'Threats to national security or public safety'

Column Science Fiction Film Club Rocketship X-M: The First Space Adventure of the Atomic Era Even cheap, rushed sci fi can be surprisingly prescient (at least about some things…) By Kali Wallace | Published on December 3, 2025 Credit: Lippert Pictures / 20th Century Fox Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Lippert Pictures / 20th Century Fox Rocketship X-M (1950). Directed by Kurt Neumann. Written by Kurt Neumann, Orville H. Hampton, and Dalton Trumbo. Starring Lloyd Bridges, Osa Massen, and John Emery. Let’s go back to 1946. World War II had been over for a matter of months, and postwar anxiety about the future is high. The relationship between United States and the Soviet Union, who had been allies during the war, was rapidly degenerating into what would become the Cold War, but exactly what that would look like was still a few years in the future. This was before the Soviet Union began testing nuclear weapons, before the U.S. declared the so-called “Truman Doctrine” for preventing the spread of communism around the world, before the Iron Curtain and the Warsaw Pact, before the Space Race. In March of 1946, Hollywood screenwriter, novelist, and columnist Dalton Trumbo published an opinion piece in a weekly magazine called Script. Script was a Hollywood-based film magazine with a strongly literary tone and a very liberal political bent; it had been founded by Rob Wagner, an outspoken progressive socialist, and continued in that vein after his death in 1942. The article Trumbo wrote for Script in 1946 carried the tongue-in-cheek title “The Russian Menace,” and in it he points out that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are making the same aggressive political, economic, and military moves around the world, and he suggests that the anti-Soviet fear Americans feel is echoed by anti-American fear in the Soviet Union. He was right, of course, but he was also a member of the Communist Party USA, and being right about American politics in 1946 while also being a communist working in the film industry meant he was making a lot of people very angry in Hollywood. That included Billy Wilkerson, the founder and owner of The Hollywood Reporter, who in 1947 wrote a column called “A Vote for Joe Stalin,” in which he named Trumbo and several others as communist sympathizers. A few months later, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) used the names Wilkerson had published to summon the several directors, screenwriters, and actors to appear before Congress. The “Hollywood Ten,” as they came to be known, refused to cooperate with the hearings and were charged with contempt of Congress. Leaders of the film industry got together immediately afterward and put together the first iteration of the Hollywood blacklist. Trumbo was one of the cited and blacklisted screenwriters; he went to prison for several months in 1950. But he was also one of the few who kept working over the next decade, albeit quietly, without his name appearing on his films. Those films include Roman Holiday (1953), one of the great romantic comedies of all time; Trumbo was not fully credited on the film until 2011, fifty-seven years after he won, but could not claim, an Academy Award for the story. Just as he had been central to the beginning of the blacklist era, Trumbo would be equally important in bringing about its end, when actor Kirk Douglas brought him on to write Spartacus (1960) and director Otto Preminger hired him to write Exodus (1960). With one of the most prominent victims of the blacklist being properly and publicly credited on two huge films, and the Hollywood studio system in its dying days, that was the beginning of the end for the blacklist era. Amidst all of those big, world-changing events, it’s almost a quaint little footnote that while he was blacklisted, right before he went to prison to serve out his sentence, Trumbo also did some speedy script-doctoring on a slapdash, low-budget, barely-more-than-a-B-movie sci fi film about going into space. Rocketship X-M is certainly no Roman Holiday or Spartacus, but it is a movie that sits at an interesting turning point in cinema history, as it was the first science fiction film of the Atomic Era and the first post-WWII film about space travel. But it only holds those distinctions by a hair, because it went into production specifically to capitalize on interest in the film that ended up being second. That film was George Pal’s Destination Moon (1950), a highly publicized, much anticipated “serious” movie about the practical problems of space travel. Destination Moon was in production for two years, with a respectable budget and a script co-written by Robert A. Heinlein. (Which also means a script with shades of Heinlein’s post-WWII politics, but that’s a topic for another day.) It was also being filmed in Technicolor in an era when about half of American films being made were still black and white. We’ll watch Destination Moon in the future, but what matters now is that without Destination Moon, Rocketship X-M would never have been made. When news got out that Destination Moon would be delayed, Lippert Pictures decided to take advantage. Lippert was a studio known for making films very quickly and very cheaply, which is exactly what they did with Rocketship X-M. They called up director Kurt Neumann, who had spent some of the 1940s making Tarzan films for RKO Pictures, to talk about a space travel story he’d shopped around. The