new colors.”  Talarico later quoted the 13th-century Islamic mystic as saying “in every religion there is love, yet love has no religion.” Talarico, looking to become the first Democrat to win statewide election in Texas in decades, has faced much scrutiny over his leftist version of Christianity and the uber-woke church he attends in Austin. That scrutiny comes as the legacy media speculated that Talarico could sway Christian voters who ordinarily vote Republican. On the 2024 podcast, Talarico celebrated Bhojani’s election as the “true fruition of multi-racial, multicultural, multi-religious democracy” and “a threat to those who don’t believe in a pluralistic democracy” and “those who are pushing a sectarian exclusive Christian nationalist vision for our country.” He also said that “Texas is proud to be the home of more Muslim Americans than any other state in the union” and that advocating for the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms was “deeply unchristian.” The creep of Islamic ideology into Texas has been a hot issue over the last few years, with Governor Greg Abbott designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a foreign terrorist organization in November 2025. Abbott accused CAIR of attempting to impose Sharia law on the Lone Star State. State officials have also moved to challenge planned Islamic cities, keep schools promoting Sharia law from receiving state dollars, and pushed backs on efforts to brand the Alamo as an “Islamic building.”  Talarico, who describes himself as a “Christian who hates Christianity,” has said he believes God is “nonbinary” and that Jesus was a “radical feminist.” During a recent commencement speech at Paul Quinn College, Talarico appeared indifferent to whether people believed in God or attended church.  “I’m not asking you to join an organized religion. I’m asking you to join something bigger than yourself. Find a spiritual practice that works for you, whether it’s meditation or fasting, gardening, or bird watching, whether it’s in a church, or a temple, or a book club, or a neighborhood group, find a community that can help you touch the ground of your own being.”

Be honest: Are you reading this on a cellphone right now? Even if you’re not, will you make it through this whole article without looking at your phone? That urge to check your phone is the same intrusive, compulsive pull that kids as young as kindergarten are feeling in America’s classrooms, every hour of every day. That truth is why dozens of states have done something that seemed impossible a few years ago: They’ve banned cell phones in schools from bell to bell. If your state isn’t one of them, it’s time to ask why not — and how your students are at risk of falling behind. By the time kids are 10 years old, in fourth or fifth grade, roughly half of them already have their own smartphone. Phones are competing for attention with teachers, friends, books, physical activity, hobbies, and learning. And in the minds of millions of schoolchildren, the phones are winning. This must change. Cellphones in schools is the rare issue with almost universal consensus — blue states and red states, academics and parents, teachers, principals, and even a significant number of students. The science is clear. Academic performance has been steadily declining in the decade since smartphones have been widely adopted. Today, America’s high schoolers have the lowest levels of reading and math achievement in recent history. It’s clear the phones are the problem. Smartphone use by adolescents has been definitively linked to less time spent on schoolwork, poor cognitive control, and poor academic performance — and schools that have banned cellphones have seen learning gains and behavior improvements in their students. The American people agree. By nearly a four-to-one margin (74% to 19%), adults support a ban on cell phones during class time. This reform is popular with Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike. Teachers and principals also agree. One survey found 86% of principals in schools with a cellphone restriction endorse the benefits, including impact on “school climate, a reduction in inappropriate cellphone use, and a reduction in cyberbullying.” Teachers point to fewer disruptions in the classroom, with 90% of teachers surveyed supporting a ban during class time, and 83% supporting a bell-to-bell ban. Even six in 10 students support at least some restriction. Moreover, Republican- and Democrat-controlled states are moving in the same direction at the same time. When governors from such different perspectives as Kathy Hochul (D) of New York and Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) of Arkansas both agree on a bell-to-bell ban, the issue has transcended politics into the realm of common sense. Unfortunately, the details are where this consensus starts to fray. Of the 44 states that have enacted some form of law or policy on cellphones in schools, only 26 have bell-to-bell bans covering the full school day. A common policy among states and school districts is the simple “no show” policy, where a phone has to be out of sight, but can be carried in a pocket or backpack. Anyone who has ever tried to cut down on their own screen time knows that the temptation can be too hard to resist. Two experiments found that “the mere presence of these devices reduces cognitive capacity” — even when people are actively trying to resist the distraction. Adults in the U.S. look at their phones an average of 186 times per day, or about once every five minutes we’re awake. The jumble of notifications, colors, dopamine rewards, addictive behavior, and the sheer volume of information means that there is only one solution that policymakers should consider. When it comes to cellphones in schools, it has to be cold turkey. It’s time for policymakers in the states that have not yet passed a cellphone ban to catch up. Every school year that goes by with students forming bad habits and deepening their reliance on their phones puts them another year deeper into distraction and isolation. And the states, schools, and districts that have a partial ban in place (allowing phones in pockets and during breaks and lunch periods) need to understand that these half measures aren’t enough. Students sneaking a peek during class or cramming in screen time outside the classroom degrade the learning environment. In fact, phones in schools have been shown to have a negative effect on academic performance even for students who do not personally use a device. Returning to the original question: Did you make it this far without looking at, or thinking about your phone? If the answer is no, imagine what it’s like for our kids. *** Liesel Crocker is a senior research fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability.

