In Victorian Europe, hairwork jewelry was a popular means of remembering the departed. Family or friends would snip lockets of hair — or the dying individual would cut a locket himself and give it to…

Graphite is mined at the Northern Graphite mine plant in Lac-des-Îles, Quebec, on March 7, 2024. Sebastien St-Jean/AFP via Getty ImagesDomestic scandium and graphite are among the critical minerals Ottawa…

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Gavin Newsom has his eye on the prize — the American presidency — more than anyone else. His latest tactic to achieve his lifelong, long-professed goal has been his mission of unrepentant gerrymandering with Proposition 50, dubbed the “Election Rigging Response Act.” The proposition’s adoption by voters on Tuesday means that the California Constitution will be amended so as to replace the current electoral state map that was drawn by a bipartisan commission — and five House seats will be flipped in the Democrats’ favor. With the proposition’s massive victory — by a vote of 64 percent to 36 percent — Newsom’s reputation as the Democrats’ attack dog against Trump has been sealed. The aggressive partisanship is the point. Newsom is taking an approach to Trump that satisfies Democrats’ desire for their leaders to show an urgency that “meets the moment,” a moment in which they believe the president is a fascist leading the country down a path toward the elimination of democracy. With the proposition’s massive victory — by a vote of 64 percent to 36 percent — Newsom’s reputation as the Democrats’ attack dog against Trump has been sealed. The passage of Proposition 50, Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett told Politico, represents “the rise of Gavin Newsom as a prime political opponent of Donald Trump.” (RELATED: Post Prop. 50, California GOP Needs Reality Check) To celebrate the passage of Prop. 50, Newsom’s press office posted an AI image of Trump as a baby having a tantrum while Newsom forces him to eat his carrots. Newsom himself said that his victory in California, as well as Democrats’ wins in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York City, mean that the Democratic Party is “in its ascendancy.” The sense that Newsom has made himself into the undisputed leader of the Democratic Party, while also putting Trump and the Republican Party into a defensive stance, comes perfectly timed for Newsom’s presidential ambitions. It was only last week that the governor appeared on CBS Sunday Morning to tease, publicly for the first time, the launch of his presidential campaign. This means that Newsom has put the idea of his presidential run on everyone’s minds just as he has his moment in the spotlight for his Proposition 50 victory. (When asked last week whether he has given running for president serious thought, Newsom said, “Yeah, I’d be lying otherwise. I’d just be lying, and I can’t do that.”) Without his Proposition 50 gambit, Newsom could very well be struggling to maintain his prominence in the party, as his second term in office is winding down and California Democrats are fully engaged in the primary campaign to replace him. Instead, Newsom seems as nationally relevant as ever. And that’s not to mention Proposition 50’s added benefit of amassing a roster of national small-dollar donors that can easily be transitioned to presidential donors. According to Politico, Republicans believe that Newsom “looks more politically formidable than at any other point in his career.” That is saying something, especially given the numerous times Newsom has been chatted about as the future of the Democratic Party. In 2004, GQ speculated over whether Newsom would become the next Bill Clinton. In 2015, when Newsom was still lieutenant governor, a column in the San Francisco Chronicle called for him to drop out of the governor’s race and run for president. “If by some cosmic roll of the dice Newsom does decide to declare his candidacy for president, all this gauzy talk of [Hillary] Clinton’s inevitability and lock on the Democratic nomination will take a hit,” said Bill Katovsky. “Dare I say game-changer?” In 2023 and 2024, Newsom’s extensive efforts to raise his profile on the national stage led to the inevitable (and correct) conclusion that he was prepping for a presidential bid to challenge the cognitively addled Joe Biden. While Newsom played his cards wrong in 2024, choosing to retreat into Biden-supportive mode when his presidential aspirations became too obvious, he has essentially already been running for president for years. And now, with just three more years to go, he is in his strongest position ever. Come 2028, we may see Gavin Newsom splashed across Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC as the president-elect of the United States. Ellie Gardey Holmes is the author of Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power. READ MORE: Gavin Newsom Claims Working-Class Background, Teases Presidential Run Gavin Newsom’s New Low Newsom Can’t Memory-Hole What He Did to California