problem with the initial script is that it was basically the same story as Destination Moon. As in, it was about going to the Moon, as suggested by the spaceship being called Rocketship Expedition Moon. The switch to send the ship to Mars instead happened after the fact, just like it does in the movie. That’s when Dalton Trumbo was brought on to doctor the script. He’s the one who refigured the Mars scenes—and in doing so, completely changed the tone of the film. It took Neumann all of nineteen days to film Rocketship X-M, and less than a month later the movie was released into theaters. And it shows. It shows that this movie was thrown together in a rush. Nobody so much as cracked a middle school science book, much less consulted any scientists. The film uses stock footage of a V-2 rocket launch for the take-off scenes. The gender politics and clumsy romance are such a mess I could physically feel the feminism curling up to die inside my soul. It’s filmed in a handful of interior sets, one of which looks like a classroom. Nuclear cavemen with rocks beat astronauts armed with guns. There is a Texan. There is always a Texan. (Aside: The outdoor Mars scenes were filmed at good old Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, years before that same location will once again play Mars in Robinson Crusoe on Mars [1964]. I went looking for what else has been filmed at Zabriskie Point, and I learned that parts of Spartacus were filmed there. There is also a film called Zabriskie Point [1970]; in his review Roger Ebert said of director Michelangelo Antonioni, “He has tried to make a serious movie and hasn’t even achieved a beach-party level of insight.” I haven’t seen the film but: ouch. Zabriskie Point is also famously the location of the cover image on U2’s 1987 album The Joshua Tree. I hope you can all recognize it now by sight. This concludes today’s edition of “Know Your Geology Landscapes.”) Rocketship X-M would be such a silly movie, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s also a dire warning against nuclear annihilation in which all of the explorers die at the end. The film opens with one of the most unintentionally funny pre-liftoff sequences I’ve ever seen in a space movie. There is a voice proclaiming over loudspeaker that takeoff is just a few minutes away, but all the characters are having a leisurely press conference in the aforementioned classroom. We meet the members of the crew that’s headed to the moon, which includes rocket scientists Karl Ekstrom (John Emery) and Lisa Van Horn (Osa Massen), and the flight crew of Floyd Graham (Lloyd Bridges), William Corrigan (Noah Beery, Jr.), and Harry Chamberlain (Hugh O’Brian). Nobody at the press conferences asks why the actual rocket scientists are going on the trip, but they do ask why a woman would worry her pretty little head with things like chemistry. The mission heads into space, but on their way to the Moon they run into some problems. First there’s a flurry of meteors around them, then the ship abruptly loses power. Eckstrom and Van Horn decide that a different fuel mixture will solve the power problems, so they sit down to calculate the appropriate mixture on paper. When they come up with different calculations, Eckstrom tells Van Horn her pretty little head must have made a mistake on account of being too female; they go with his calculations instead. Even when Van Horn once again expresses misgivings about the proposed fuel mixture, they forge ahead with Eckstrom’s solution. This turns out to be a bad idea, because his fuel mixture sends the ship careening off into space at such a high acceleration that it knocks the entire crew unconscious for several days. When they wake up, they realize they have accidentally flown to Mars. Van Horn is a professional so she does not immediately wake up and say, “I told you dumbfucks there was something wrong with the calculation,” but I said it to the television while I was a watching. After they get over their initial shock, the crew is actually very excited for a chance to explore Mars. And you know what? I believe that. Of course they ought to be excited! They might have taken a wrong turn, but they are on Mars! They set out to explore, at which point the film switches from black and white to a reddish-pink tint. A Martian filter, if you will. After tromping around Zabriskie Point for a while, they stumble upon the ruins of a Martian civilization. Their Geiger counters tell them the radiation is very high—so high that they immediately know the civilization was nuked to ashes—but they keep exploring anyway. During their radioactive campout that night, they finally spot some Martians. The Earthlings eagerly go to meet them, but the Martians respond by attacking. Most of these attacks involve throwing rocks down from clifftops. Corrigan the Texan and Eckstrom are both killed, and Chamberlain is badly injured. The three survivors somehow make it back to the ship and head back to Earth—the film skips over the details pretty quickly—but as they near home, Van Horn and Graham realize they don’t have enough fuel to land. They relay what they can about their mission to ground control, then the ship crashes in Nova Scotia, killing the crew. Afterward, the mission commander on Earth (played by Morris Ankrum) reassures the press that in spite of the tragic end, the mission was not a failure, because they learned a great deal about both space travel and Mars, and can do better next time. I am absolutely fascinated by this