Screencap of Twitter/X video. People at CNN are in a panic as Paramount is set to become the new owner of the far left network. The owner of Paramount is known to lean a little more to the right, so some…

Screenshot The notoriously liberal national newspaper USA Today just published an op-ed from a woman living in Texas who is a Democrat and says that she loved Trump’s State of the Union Address. She…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during Snowflake Summit 2025 in San Francisco on June 2, 2025. Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesOpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Feb. 27 that his company has struck a deal with the…

Former President Bill Clinton released a video statement on his Epstein deposition. On Friday Bill Clinton testified before the House Oversight Committee on his connections to Jeffrey Epstein from an…

A test tube labelled "Bird Flu", eggs and a piece of paper in the colours of the U.S. national flag are seen in this picture illustration, on Jan. 14, 2023. Dado Ruvic/ReutersCHICAGO—Bird flu has wiped…

Federal officers in front of the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis on Jan. 9, 2026. John Fredricks/The Epoch TimesA federal judge on Feb. 27 extended an order that blocked immigration…

Experts explains there are numerous factors for developing trend Students nationwide are shifting the way they tackle their higher education goals, with more opting for community college as a pathway, according to recently released survey data. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center released its Final Fall Enrollment Trends report, which highlighted how growth in… Source

OPINION: Professor says recent Olympics ‘might be a little glimpse of […] a kind of radical nativist, aggressive, more isolationist great power version of America’ Progressives truly are just plain miserable. It’s bad enough their misery has taken its toll on popular entertainment; even when one thing breaks the PC boilerplate, the prog pundits are all over it — like The Guardian’s Jesse… Source