The headlines were predictable. In the wake of the 2025 election here’s a sampling: The New York Times: “Republicans Point Fingers After Their Losses, but Not at Trump,” with the subtitle, “Casting around for culprits, leaders in the party blamed their candidates, the government shutdown and a weak economic message.”  Politico: “‘Not a great night’: Republicans point fingers after blowout off-year election losses” The Hill: “GOP blame game begins after election rout.” And on and on — and on and on and on — go the similar headlines of the dark ill-fortune of the GOP as a result of this week’s election. Alas for the critics, they seem not to be familiar with American political history. Let’s take a spin through election history. Here are three examples: 1964: Democrat President Lyndon Johnson wiped the floor with GOP presidential nominee, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. The results: LBJ, Electoral Votes: 486 Goldwater: 52 LBJ Popular Vote: 43,129,040 Goldwater Popular Vote: 27, 175, 754 1966: But a mere two years later?  A serious GOP rebound. Republicans: + 47 House seats, + 3 Senate seats And 14 years later? 1980: Reagan Electoral Votes: 489; Carter Electoral Votes: 49. 1982: But two years later? A serious Democrat rebound: Democrats: + 26 House seats; Republicans: – 26 House seats. As noted, one could go on and on and on with similar examples, and what one sees is a decided historical pattern. That pattern being that when Democrats or Republicans get clobbered in an election, they can and frequently do rebound in the very next election — or, at a minimum, the election after that. All of which is to say, the current liberal media headlines like those above of the GOP loss in the 2025 elections can and most likely, if the historical pattern of decades holds, will be reversed in the next elections. (RELATED: The Cold Civil War Is Now on Defrost, and the Right Still Isn’t Ready) Why? Because events of the day can — and most assuredly will — change. And frequently, history shows that change will benefit the losers of the last election. There is nothing either new or mysterious about this. Nor is there any change in the headlines from the opposition media of the day. When the Democrats lose, the liberal media plays the loss down; the Republican-leaning media plays the loss up. And, of course, the reverse is true. A classic example was Republican President Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972. A mere four years later, with Nixon both term-limited and then forced to resign as a result of Watergate, yielding the presidency to Vice President Gerald Ford, out of the blue on the national political scene came a barely known former Democrat governor of Georgia named Jimmy Carter. Carter turned the political scene upside down. He first captured the Democratic nomination from a veritable flood of better-known and well-established Democrats with names like California Governor Jerry Brown, Alabama Governor George Wallace, Washington Senator Henry Jackson, Indiana Senator Birch Bayh … and more. Then Carter went on to defeat incumbent GOP President Gerald Ford. All of which is to say, the headlines on this week’s 2025 elections that blare about a GOP loss are to be taken with a political grain of salt. Or, as in the vernacular? “Ya win some, ya lose some.” But history — and the politics of the moment — keep moving. And speaking of Lyndon Johnson, I began to learn this lesson when I was a literal kid with a love of reading up on politics. As I well recall, the media of the day, on one fine autumn day in November of 1963, was filled with stories about the political advantages that would make President John F. Kennedy unbeatable for re-election in 1964. And then… And then there was that horrific, still very memorable day of the president’s fatal trip to Dallas. And the political world, not to mention the world at large, was changed forever. All of which is a long way of saying that the GOP defeats this past week are most certainly not carved in stone and that, yes indeed, time and history are already moving on. Stay tuned. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Three Cheers for Mark Levin Newsom, Not Trump, Is Code Red for America Trump Improves the White House East Wing