ending. I wasn’t expecting it at all; I assumed Van Horn and Graham would survive to be obnoxiously heteronormative in the worst 1950s fashion. But they didn’t. They get smashed to pieces in Canada! That’s an ending I didn’t see coming. Rocketship X-M was made specifically to get carried along in the wake of Destination Moon’s promotional blitz and hype. The two films have strongly different politics, and Destination Moon did overshadow Rocketship X-M when it premiered all of twenty-five days later. But Rocketship X-M’s attempt to borrow some of Destination Moon’s hype actually worked, because it was pretty successful in theaters, especially considering how cheap it was to make. (Dalton Trumbo was serving an eleven-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress when Rocketship X-M came out. Years later, in a documentary about the Hollywood blacklists, he would say about his conviction, “As far as I was concerned, it was a completely just verdict. I had contempt for that Congress and have had contempt for it ever since.”) Rocketship X-M lived on for a while on television, like so many other low-budget black and white sci fi movies of the ’50s, fading but never entirely vanishing. One of the people who saw it in the early ’50s was Wade Williams, a theater owner in Kansas City. At some time in the ’70s, he set about trying to figure out what had happened to the film he remembered so fondly. He was able to locate a copy of the film—the original copies had degraded, but there were duplicates—and acquire the rights. He wanted to rerelease Rocketship X-M, but he felt that audiences in the late ’70s would look at it very differently than audiences had in 1950. So he decided to contact some Hollywood special effects people to give the film a bit of makeover. The goal was to replace the stock footage of the V-2 rocket launch and add a handful of spaceship exterior shots. That’s exactly what they did, although I can’t figure out if the slightly expanded film was ever played in theaters in the ’70s. It is more or less the version that made it to home video releases and eventually to streaming. I say “more or less” because a lot of people have pointed out some discrepancies between the descriptions of the added scenes and what’s in modern versions of the film, so it’s possible some of the added scenes were later removed before the film made it to home video and streaming. I don’t think the original 1950 theatrical version of the movie currently exists anywhere we can watch it. Rocketship X-M is not a good movie, but I like it anyway. It starts out feeling like exactly what we would expect from a quick-and-dirty cash grab designed to take advantage of another movie’s expensive advertising campaign, but it makes a dark turn that I find so interesting. And that pro-science, anti-war tone ends up being a prescient look at the themes sci fi films would be grappling with through the ’50s and ’60s. For one thing, the film is very clearly saying that nuclear weapons will destroy civilization. A lot of sci fi films that followed in the 1950s have a cautionary tone toward nuclear weapons, but Rocketship X-M goes beyond cautionary and into prohibitionary. When the characters first encounter the Martians, Ekstrom says, “From Atomic Age to Stone Age,” a solemn pronouncement that is treated as the inevitable outcome of nuclear war. When designing the look of the radiation-scarred Martians, makeup artist Don L. Cash is said to have referenced photos from survivors of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film is not being wishy-washy about this matter. But I’m just as interested in its firmly pro-science stance. In 1950, neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union had even launched artificial satellites into orbit, much less tried to send an animal or a person into space. Nobody had died trying to get to space yet. And here is Rocketship X-M, the very first movie with a fictional take on what a space mission might look like, coming right out and saying that people will die, but it will be worth it. That’s not something very many sci fi films say outright. What do you think of Rocketship X-M? Does anybody recall seeing this one back in the day? Does anybody know why there is always a Texan in cinematic spaceship crews? Next week: We’re skipping over more than 70 years of cinematic history for something completely different. Watch Mars Express on Apple, Amazon, Fandango, or Plex.[end-mark] The post <i>Rocketship X-M</i>: The First Space Adventure of the Atomic Era appeared first on Reactor.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., has introduced a bill to ensure homeschoolers aren’t discriminated against in college admissions. “No student should ever face discrimination or disadvantage during the college admissions process simply because they were homeschooled,” Harris said. “Yet, many universities still treat homeschoolers as second-class applicants by requiring excessive documentation and additional testing.” The Higher Education Act currently defines an “institution of higher education” as one that admits students with a high school diploma or its recognized equivalent. However, the law refers to homeschoolers as “Students Who Are Not High School Graduates.” This has caused some colleges and universities to require homeschoolers to take the GED despite having legally graduated. Harris’ bill, called The Home School Graduation Recognition Act, replaces the heading “Students Who Are Not High School Graduates” with