The headline is troubling: “More Americans say they are living paycheck-to-paycheck,” CNBC reported on Tuesday. The report featured one of the most commonly cited statistics by economic pessimists: that 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. But this statistic is hugely misleading.  For one, the survey was taken by LendingClub (an institution that offers personal financial loans), and the question was framed as “Do you need your next paycheck to cover monthly spending?” There’s a little bit of a sampling issue there. The Federal Reserve, which used a much broader sampling, reported that 37% would struggle to meet an unexpected expense (i.e. don’t have substantial savings), and Bank of America found that fewer than a quarter of the Americans reported “living paycheck to paycheck” when it was defined as spending 95% of their income on necessities.  These numbers offer a far more realistic measure than the figures often cited. Even among this group, living paycheck to paycheck does not necessarily imply poverty or even financial hardship. It just means that you’re spending all the money you’re bringing in. It doesn’t mean that you’re spending it wisely or living within your means. We’ve heard a great deal about prices on the rise. Also on the rise has been our expectation for quality. Let’s take a look at what those paychecks are actually buying.  On average, houses have more than doubled in square footage since the 1950s (an often romanticized decade for economic stability). Cars now have airbags, collision avoidance, and cameras, and they last over 200,000 miles. Fewer than 2% of American homes had air conditioning of any kind in the year 1950. Now it’s up to 90%. To have ever been on a commercial flight in the 1950s was a sign of immeasurable status and wealth. Now nearly half of Americans fly at least once per year. Healthcare is vastly superior to what it was. Everyone has a lot to say about ballooning costs, and while they are legitimate concerns, there is no denying that you are better off with the healthcare system of today than that of the 1950s. Vaccines have eradicated smallpox and nearly eradicated polio and measles, some of the most sweeping and deadly diseases in history. Cancer treatment has taken massive leaps such that certain types of cancer can be mitigated entirely.  Most of all, there’s the internet. More than 95% of Americans regularly use the internet. This includes 83% of all Americans below the official poverty line. What’s on the internet? Google and all its services are entirely free to use. This means that any one of those people with regular access can tap into an incomprehensibly large database of information. Lectures and papers from the top academics in the world are available for free. Typical “how-to” videos on YouTube save Americans the time and frustration of figuring out endless niche chores. Consider how much time (and opportunity cost) you’ve saved by outsourcing to the internet that which once required professionals. There is virtually no topic you can’t master. Virtually no person on the planet that you can’t communicate with instantaneously. Entertainment is no longer limited to a few timed channels and the magazines you happen to own; you have the option to stream millions of movies, songs, videos, or whatever else you please from the comfort of your home. And now, at the cusp of the AI Age, a free Google account entitles one to full access to Google Gemini and a free X account gives you Grok (some of the top AI models in the world). It is casually becoming an expectation of even poorer Americans to have access to the research capabilities and generative manpower that once required dozens of employees at the very least. Education and innovation have quite literally never been easier. A lot of these progressions seem obvious when you say them out loud, but this is precisely the point. The newfound advantages of the 21st century are so ubiquitous that they’re taken for granted. A fish doesn’t know it swims in water. These statistics offer a much-needed reminder that things are, in fact, getting better. Excepting a few truly impoverished individuals, everyone in the contemporary United States is enjoying access to luxuries that would dwarf even the wealthiest standards of living several decades ago.  This is not to suggest that everything about our society is perfect. But to pretend like our material conditions have not improved over the past decades is just blatantly incorrect.  While there do exist areas in which public life has shown signs of decline, they have nothing to do with this romanticized view of the past economy. The declining birth rates, rise in single-parent homes, and intensifying political polarization are all very serious issues. But contrary to what lots of people would have you believe, these are the products of culture — not economics.  And cultural problems require cultural solutions. Reducing everything that is negative in society to economic anxiety is lazy and dishonest. It’s easy for Senator Bernie Sanders to tell you that if only you support his subsidies, life will get better. It won’t. Writing checks is not going to make people more likely to get married and have families. Going to church might. Statistics like the one reported on CNBC are not entirely meaningless, but they are desperately lacking in proper context. Material conditions today are vastly better than they were in the 1950s. The state of the past was not some romantic ideal lost to history. Chin up, America. Our best days lie ahead. *** 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.