In 2018, the world recoiled when a Chinese scientist announced the birth of the first gene-edited babies. For a brief moment, humanity looked in the mirror and saw what it was becoming. Not a species guided by faith or humility, but one tinkering with its own design. Seven years later, that mirror is back in front of us. And this time, it’s bigger, better funded, and headquartered in Manhattan. A new startup called Manhattan Genomics has vowed to “end genetic disease” by editing embryos before birth — in other words, to design human beings. Its founders are not mad scientists in lab coats but sleek entrepreneurs fluent in the language of disruption. One of them even compares her venture to the Manhattan Project. The analogy is as revealing as it is disturbing. Both promise to change the world by splitting something sacred — the atom, then, the genome now. (RELATED: Eugenics: The Dark Side of IVF) To be fair, not all genetic editing is dystopian. In some rare cases, it can be genuinely life-saving. A baby might be born with a deadly mutation that could be corrected in the womb. A family with a long history of inherited disease might finally be freed from fear. In those instances, technology can serve compassion — science working as an extension of mercy. Manhattan Genomics is not content to heal the sick; it aims to rewrite the human story. But that is not what this movement is really about. Manhattan Genomics is not content to heal the sick; it aims to rewrite the human story. It wants to move from curing illness to “optimizing” life itself. And that shift — subtle, seductive, sold in the language of progress — is where the real danger lies. Because once we begin deciding what counts as a “better” human, we are no longer doctors but designers. (RELATED: What C. S. Lewis Can Tell Us About New IVF Eugenics Technology) We’re told this is about compassion, yet it reeks of control. It is not hard to imagine where it leads: embryos selected not only for health but for height, intelligence, appearance — and, inevitably, for profit. A world where parents become consumers, children become products, and the line between creation and construction disappears. Today’s “disease prevention” becomes tomorrow’s “enhancement,” and before long, morality itself is just another obsolete gene to edit out. (RELATED: ‘Three-Parent’ Human Experiment Becomes the Standard for a New IVF Treatment) The language of this new era is curiously familiar: “innovation,” “empowerment,” “choice.” It’s the vocabulary of Silicon Valley — soft words masking hard realities. And while the founders insist they’ll be transparent, their track records read more like parables of hubris. One cofounder previously helped launch a project to create glowing rabbits. Now she wants to glow up humanity itself. The symbolism writes itself. Their pitch to investors sounds philanthropic: we will end suffering. Yet ending suffering has always been the first justification for the worst ideas. The early eugenicists of the twentieth century said much the same thing — that they would “eliminate defects” and “advance mankind.” They used science to rationalize moral blindness. The tools are different now, but the temptation is the same: to play God without permission. Even some scientists who support embryo research admit that what’s unfolding is a moral free-for-all. In academia, there were guardrails — committees, ethics boards, and some degree of accountability. But startups answer to venture capital, not conscience. When progress is measured by funding rounds and press coverage, the line between “innovation” and “insanity” can blur quickly. Manhattan Genomics isn’t just rewriting genes. It’s also rewriting the rules. The Christian concern here is not rooted in technophobia, but theology. The belief that life is sacred, that creation has purpose beyond our engineering. Christians, conservatives, and frankly anyone who values sanity should see this for what it is: a rebellion against limits. The story of Eden began with the same impulse — to know more, to control more, to be like God. Now, however, the serpent tempts not with apples but with upgrades. Yes, there will be moving stories: a child saved from illness, a family spared heartbreak. But those exceptions will be used to justify an industry of genetic vanity. The real market won’t be the sick; it’ll be the scared and the ambitious — the parents who want guarantees, the elites who can afford them. “Healthy” will quietly evolve to mean “enhanced.” And like all luxuries, it will trickle down only in advertising, never in access. The moral implications are staggering. Once we start treating embryos as editable code, what stops us from debugging the inconvenient — disability, difference, perhaps even temperament? We’ve already seen societies discard the unborn for having the “wrong” chromosome count. Imagine that prejudice with a billion-dollar research lab behind it. There’s a tragic irony in the company’s name. The original Manhattan Project gave humanity the power to destroy itself in an instant. This one offers the same outcome, only slower and subtler — a creeping corrosion of what it means to be human. So yes, Christians should care. Conservatives should care. Anyone who believes that life is more than data should care. Because this isn’t science serving humanity, but science rearranging it. We’re told this is progress. But progress toward what? You can draw your own conclusion. Something tells me it won’t bring much comfort. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: Comrade With a Condo: The Mamdani Myth Exposed The Armed Awakening of America’s Radical Left Can We Speak of Churchill Without Distorting The Truth?