the title “Students From Non-Traditional Settings.” Harris says this creates a clear, uniform federal definition affirming homeschool graduates as high school graduates. “With nearly three million homeschooled students across America, it’s long past time to end this discrimination and guarantee every student a fair shot at higher education,” Harris said. The House Education and Workforce Committee, of which Harris is a member, supports the bill. The Home School Legal Defense Association also endorses Harris’ effort. “The Home School Graduation Recognition Act will eliminate ambiguity, prevent ongoing misinterpretation, and ensure equal treatment for homeschool graduates by clarifying that homeschool graduates meet the definition of high school graduates for federal student aid purposes,” HSLDA president James R. Mason said. The post EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Harris Introduces Bill to Stop Discrimination Against Homeschoolers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Democrats have spent the better part of two decades branding themselves as protectors of working Americans. But when you examine their actual policy choices rather than their press releases, a consistent pattern emerges: Their interventions routinely raise costs, distort markets, and ultimately hurt the very people they claim to champion. Their latest foray into student lending and consumer credit is a case study in that contradiction.A chorus of congressional progressives—led, predictably, by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—is now demanding that President Donald Trump halt his administration’s effort to sell off portions of the federal student loan portfolio. Their reasoning is as political as it is transparent: They want to keep these loans on the government’s books so they can one day engineer a mass “forgiveness” program. Lost in this rhetoric is the structural reality that Washington’s heavy-handed role in student lending is one of the primary drivers of soaring tuition. When the federal government guarantees easy credit, institutions raise prices accordingly. The Warren-Sanders model—limitless federal lending paired with periodic political promises of forgiveness—gives colleges every incentive to hike tuition further, secure in the knowledge that taxpayers will absorb the fallout.Trump’s policy moves in the opposite direction. Transferring significant portions of the loan portfolio to private entities reduces federal exposure, reins in a program plagued by delinquency, and returns loan management to organizations equipped to handle it. For decades, Democrats warned about runaway deficits; yet when confronted with an opportunity to reduce a structurally unsound federal liability, these same voices insist taxpayers should shoulder even more risk. The inconsistency is striking—but it’s also revealing.Because even as they fight to prevent a modest correction in the Student Loan Program, Democrats are simultaneously pushing for a national 10% cap on credit card interest rates. As economist Stephen Moore has shown in his analysis of credit markets, such a cap would instantly make millions of at-risk borrowers unprofitable to serve, drying up access to mainstream credit almost overnight. The data is clear: Unsecured lending only functions when lenders can price for risk. Eliminate that price signal and lenders retreat.That retreat hits hardest among the populations Democrats claim to champion. Higher-risk borrowers—young adults, gig workers, families with limited savings, individuals recovering from financial setbacks—rely on access to revolving credit to manage unexpected expenses, smooth income volatility, or simply build a credit history. If Washington dictates that lenders may not charge more than 10% interest on unsecured credit, banks will respond exactly as any rational actor would: They will stop offering credit to borrowers whose risk profile exceeds the artificial ceiling.And here is the deeper irony. In higher education policy, Warren and Sanders insist on maintaining federally subsidized lending structures that inflate tuition and embed perverse incentives throughout the system. Colleges raise prices because Washington promises unlimited credit and then flirts with broad forgiveness. In consumer credit policy, those same lawmakers champion restrictions that will make legal credit scarce precisely when vulnerable households most need it. The result is a double blow: escalating education costs on the front end and shrinking credit availability on the back end.This creates a perverse policy loop. Federal interventions make college more expensive. Families borrow more to keep up. Tuition continues to rise. Then, when those same families need access to credit to manage expenses, progressive policymakers seek to cap rates at levels that make offering that credit impossible. What starts as misguided paternalism ends as a direct assault on household financial stability.A responsible government would reverse both trends. It would acknowledge that federal overreach in student lending has driven tuition inflation for years and welcome efforts to reduce taxpayer risk. And it would recognize that capping interest rates on unsecured credit below market-clearing levels doesn’t protect consumers—it excludes them.Yet Democrats want it both ways: unlimited government risk when it fuels their preferred political narratives, and heavy-handed restrictions on private credit markets when it yields a populist talking point. Trump’s approach—restoring fiscal discipline in student lending while letting market forces allocate credit—is the only one grounded in economic reality. More importantly, it is the only approach that actually protects working Americans from the long-term consequences of distorted credit markets and runaway tuition. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Democrats Want It Both Ways on Debt—and Working Americans Will Pay the Price appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Public Polls Are for Entertainment Purposes Only