Another stabbing. Another headline. Another round of thoughts and prayers followed by absolutely nothing changing. The day before this attack, a friend of mine had his front door kicked in. His wife was home with their baby when the attacker got inside and tackled her to the ground — both of them on the floor. My friend was able to get to her in time, fight the attacker off, and get his wife and baby out safely. It could have ended very differently. It didn’t, because he was there and he was ready. These stories aren’t rare anymore. They’re routine. And every time one happens, the same question follows: what if someone there had been armed? The answer is simple. It would have changed everything. I grew up in California, and firearms were part of my life from an early age. My family ran a nonprofit helping families with food, clothing, and furniture — the kind of work that puts you face to face with people at their most vulnerable. It also put a target on us. Before I turned 18, my family endured 14 attempted break-ins and two attempted murders. That reshaped how I saw the world. I got serious about firearms training, earned my National Rifle Association instructor certifications, and kept building from there. Then came the Chabad of Poway shooting. Watching an attack unfold in a synagogue — a place that’s supposed to be safe — prompted me to take action. I started teaching publicly, and it grew into a full training operation. Today I run “The Tactical Rabbi,” a firearms and security training brand with a YouTube channel that’s crossed 35 million views and a growing presence on Instagram, where I break down concealed carry, active-shooter response, and security preparedness for anyone wanting to learn. I’ve spent years watching regular people — parents, business owners, synagogue members — try to navigate the maze of legal protections. In New York, that maze is a nightmare and for many, hard to work through. New York is technically a “shall issue” state now, post-Bruen (the June 2022 Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen recognizing a constitutional right to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense). On paper, the Supreme Court forced the state’s hand. In practice, New York found a new way to make the right to self-defense functionally unreachable for most people. To get a carry license, an applicant has to complete 16 hours of classroom instruction, plus two hours of live-fire training, submit four character references, sit for an in-person interview, and pass a background process that, in my experience, takes an average of six months — and commonly can stretch past a year. An attorney once put it to me this way, and I haven’t heard it said better: if New York actually cared about safety, the ratio would be flipped — sixteen hours of live-fire and safe-handling training, two hours of legal seminar. Instead, it’s the opposite. The overwhelming majority of mandated time isn’t spent teaching people to operate a firearm safely. It’s spent walking them through everything they’re not allowed to do. That’s not a safety program. That’s a liability shield with a permit slip attached. And that’s before you factor in the cost — training, fingerprinting, application fees, lost work hours — which adds up to something far beyond a minor inconvenience. For someone working full-time or living on a tight income, six months to a year of cost and paperwork isn’t a deterrent. It’s often a hard stop. Even after someone clears every hurdle and gets approved, New York’s list of “sensitive locations” strips the license of most of its value. Subways. Times Square. Public transit. The exact places where violent crime is most concentrated and where the value of self-defense is most needed are off limits. The state hands you a license in one hand and takes back the protection with the other. To be clear, I don’t think every requirement is worthless. A seminar on the legal use of force has real value. Live-fire training has real value. The problem isn’t that New York asks people to be trained and responsible. The problem is how it’s built — layered, slow, and expensive in a way that has far more to do with discouraging applicants