In Victorian Europe, hairwork jewelry was a popular means of remembering the departed. Family or friends would snip lockets of hair — or the dying individual would cut a locket himself and give it to loved ones — to be preserved in bracelets, rings, and other decorative keepsakes. Today, that tradition has been revived, albeit in a different form. At first glance, the service may seem like a modern equivalent to the Victorian tradition of hairwork — but it’s really much darker. In recent days, pro-life advocates have sounded the alarm on jewelry made from “leftover” embryos. Though this service is offered by a number of online jewelry retailers, U.K.-based Blossom Keepsake’s marketing went viral. “POV: you’re an IVF mama who needs to decide what to do with leftover embryos,” one Instagram story from the brand reads.  Blossom Keepsake advertises potential embryo inclusion in any of their jewelry, framing the service as a way to “honour this chapter of [the family’s] story — by transforming these embryos into timeless pieces.” Customers can request the release of their embryos from the IVF clinic, send them to the jeweler, and receive their custom order 8–10 weeks later. (RELATED: Eugenics: The Dark Side of IVF) At first glance, the service may seem like a modern equivalent to the Victorian tradition of hairwork — but it’s really much darker.  Dystopian, Not Victorian  Blossom Keepsake and similar retailers recognize the emotion involved in the creation of embryos for IVF or surrogacy. Fertility clinics usually create more embryos than can be implanted, which leaves the intended parents on the hook to freeze their biological children and pay the attending storage fee to the clinic, offer them up for “embryo adoption,” or destroy the remaining embryos. (RELATED: Catholics Cannot Endorse the President’s IVF Mandate) Blossom Keepsake seems to soften the blow of the third option: “When storage is ending and donation does not feel right, there is a gentler way to honour what you created.” Though you’ll never meet the unborn children you created, you can carry their remains with you through a commemorative necklace or ring.  But do people belong inside jewelry?  This strange question can only be asked because our culture has failed to correctly ask and answer all the preceding questions — Should human beings be frozen in cryostorage? Should fertility exist as a consumer good? Is there a right to parenthood and children?  What Do We Owe to Embryos? It’s deeply unfashionable to bring reason to bear on emotionally charged issues like IVF. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to reach this point in a face-to-face conversation because people tend to focus on the secondary and tertiary questions, such as whether dead embryos belong in jewelry, instead of the primary questions. But the primary questions must be dealt with in order to have any sort of moral clarity on the issue and its related facets — namely, are embryos persons? The science is astoundingly clear. “Embryo” as a term refers to the phase of human development from conception up to about eight weeks, at which point “fetus” becomes the operative term. From the moment of conception — whether in utero or in a laboratory setting — that new being has a completely distinct genetic makeup and would naturally progress through the stages of human development unless by disease, an inhospitable environment, or deliberate destruction. (RELATED: The Messed-Up World of People Who Believe Abortion Is Love) An embryo is not a non-human; it is simply a very young, very small human. And in terms of personhood — in terms of personal dignity and human rights — an embryo is comparable to a toddler or an adolescent. These words refer only to different stages of progression through the natural course of human development. An embryo exhibits different physical traits and abilities than a fetus, which exhibits different physical traits and abilities than a newborn, which exhibits different physical traits and abilities than a teenager, and so forth. And so, if embryos are persons, then there are certain rights that they possess — chief among them, the right not to be killed, whether for convenience or for commemorative jewelry.   IVF Causes More Deaths Than Live Births The practice of IVF, in which eggs and sperm are retrieved from donor parents and then combined in a laboratory setting to create multiple embryos, has created a brave new world of ethical nightmares. It’s easy to argue that the ends justify the means when the desired end is a longed-for child — after all, there is nothing more precious than new life. But the means matter just as much as the end, and the reality is that IVF results in embryo death on a massive scale. IVF doctors routinely create more embryos than a woman desires to carry to term. By some estimates, as few as 2.3 percent of all embryos created through IVF are actually born. The rest are frozen or destroyed — only a handful are made available for adoption by other hopeful parents. Victorian hairwork jewelry was commemorative, but it didn’t directly result from or cause the death of the remembered individual. It was a common way of remembering a person who had reached the end of his or her life, untimely though that death may be. Embryo jewelry, on the other hand, can only be created through the intentional destruction of a person. Yet, ironically, it aims to remember a person who was never allowed to grow or be born in the first place. READ MORE from Mary Frances Devlin: America Is in Awe of Erika Kirk Gen Z: The Obergefell Generation Harvard’s Sacred Cash Cows Mary Frances Devlin is a George Neumayr fellow and contributing editor with The American Spectator. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame. Follow her on X at @maryfrandevlin. READ MORE from Mary Frances Devlin: America Is in Awe of Erika Kirk Harvard’s Sacred Cash Cows I Read Dylan Mulvaney’s Memoir So You Don’t Have To

They WANT to Indoctrinate your Children.