Playing Smashmouth: AgSec Rollins Taking the Blue States' SNAP

Also known as "blue field entoptic phenomenon" and "blue sky sprites", the little dots move in time with your heartbeat.

ABC late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t suspended for very long for preposterously claiming that Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer, Tyler Robinson, was a right-wing MAGA type. In the wake of Kirk’s killing, the media aggressively played dumb, claiming the motive was “elusive” and “complicated.” Now we’re seeing the effects of the misleading coverage. According to a November 25 McLaughlin & Associates national poll of 1,000 likely voters conducted for the Media Research Center, less than a quarter of respondents correctly described Tyler Robinson, the man accused of murdering TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, as left-wing.  The poll asked participants the following question: On September 10, 2025, Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking on a college campus. What was the political ideology of his killer? Options for answers included: “left-wing,” “moderate,” “right-wing,” “no ideology,” “other,” and “don’t know.”  The plurality of respondents (27.5%) professed no knowledge of Robinson’s political ideology. Less than a quarter – 24.1 percent –  identified him as left-wing, while 22.3 percent incorrectly asserted that he was right-wing. Another 13.2 percent claimed he was either moderate or a centrist. The evidence that Robinson was a left-wing radical is voluminous.  In a text conversation obtained by investigators, he plainly stated his motive: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”  Multiple family members publicly confirmed his left-wing tendencies. Robinson’s mother remarked that over the past year, her son had started to “lean more to the left, becoming more pro-gay and trans rights-oriented.” Another family member recalled him expressing outright hatred of conservatives. Robinson inscribed his bullet casings with unambiguously far-left messages, despite the bad-faith insistence by corporate journalists that they were somehow inscrutable. The slogans included, “Hey, fascist, catch,” and “Bella Ciao” (the name of a left-wing song popular among antifa radicals). With nearly a quarter of respondents convinced that Kirk was killed by a right winger, it is inarguable that the corporate media have mangled the facts of the case. But the fact that the most common response was professed ignorance about Robinson’s motive highlights another pernicious aspect of the press’s approach to this story: their lack of interest. To left-wing journalists, Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension for lying about Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer was orders of magnitude more deserving of coverage than the shooting itself. As soon as ABC yanked the show, the corporate media pivoted to focus on what they deemed a case of government censorship. CNN host Jake Tapper called the four-day hiatus “pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime.” Americans had just days to catch any of the press’s few quiet admissions that Robinson was a left-wing radical. After that, Charlie Kirk was relegated to the role of background character in articles and news reports resulting from his own murder. Given the media’s disastrous mishandling of this story, it should come as no surprise that respondents’ news consumption habits proved a significant determining factor in how they understood Robinson’s politics. Only 18.8 percent of those who primarily watched left-of-center cable news outlets were able to correctly describe his ideology, as compared to 27.7 percent who asserted that he was right-wing. Surprisingly, even among right-of-center cable news viewers, barely over a third of participants (33.5%) answered that Robinson was left-wing, and a still-considerable 18.0 percent believed him to be right-wing. The professed political ideology of respondents also heavily affected their perception of Robinson’s own political proclivities. A whopping 35.4 percent of liberals believed he was right-wing, while just 12.7 percent identified him as left-wing. For conservatives, 17.0 percent answered that he was right-wing, whereas over 41.9 percent described him as left-wing. Students were the single least likely cohort to correctly identify Robinson’s political bent; 33.2 percent of students believed Charlie Kirk’s accused murderer was right-wing, while a paltry 4.0 percent accurately labeled him left-wing. The American left appears to have a political violence problem. According to a September survey by YouGov, nearly one-fifth (18%) of liberals believed politically-motivated violence was at least “sometimes justified.” But despite leftists’ burgeoning fondness for political terrorism, the McLaughlin poll demonstrates that the left-wing media remain unwilling even to acknowledge when their own side has engaged in it.