than preparing them. New Jersey’s process, by comparison, is a two-hour seminar plus a 50-round live-fire qualification across three to 15 yards. That’s it. It’s faster, cheaper, and — frankly — makes more sense as an actual proficiency test than New York’s process. Approval times run dramatically shorter than New York’s. I still don’t think New Jersey’s system is where it should be, constitutionally. But if I had to choose between the two states as they stand today, it isn’t close. Meanwhile, most of the country has moved toward constitutional carry — which is closer to how the Second Amendment was actually written and intended to function. More states should be moving in that direction, not away from it. People will say these hurdles exist because lawmakers want gun ownership to stay rare. That misses the bigger picture. The Second Amendment wasn’t written to manage a hobby. It was written as a check against tyranny and, just as importantly, as a guarantee that every individual has the right to defend themselves and the people they love. That right doesn’t mean much if the state can regulate it into practical non-existence while still calling it “shall issue.” And there’s a second half to this problem that doesn’t get talked about enough: the revolving-door approach to repeat offenders in cities like New York. When people with long, documented histories of arrests face little to no real consequence, you remove any incentive for a would-be attacker to hesitate. Deterrence works both ways — an armed, trained citizen is one form of deterrence; real consequences for violent behavior are another. Weaken both at the same time, and you shouldn’t be surprised when incidents like stabbings and other violent crimes keep happening. I’m constantly asked where to start, and I always come back to the same comparison: learning to drive. The first time you get behind the wheel, it’s intimidating — you don’t know what you’re doing, and that uncertainty is real. But with the right instructor, proper training, and time behind the wheel, that discomfort turns into competence. A firearm is no different. It’s a tool. Treated seriously, trained on properly, and understood clearly, it becomes something you can rely on rather than fear. That’s the piece so many of these processes get backward. They spend their energy trying to make people afraid of the tool instead of competent with it. Fix that, and you fix most of what’s actually wrong with the system. There are many fantastic resources and firearms instructors across the country — people who know the laws and people who follow everything Second Amendment-related. For example, if you are worried about owning or bringing a firearm into your home, Yehuda Remer, also known as The Pew Pew Jew, has a series of children’s books that talk about gun safety and living with firearms in your home. He also has a history of the Second Amendment so you and your child can learn about its importance and why we have it. He is a Second Amendment activist living in Texas who educates children and parents about those rights. His work and advocacy span the better part of 15 years, during which he has called for everyone to arm themselves, especially Jews. Since October 7, his voice has been an important wake-up call for Jews around the country to pick up a firearm, train, and survive. If any of this resonates — if you’ve been sitting on the fence about getting trained, getting licensed, or just learning how to think about your own safety — don’t wait for the next headline to decide for you. Reach out. Find me on YouTube and Instagram as The Tactical Rabbi, or drop me a line at info@thetacticalrabbi.com. I’m happy to help point you in the right direction. Or you can reach out to The Pew Pew Jew at www.thepewpewjew.com or email him at thepewpewjew@gmail.com. *** Rabbi Raziel Cohen is a firearms instructor and security consultant known as “The Tactical Rabbi.” His YouTube channel has surpassed 35 million views, and he shares ongoing training content on Instagram. Yehuda Remer is an award-winning Second Amendment advocate who has published 10 books and has appeared on media outlets including Fox News, ABC News, and other publications. 