Culture The Tender Mercy of Robert Duvall  From Mac Sledge to Col. Kilgore, Duvall’s characters embodied the soul of our nation. Back in the old America, where country music still mattered and real men donned decent blue jeans and 10-gallon hats and sang until their hearts turned blue, Robert Duvall crooned beneath the heavens in front of a 40-foot wide Lonestar State Flag. In a dusty, dim Texas bar, couples held hands and swayed slowly as Mac Sledge, a washed-up country singer portrayed by Duvall in Bruce Beresford’s incredible 1983 film, Tender Mercies, sang the beautiful medley “If You’ll Hold The Ladder (I’ll Climb To The Top).” There are so many indomitable performances by Duvall throughout his career that it’s difficult to choose a favorite, but for me, his redemptive arc as Sledge in Tender Mercies takes the very top prize. Always the real deal, Duvall had told Beresford he would only take on the role if Beresford promised Duvall he could sing the songs in the music-heavy film without autotune and in his own voice.  For that magnetic, majestic performance of true grit and faded misery, Duvall won the award for Best Actor at the 56th Academy Awards in 1984. The country music star Dolly Parton, who co-presented the award standing next to a youthful Sylvester Stallone, screamed with delight as she tore open the envelope.  There is no easy answer to the film, no sudden flash of light that completes the blighted canvas. That’s what made it so great. After all, life’s a lot like that too. “I don’t trust happiness,” Sledge tells his girlfriend Rosa Lee (played by Tess Harper), a young widow living on the edge of nowhere with her impressionable son. “I never did, I never will.”  But happiness is exactly what Duvall brought to America and viewers from around the world in a career that spanned country music barrooms to the war-torn beaches of Vietnam. He didn’t dance for fun or toss away one-liners for laughter. His characters were tough men, broken men, decent men, and devout men. They were the type of men that rarely seem to exist anymore in the new world we have conjured with pixels and irony. His loss is a tragedy not only to the giant empire of film but the one we built and lost somewhere between New York City and Los Angeles.  Duvall, one of the great American actors of the 20th century, passed away peacefully at his home in Middleburg, Virginia on Sunday, February 15. He was 95 years old and remembered for his great passion and dedication to the silver screen in a statement released the next day by his wife Luciana. “Bob gave everything to his characters and to the truth of the human spirit they represented,” Luciana wrote. “In doing so, he leaves something lasting and unforgettable to us all.” Duvall played many memorable characters in a career that spanned seven decades. The actor and director starred in lead roles in The Great Santini, Tender Mercies, and The Apostle, earning nominations for best leading actor in each at the Academy Awards.  In 2003, Duvall portrayed Robert E. Lee in Ronald F. Maxwell’s Civil War drama Gods and Generals. A personal favorite of mine was his domineering force as crew chief and car builder Harry Hogge in the sports action film Days of Thunder featuring a young Tom Cruise. An old-school mechanic in Gone in 60 Seconds, a mysterious neighbor in To Kill a Mockingbird, and a fatherly CEO in Adam Sandler’s basketball love story Hustle, Duvall’s range was immense. Duvall is perhaps best remembered for his brief role in Francis Ford Coppola’s tour de force Apocalypse Now. Though on screen for barely 15 minutes, Duvall delivered one of the most indelible performances in film history. Descending into the battlefield via a helicopter blaring “Ride of the Valkyries” in the middle of a burning jungle, the raw energy of Duvall’s character, the maniacal Col. Bill Kilgore, embodies the pure anarchy, chaos, and violence of the Vietnam War.  “You smell that?” Kilgore screams over the roar of a helicopter after landing on a bombed-out beachfront. “Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know that gasoline smell? Smells like victory.”  Surveying the destruction wrought by his boys, Kilgore opens a deck of playing cards and begins tossing a card on each dead body he passes. A lieutenant in the background, via translator, yells at frightened Vietnamese civilians: “We are here to help you.” Duvall’s Kilgore is insane and completely untamed, emblematic of the on-the-ground reality for what became a red, white, and blue killing field. It’s why, nearly 50 years after its premiere, audiences can still instantly recall his stunning performance in the Palme d’Or-winning film.  Duvall is also remembered for his iconic portrayal of Tom Hagen, the quiet intellect of the Corleone mob family in Coppola’s 1972 film, The Godfather, and its 1974 sequel, The Godfather II. Though born a German-Irish orphan, Duvall’s character becomes consigliere and lawyer for mob boss Vito Corleone, acting as the trusted advisor and confidant for the crime family. Duvall’s character is the order amid Corleone chaos. He anchors the film in a way that no other character can. It’s a role that only an actor as skilled as Duvall could portray.  Duvall could be raw and electrifying, remorseful and forlorn, direct and blistering, calculated and charismatic. He was one of the greatest to ever do it. He often portrayed a side of America that is now fleeting, in honest and mercurial ways. He will be missed, immensely. See you on the other side, Mr. Duvall. The post The Tender Mercy of Robert Duvall appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Trump Seeks to Extend Domestic Spying Powers He Once Condemned The White House is pushing Congress to extend the government’s surveillance authority. In an April 10, 2024 post on Truth Social, then-candidate for president Trump urged Republicans in Congress to “KILL FISA,” referring to the U.S. law establishing procedures for foreign surveillance. “IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” Yet now that he has entered the White House for a second term, Trump is seeking to extend those spying powers he once denounced. As POLTICO reported last week, the Trump administration, in an effort led by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, is quietly pressing Congress to approve a “clean” extension of Section 702 surveillance authorities, potentially through 2027.  Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act originally became law in 2008 after the U.S. Congress voted to retroactively authorize parts of a secret, unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program constructed under the George W. Bush administration during the War on Terror after it was exposed to the American public in December 2005 by James Risen of the New York Times. As Risen and a colleague wrote at the time, citing anonymous U.S. officials, Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency [NSA] has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda. We later learned through the brave whistleblowing of Edward Snowden and reporting from Glenn Greenwald that the NSA’s secret data collection program extends well beyond the originally reported “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of Americans; the NSA’s internal motto is “collect it all,” and that organization engages in surveillance and bulk data collection against every American citizen. Under the pretext of targeting foreigners abroad, Section 702 of FISA has expanded the federal government’s ability to warrantlessly collect Americans’ private communications, then later search through those communications using Americans’ personal data. So-called “incidental” or “backdoor” searches have long allowed intelligence agencies like the FBI to access constitutionally protected private communications without ever going to a judge. Congress has nominally required intelligence agencies to estimate the frequency of such database queries, yet when intelligence officials are—albeit rarely—confronted by lawmakers, they have repeatedly failed to produce meaningful numbers. With the FBI and other intel agencies ignoring even minimal legal mandates to keep a tally of its own “backdoor searches,” the true scope of warrantless access to Americans’ communications remains largely unknown. Even so, Americans do not have to wonder whether or not those vast spying powers will ever be wielded for political purposes against them. That has already happened. In a 2019 report, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the FBI made “fundamental errors” and provided misleading information to the secret FISA court in order to obtain surveillance authorization targeting 2016 Trump campaign official Carter Page. In April 2022, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its annual transparency report on the intelligence community’s use of national security surveillance authorities, revealing that the FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless queries of Americans’ data in 2021. Those high profile spying abuses led to a legislative battle in April 2024 between the House intelligence committee—which had proposed a version of FISA that kept all of the U.S. security state’s abilities to surveil and collect data on American citizens in tact—and the House judiciary committee—which sought to introduce reforms to prevent intelligence agencies from engaging in those surveillance activities against Americans. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA)—who in July 2023 claimed that the unchecked power of intelligence agencies “is what keeps [him] up at night” and denounced how “the top law enforcement agency in the country, that is supposed to be protecting and serving the American people, is being used against them, it’s violating the privacy of Americans”—ultimately cast the deciding vote to reject an amendment requiring law enforcement to obtain a warrant before searching Americans under Section 702, extending the U.S. security state’s authority until its scheduled sunset on April 20, 2026. In January 2025, a federal district court ruled that law enforcement agencies must obtain a warrant before searching Americans’ communications collected under Section 702 of FISA, rejecting the government’s longstanding reliance on a “foreign intelligence” exception. But the current version of Section 702 that Miller and the Trump administration are pushing through Congress does not include an official warrant requirement for querying Americans’ data, signaling the administration’s willingness to openly violate the Constitution and continue the now decades-long process of shredding Americans’ fourth amendment protections. Congress, which has routinely abdicated its own responsibilities to the executive branch on matters of war and intelligence oversight, will likely follow their lead. The post Trump Seeks to Extend Domestic Spying Powers He Once Condemned appeared first on The American Conservative.