The woke pastor of the North Chili United Methodist Church in Upstate New York recently surprised his congregation with the news that he plans to masquerade as a woman full-time and take cross-sex drugs.No longer sporting the beard he wore in his headshot photo on the United Methodist of Upper New York website, Rev. Phillip Phaneuf, 51, donned rainbow stoles and told his congregation on Nov. 23, "I am inviting you to join me in a season of creative transformation for myself and, I think, for all of us."'They do not support me.'"I'm transitioning. I'm affirming and saying to all of you that I am transgender," continued Phaneuf. "The best way to put this is that I'm not becoming a woman; I'm giving up pretending to be a man."The Methodist pastor, who is hardly the UMC's first transvestite pastor, called for the Holy Spirit's involvement in the process and cautioned his parishioners about the "fear of the unknown" in such circumstances.In an apparent attempt to assuage such fear, Phaneuf told churchgoers that while he's changing his name to "Phillippa," they could still call him "Phil"; that his personality wouldn't change; and that he would continue to prioritize "belonging." He noted, however, that he was now identifying as an "asexual" and that his face, name, body hair, voice, and clothes would change — adding that there is no such thing as "girls' clothes or boys' clothes."Phaneuf — who claims his pronouns are now "she, her" — said that he wouldn't become the "pronoun police," as he expects that no one will "misgender or mispronoun out of malice."The legacy media appears keen to respect Phaneuf's wishes, with even the New York Post playing along and Fox News Digital refraining from using his correct pronouns.RELATED: 'Not medicine — it's malpractice': Trump HHS buries child sex-change regime with damning report Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesThe Methodist pastor claimed during his sermon that the scriptures, Methodist theology, his district superintendent, his bishop, and the UMC are "okay" with his transition.At the expense of alienating thousands of congregations, the United Methodist Church has accommodated LGBT activists' demands in recent years. For instance, the 2024 General Conference removed the church's 40-year ban on non-straight clergy last year and dropped the prohibition against performing same-sex weddings.While the pastor claimed that his superiors were receptive to his transvestism, he told his congregation that his parents were "absolutely not.""They texted me this morning and asked for me to tell you all that they do not support me and that they have chosen their convictions and their beliefs over supporting their child," said Phaneuf.Despite his parents' alleged rejection of his lifestyle choice, the pastor was quick to lean into his superficial female role-play, getting his ears pierced, wearing makeup, and throwing on a wig.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Could hormonal birth control be turning women into NPCs?That’s “non-player characters,” by the way. You may remember the meme, which reached the height of its popularity a few years ago and has largely disappeared now.Only now, many decades after it was unleashed on the world, are we starting to understand hormonal contraception’s effects more fully.The NPC is a person who lacks any kind of unique identity. Who they are is completely determined by their social circumstances and by the values and information fed to them by a narrow range of approved sources: the government, scientists and “experts,” the mainstream media, Hollywood and Netflix, handpicked celebrities and influencers.The NPC exercises no independent judgment, no free-thinking of their own. They simply do as they’re told, and they get very angry if you don’t do the same.The NPC is represented by a special Wojak — a cartoon person — with grey skin and generic facial features: pindot eyes, a semi-triangle nose, and a horizontal line for a mouth.During the pandemic, for example, the NPC meme was used to mock everyone who chose to “trust the science” unquestioningly. It was also widely used in Donald Trump’s first presidency to describe devotees of the mainstream media who repeated its various platitudes and mantras ad infinitum — “orange man bad,” “diversity is our strength,” and so on.That sync-ing feelingA new study suggests that hormonal birth control reduces the “functional individuality” of women’s brains, making them more alike with one another. Making women NPCs, in other words.Researchers analyzed the brain activity of 26 users by means of MRI scans. They looked in particular at something called “functional connectome fingerprinting,” a