A remarkable outburst of interest in Western civilization has marked this extraordinary month. We began July with a celebration of America’s 250th birthday and a special focus on the history, principles, and people who launched this singular nation a quarter-millennium ago. As the month concludes, we witnessed a flood of commentary on Homer’s ancient epic the “Odyssey.” Discussions have centered not only on Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film, but on the meaning and teachings that ancient text inspires. As we revel in this outpouring of interest in Western civilization, both ancient and American, we should also reflect on the connection between these two seeming coincidental events. After all, America is a culminating expression of the ancient Western tradition that was inaugurated by the epics of Homer. The many ships that sailed from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean brought not only settlers to the New World, but also the fullness and complexity of that Western tradition. If one wishes to see the course of that tradition in its most intensely realized form, one need only to look for its evidence on our own shores. To slightly alter a famous line by Bishop George Berkeley, “westward the course of Western civilization takes its way.” I would point to two specific ideals that the “Odyssey” inaugurated, and which have become embedded as part of our own civilizational inheritance in the West generally, and in America specifically.  The first of these elements was the ideal of human beings as consummate explorers. The second of these elements was to affirm the concrete human longing for home. While seemingly contradictory impulses, they are both deeply constitutive elements of Odysseus as a character, and of the American people as a nation. The “Odyssey” is the first great work that describes the wonders of exploring. Odysseus encounters the utter limits of both the known and the unknown world. While the Christopher Nolan film emphasized the horrors that the explorer can encounter — monsters such as the Cyclops, enchantresses like Circe, and perils like the Scylla and Charybdis — the original epic also described a number of the wonders, attractions, and temptations that the undiscovered world offers to the adventurer. The islands of Circe and Calypso are described as places of great natural beauty, and Odysseus is charmed (to the point of seduction) by both beautiful demi-goddesses, spending lengthy time with each. The Sirens’ song offers to Odysseus the prospect of knowledge of all things, a temptation that impels Odysseus to strain against the ropes that bind him to the mast. His diversion to the island of the Cyclops is inspired by his desire to know the minds and ways of different kinds of creatures — a curiosity that proves deadly, in this case. Throughout Odysseus’s 10-year journey, he demonstrates the quality of exploration, adventurousness, curiosity, and the willingness to challenge limits both natural and divine. This quality of the explorer has come to define a core dimension of the American spirit. The adventurous and exploratory aspect of Odysseus became so engrained in the social imagination of the West that it came to be seen as the paradigm by which later explorers were described and understood. As Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci made their ways westward across the Atlantic Ocean, contemporary authors across Europe regularly described their explorations as a new kind of odyssey, and these sailors as the embodiment of a contemporary Ulysses. In the minds of these European thinkers, America was metaphorically discovered by Odysseus, and his spirit of exploration and discovery came to predominate a major dimension of American self-understanding. Yet, in a seeming contradiction, the “Odyssey“ is simultaneously the foundational Western text that valorizes homecoming. Though Odysseus tarries and strays, the unwavering object of his journey remains his homecoming to Ithaca — and to his wife, his son, his father, and his countrymen. His is not only the voyage of a single man toward a homeward destination, but the journey of the human soul that is tempted at all sides to be more or less than a human. He is offered both an endless hedonistic torpor by the Lotus-Eaters and the life of godlike immortality by Calypso. However, in these and every other instance, Odysseus remains resolute in his aim of reaching home. To return home is thus to affirm his humanity, a condition that accepts the limits and rewards of our unique state — mortal and needy, but also inventive and reflective. Many, if not most, of the same Americans who traveled to the New World, or once arrived here, who pulled up stakes to move farther west, at the same time were compelled by the desire for home. While, in contrast to Odysseus, these wayfarers to the New World were not seeking to “return,” nevertheless like him, they journeyed for the sake of homecoming. Many of the same people who came to be described as “pioneers” were also “settlers,” a people who pushed past existing boundaries in the mission to make a good home. Among the earliest wayfarers to the New World was John Winthrop, who in 1630 told his fellow Puritans that they would be erecting “a city on a hill.” It was for the sake of those new homes, new cities, and ultimately a great nation that these adventurous people would wander toward and beyond the edges of civilization. These twin Odyssean themes remain at the very heart of American memory, experience, and storytelling. Our own literary and cinematic tradition is laced through with this most ancient of Western tensions first articulated in the “Odyssey” and expressed in much more recent American stories from “The Wizard of Oz” to “Huckleberry Finn,” from “The Great Gatsby” to “Apollo 13,” from “Little House on the Prairie” to “Field of Dreams” (which features the iconic American sport that one wins by going home). Dorothy Gale longs at once for “somewhere over the rainbow,” and — journeying past that rainbow to Oz — afterward intones, “there’s no place like home.” Gatsby longs for the “green light,” symbolizing a distant desire and the possibility of a home with Daisy. And, in the portrayal of astronaut Jim Lovell of Apollo 13, we recognize both his yearning to cast off the earth’s gravity and his desperate hope to return to his earthbound family. As we move toward the conclusion of an eventful July, let us both acknowledge and celebrate the American inheritance of a Western tradition that has been a major topic of conversation and debate this month. As heirs of that tradition, we remain both explorers and home-seekers, pioneers and people with roots, a nation that seeks to “go where no man has gone before” and eternal kids who make sure to head home when Mom rings the dinner bell. *** Patrick Deneen is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the author of “American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals about Our Divided Souls.” 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.