method of identifying patterns of brain connectivity that are distinct to each person.They found that while each woman’s brain patterns remained identifiable, the overall distinctiveness of those patterns was reduced by hormonal birth control.In basic terms, there was a general “dampening” or “normalizing” effect on the brain as a whole.The changes affected certain networks more than others, though: networks involved in executive function, muscle control, perception and attention, and the so-called “default mode network,” which is active during various kinds of introspection, including daydreaming, thinking about oneself and others, remembering the past, and planning for the future. The default-mode network is central to the creation of an “inner self” and a coherent “internal narrative.” In other words, a distinct identity.RELATED: Time for RFK Jr. to expose the dark truth about the pill Rattankun Thongbun via iStock/Getty ImagesMood for thoughtIn truth, I might have been exaggerating just a little bit when I said birth control could be turning women into NPCs. Yes, we’ve seen changes in particular regions of the brain that are associated with particular functions, but the researchers didn’t investigate the actual effects of these changes — I’ve simply inferred what they might be. The researchers did note evidence that the changes were associated with increases in negative moods, which many of the participants recorded, but we can’t say much more than that, at least not yet.What we need is more research. This might look at direct evidence of the effects of hormonal birth control on female behavior, preferences, and character: things like individual decision-making processes and personality traits like conformity.BrainsplainingThere are plenty of studies that already do that kind of thing with hormones, especially testosterone. Some have shown that a dose of testosterone will make a man more likely to stand up for himself and defend a minority opinion, even in the face of disapproval from the majority. Studies have also shown that testosterone makes men more comfortable with inequality and hierarchy, which is usually couched as an “antisocial effect,” but when you remember that virtually every society in history has been hierarchical, except our own — at least in principle — that doesn’t really make much sense.Still, we have every reason to be concerned about the effects of hormonal birth control on women’s brains and their behavior. As the study notes, more than 150 million women worldwide use hormonal birth control, and if it is changing the way their brains work, that obviously could mean significant effects in the aggregate, with the potential to touch more or less every aspect of life, from personal relationships to politics.Retrograde researchOf course, this is a controversial stance to take, even as evidence mounts. The drug makers don’t want to lose money if women stop taking hormonal birth control, and the champions of “liberation” don’t want women to stop either. The entire sexual revolution was kickstarted by the pill, and “equality” as we understand it is predicated on women having total conscious control over their bodies. Anybody who says women shouldn’t take hormonal birth control, or just that they should think carefully before they do, is immediately denounced as retrograde, sexist, or, as we’ve seen with recent viral social-media trends, a purveyor of dangerous “medical misinformation.” And that includes women who’ve been on hormonal birth control themselves and quit, and female medical professionals like Dr. Sarah Hill, the author of the very well-reasoned and evidenced book, “This Is Your Brain on Birth Control.”My new book, “The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity,” is a call to get serious about the effects of hormones on politics. Deadly serious. Testosterone, in particular, is rapidly disappearing, in large part because we’ve created a world that’s reliant on thousands of chemicals and substances that mimic the “female” hormone estrogen. We had created that world long before we even knew what many of those chemicals are, let alone what they do to us.The same is true of hormonal contraception. Only now, many decades after it was unleashed on the world, are we starting to understand its effects more fully, having built a world that is reliant upon it to function.Our hormonal interventions remain clumsy and short-sighted. In truth, we’ve not come all that far from the first bright spark who decided to lop off a bull’s testicles to bring it under control. In that first brutal act, endocrinology — the science of hormones — was born, a science still very much in its infancy.